"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (20 page)

“
Jimmy never met Joe Louis before that trial, only the jury didn’t know that. But Jimmy was strong for civil rights. That part is true. The only thing is, every time he won a trial, he thought he could never lose. And have no doubt: he hated Bobby with a passion. I heard him call Bobby a spoiled brat to his face in an elevator and start after him. I held Jimmy back. Many a time Jimmy said to me they got the wrong brother. But he hated brother Jack, too. Jimmy said they were young millionaires who had never done a day’s work.
”

In
The Enemy Within,
Bobby Kennedy asserted that after the trial, Joe Louis, who was out of work and deeply in debt at the time, was immediately given a well-paying job with a record company that got a $2 million Teamsters pension fund loan. Joe Louis then married the female black lawyer from California whom he had met at the trial. When Bobby Kennedy’s right-hand and chief investigator, the future author Walter Sheridan, tried to interview Joe Louis for the McClellan Committee about the record company job, the ex-champ refused to cooperate and said about Bobby Kennedy: “Tell him to go take a jump off the Empire State Building.”

Still, Bobby Kennedy expected to have the last laugh by the end of 1957.

Hoffa’s need to control his environment had led to a federal indictment for hiring a friend of Johnny Dio to illegally wiretap and bug Teamsters offices to make sure that none of his own officers were feeding the McClellan Committee information against him, as he had done against Beck. Hoffa’s coconspirator in the bugging offense was Owen Bert Brennan, his partner on his Test Fleet and Sun Valley ventures, a man well motivated by his own potential legal problems involving these two ventures.

In addition to the pending bugging indictment, Bobby Kennedy brought a separate perjury indictment in Washington because Hoffa had lied about the bugging incidents in his testimony before the McClellan Committee.

At the time Hoffa had these two indictments hanging over his head, the Teamsters union was, and for decades had been, affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the world’s largest labor organization. In September 1957 the Ethics Committee of the AFL-CIO charged that Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa had used “their official union positions for personal profit.” The AFL-CIO further charged that Hoffa “had associated with, sponsored, and promoted the interests of notorious labor racketeers.”

The response of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was to elect Jimmy Hoffa, while under indictment in two federal jurisdictions, to his first term as president.

In those tight-reined days, the president was elected not by the rank and file, but by handpicked delegates to the International Convention held every five years. And just to be on the safe side, there were no secret ballots. In his acceptance speech Jimmy Hoffa said, “Let us bury our differences.”

How many dissidents had Jimmy Hoffa and his racketeers already buried? How many houses would be painted in the future?

We do know that as a result of his ascendance to president, Jimmy Hoffa was able to advance his mob allies. Although it was to change by the seventies, Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano was in 1957 a staunch Hoffa man and president of Local 560 in Union City, New Jersey, one of the largest locals in the nation. Hoffa immediately gave Provenzano a second paycheck by naming him president of New Jersey’s Joint Council 73, with its one hundred thousand members. By 1959 the government had installed a Board of Monitors to oversee the Teamsters. The Board of Monitors ordered Hoffa to purge Provenzano from the union. Instead, in 1961 Hoffa added a third paycheck and enormous power to his ally by making him an International vice president. In that same year, Provenzano “buried his differences” with popular reform-minded Local 560 member Anthony “Three Fingers” Castellito by having him strangled to death and buried on a farm in upstate New York by K.O. Konigsberg, Salvatore Sinno, and Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio.

Ten days after Hoffa took the oath of office in 1957, the AFL-CIO kicked out the Teamsters, saying that they could get back in only if they got rid of “this corrupt control” of the union by Jimmy Hoffa and his racketeer union officials.

On November 15, 1957, the public was greeted with the news of the Apalachin conference. Notwithstanding J. Edgar Hoover’s protestations to the contrary, there appeared to be a national crime syndicate that operated like a separate country and whose capital appeared to be New York City.

Ten days later a federal jury in New York City was impaneled to try Hoffa and Brennan on the bugging charges. The jury hung at eleven to one. Promptly a new jury was impaneled. During the second trial a member of the jury came forward to report a bribe attempt. He was excused and replaced by an alternate. This jury found Jimmy Hoffa not guilty.

A crushed Bobby Kennedy still had the perjury charge against Hoffa to fall back on. But not for long. The perjury indictment relied on wiretapped conversations between Johnny Dio and Jimmy Hoffa. The wiretap had been authorized pursuant to New York State law and was a valid search and seizure of the telephone conversation under existing New York law. Unfortunately for Bobby, this was the beginning of the age of the Warren Court’s expansion of its control over state and local police procedures. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such state-sanctioned wiretaps were unconstitutional and that any evidence obtained by the wiretaps or derived from them was “fruit of the poisonous tree.” As a consequence there was no admissible evidence with which to bury Jimmy Hoffa, and the perjury indictment was dismissed.

“
I went to work for the union around the time all this was going on, right after Jimmy got the president’s job. After the wiretap trial everybody was saying they didn’t make a parachute big enough to save Bobby Kennedy’s ass when he jumped off the Capitol.
”

 
chapter fourteen
 

The Gunman Had No Mask

“
I flew to Detroit and reported to Local 299 on Trumbull Avenue. That was Jimmy’s home local. It was down the street from Tiger Stadium. Local 299 was having an organizing drive to unionize the cab drivers of Detroit. Right across the street from the union hall there was a big taxicab garage, and when my cab pulled in to Local 299 I could see the Teamsters picketers across the street. That was going to be me. I knew I was right where I belonged. I was very happy to be an organizer attached to Local 299, and if I worked out on this job they’d make me an organizer back in Philly at Local 107, even if they had to create an extra position for me. I had a chance to get the head rabbi as my rabbi.

I already had my sights set on becoming an International organizer some day. That’s a position at the very top. You worked out of the national office. You traveled all over the country in that position, wherever they needed you. You could do a lot of favors that were legitimate and still help yourself. If that thing hadn’t happened to Jimmy at the end, I would have been an International organizer.

In Detroit I was assigned to Bill Isabel and Sam Portwine. They worked as a team, doing public relations, but actually Sam looked to Bill as boss of the team. Bill was about 5'8" and was known for his ability with candy, not the kind you eat, the kind you use to blow things up with—dynamite. Bill was proficient in bombing, and he always packed. Bill was born in Ireland, but he sounded American. He came up through the ranks as a trucker. He was stationed in St. Louis and was listed as an organizer for a St. Louis local and as an organizer for the Joint Council in St. Louis that a real good union man named Harold Gibbons headed. Harold Gibbons was the one Jimmy should have appointed to take his place instead of Frank Fitzsimmons when Jimmy went to school in 1967.

Sam was out of Washington, D.C., and was a little taller and heavier and quite a bit younger than Bill, more my age. I was about thirty-seven. I think Sam came out of college and went straight to work for the union. They were both very tight with Jimmy Hoffa.

There were about eight organizers assigned to the taxi driver organizing drive. We would assemble every morning and then go to a place to picket and hand out flyers that Bill and Sam put together as the public relations men on the thing. Sometimes we would picket the taxicab garage across the street from the union hall. Other times we would put up informational picket lines at cab stands around the city, like at the big convention center Cobo Hall or at the Warner Hotel.

You’d take cabbies aside and you’d explain the benefits of being organized, and you’d ask them to sign a union card. If you got 30 percent of the workers to sign, then the labor law entitled you to an election to see if the workers wanted the union or not. But Bill taught me that you would never ask for the election until you had better than 50 percent, because with less than that you were sure to lose. Bill also explained to me that if you did get the right to hold an election, another union could come in and try to take it from you. If they got 10 percent of the cards they could intervene in the election and maybe beat your union out after you did all the work. Once we were kicked out of the AFL-CIO we were always concerned about one of their unions coming in on one of our elections to intervene and steal the election or siphon off enough of our votes so that nobody won. It was dog-eat-dog there for a while. You didn’t know who to trust, but you kept taking cabbies aside and persuading them to sign a card. For some reason there were a lot of lesbians who were working as cabbies at that time in Detroit. They liked to be treated like men, and you had to respect that or you wouldn’t get a signature.

If they did sign the card that didn’t mean they had to vote for the union later on in the election, because those elections were supervised and they were by secret ballot, so the cabbies could sign just to get rid of you and then vote whichever way they wanted to, and you couldn’t do anything about it.

I was staying at the Holiday Inn, and the union was picking up my hotel bill and giving me meal money and daily-expense money, and I got a paycheck besides. You could have more than one full-time union job in those days and pick up as many full-time paychecks as Jimmy or whoever was your rabbi got for you. I had the one, but I know Bill and Sam got paid out of several different accounts.

It seemed like easy money, and Detroit was a lot like Philly. There was plenty to do and never a dull moment. We’d go to the fights or a football game or whatever was in town. Bill and Sam were both heavy drinkers and so we did a lot of that together.

They taught me that the word
union
means something. Everybody’s got to be united in the same direction or there is no progress for the worker. A union is only as strong as its weakest member. Once there is dissension the employer senses it and takes advantage of it. Once you allow dissension and rebel factions to exist you are on the way to losing your union. You can have only one boss. You can have helpers, but you can’t have nine guys trying to run a local. If you did, the employer would make side deals and split the union. The employer would illegally fire the strongest union men and get away with it while the union was split in half.

“Rebel factions are like Nazi collaborators during the war, like they had in Norway and France,” Bill Isabel told me. “Jimmy Hoffa will never tolerate rebel factions. He’s worked too hard to build what we have. He’s the first one up in the morning and the last one in bed at night. Look at how much better off we all are today. The rebels didn’t give us shit. Jimmy won it all. The pension, the hospitalization covering your whole family every time you’re sick. He’s fighting for a Master Freight Agreement where every trucker gets the same wage all over the country. And whatever Jimmy gets for us, the do-gooders in the AFL-CIO tag along and get the same for its members. Then they complain that Jimmy’s tactics are too rough. You were in the war; you know what you got to do to get from point A to point B. I say if a few pints of Guinness get spilled along the way, that’s tough shit, my fine colonial boy.”