"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (33 page)

Jimmy told me to meet him back at the union office. At the Chicago office Jimmy told me point-blank to tell our friends back East that nothing should happen to Partin. Jimmy told me he had a good defense for the Chicago thing, and they were still working on Partin for an affidavit on the Chattanooga thing.

Besides that, they had a congressman in Chicago named Roland Libonti. I never met the man, but I heard about him. He was with Sam Giancana. Later on it came out in the papers that Giancana’s son-in-law, Anthony Tisci, was on Libonti’s congressional payroll. They had Libonti making resolutions for a congressional investigation of Bobby Kennedy. The idea was that Bobby Kennedy had violated Jimmy Hoffa’s constitutional rights with illegal wiretapping and surveillance and by planting Partin in their rooms at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville. Jimmy was looking forward to turning the tables on “Booby” and getting him to have to take the Fifth at the congressional hearing. Jimmy claimed he had tapes of Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe having sex. Johnny Roselli and Giancana had Marilyn Monroe’s house bugged. He never played me the tapes, but I got the impression that he planned on having them played, maybe during the congressional hearings if they ever had them.

I left Chicago and went back to the fun and games in Philly, and I passed the word among our friends about Partin. At 107 we still had the battles with the rebels and the battles with the other outfits from the AFL-CIO. We had a bar on Delaware Avenue where we used to keep shirts to change into. The cops would be looking for a guy in a green shirt, and I’d be sitting in the bar with a blue shirt on. I’d show the cop my bar tab. It would look like I was sitting there all day, only I could drink that much in an hour.
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The Chicago trial of Jimmy Hoffa and seven codefendants began on April 27, 1964, five weeks after Hoffa had received a crushing eight-year sentence in Chattanooga. As had been done in Chattanooga, the identities of the prospective jurors in the jury pool were kept from both sides until the morning of jury selection.

The selection of jurors went without incident, and the government proceeded to put on a pension fund fraud case consisting of thirteen painstaking weeks of live testimony and the introduction into evidence of more than 15,000 documents for the jury to consider. It was a federal case in every sense of the phrase.

The pension fund fraud centered on the improvement of a tract of land in Florida that had been intended as a housing development for Teamsters willing to personally invest in it by purchasing lots, for either retirement or vacation homes. The tract was to be known as Sun Valley Village. While lots were sold to Teamsters, including Jimmy Hoffa, the land was never developed by the developer and the developer had since died. The Sun Valley Village development went into bankruptcy, and the undeveloped lots became worthless.

Unfortunately for Jimmy Hoffa, before Sun Valley went bankrupt in 1958, he had authorized the depositing of $400,000 in a non-interest-bearing account in a Florida bank as collateral to secure a loan to the benefit of the Sun Valley developer for the purpose of building roads and bringing utilities to the land. Jimmy Hoffa took that $400,000 that he pledged directly from the pension fund of his own Detroit local. When Sun Valley filed for bankruptcy, the bank held on to the $400,000 collateral. For Hoffa to get back the $400,000, he had to come up with a total of $500,000, which the developer had owed the bank altogether when he died.

To gather together the half-million it would take, according to the government, Hoffa went on a pension fund lending binge between 1958 and 1960. Hoffa and the seven codefendants began lending pension money left and right on speculative ventures, charging points and finder’s fees, and funneling a portion of that money to Hoffa to pay off the Florida bank loans. By 1960 the mission was accomplished and Hoffa not only paid off the Florida bank, he paid Local 299 $42,000 in lost interest when he repaid the $400,000 to the local’s pension fund.

What turned all this into fraud, the government contended, was the fact that Jimmy Hoffa personally sought to profit while he encouraged Teamsters to invest in Sun Valley Village parcels; that he personally sought to profit while he pledged Local 299’s pension fund money; and that he personally sought to profit while he scrambled his way through the Central States Pension Fund to siphon off enough money to pay back Local 299. The government contended that Hoffa’s personal profit motive was contained in a document he had signed. The government contended that Jimmy Hoffa had signed a secret trust agreement with the developer whereby Hoffa was to receive 22 percent of all of the development’s profits once the project was completely developed.

Jimmy Hoffa’s defense was simple: He was going to deny that the signature was his. The developer was dead and couldn’t testify that the signature on that trust agreement was Hoffa’s. Jimmy Hoffa’s partner, Owen Bert Brennan, was dead and couldn’t testify that the signature was Hoffa’s. Perhaps Bert Brennan had signed Hoffa’s name and was going to keep the extra 22 percent profit himself. Perhaps the developer had signed Hoffa’s name to gain credibility with other investors by claiming that Hoffa, with the might of his pension fund, was behind the project.

The government showed that the scrambling between 1958 and 1960 to get the money to pay the bank included things such as a $330,000 kickback on a $3.3 million loan for the building of the Everglades Hotel in Miami. On another scramble, $650,000 went to the Black Construction Company. There was no Black Construction Company; Cecil Black was a $125-a-week laborer, and he never saw a dime of the money.

What made this Chicago case particularly galling to Jimmy Hoffa was that all the scrambling he was alleged to have done between 1958 and 1960 was done in what he considered self-defense. All of this scrambling to repay the Detroit local its money was a direct result of the heat being put on by Bobby Kennedy during the McClellan Committee hearings and by the negative light being cast by Kennedy on that pledged, non-interest-bearing $400,000 deposit as collateral.

The chief witness in the Chicago trial against Jimmy Hoffa was an FBI handwriting expert who testified that the signature “J.R. Hoffa” on the trust agreement was a signature that was consistent with known handwriting exemplars of Jimmy Hoffa.

The government rested its case and Jimmy Hoffa took the stand. As expected, Hoffa denied it was his signature on the trust agreement. As was not expected, Hoffa went one step further and denied that he ever in his life signed a legal document “J.R. Hoffa.” Jimmy Hoffa swore that he always signed all legal documents “James R. Hoffa.”

While the government didn’t have a surprise witness, it shuffled through its own mounds of documents to find a surprise document. On cross-examination Jimmy Hoffa was asked if he personally had leased a penthouse in Miami Beach at the Blair House. Confident that the penthouse lease could be justified as an appropriate union expense, Hoffa said that he had. When asked if he had personally signed the lease Hoffa said that he had. At that point the prosecutor asked Hoffa to authenticate the signature and handed the lease to Hoffa. To Jimmy Hoffa’s everlasting dismay he had signed the lease “J.R. Hoffa.”

What the Chicago case against Jimmy Hoffa was all about was eloquently stated by Walter Sheridan: “Hoffa was using funds reserved for the pensions of Teamsters members to extricate himself from a situation where he had misused funds belonging to Teamsters members for his own benefit.” In dollars and cents, Jimmy Hoffa had swiped $400,000 from his union brothers, and to pay it back before it became a legal issue, he swiped another $500,000 from those same union brothers.

On July 26, 1964, the jury promptly found Jimmy Hoffa and his seven minions guilty of pension fund fraud. On August 17, 1964, Jimmy Hoffa was given an additional five years in jail to serve consecutively with the eight-year sentence he had received in Chattanooga.

This total of an unlucky thirteen years of sentences to be spent in a federal jail for Jimmy Hoffa was followed a week later, on August 25, 1964, by the news of Bobby Kennedy’s resignation as attorney general and his announcement that he was running for the U.S. Senate from New York. Walter Sheridan resigned from the Department of Justice to help run Bobby Kennedy’s campaign.

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You got so used to Jimmy winning it was hard to picture him losing back to back to Bobby. You just knew he wouldn’t take this lying down.

Still and all, the way he played the first trial in Tennessee he ended up turning a slap on the wrist into serious jail time. He kept going back with cash to bribe the jury even though he kept getting caught. It was like the kangaroo kept bopping the back of his head and he never caught on and he kept on walking into it.

Some of our friends questioned Jimmy’s judgment, blabbing out loud like that to a man he hardly knew, Ed Partin. In our world you’ve got to keep things inside if you expect to be trusted. You don’t want people losing respect for you.

I later heard from Harold Gibbons that after that thing in Chicago, Jimmy was careful to sign everything “James R. Hoffa.”
”

At the time of his announcement for the U.S. Senate, Bobby Kennedy had spent three and a half years targeting Hoffa and the Teamsters. Bobby Kennedy’s efforts had resulted in the indictment of 201 Teamsters officials and the conviction of 126 of them.

Thanks to Bobby Kennedy, mobsters everywhere were going to be under such public scrutiny that they wouldn’t be able to gather together at a public restaurant without it being raided. On September 22, 1966, a table full of mobsters from around the country having lunch at La Stella restaurant in Forest Hills in Queens, New York, were arrested by the police. Included in the group that was taken in, harassed, and released without charges were Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Joe Colombo, and Carlo Gambino. A month later the same group defiantly held another meeting at La Stella, only this time they brought their lawyer, Frank Ragano, with them.

Bobby Kennedy’s campaign against organized crime, and especially the methodology he devised—gathering intelligence, focusing on targets, making deals with informants, employing sophisticated electronic surveillance, and insisting on the pooling of information by disparate and often competitive government agencies—set the stage for every action the federal government has taken against organized crime since. Today no one questions the existence of organized crime or the commitment of the federal government and the FBI to its eradication. Today, thanks to Bobby Kennedy, organized crime is hardly thought of as a local police problem. The head may have been cut off, but the dog never died. The damage done by Bobby Kennedy to the power of organized crime and to mobster Teamsters was irreversible.

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Jimmy Hoffa didn’t care anything about money. He gave it away. But he did like the power. And jail or no jail, he wasn’t about to give that power away. First, he was going to do whatever he could to keep from going to jail. If he went to jail he was still going to rule from jail while he did whatever it took to get out of jail. Once he got out of jail he was going to take back control of everything. And I was going to help him.
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In 1965 a defense motion for a new trial was filed in Chattanooga on the grounds that jurors in that trial were having sex with prostitutes. The motion alleged that prostitutes had been arranged for and provided by U.S. marshals as inducement for the jurors to side with the government. The motion was accompanied by the affidavits of four Chattanooga prostitutes. One of them, a Marie Monday, claimed that the judge in Chattanooga had told her that he was out to “get Hoffa.” One can only imagine the laughter that this bit of legal “improv” engendered in Chattanooga’s hallowed halls of justice. The judge laughed the motion out of court. The government took one of the prostitutes to trial and convicted her of perjury. Whereupon Marie Monday promptly recanted her affidavit.

At the July 1966 Miami Beach Teamsters Convention, Jimmy Hoffa amended the IBT constitution to create a new office—the office of general vice president. That officer had all the power necessary to run the union in the event the president went to jail. Hoffa installed his perceived puppet, Frank Fitzsimmons, as the new general vice president. Hoffa gave himself a raise from $75,000 a year to $100,000 a year, the same salary as the president of the United States. Only Hoffa’s salary would now contain a provision that the salary would continue to be paid in the event the president went to jail.

It was explained to the delegates that the reason Hoffa should continue to receive his pay while in prison was that prison is the equivalent of traveling for a rest period to conserve Hoffa’s health, something like the expenses incurred in traveling to go deep-sea fishing. Hoffa had the delegates approve the payment of all past legal fees and expenses, regardless of whether he lost the case or not. Those expenses amounted to $1,277,680 as of the date of the convention. Hoffa had the delegates approve the payment of all of his future legal expenses, whatever they might turn out to be.

Meanwhile, Hoffa’s Chattanooga appeal made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal because it presented a novel issue involving Hoffa’s constitutional right to counsel and whether that right was violated by Partin’s presence at the Andrew Jackson Hotel. The appeal was being heard at the height of the “criminal law revolution,” the decade from 1961 to 1971 when criminal rights were being created where none had previously existed. Hoffa’s appeal was being handled competently by Joseph A. Fanelli, a seasoned appellate lawyer new to the Hoffa team. Walter Sheridan wrote that after oral argument in the Supreme Court the prosecution team was “not at all certain when it was over how the Justices would rule.”