Corruption and the Fall of Jimmy Hoffa: An Inside Story from the Man Who Claims He Killed Hoffa Corruption and the Fall of Jimmy Hoffa: An Inside Story from the Man Who Claims He Killed Hoffa Posted on March 15, 2006 Review: "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank 'the Irishman' Sheeran and the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the Final Ride of Jimmy Hoffa. "I heard you paint houses." Those are the first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to Frank Sheeran, who would become a top Teamster official in the 1960s and '70s as well as a hired killer for Hoffa and the mob. The words refer to the splatter of blood when the deed is done. Hoffa hired Sheeran in that first telephone conversation as an "organizer," on the recommendation of Russell Bufalino, the Mafia boss of Pennsylvania. I Heard You Paint Houses is Sheeran's story of his life with Hoffa and in the mob, as told in hundreds of hours of tapes to one of his former attorneys, Charles Brandt.

There have been too many books on the mob and on the Hoffa era in the Teamsters, most of them terrible. This one is worth reading. Sheeran was close to Hoffa, and gives an insider's feel for the intimate relationship of Hoffa and the Teamster leadership to the mob. An Insider's Story Hoffa created a local union for Sheeran: Delaware Local 326 was carved out of Philadelphia Local 107, with Sheeran installed as president. He was identified as a mob leader in the 1987 RICO lawsuit against top Teamsters that led to the present-day consent order. It's an easy book to read, and even fun, if that's an appropriate word for a book about murder and union corruption. Sheeran and Brandt (half the book is taken verbatim from the Sheeran tapes, the rest written by Brandt) don’t romanticize the mob; to "The Irishman", it's just a business and the way he lives. He matter of factly describes killing three people in one day and then he "met up with Jimmy to give him the report." There is considerable coverage in the book of Hoffa's trials.

Hoffa was tried for taking payoffs from carhaul employers, and got a hung jury by bribing several jurors. His co-defendant was Bert Brennan, his business partner in the scams that sent him to prison. Brennan's son Larry currently heads Michigan Joint Council 43. Then Hoffa was tried and convicted in 1964 for the jury tampering, and also convicted by a Chicago jury of defrauding the Central States Pension Fund to line his own pocket in a Florida land scam. His appeals ran out in 1967 and he entered Lewiston Prison to serve a combined 13 year sentence. The chapters on the trials show Hoffa as master strategist and as a brazen crook who used threats and bribes routinely. And they show that his famous ego could be his weakness. Why Hoffa Was Murdered James P. Hoffa, the current Teamster president, likes to say the mob killed his dad. It's half true. Mobsters killed Hoffa for sure, but Hoffa was a part of their operation. Sheeran makes very clear who their victims are: they kill their own. Mainly they kill mob insiders who they fear have information that may be used against them.

Hoffa was too eager to get back into office, and they felt he would trade information in exchange for lifting the restrictions put on him to stay out of the union when Nixon pardoned him in December 1971. Sheeran adds some details to what is already well-known about the corrupt relationship between Hoffa and the Nixon administration. Sheeran himself delivered a suitcase of money to the home of John Mitchell, the Attorney General who later went to prison himself for Watergate crimes. After Hoffa left prison in 1971, Sheeran claims he was a changed man. More "puffing," as Sheeran calls it, about what he would do to whom, even though his power was gone. That "puffing" scared top mobsters; it made them think he would make a deal with the Justice Department. That's why Russell Bufalino co-ordered the hit on Hoffa. Sheeran believes the 1972 book by Kennedy aide Walter Sheridan played a role in the Hoffa murder. That book revealed that Hoffa had snitched to the FBI on Teamster President Dave Beck to help send Beck to prison and Hoffa into the Marble Palace.

Bufalino and other Hoffa associates feared that once again he would turn FBI informant to get into the Marble Palace. That's the FBI's view of the crime as well. Sheeran adds one new twist: that he himself, not Salvatore "Sally Bugs" Bruguglio, pulled the trigger on July 30, 1975. The other new tidbit is a Detroit home address where Sheeran says the Teamster president was killed. (The owner of the house now has a website, apparently shopping for his 15 minutes of fame.) Whose Union Is It? I spoke with Dan Moldea, author of The Hoffa Wars, the authoritative 1978 book on Hoffa and his era, about Sheeran's book. Moldea thinks Sheeran embellished the story by making himself the trigger man, but that otherwise there's a lot to learn from the book. It adds some details and intimate connection to Hoffa that only an insider can provide. Teamsters interested in how the Teamsters Union became corrupted should read it. While mob influence in the Teamsters (and in the USA overall) is lower today, the culture created then lives on inside much of the Teamsters.

Hoffa became obsessed with saying of his former flunky and successor, Frank Fitzsimmons "It's not his union, it's my union." The idea that the Teamsters belongs to any general president or official is a legacy of the mob era that Teamster members continue to struggle against today. Ken Paff Profile: The Teamsters | UK news | The Guardian Transport Profile: The Teamsters Teamsters union has a long and rich history - linked to organised crime in the past it is still a powerful force in the US Ford trucks in a Detroit car park. The Teamsters union has won significant concessions from employers at US ports and airports. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images Wednesday 17 March 2010 07.59 EDT First published on Wednesday 17 March 2010 07.59 EDT Share on Messenger Close The 1.4 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters is one of the largest unions in the US. Formed in 1903, the union began by organising gravel haulers, beer-wagon drivers and milk and bakery deliverymen.

In coming decades it organised truck drivers, and in 1912 organised one of the first transcontinental freight deliveries, a 91-day haul of soap from Philadelphia to San Francisco. In the decades that followed, the union was linked to organised crime and its reputation suffered when its high-profile former president Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975 on his way to meet with a mob figure and another union official. Hoffa had been jailed after his conviction on jury tampering and bribery charges, and federal officials believe the mob killed Hoffa to prevent him from regaining control of the union. In the 1980s, the US justice department accused the union of being under the control of organised crime and sought to take it over. The union persisted, and by the 1990s was the nation's biggest and most powerful labour organisation. Under the leadership of Ron Carey, the union led a 15-day strike in 1997 against delivery giant UPS over its use of part-time workers. The teamsters triumphed, winning substantial pay rises and pension benefits for 185,000 workers. The union is now led by James Hoffa Jr, son of Jimmy Hoffa.

Recently the Teamsters has pushed for trucking firms to lower exhaust-pipe emissions at US ports, and has campaigned for government action against FedEx over the status of its drivers. Analyze This: How Jimmy Hoffa helped forge an unlikely union with the Jewish state - Jewish World - Jerusalem Post Analyze This: How Jimmy Hoffa helped forge an unlikely union with the Jewish state He used his Teamsters influence to help smuggle arms in 1940s. (photo credit:) Other than the fact that they were both tough-minded men who met violent ends - and at some point in their careers probably ordered the breaking of bones for the sake of their cause - there would seem not to be much in common between the late Yitzhak Rabin and the presumably deceased US union leader James R. "Jimmy" Hoffa. Yet on Wednesday night in Washington, DC, the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center (at Tel Aviv University) will pay tribute to Hoffa at a gala dinner that features as speakers Dalia and Yuval Rabin, as well as former US president Bill Clinton. Hoffa is best known today for building the International Brotherhood of Teamsters into a national labor power; his fierce conflicts with Robert F.

Kennedy; his 1964 conviction on charges of trying to bribe a juror in a grand jury investigation; the controversial 1971 commutation of his sentence by president Richard Nixon; and his sudden disappearance outside a Detroit eatery in 1975, his fate - and the whereabouts of his body - still a mystery. Apparently, though, there is another side of Hoffa that is less known. In the late 1940s, inspired by and sympathetic to the labor-led Zionist cause, he used his Teamsters influence to help smuggle arms and supplies to the Jewish community in Palestine, and subsequently forged links between the Teamsters and the newborn State of Israel. In 1955, he sponsored a charity dinner that raised $300,000 for an orphanage in Jerusalem and visited here the next year to personally dedicate it. All this, plus the fact that his son James P. Hoffa followed in his father's footsteps to become the current president of the 1,400,000-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters and will also be honored at the Washington event, makes the Rabin Center's Washington dinner more understandable.

Still, without suggesting that this particular honor is not deserved, the linking of the elder Hoffa's name with that of Rabin certainly should raise eyebrows among those who have more than a passing familiarity with the career of the former. Hoffa may well be rightly respected and remembered as a champion of labor by the Teamsters, and as a friend of the Zionist cause by the Rabin Center. But there is a much darker side to his story, one in which organized crime plays a central, and fatal, role. It has been alleged that throughout his career, Hoffa allied himself with mob elements to further the interests of his union, and himself. And it is widely believed that when the two finally clashed - after Hoffa sought to regain control of the Teamsters upon his release from prison, over the objections of powerful New Jersey Teamster official and top Genovese family capo Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano - the Cosa Nostra had him eliminated. "Of course, when we decided to honor the memory of Jimmy Hoffa, we discussed all the involved aspects of this complex man who led the labor movement at a very difficult and complicated time in its history," says Stuart Davidson, president of the American Friends of the Rabin Center.

"But we are very proud of our relationship with the Teamsters Union, whose support for Israel began with Jimmy Hoffa and has continued today under his son's leadership. Remember, Hoffa was not Jewish, and he had no profit or personal motivation to help the Jews fighting for Palestine - it's not as if there were many Jewish Teamsters. Yet he did so, at some degree of personal risk, because he sincerely believed in the Zionist cause, and that the Israeli labor movement should also be supported." All true enough, as is the fact that in those crucial months leading up to and during the War of Independence, a desperate Zionist movement sought and accepted aid from all types of quarters - including from such noted and notorious gangsters as Meyer Lansky and Mickey Cohen. Should those men also be honored today for their assistance? "I'm offended anyone would even make that comparison," Davidson responds. "Jimmy Hoffa fought his battles on behalf of his union and its members, against formidable forces arrayed against the labor movement that included the government and organized crime.

While we have to acknowledge all the good, bad and ugly that sometimes entailed, Hoffa was not out to make a profit for himself, and he was certainly no Meyer Lansky." Maybe - although some might take issue with that assertion. Five years ago, a former Teamsters official and occasional mob hitman named Frank "the Irishman" Sherran made a deathbed confession in which he admitted shooting his old friend Hoffa in a Detroit home on the day he disappeared. The body was then taken to a local funeral parlor where it was cremated - and not to New Jersey to be sunk in the freshly poured cement foundations of Giants Stadium, as has been fancifully rumored. What's more, Sherran also said he earlier had occasionally killed directly on orders from the Teamsters leader, a claim The New York Times said "seems likely to spur a reappraisal of Hoffa's career." Yet it's still true that none of that takes away from Hoffa's willingness to help the Jewish community in Palestine's hour of need or to forge links with the State of Israel, which remain as part of the positive legacy he left the union he helped build and that his son now leads.

It should perhaps also be noted that Hoffa is hardly the only benefactor of Israel, living or dead, who has been honored here despite a somewhat checkered past. One has only to look at the various institutions around the country endowed by and bearing the name of Marc Rich, who remains a highly wanted fugitive in the US for alleged financial misdeeds after the aborted pardon Clinton attempted to grant him. One final point worth noting: When Meyer Lansky tried to make aliya in the early 1970s, then-prime minister Golda Meir denied his request for citizenship despite his past work on behalf of the Zionist cause. But, as Davidson points out, when Jimmy Hoffa visited Israel in the 1950s, "he was very warmly greeted by Golda, and there are several photos of them together." Now that makes sense. Two tough labor leaders who believed in giving their all on behalf of working men and women - at least Jimmy and Golda had that much in common. JTA contributed to this report. Calev@jpost.com Relevant to your professional network?

Please share on Linkedin Professor seeks Jimmy Hoffa case records - US news - Crime & courts | NBC News Professor seeks Jimmy Hoffa case records Retiree is trying to prove prosecutorial misconduct in case Below: + - CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — The government's hard-won conviction of Jimmy Hoffa on jury-tampering charges is under assault 45 years later. A retired law professor has persuaded a federal judge to consider unsealing secret grand jury records to set the historical record straight. William L. Tabac wants to prove his theory that the Justice Department — then led by Hoffa's nemesis, Robert Kennedy — used illegal wiretaps and improper testimony to indict the Teamsters leader. "I think there is prosecutorial misconduct in the case, which included the prosecutors who prosecuted it and the top investigator for the Kennedy Department of Justice," Tabac said. James Neal, the special prosecutor who convicted Hoffa in 1964 in Chattanooga, calls the claim "baloney." But the petition from Tabac, who taught at Cleveland State University and has been gripped by the Hoffa case since his days as a law clerk, will be heard Monday in a Nashville courtroom.

Another post-mortem in controversial case To prepare for the hearing, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Todd J. Campbell ordered the Justice Department, FBI and other agencies to turn over any sealed records from the Hoffa grand jury related to testimony by investigator Walter Sheridan, wiretapping or electronic eavesdropping. It's yet another post-mortem look into the affairs of the controversial trade union leader, whose career, disappearance and presumed death continue to spawn conspiracy theories decades later. Advertise The special grand jury convened in 1963 after the federal government had failed for the fourth time to convict Hoffa of corruption charges while he led the Teamsters. The grand jury indicted Hoffa on charges of jury tampering in a Nashville case that accused Hoffa of taking payoffs from trucking companies but ended in mistrial. A jury in Chattanooga found Hoffa and three co-defendants guilty. Hoffa, later convicted in Chicago of fraud and conspiracy, continued as Teamsters president even as he served four years in prison until stepping aside and getting his sentence commuted by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Multiple reports describe open animosity between Hoffa and Kennedy, who investigated Hoffa while in the Senate and as attorney general.

Wants to look at grand jury records Tabac contends the indictment may have been based only or in part on the testimony of Walter Sheridan, a Kennedy special assistant who headed the investigation. Sheridan's testimony "was, in effect, Kennedy's," said Tabac. "Even during the Cuban missile crisis he (Kennedy) was in touch with Nashville all the time," Tabac said. "I believe he testified to the grand jury through his top aide and I believe it was wrong, especially if that is the basis on which he (Hoffa) was indicted." Tabac (TAY'-bak) also thinks Edward Grady Partin, a Teamsters official and Hoffa confidant who testified for the prosecution, may have worn a concealed microphone to record conversations with Hoffa and those were heard by the grand jurors. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, Partin died in 1990 and Sheridan, who wrote the 1972 book "The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa," died in 1995. Tabac says only the grand jury records can reveal what happened. Federal prosecutors oppose Tabac's petition, saying it doesn't meet Supreme Court standards for lifting grand jury secrecy.

Hoffa was last seen in July 1975 in suburban Detroit, where he was supposed to meet with a New Jersey Teamsters boss and a Detroit Mafia captain. Numerous theories about Hoffa's demise Hoffa was declared legally dead but his body has never been found, spawning innumerable theories about his demise. Among them: He was entombed in concrete at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, ground up and thrown in a Florida swamp or obliterated in a mob-owned fat-rendering plant. The search has continued into this decade, under a backyard pool north of Detroit in 2003, under the floor of a Detroit home in 2004 and at a horse farm in 2006. Neal, a fledgling lawyer when Kennedy chose him to prosecute Hoffa, said the government did nothing illegal. "Apparently, he (Tabac) thinks if he got the grand jury material he would see that we obtained evidence by wiretaps. It's baloney," Neal said. Even if Tabac can prove his theory, it's unclear if that would lead to overturning the conviction. "The problem is just that everyone is dead, so it is pretty hard to do," Tabac said.

"If there is perjured testimony, I think the relatives may have standing to bring some kind of ... name-clearing procedure." Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Where is Jimmy Hoffa? - Princenthal & May, LLC Where is Jimmy Hoffa? 07/31/2015 | Tags: History , Jimmy Hoffa , Mobsters , Teamsters July 30th marks the anniversary of one of the most famous conspiracies of all time – the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. The Teamsters president’s last contact was a call to his wife from a Detroit pay phone in 1975. He told his wife he was to meet two organized crime leaders at a restaurant there, but they never showed. At the time, Hoffa had resigned from the Teamsters after serving time for jury tampering, fraud, and attempted bribery, but sources say he was scheming to return to power. The FBI believes they know why Hoffa was killed – likely by the Mafia to prevent him from disclosing mob infiltration of the Teamsters, including misappropriation of pension funds.

But as for who to charge, investigators have simply never found enough evidence. And now, most of those thought to be involved or have information have died – of natural causes, or murdered themselves. Still, the fascination with the case remains. The last trace of Hoffa is a single strand of hair found in a car that was seen leaving the Machus Red Fox restaurant. DNA testing confirmed the hair to be the then-62 year old Hoffa’s. In 2003, the Oakland Michigan Sheriff’s Department searched a property where a briefcase allegedly containing a syringe used to poison Hoffa was buried. In 2006, the FBI excavated a horse farm formerly owned by a Teamster’s employee. As recently as 2013, the FBI received a credible tip from mobster Anthony Zerilli that Hoffa’s body might be buried in a Michigan field 20 miles north of where he was last seen. Zerilli was in jail at the time of the disappearance, but swore he was privy to details of Hoffa’s murder. Agents scoured the field but found nothing. These are just a few of the thousands of tips investigators have looked into over the years.

And yet other than that lone follicle, no trace has ever been found of the notorious Teamster. Why? One of the more grisly theories says Hoffa’s body may have been run through a cardboard shredding machine at a mob-owned garbage facility that was destroyed by fire 6 months after Hoffa went missing. That would seem like a very final final resting place, but Detroit isn’t giving up on finding Hoffa. The city’s current U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade says the case “is inactive, but not closed.” Federal monitoring of the Teamsters isn’t a closed case yet either – the government plans to continue scrutinizing the union to keep it from being influenced by organized crime until the year 2020. Today the group is led by James Hoffa Junior. Elected in 1999, he vowed “the mob killed my father. If you vote for me, they will never come back.” Share: A Worker’s Hero: The Life And Legacy Of James R. Hoffa | Teamsters A Worker’s Hero: The Life And Legacy Of James R. Hoffa James R.

Hoffa who served as the union’s General President from 1957 to 1971. Hoffa was born on February 14, 1913, in Brazil, Indiana. He began his working life at an early age in order to help support the family following the death of his father in 1921. He was keenly aware that his father’s death was directly related to the working conditions on the job in the town’s coal mines and never forgot the pain and hardships it caused. Hoffa began taking on odd jobs and continued this practice when he moved with his mother and three siblings to Detroit in 1924. He was initiated into the labor movement in his teens when he took on full-time work as a warehouseman for Kroger grocery stores. It was there in 1932, angry over poor working conditions and unfair treatment of employees, that Hoffa led fellow workers in a successful strike against the company. He was just 19 years old. Hoffa’s activities caught the attention of the Teamsters.

He joined the union in 1933 and quickly rose through the ranks, becoming a business agent for Local 299 in Detroit that same year. By 1937, he was elected President of the local and continued to strengthen his leadership abilities by forming the Michigan Conference of Teamsters in the early 1940s. He was a tireless organizer for the union and champion of labor concerns. He even met his wife, Josephine, when she was on strike against the company where she worked. His natural skills and easy rapport with rank-and-file workers broadened his popularity throughout the Central region, earning him a position as Trustee on the General Executive Board in 1947, and election to the board as a Vice President in 1952. Hoffa was elected General President at the national convention in 1957. As General President, Hoffa developed a well-earned reputation among his peers as a tough and effective bargainer. He continued to work hard to expand the number of working men and women who were protected by union contracts. Under his leadership, the union's membership rose to include more than 2 million workers.

His crowning achievement was the 1964 National Master Freight Agreement, which united more than 400,000 over-the-road drivers under one contract. Congressman Elmer Holland (D-PA) was quoted as saying “Jimmy Hoffa has put more bread and butter on the tables for American kids than all his detractors put together.” Hoffa’s devotion to the Teamsters and their families is legendary. His whole life was dedicated to bettering the lives of all working families and he was a leading advocate in the war on poverty. “While working men and women have long known the value of a dollar—it is a lesson well taught to one who labors for a living—it has taken a long, long time to teach employers the value of a human being, and in many cases has not yet been successfully taught,” he said in 1964. “Few give thought to what happens to displaced workers, but they can analyze to the penny what the profits will be.” He was ahead of his time in many ways. He pushed for civil rights, supporting a young Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists years before they gained national attention.

He refused to condone segregated local unions, even at the cost of losing organizing campaigns in the South. “If they want segregation, we don’t want them,” he said. “We pride ourselves on the fact there are no Jim Crow locals in our union.” Understanding the importance of a strong political voice for the union and the creation of an active, educated working class, in 1959 Hoffa developed the Democratic, Republican, Independent Voter Education project (DRIVE) to promote political activism in the union. He also clearly understood the importance of organizing as the lifeblood of the union and the foundation for those political activities. “Organize. Organize some more. It is the way we can show the powers that be that they are not going to take away our wages, hours, and benefits. Our voice will be too loud and strong to ignore,” he said in 1965. Hoffa never became immune to the needs of working families even when he reached the pinnacle of union leadership. His ceaseless work on behalf of laborers here and abroad elicited unabashed feelings of respect, admiration and loyalty from workers everywhere that are still alive today.

Inducted into Labor’s International Hall of Fame in 1999, his memory and achievements are also celebrated through the James R. Hoffa Memorial Scholarship Fund, which awards hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in scholarship grants to the children of Teamster members. Sign Up For Action Alerts Sorry, but we failed to add you to the list. Please try again or contact 1.888.780.6763 Please leave blank Jimmy Hoffa (Character) - Biography biography from The Irishman (2018) The content of this page was created by users. It has not been screened or verified by IMDb staff. Warning! This character biography may contain plot spoilers. Visit our Character Biography Help to learn more. Character Biography History Discuss James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa (born February 14, 1913, disappeared July 30, 1975), was an American labor leader. As the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hoffa wielded considerable influence. After he was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror, he served nearly a decade in prison.

He is also well-known in popular culture for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his unexplained disappearance and presumed death. His son James P. Hoffa is the current president of the Teamsters. Born in Brazil, Indiana, on Feb. 14, 1913, his paternal ancestors were Pennsylvania Germans ("Pennsylvania Dutch") who migrated to Indiana in the mid-1800s. His maternal ancestors were Irish-American. James grew up fast when his coal-driller father, John Cleveland Hoffa, died from lung disease in 1920. His mother, Viola "Ola" Riddle, took in laundry to keep the family together, and the children also helped with afterschool jobs. Hoffa later described his mother lovingly as a frontier type woman "who believed that Duty and Discipline were spelled with capital D's." In 1922, the Hoffas moved to Clinton, Indiana, for a two year stay, then to Detroit to an apartment on Merritt Street on the city's brawling, working-class west side. Tagged by the neighbor kids as a hillbilly, Hoffa won respect and acceptance with his fists.

After school Jimmy worked as a delivery boy and finally dropped out of school in the 9th grade just as the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression brought massive layoffs and business failures. A friend, Walter Murphy, told him to get into the food business. "No matter what happens, people have to eat," he said. Jimmy got a job at the Kroger Grocery and Baking Company, whose warehouses were located just a few blocks from his home. Lying to the foreman about his age, Hoffa began his job of unloading produce from railroad cars for 32 cents an hour. The pay, two-thirds of it scrip redeemable for food at Kroger's, was good considering the growing unemployment and food lines. The downside to the new job was that warehouse workers were required to report at 4:30 p.m. for a 12-hour shift, but they only got paid for the time that they actually unloaded produce. The rest of the shift, they would sit around idle and unpaid, waiting to be called but unable to leave the premises. The men also endured a foreman from hell, "the kind of guy," Hoffa later said who causes unions.

Called the "Little Bastard" by all the workers, he abused his powers, threatening and firing workers for no reason. Hoffa and his coworkers, including Bobby Holmes, who would also rise in the Teamster hierarchy with Hoffa, bided their time. The harsh reality that one third of American workers remained jobless made them cautious in their organizing efforts. Finally one night in the spring of 1931, after two workers were fired for going to a food cart for their midnight dinner, the men acted. Hoffa called for a work stoppage just as trucks loaded with Florida strawberries pulled into the warehouse. Faced with the need to get the perishable cargo into refrigerators quickly, Kroger management agreed to meet with the new leaders the following morning as long as the workers resumed their duties. After several days of negotiating Hoffa and his aides had a union contract. It included a raise of 13 cents an hour, the guarantee of at least a half a day's pay per day, a modest insurance plan and, of course, recognition of the union. The new leaders soon applied for and received a charter as Federal Local 19341 of the American Federation of Labor.

Hoffa was fired the following year after a fight with a plant foreman who goaded the hot-tempered union leaders into throwing a crate of vegetables on the floor and spraying the boss with assorted vegetable juices. Jimmy claimed in later years that he quit before he could be fired and walked away. Hoffa next landed a job as a full time union organizer for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He took the Kroger union with him into the IBT where its membership was absorbed into Local 299. He and other IBT organizers fought with management in their organizing efforts in the Detroit, Michigan, area. Hoffa used organized crime connections to shake down (see extortion or protection racket) an association of small grocery stores. This led to his first criminal conviction, for which he paid a fine. After he rose to a leadership position in Local 299, Hoffa continued to work with organized crime in Detroit using the threat of labor trouble to induce business to use a mobster controlled clothier (Friedman and Schwarz, 1988). The Teamsters union organized truckers & firefighters, first throughout the Midwest and then nationwide.

It skillfully used quickie strikes, secondary boycotts and other means of leveraging union strength at one company to organize workers and win contract demands at others. Hoffa took over the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, when his predecessor, Dave Beck, was convicted on bribery charges and imprisoned. Hoffa worked to expand the union and in 1964 succeeded in bringing virtually all North American over-the-road truck drivers under the single National Master Freight Agreement, which was said to give many truck drivers access to a middle-class income. (citation needed) Hoffa then pushed to enlist workers from industries only very marginally related to transportation. Airline employees, hotel workers, and some employees of Disney World (including Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Goofey) are Teamsters. President John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson both put pressure on Hoffa through John's brother Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General, attempting to investigate his activities and disrupt his ever-growing union. The Kennedys in particular were sure that Hoffa had pocketed a great deal of union money.

Having expelled the Teamsters in the 1950s, the AFL-CIO also disliked Hoffa and aided the Democrats in their investigations. Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa, is the Teamsters' current leader; his daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, currently serves as an associate circuit court judge in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1964, Hoffa was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror and jailed for 15 years. On December 23, 1971,[1] however, he was released when President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to time served on the condition he not participate in union activities for 10 years. Hoffa was planning to sue to invalidate that restriction in order to reassert his power over the Teamsters when he disappeared at, or sometime after, 2:45 pm on July 30, 1975 from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Oakland County, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.

He had been due to meet two Mafia leaders, Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone from Detroit and Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano from Union City, New Jersey and New York City. DNA evidence examined in 2001 placed Hoffa in the car of longtime Teamster associate Charles O'Brien, despite O'Brien's claims Hoffa had never been in the car. Police interviews later that year failed to produce any indictments. In July 2003, after the convicted killer Richard Powell told authorities that a briefcase containing a syringe used to subdue Hoffa was buried at a house in Hampton Township, Michigan, another backyard was examined and excavated. Again, nothing was found. In 2003, the FBI searched the backyard of a home in Hampton Township, Michigan formerly frequented by Frank Sheeran, Second World War veteran, Mafia hitman, truck driver, Teamsters official and close friend of Hoffa. Nothing significant was found. In 2004, Charles Brandt, a former prosecutor and Chief Deputy Attorney General of Delaware, published the book I Heard You Paint Houses. The title is based on a euphemistic exchange apparently used by hitmen and their would-be employers.

"I heard you paint houses." "Yes, and I do my own carpentry, too." House painting alludes to the splatter of blood on walls, and "doing my own carpentry" to the task of disposing of the body. Brandt recounted a series of confessions by Sheeran regarding Hoffa's murder, and claimed that Sheeran had begun contacting him because he wished to assuage feelings of guilt. Over the course of several years, he spoke many times by phone to Brandt (which Brandt recorded) during which he acknowledged his role as Hoffa's killer, acting on orders from mob boss Russell Bufalino. He claimed to have used his friendship with Hoffa to lure him to a bogus meeting in Bloomfield Hills and drive him to a house in northwestern Detroit, where he shot him twice before fleeing and leaving Hoffa's body behind. An updated version of Brandt's book claims that Hoffa's body was cremated within an hour of Sheeran's departure.

On February 14, 2006, Lynda Milito, wife of Gambino crime family member Louie Milito, claimed that her husband had told her during an argument in 1988 that he had killed Hoffa and dumped his body near Staten Island's Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. In April 2006, news reports surfaced that hitman Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski had confessed to author Philip Carlo that he was part of a group of five men who had kidnapped and murdered Hoffa. The claim's credibility is questionable, as Kuklinski has become somewhat notorious for repeatedly claiming to have killed people including Roy DeMeo that concrete evidence has proved he could not have killed. The story forms part of the book The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, which was released on July 1, 2006.

On May 17, 2006, acting on a tip, the FBI began digging for Hoffa's remains outside of a barn on what is now the Hidden Dreams Farm in Milford Township, Michigan where they surveyed the land and began to dig up parts of the 85-acre parcel, according to federal officials. More than 40 agents sectioned off a piece of the property where they believed Hoffa's bones might be. Federal agents would not say who tipped them off, but said they received information on a group of people who had met on the land 30 years before. The FBI has made contact with Hoffa's daughter, but no other information has been released. It is not known if the FBI has found anything, although images taken from a helicopter appeared to show agents digging something out of the ground. The investigation team included forensic experts from the bureau's Washington laboratory and anthropologists, archaeologists, engineers and architects. On May 18, 2006, the Detroit Free Press reported that the Hoffa search was prompted by information supplied by Donovan Wells, 75, a prisoner at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, KY.

The newspaper said Wells, who was jailed for 10 years in January 2004 for using his Detroit-area trucking company and drivers to ship large quantities of marijuana from Texas to Detroit from 1998-2001, was trying to parlay his knowledge about Hoffa's disappearance to get out of prison early. On May 20, 2006, the Free Press, quoting anonymous sources, said one of Wells's lawyers had threatened to go to the media during the previous year unless the US Attorney's Office acted on Wells's information and followed through on a pledge to seek his release from prison. The next day, the newspaper quoted Wells's lawyer from a 1976 criminal case, James Elsman of Birmingham, who said the FBI in 1976 had ignored Wells's offer to tell them where Hoffa was buried. The lawyer said the FBI ignored him again on May 18, after he learned that the FBI was digging in Milford Township and called the bureau to offer the information. Outraged, Elsman said he then offered the information to the Bloomfield Township Police Department.

On May 22, an FBI agent and township police detective visited Elsman's office, but Elsman declined to offer much information, saying he first wanted them to provide him with a signed release from Wells. Elsman also offered to visit the horse farm to help agents pinpoint where to dig. The FBI didn't take him up on his offer. On May 24, 2006, the FBI removed a large barn on the farm to look under it for Hoffa. On May 30, 2006 the FBI ended the search for Hoffa's body without any remains found at the Hidden Dreams Farm. On June 16, 2006, the Detroit Free Press published in its entirety the so-called Hoffex Memo, a 56-page report the FBI prepared for a January 1976 briefing on the case at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. The report, which the FBI has called the definitive account of what agents believe happened to Hoffa, can be found online. In November of 2006 KLAS-TV Channel 8 Las Vegas interviewed author Charles Brandt about the latest news regarding Hoffa's murder and disappearance.

Brandt claims that Hoffa's body was taken from the murder scene and possibly driven two minutes away to the Grand Lawn Cemetery where he was cremated. On December 9th 2007 the E! Channel debuted the 20 Most Shocking Unsolved Crimes. The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa was number four. The house at Beaverland and Curtis streets where Frank Sheeran allegedly killed Hoffa was highlighted along with its proximity to the Grand Lawn Cemetery in Detroit. Page last updated by !!!deleted!!! (13262373) , 8 years ago

Question: Which US Trade Union was led by the notorious Jimmy Hoffa?
Answer: Teamsters