Road Rage

The seduction of James Phillip Hoffa began several months before the election that's expected to make him president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Last March the son of legendary Teamsters president and all-around thug James Riddle Hoffa flew from Detroit to Washington, D.C. to attend the 113th annual Gridiron Club dinner. The setting was the ballroom of the Capital Hilton, two blocks from the White House. The white-tie affair is one of Washington's most tribal mating rituals between journalists and politicians. The club of 150 journalists performs for 500 bigwigs, with skits lampooning politicians and send-ups of the reporters. Every talking head, every hype artist, every Cabinet member is on hand. Even the president attends to roast and be roasted. Hoffa rented a tux and made the scene.

Just the prospect that the 57-year-old labor lawyer might become the next chief of the Teamsters union was enough to catapult him into Washington's power structure. Robert Novak, the crusty conservative columnist and this year's Gridiron president, invited Hoffa. He seated him with, among others, Clinton buddy Vernon Jordan, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, NBC's Tim Russert, CNN's Judy Woodruff and Wall Street Journal executive editor Al Hunt. "It should be an interesting table," Novak said shortly before the evening began.

Indeed.

Hoffa was the hit of that dinner. Vernon (text continued on page 152)Hoffa(continued from page 120) Jordan told him about his job as a Teamster when he was in law school. Writer Marylouise Oates, the wife of Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, said her father had been a Teamster in Philadelphia. Greenspan talked economics with him. "I thought he came off as very down-to-earth," Al Hunt said afterward. "He has a good sense of humor."

The labor lawyer from Detroit was starstruck. "It was certainly exciting," Hoffa said the next morning from his hotel room. "I look forward to working with them."

A month later federal investigators finished working over Hoffa's 1996 campaign finances, found some irregularities but cleared him to run in this year's special election. Barring unforeseen circumstances, Hoffa plans to return to Washington and create the second Hoffa empire in the Marble Palace, as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters headquarters on Capitol Hill is known.

"I'm going to establish a strong presidency," Hoffa promised on the campaign trail. "A bully pulpit."

•

It's the bully part that worries corporate honchos, labor leaders and politicians across the country. It reminds them of Jimmy, the all-powerful Teamster boss who disappeared in 1975. The first Hoffa grew up driving trucks and organizing workers in the violent union movement of the Thirties, when management stiffs used tire irons on the heads of strikers, and union organizers carried pistols for protection.

Jimmy Hoffa helped build the Teamsters into the most powerful union in the nation, with well over 2 million members by 1975. Jimmy--a pug-nosed, thick-armed union boss who would lean over the table, grab you by the neck and chuck you against the wall with one arm--represented gruff power. He was an unapologetic working-class tough who was so tight with organized crime that many thought he was married to the Mob.

Son of Hoffa is resurrecting the threat. His targets are the government, the labor union establishment, liberals and other assorted political enemies. His closest allies are right-wingers with strong views and considerable power within the union. With organized labor muscling for more power, the prospect of an emboldened Teamsters union run by another Hoffa could shake up the entire economy. The Teamsters are still the country's second-largest union with 1.4 million members. When the Teamsters struck United Parcel Service in 1997, packages stacked up in warehouses from coast to coast, from small towns to major airports, causing millions of dollars in losses to large companies and forcing some smaller ones into bankruptcy.

"Weee're back!" is Jim Hoffa's opening line of every speech at every truck stop and union hall.

But who's back?

Jim Hoffa calls himself a reformer, but there's no doubt he is allied with entrenched Teamster bureaucrats who believe that a long black Lincoln Town Car comes with the job. This Hoffa has also served notice he won't be anyone's political patsy. Under Ron Carey, the recently ousted Teamsters president, the union became an arm of the Democratic Party and forked over $10 million in political contributions.

"The Teamsters aren't going to be tied to any party," Hoffa says.

Without Carey at the helm, the Democrats can't count on Teamster votes or cash in the 1998 midterm elections. That could mean Congress will remain in Republican hands. And Al Gore's chances of winning the White House in 2000 will be dimmer if the Teamsters crawl into bed with the GOP.

It's not only a different Hoffa this time around. It's also a different time in America and a different bunch of Teamsters. Some of the truckers, warehousemen and other Teamsters can pull down $80,000 a year, live like yuppies and invest in mutual funds. But a strong rage still runs deep among many rank-and-file drivers. They're angry that manufacturing jobs keep leaving the country. They're angry that capitalists are getting filthy rich while Teamsters' wages creep up slowly. They know that downsizing puts friends and neighbors out of work. They don't get the high-paying jobs in the booming technology industry; they get to break their backs lifting boxes of computer parts, and trucking semiconductors from coast to coast.

Call it road rage, Teamsters style.

Son of Hoffa has plenty of rage, too, but he hides it behind the mask of a mild-mannered lawyer. Look closely and there's no doubt that James Hoffa is angry. He's been holding it in for years, since his father was first dragged before the McClellan committee, which was investigating racketeering and organized crime inside the Teamsters in the late Fifties; since Bobby Kennedy's investigations put his father behind bars in 1967; since his dad was murdered and his mother died of a broken heart.

"I don't hold any grudges," Hoffa told me. But that was candidate-speak. Whatever he is called--Sonny Boy, Junior, Jimmy--Jim Hoffa and his supporters want to get even with a lot of people: with the feds and the other unions that ganged up on the Teamsters, with socialists, liberals, Democrats and anyone else who has dissed Hoffa, his father or the working man.

As for the people in the White House and Congress who supported Ron Carey in the 1996 Teamster vote, Hoffa warns:

"I think they made a tragic mistake."

•

The Carlton Hotel is a model of stuffy arrogance, standing cold and gray on this frigid morning in the capital, just up the street from the White House. Chefs are stirring in the restaurant, where a plate of spaghetti can cost $25. At eight A.M. a dozen of Washington's top journalists meander in for a chance to meet the son of Hoffa. Waiting for Hoffa, and drinking coffee in the Carlton's Monticello Room, I expected an entourage--at least a bit of muscle.

Instead, in walk two pudgy, middle-aged guys. People start shaking the hand of the larger of the two. He stands about 5'8", looks to weigh at least 180. He has a pleasant smile and beady pale-blue eyes set in a bland face. He's wearing a blue blazer, blue Oxford shirt, patterned tie, comfortable black shoes.

"Jim Hoffa," he says to me, sticking out his hand. "Nice to meet you."

At first impression I'm thinking, Hoffa Lite.

"I get the feeling he's playing a role," columnist Robert Novak told me a few days later.

For this early-morning session with reporters, Hoffa plays the role of reformer, the reasoned voice of reconciliation, preaching unity for a leaderless and badly mismanaged Teamsters union. The assembled scribblers play along with the script until Godfrey "Bud" Sperling, the Christian Science Monitor journalist who has hosted these breakfasts for 30 years, can't take it anymore.

"Isn't there an irony in Jim Hoffa's leading a cleanup campaign?" he asks.

"Maybe for you," Hoffa shoots back.

"Doesn't it erode your credibility with some people?" Sperling asks.

"Not at all," Hoffa says. "We found that the Carey campaign had embezzled more than $1 million. We proved it. I don't think there's any irony. We are the true reformers. We're the ones who are going to rebuild this union----"

Sperling cuts him off. "How do you explain your father?" he asks. "I think we're due a little explanation."

"I don't think my father needs any explanation. He was a great Teamster. He put the Teamsters on the map. It became the most powerful union in the free world. He doubled and tripled wages, established pension funds----"

"But he was tied up with mobsters, wasn't he?" Sperling interjects.

"I don't think so," says Hoffa, his eyes narrowing. "He's been gone since 1975. He's not running in this race. I'm running. We're putting forth ideas----"

"One more question," Sperling interrupts again. "Was he killed by the Mob?"

"Well," says the son, "we don't know who killed him. But there had been indications they were afraid he was going to come back, because he was going to lead a reform movement."

Jim Hoffa is right about one thing. Who killed James Riddle Hoffa in 1975 remains a mystery. The FBI file is still open, though agency sources believe two mobsters did the hit, fearing Hoffa could no longer be trusted to play ball. One theory claims his body was taken to Central Sanitation Services near Detroit, where it was destroyed "by means of a shredder, compactor and/or incinerator." But was his father really leading a reform movement? And exactly what kind of reformer will his son be?

"Jim Hoffa as a reformer is a sick joke," says Hoffa's archenemy Ken Paff, head of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the union's dissident group. "Hoffa and his backers will sell the workers down the river and pad the pockets of the employers."

•

Detroit, Jim Hoffa's home base, is a place that somehow manages to breed anger and madness.

The city's core has never recovered from the riots in 1967, when the whites rapidly split for the suburbs. The downtown seems devoid of humanity, as if it had been hit by a neutron bomb. Blue-collar jobs have gone to the suburbs. The Motor City definitely looks like it's out of gas.

On this gray winter morning in Detroit, Jim Hoffa is pissed off at other unions, for starters.

"We're going to fight for our jurisdiction," he tells me. "We want the public employees. We want the regional trucking and warehousing workers. Teamsters are tired of being run off of every construction site by the operating engineers." Observers expect Hoffa, if he's elected, to raid other unions. "I'd like to organize doctors," he says, half-jokingly. "That would be prestige."

Hoffa has driven into town from his two-story brick home in the suburb of Troy, 15 miles north, where he raised his two sons and still lives with Virginia, his wife of 29 years. She's a movie nut. They like to cocoon and watch flicks on TV. Smiling this morning over a pair of puffy magazine articles, he strolls into his small, nondescript office on the first floor of the Michigan Teamsters Joint Council 43 building. He takes off his trench coat and slips into the chair behind his desk. Over his shoulder, Jack Nicholson, playing Hoffa's father, glowers down from a poster for the movie Hoffa.

After venting on the unions, Hoffa goes on to the feds.

"The government did what the Mob could never do. It broke the Teamsters. It did nothing to stop the looting and pillaging by Ron Carey's political operatives and hangers-on. The government sat back and let the union be looted. I've been sounding the alarm since 1993."

The fact that Hoffa is sounding off at all at this point has more to do with his father than it does with the government or the Mob or the socialists. Though the world remembers his father as a union brute who ran the Teamsters by whatever means necessary, Jim Hoffa still sees him through a little boy's eyes.

"We were a quality-of-time family," Hoffa tells me. "Dad wasn't a nine-to-five guy, home every night. He would go away for weeks at a time on organizing drives, but when he was home it was quality time. We took traditional Sunday drives like they used to do in the old days, go to a restaurant, stop by a strike on the way back and stand by the fire barrel. That's my background when I was nine, ten years old."

Jim Hoffa was a pudgy little boy, coddled by his mother, Josephine, and his big sister, Barbara, who is now a circuit court judge in St. Louis. He recalls weekends at the family cottage at Lake Orion, 40 miles north of Detroit. "Big Jim" would come up on weekends and build a seawall or take out stumps.

"It was an idyllic time in my life," Hoffa says.

Jim went to Michigan State University, played linebacker on the football team and graduated in 1963 with a degree in economics. In 1962 his father was indicted for a $1 million kickback scheme, but the case ended in a mistrial. Still, there would be more legal battles. The son traveled with his father from courthouse to courthouse, from Chicago to Chattanooga.

While in the company of lawyers, Jim decided to go to law school at the University of Michigan in 1964. That same year his father was convicted of jury tampering. For the next three years Jim studied law, and his father appealed the conviction. The kid graduated in 1966. The appeals failed, and Jimmy Hoffa was sent to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania on March 7, 1967.

Hoffa relates this history as if he's talking about someone else's father, or another son's life. Looking to stir up an ounce of passion, I ask if it was difficult loving his father and having to visit him in prison.

"Terrible," he answers, and the quiet rage begins to surface. "Just horrible. He was treated like an animal. Bobby Kennedy went out of his way to make his life miserable."

For the next four and a half years Hoffa visited his father every other week. Jim was his father's connection to the world he once ran.

"My father was still president of the union," Hoffa says. "He was very demanding. It was a difficult time for me. I would take messages in and out. He was like a lion in a cage. The Bureau of Prisons folks and Bobby Kennedy's people would come by and smirk and look at him like he was an animal."

When Richard Nixon commuted his father's sentence, freeing him on parole in 1971, the lives of the father and son became further intertwined. For the next four years Jimmy Hoffa worked out of his son's law office in Detroit, obsessed with his comeback as Teamsters president.

•

On the night of July 30, 1975 James P. Hoffa spent a sleepless night at his in-laws' summer home in Traverse City, Michigan. According to Jim (from a biography of his father by Arthur Sloane), "Dad was pushing so hard to get back in office. I was increasingly afraid that the mob would do something about it."

Jim's mother called at seven the next morning to say his father had failed to return from a luncheon appointment the day before. The son flew back home to be with his mother. A trim, then-34-year-old attorney, he appeared on TV with her, pleading for information about his father.

James R. Hoffa never returned. His disappearance is one of the most notorious missing persons cases in history. Did the Mob do him in? Was it ordered by crime bosses who saw Hoffa as a threat? Was it carried out by his enemy Tony Provenzano? Did Chuckie O'Brien, the "foster son" who lived for a while in his house, drive him from the restaurant that day, knowing he would be killed?

Jim Hoffa worried about his mother, who had collapsed from exhaustion three weeks after her husband vanished. Hoffa recalls telling his mother that probate for her husband's estate would take seven years.

"She looked at me and said, 'Well, I won't be here for that.'

"'What do you mean? You're a young woman,' I said.

"'I won't live that long,' she told me."

Five years later, Josephine Hoffa was dead.

"She died of a broken heart," says her son. "She just withered away and lost her will to live when her mate died. I could see her sinking. She died in my arms in the hospital. I had to close her eyes.

"You don't forget things like that."

•

Once Hoffa had settled his father's estate, which was worth more than $1 million, he settled into a life and a law practice supported by the Teamsters.

Son of Hoffa never drove a truck for a living. He never actually worked as a rank-and-file member. He didn't rise through union ranks, from worker to steward to business agent to president of a local and upward to regional and national office. He did the basic lawyering, representing unions and members in grievance procedures. His reputation as a labor lawyer from 1968 to 1993 is undistinguished.

"The thing about me is I've been around the Teamsters for 30 years, and I have a good reputation," Hoffa says. "I can go anywhere, look anybody in the eye. I have no problems."

Until 1991, no one had raised questions about Jim Hoffa's credentials, his choice of clients or his past dealings with figures linked to organized crime. Few people outside Detroit even knew Jimmy Hoffa had a son until Son of Hoffa made his first move to run for Teamsters president.

"I always thought about it," he tells me. "I had gone to every convention. I was there when my father was president. I was there when Fitzsimmons was there, Jackie Presser, Billy McCarthy. But I never realized I could do it."

•

In a tale of irony stacked on irony, Hoffa got his chance thanks to the federal government. In 1989, after decades of investigations into Teamsters racketeering and corruption had failed to clean up the union, the Justice Department forced the Teamsters to sign a consent decree that essentially put the union under government control. The agreement established an Independent Review Board with the power to delve into the inner workings of every Teamsters local. The government also lopped off the Teamsters leadership and set the stage for an election in 1991 that would for the first time allow rank-and-file Teamsters to vote for general president.

Jim Hoffa wanted to run, but the government disqualified him because he was neither a working union member nor a union official.

"They didn't want me to run, period," he says. "It was a government scam to keep me from running."

The right to sit in the president's chair in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters building on Capitol Hill went to Ron Carey in a three-way race. A longtime Teamster, Carey had run Local 804 in Queens since 1968. He was seen as one of the few clean characters in a union of gangsters. The Justice Department was pleased that he won, and editorials cheered his victory. "Mr. Carey's triumph is labor's triumph," The New York Times wrote in 1991. His win marked a break from the Teamsters' sordid past.

Now Carey and the government look worse than sordid. Every local union boss that became a target for investigators blamed Carey for sucking up to the Justice Department. Every perk cut from local officials created animosity and drove them to Hoffa. At truck stops and on loading docks around New York, Chicago, Detroit and Dallas, Teamsters bosses were painting Carey as a government stooge.

What's more damning is that federal officials may have refused to pursue evidence alleging that Ron Carey had Mob ties. In 1992, Michael Moroney, a veteran labor racketeering investigator, started to probe Carey's possible ties to organized crime. But when Moroney tried to bring his information before the Independent Review Board in 1994, he claims board chairman Frederick Lacey said he wasn't interested.

"In other words," Moroney tells me, "Lacey was saying, 'Carey's a bum, but he's our bum.'"

•

Realizing that Carey was a politically weak bum, Jim Hoffa mounted a campaign to unseat him in the 1996 campaign. Hoffa crisscrossed the country to get votes, hawking his name at workplaces and union halls from dawn until dusk.

When Hoffa seemed to be pulling even with Carey, the feds launched investigations into a few of Hoffa's key running mates.

William Hogan Jr., head of Local 714 in Chicago, was charged with rampant nepotism that amounted to a Hogan family fiefdom within the local. Hogan resigned from the Hoffa slate. Likewise, Dallas Teamsters boss T.C. Stone was forced off the slate after IRB investigators issued a report revealing that Stone and other Local 745 officials gave themselves more than $750,000 in vacation pay, above their salaries, from 1985 to 1996. Hoffa ally Thomas Ryan, head of a Philadelphia Teamsters local, was accused of embezzling union funds. Ryan left the Hoffa slate and was suspended from union activities for five years. All three have denied any wrongdoing, and Hoffa says they were set up.

When the ballots were counted in late 1996, Ron Carey was the winner with 52 percent of the vote.

"We beat the Mob!" Carey proclaimed after the win. In the months after the election, Hoffa's supporters uncovered a series of money-laundering schemes in the Carey campaign. They showed, among other things, that Carey operatives had embezzled Teamsters funds by diverting more than $700,000 to liberal advocacy groups and back to Carey campaign accounts.

Federal officials threw out the 1996 results and banned Carey from running in the new election. (Carey was subsequently expelled from the union.) Jim Hoffa became the presumptive leader.

It has created the government's worst nightmare.

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The question of what Jim Hoffa would do as Teamsters president remains unclear, beyond kicking out the Carey people and trying to get the government out of the Teamsters' business. In campaign stops he does little more than promise to better manage the union, start aggressive organizing drives and restore Teamster pride. The best insight into the next Hoffa regime comes from the three men who helped retool Hoffa from labor lawyer with a well-known name to the likely Teamsters president. Larry Brennan, Richard Leebove and George Geller make up Hoffa's troika.

In a way Hoffa is Larry Brennan's creation. Brennan, the longtime president of Michigan Teamsters Joint Council 43, qualified Hoffa by making him an administrative assistant in 1993 with a $56,000 salary. Brennan also provides a living connection between the two Hoffas.

"Jimmy Hoffa was my mentor," Brennan tells me one afternoon in his huge, cluttered office with a pastel portrait of Jimmy Sr. "I named my son Jimmy."

Does the son resemble the father?

"He has tenacity, like his father had." Brennan says. "I think his heart's in it." Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

In the eyes of the dissidents, the reformers and Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Larry Brennan represents the worst of the union's old guard. They accuse him of using intimidation to run the Detroit locals for the benefit of himself and the employers rather than for the workers. Though the federal government hasn't been able to pin anything on Brennan, a Teamsters health fund indirectly under his control has been riddled with corruption. Federal investigators had just finished questioning Brennan before I arrived.

"Nazis" and "fascists" is how Brennan sees the feds and Carey's internal investigators. Brennan says Jim Hoffa is a bulwark against the real national threat: the AFL-CIO, which he dismisses as a group run by socialists.

Brennan shares that belief with Rich Leebove and George Geller. He brought the two former members of Lyndon LaRouche's Labor Party into his locals in the Eighties. The Labor Party was a radical, right-wing, antiestablishment cult that grew out of the Sixties' political ferment. Leebove and Geller have taken LaRouche's crusade against liberals into the Teamsters and inside Hoffa's campaign.

Leebove left LaRouche for the Teamsters because LaRouche's increasing anti-Semitism made it hard for him "to go home at Passover." Leebove helped run Hoffa's 1996 campaign, but he proved his true value last year. It was Leebove, working with other anti-Carey activists, who doggedly investigated Carey's campaign finances, uncovered evidence of the embezzled funds and forced federal campaign officials to begin a probe that led to Carey's demise.

"As a union political operative," wrote The Wall Street Journal, "he was the person most responsible for toppling Carey." To be blunt, Hoffa owes Leebove, but Leebove can't collect.

An investigation into Hoffa's 1996 campaign found that he failed to accurately report $43,868 in donations and the campaign received $167,675 in in-kind contributions from Rich Leebove. The Hoffa campaign was fined, but Hoffa was cleared to run. Leebove, however, was barred from the election.

If Leebove is the political operative, his colleague George Geller is the political theoretician. A rangy six-footer who looks like a wild-eyed Woody Allen, Geller is a true believer who traded the LaRouche cult for the Teamster cult. Over dinner at Giorgio's, an Italian diner outside Detroit, Geller declared his hatred for the New Left, the Kennedys, the New York Times editorial pages and, for good measure, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"To some degree," Geller says, "Hoffa functions as a symbol as much as he does a real person. He served as that for me, a shield against government takeover of the Teamsters."

Geller lives for the day when Hoffaled Teamsters take over. "We represent the true working class," he says. "We're a little violent, a little big, a little threatening. Everyone else wants us to be tethered to liberal notions. We're the ones who are going to kick over the bucket and create a ruckus."

•

Hoffa may look like he's been deskbound in a law office for decades, but he hits the campaign trail with boundless energy. For the past three years he's been getting out of bed at four o'clock on many mornings and flying to union halls and truck stops from coast to coast. His campaign events are like union revival meetings.

One nasty Saturday night in January a cold, heavy rain pelted the low-slung union hall on the ass end of Baltimore. But it couldn't keep 500 Teamsters from turning out for a fund-raiser with Jim Hoffa. Baltimore is a town that still works, and the Teamsters are strong. Members of Local 570 have forked over $100 a head to dance, eat oysters and sloppy joes, drink jug wine and Bud-weiser by the pitcher, and listen to Jim Hoffa.

An hour later he's at the microphone, revving up the faithful.

"Weee're back!" he says. The crowd cheers and Hoffa starts trashing other unions and the government.

This is Hoffa territory, and after he delivers his speech, he spends an hour signing autographs and posing for Polaroid pictures at $5 apiece. He's besieged by fans, like a rock star on tour. The union hall rings with the chant: "Hoffa! Hoffa! Hoffa!" The crowd is warmed up for the last speaker, Dennis Taylor, president of Local 355.

Taylor hoists a blowup of the Life magazine cover from May 18, 1959. It features Jimmy Hoffa, his greasy hair slicked back and his menacing mug staring into a truck's rearview mirror, under the headline A national threat: Hoffas Teamsters.

Taylor says, "A national threat--Teamsters--that's us."

Which is what worries the Establishment--political, corporate and labor. And why its leaders will do everything they can to tame Son of Hoffa. Even before the election, Hoffa can expect invitations to the White House, to the offices of every committee chairman in Congress and every corporate boardroom. It's their way of saying, "Nice Teamster, nice Hoffa."

"We're back," says Son of Hoffa at every opportunity. For people who remember his father or the days of a more violent Teamsters union, those are very frightening words.

They're angry that capitalists are getting filthy rich while Teamsters's wages creep up slowly.