Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy vs Jimmy Hoffa

James Neff “Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy vs Jimmy Hoffa”  Little Brown & Co. , 2015, 340 pp.

Author, James Neff, is an investigations editor at the Seattle Times.  Many of the records used in this book had been closed for 50 years and have just recently been made available.  Bobby Kennedy’s creation of the “Hoffa Squad” is well detailed in this book which chronicles how from 1957 to 1964 Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa channeled nearly all of their powers into destroying each other.  I certainly gained a new appreciation of Bobby Kennedy from reading this book.

Bobby Kennedy made fighting organized crime a top priority, and even after he resigned, the Justice Department kept it up. That was a profound shift in federal law enforcement. RFK got it done. Despite his many flaws, Hoffa did boost the power and influence of the Teamsters, bringing good wages and benefits to millions of members. Unfortunately, he also played into the hands of enemies of the labor movement, allowing unions to be besmirched broadly by accusations of bossism and gangster ties.

My Notes:

Pg. 22:  In 1956 the FBI announced that they had cracked the Riesel case (the news reporter who had been blinded by an acid attack).  The ‘mastermind’ behind the acid blinding, the FBI sais, was labor racketeer Johnny Dio (the racketeer portrayed in the movie “On The Waterfront”).  Later evidence pointed to Hoffa as the one who ordered the attack but no charges were issued against Hoffa.

Pg. 41:  Bobby Kennedy only worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy for six months but was forever linked to him because he refused to disavow McCarthy’s conduct, even after the Senate voted overwhelmingly in 1954 to censure McCarthy.  Kennedy considered loyalty a defining virtue.  (McCarthy, a Catholic,  had been a family friend, particularly of Joseph Kennedy).

Pg. 50:  Hoffa dropped out of school after ninth grade.  He went to work job stocking goods at a department store, ten hours a day, six days a week, for twenty cents an hour.  He turned his $12 weekly check over to his Mother.  When he was 18 he stepped up to serve as a coordinator to form a union at Kroger’s. 

Pg. 158:  In 1959 Bobby Kennedy sent a letter of resignation to Senator McClellan, stepping down as chief counsel to the McClellan committee hearings.  (Bobby was going to lead John Kennedy’s bid for president).  The (John) Kennedy-Ervin bill in the senate resulted from the investigation, but Republicans and southern Democrats in the House added business-friendly provisions that limited picketing and boycotts.  Kennedy took his name off the bill before it passed as the Landrum-Griffin Act.  The law did address union abuses exposed during the rackets hearings: after the law was passed, union members would have the right to vote by secret ballot, making it harder for racketeers to take over through intimidation; locals had to file annual financial reports with the Labor Department, revealing how officers were spending union dues; union leaders also had to disclose any conflicts of interest, such as having business deals with officials of the companies they were bargaining against, a provision that forced Hoffa to change his conduct. 

Pg. 160:  To have a Kennedy in the White House was unthinkable to Hoffa.  He so far had survived the longest, most extensive congressional investigation in history, one that, at its peak, employed more than one hundred government lawyers, investigators, accountants, and support staff.  He had been charged on four separate occasions in federal court: for bribery, perjury, and twice for wiretapping.  Each time he beat back the indictments.

Pg. 187:  A later investigation of Hoffa was halted.  It later turned out that Hoffa, by reaching out to the vice president (Nixon) had made a deal with Nixon: if the Justice department would lay off the Sun Valley case, the Teamsters would back Nixon for president and help him defeat Kennedy.  This same thing happened in the Test Fleet investigation which also involved Hoffa.

Pg. 199:  Shortly after the Democratic convention, FBI director Hoover, a Nixon supporter, had the confidential FBI files of the entire Kennedy family moved into his office.  He had highlights of the report on JFK prepared:  they included data reflecting that Kennedy carried on an illicit relationship with another man’s wife during WWII; that Kennedy was compromised with a woman in Las Vegas; and that Kennedy and Sinatra have in the recent past been involved in parties in Palm Springs, Las Vegas and New York City.  (Later in the summer of 1960, Hoover gave this dossier to candidate Richard Nixon.)

Pg. 217:  Shortly after Bobby Kennedy became attorney general, his team compiled a list of the nation’s top forty racketeers, then sought every shred of information about them in the possession of twenty-seven federal agencies, everyone from the Narcotics Bureau to the US Postal Service.  They counted on getting little from the FBI.  At the top of the target list was Hoffa.

Pg. 226:  The teamsters suffered a loss in reputation after being noisily expelled from the AFL-CIO in 1957.  But their ranks jumped from 1.2 million members to 1.7 million by 1961. 

Pg. 336:  In 1964 when Bobby Kennedy stepped down as attorney general, he left behind a Justice Department that was both bigger and more nimble, one so committed to fighting organized crime that Hoover could not undo its progress.  Under RFK’s generalship, the department brought several hundred indictments against mob-connected businessmen, hoodlums, and racketeers.  It washed out the Teamsters, bringing 201 indictments against union officials or their associates, resulting in 126 convictions. 

Pg. 339:  Hoffa was finally convicted in 1964 of jury tampering and sentenced to jail for eight years.  Only six weeks later, he was convicted of defrauding a Teamster-managed pension fund. After all his appeals failed, Hoffa entered prison in early 1967 defiantly, still hoping to overturn his convictions. He failed but was pardoned was in 1971 by Nixon.  He immediately tried to regain control of the Teamsters but his stand-in, Fitzsimons would not relinquish power.  On July 30, 1975 Hoffa disappeared outside the Machus Red Fox restaurant in suburban Detroit after being stood up for a meeting scheduled with local Mafia member Anthony Giacalone.