The People vs. Jimmy Hoffa (Part 1)

The man who steps off the plane at the Berry Field municipal airport wears a sharp gray suit, a matching tie and an air of unshakable confidence. He smiles for the cameras, unaware that from the moment he sets foot in Nashville, he is Napoleon marching on Waterloo. Hoisting an umbrella to protect the suit from a light fall drizzle, he strides into the airport terminal flanked by a secretary and a subordinate. He carries a black case. Local and national reporters rush toward him as if magnetized. Flashbulbs pop. He has his opening provocation down cold. He's had plenty of chances to rehearse.

"Bob Kennedy is using the FBI as his own personal police force," James R. Hoffa says, hitting those P's hard like a finger jabbed in the chest. Kennedy is "using the taxpayers' money for his own vendetta." Kennedy is "usurping the powers of his office." Kennedy is "making his own policies and starting out just like Hitler did." In case no one was listening the first time around, the stocky, commanding union boss embroiders the analogy: "The United States is being run like a police state, and Kennedy is turning the U.S. into a country like the one ruled by Adolf Hitler." At no time does Hoffa show the slightest hint of fearing such a man.

Fear? That little prick Kennedy? As chief counsel to the McClellan Committee investigating labor corruption, attorney Robert Kennedy had come after Hoffa before. So had the Eisenhower Justice Department. Twice Hoffa was acquitted, and there was one mistrial. In the closest call, the government had tried to nail him for bribing an attorney, John Cheasty, to infiltrate the committee and report back on the findings. It should have been a slam dunk. But the defense made hash of Cheasty on the witness stand. Just to be safe, heavyweight champ Joe Louis stopped by the courtroom, allegedly at the Teamsters' behest, to give Hoffa a brotherly hug. Little things like that mean a lot to a mostly black jury. Kennedy said if Hoffa wasn't convicted, he'd jump off the Capitol Dome. After Hoffa was acquitted, he sent Kennedy a parachute.

Now Robert Kennedy was attorney general. His brother was president of the United States. Big deal. Hoffa told the last lawyer who came after him, "Hoffa isn't afraid of anybody, including you." (Hoffa had a way of referring to himself in the third person, especially in court.) Even so, Kennedy's pursuit has been so relentless that the press begins to talk of a "Get Hoffa Squad" within the Organized Crime division of his Justice Department.

To Hoffa, this latest trial has the feel of a grudge match. It involves a misdemeanor charge that a dummy company had been created in the late 1940s to benefit Hoffa, who then controlled the Michigan Teamsters. In 1948, a Michigan trucking company, Commercial Carriers, had asked Hoffa's help in settling a costly strike. Shortly afterward, a company was created in Nashville called Test Fleet Corporation. Its listed owners were Josephine Poszywak and Alice Johnson—the wives of Jimmy Hoffa and Teamsters official Bert Brennan. Test Fleet owned 10 trucks that were leased to Commercial Carriers. Over the next nine years, Commercial Carriers would do more than $1 million in business with Test Fleet. The government intended to prove that the money was a payoff to Hoffa—that he had called off the strike in return for a piece of business.

Jimmy Hoffa was a lightning rod for these kinds of charges, in part because of his unprecedented power. In 1931, as a teenage Kroger dockworker in Detroit, he had rallied his co-workers against the grocer's low pay and harsh working conditions. Thirty years later, he had unified the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a group of loose-knit autonomous locals, into a single collective fist. For every Teamster who resented Hoffa's power-grabbing and his dealings with the mob, which permeated the American trucking industry, there were hundreds more grateful for his clout and his piull tenacity at the bargaining table. "What do you hire us for," he asked a truckers' convention, "if not to sell your labor at the highest buck we can get?"

At the airport, Hoffa answers a few more questions, presses the flesh with a cabbie, boards a red Thunderbird sedan driven by local Teamsters chief Ewing King. It pulls up out front of the Andrew Jackson Hotel downtown. For several months, Hoffa's seventh-floor block of rooms will become the temporary nerve center of a nationwide brotherhood 1.7 million members strong. For several months, the nation's most powerful and controversial labor leader will butt heads with the most powerful prosecutor in the country. For much of that time, a Nashville courtroom will be their private battleground.

It is a time when the world is changing and Nashville is a young man's city, in a country of young men. The trial will only be the beginning. The ensuing thunder will reverberate all the way to the White House and the Supreme Court, even beyond. Careers will be made and broken. There will be blood spilled and murders attempted in the plain light of day. One local attorney will go on to glory. Another will go to prison, to ruin, and finally to his grave.