Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa in Martin Scorsese's The Irishman
Martin Scorsese's masterful crime epic The Irishman opened today at the Belcourt. While thanks to Netflix, in one week we'll all be able to watch it from our couches, our bellies distended from Thanksgiving gluttony, I consider it a film worth seeing in the theater. Yes, it's tempting to watch a 209-minute movie in a setting where pausing, multiple bathroom breaks and easy wine-glass refills are an option. But it's Scorsese, baby!
Anyway, more on my love for The Irishman can be found in this week's dead-tree edition of the Scene, wherein you'll find my review. But I'm here to point you in the direction of an interesting little tidbit.
Scorsese’s exhaustive exploration of Teamster-turned-mob-hitman Frank Sheeran and his associates veers at various points into exceptional real-life moments. One such moment is the attempt on Jimmy Hoffa’s life that took place in a Nashville courtroom in 1962. That segment of the film alone gives us a pair of timeless quotes uttered by Hoffa, portrayed here by a delightfully exasperated Al Pacino (sporting that dopey Hoffa haircut): “Nashville is full of nuts” and “You charge with a gun, with a knife you run.” The former still rings true, while the latter is easy for you to say if you've just found yourself at the lucky end of a misfired pistol.
In doing a bit of research while I wrote my review, I turned up a story I admit I had no idea existed: a two-part cover story by late, great Scene editor Jim Ridley that we ran back in 2002, around the 40th anniversary of that aforementioned attempt on Hoffa's life. (Here's part one, and here's part two.)
You see, during his brother's time in the White House, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy began to pursue International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Hoffa — hard. So hard, in fact, that the press often referred to a so-called "Get Hoffa Squad" organized by Kennedy within the Justice Department. While Hoffa was suspected of all kinds of shady business and ties to organized crime (which The Irishman takes some liberties in depicting, based as it is on Charles Brandt's heavily researched 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses), the trial in Nashville was the Justice Department's attempt to prove Hoffa had accepted payoffs via a Nashville-based shell company. As Ridley explains it:
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.
It's a long, fascinating, tangled story that Ridley — one of the finest writers of long-form narrative this state has ever seen — untangles with prowess. It's also a story that gives us gems like this paragraph about what happened to Hoffa's would-be assassin Warren Swanson once his pellet gun failed to bring down the Teamster King:
A marshal sapped Swanson with a gun just as Chucky O'Brien cleared the desk. O'Brien pummeled the gunman with his canned-ham fists, then kicked him in the face. The blood spattered Duren Cheek's shoes. The beating was so savage that spectators who had previously feared for their own lives now feared for Swanson's.
It's a hell of a story. Give it a read as you're waiting on the turkey to finish cooking. Those links again: part one, and part two.
