"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (29 page)

The jury was sequestered, and on the third day of deliberations they were dismissed by Judge Miller after repeatedly reporting that they were hopelessly deadlocked. However, before allowing them to step out of the jury box he turned from them as they sat in their seats and addressed the courtroom. Among other statements, the record reveals the following comments by Judge Miller.

From the very outset, while the jury was being selected from a list of those summoned for jury service, there were indications that improper contacts had been made and were being made with prospective members of the jury. I have signed orders to convene another grand jury soon after the first of the year to investigate fully and completely all of the incidents connected with this trial indicating illegal attempts to influence jurors and prospective jurors by any person or persons whomsoever and to return indictments where probable cause therefore exists. The system of trial by jury…becomes nothing more than a mockery if unscrupulous persons are allowed to subvert it by improper and unlawful means. I do not intend that such shameful acts to corrupt our jury system shall go unnoticed by this court.

Jimmy Hoffa, on the other hand, told a TV audience on Christmas Eve that it was “a disgrace…for anyone to make a statement that this jury was tampered with.”

 
chapter eighteen
 

Just Another Lawyer Now

“
In 1963 Jimmy Hoffa told me he was determined to get a Master Freight Agreement by the end of the year. There were a lot of distractions for Jimmy in 1963, but by the end of the year he had it wrapped up. In the first contract we got a 45-cent-an-hour raise. Plus our pensions started going way up. A guy retiring out of a local today gets $3,400 a month. Add that to Social Security and you can live on it. All that came from Jimmy Hoffa that year, even with all the distractions. Once the Master Freight Agreement was signed Jimmy put me on the National Negotiating Committee for the union.

The dream of a Master Freight Agreement went all the way back to the Depression. With one agreement covering all the Teamsters in the country everybody would get paid the same hourly wage and get the same benefits and get the same pension. The best thing about it, though, was that there would be only one contract to negotiate. Instead of every trucking company negotiating individual contracts around the country, there would be a Management Negotiating Committee that would negotiate a single contract with the union National Negotiating Committee. If we had to strike because we couldn’t come to terms there would be a nationwide strike, but we never had to go that route. Jimmy never had a nationwide strike. Still, with the fear of it in management and the government’s minds, you can imagine how hard that kind of thing was for Jimmy to accomplish. He had to get all the trucking companies to agree and all the locals in the union to agree. With a single contract the trucking companies couldn’t divide and conquer anymore, and thieves like Raymond Cohen couldn’t get paid under the table for sweetheart contracts. Cohen was that way.

That’s why Jimmy had us fight so hard against the rebels and sometimes do what we had to do. Jimmy needed a solidified union. Philadelphia was the toughest nut for Jimmy to crack. First, Cohen was against giving up the power. Second, the Voice and the other rebel groups were still very active and agitating. The truckers in Philadelphia took advantage of the situation at 107. They wouldn’t even cooperate on an area-wide agreement. They knew Cohen wouldn’t strike. Jimmy brought them around by threatening to shut them down with strikes at their terminals outside of Philadelphia.
”

In February 1963 while the grand jury in Nashville was gathering evidence of jury tampering, Jimmy Hoffa spoke about the trucking companies in Philadelphia: “They’ve either got to live with us here or fight with us everywhere.”

Hoffa addressed the problem of the rebel Voice, which he believed was then being supported and encouraged by the AFL-CIO and by Bobby Kennedy: “We have to convert them to our way of thinking.”

And Hoffa addressed the legal proceedings in Nashville: “Something is happening in this country by the name of Bobby Kennedy. One man has assigned an elite squad of twenty-three deputy attorneys general to work his dictates on me.”

Along with everyone else who had been part of Hoffa’s Nashville entourage at the Andrew Jackson Hotel, Ed Partin was summoned to the grand jury in Nashville, and following the Hoffa party line he took the Fifth. Bill Bufalino wrote the precise language out for him on a card to take into the grand jury room. The government was determined to keep Partin’s defection a secret. Meanwhile, people like the State Highway Patrol trooper began admitting the truth, and a jury-tampering indictment looked promising to the government.

Jimmy Hoffa spent fourteen weeks in Philadelphia at the Warwick Hotel campaigning against the Voice in the upcoming April election. In an election held a few months earlier the Voice had lost by only 600 votes in a local with 11,000 members. That election was set aside because of the anti-Voice violence that had dominated that election. Not resorting to violence this time, Hoffa campaigned vigorously and explained the benefits in pay and in pension that would come from the plans he had for the Teamsters Union. In the election of April 1963, Hoffa’s Teamsters defeated the Voice again, bringing the fourth-largest Teamsters local back in line. Hoffa promised to “let bygones be bygones.” Equally as important to Hoffa as defeating the Voice, Cohen now owed Jimmy Hoffa his complete loyalty in the matter of a Master Freight Agreement.

On May 9, 1963, Jimmy Hoffa was indicted in Nashville for jury tampering. At the entry of his not-guilty plea Hoffa held a press conference and said that Bobby Kennedy “has a personal vendetta against me and is trying to convict me with planted stories in the press…. Of course I’m not guilty. This indictment talks about ten people and I only know three of them.”

On June 4, 1963, Cohen was convicted of embezzling union funds. There now would be no doubt about the dream of a Master Freight Agreement. Cohen would be removed as president of Local 107 and would go to jail. Cohen would be in no position to work secretly against Hoffa’s negotiations with the Philadelphia trucking companies.

On the same afternoon of Cohen’s conviction, a grand jury in Chicago indicted Jimmy Hoffa for fraudulent misuse of the Central States Pension Fund for personal profit. The principal charge against Hoffa dealt with the pledging of $400,000 of union funds at no interest to secure a personal loan for the Sun Valley land development deal in Florida. It was alleged that James R. Hoffa had a secret 22 percent ownership interest in the profits of that venture. Hoffa denied that he had any such secret interest.

“
Right after Cohen went to school I went with Jimmy for a negotiating session against management, in a motel in Arlington, Virginia, outside of Washington. I grabbed some college kids and gave them $50 each to use all the public toilets and keep the elevators busy. Then I put laxatives in one of the coffee urns. Those of us on the union’s team who drank coffee took our coffee from the other urn. Management was split about 50-50 on urn selection. Half of the people from management took coffee from the doctored urn. Pretty soon one guy ran into the one bathroom in the negotiating room and wouldn’t come out. The other few guys went nuts running around the hotel looking for a toilet that wasn’t being used. They all stayed out of the negotiations after that to rest up and change their clothes. I had thinned out the herd. It was easier to negotiate against a smaller group. Even with all the pressure on Jimmy, I never saw him laugh so hard as when we got back to our room.

During that summer and fall I didn’t see that much of Jimmy. Jimmy met a lot with his lawyers about the new indictments. The first trial was going to be the one for so-called jury tampering. They had it scheduled in Nashville in October. I was planning on going down and getting to the Grand Ole Opry. The Chicago pension fund case involving the Sun Valley matter was scheduled for the spring of 1964. I most definitely looked for any excuse to go to Chicago.

The lawyer Frank Ragano claims in a book and on the History Channel that Jimmy Hoffa gave him a message to deliver to Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello—to kiss the president, John F. Kennedy. He said it happened in Jimmy’s office in Washington while they were working on the trial preparation. I for one cannot see Jimmy delivering a message like that through that messenger with those words.
”

In 1994 Frank Ragano wrote a memoir appropriately called
Mob Lawyer.
In the memoir, Ragano claims to have heard a discussion between Jimmy Hoffa, Joey Glimco, and Bill Bufalino in early 1963 while the grand juries were meeting in Nashville and Chicago, but before the indictments had been handed down. While playing gin with Glimco, Hoffa asked Bufalino, “What do you think would happen if something happened to Booby?” (Hoffa always referred to his archenemy as
Booby.
)

The consensus reached in the discussion was that if something happened to Bobby, Jack would unleash the dogs. But if something happened to Jack, Vice President Lyndon Johnson would become the president, and it was no secret that Lyndon hated Bobby. Lyndon, it was agreed, definitely would get rid of Bobby as attorney general. According to Frank Ragano’s recollection, Jimmy Hoffa said, “Damn right he would. He hates him as much as I do.”

A few months later, on Tuesday July 23, 1963, four months before President Kennedy was assassinated, Ragano claims to have been meeting with Hoffa about the new indictments that had recently been handed down in May and June. Hoffa was beside himself with rage. According to Ragano he was told by Jimmy Hoffa: “Something has to be done. The time has come for your friend and Carlos to get rid of them, kill that son-of-a-bitch John Kennedy. This has got to be done. Be sure to tell them what I said. No more fucking around. We’re running out of time—something has to be done.”

“
Okay, the way I look at Frank Ragano is that they didn’t know about Partin. Jimmy was pretty sure they had a spy in their midst during that trial in Nashville. I know that everybody that was a part of that Andrew Jackson Hotel scene was a suspect in Jimmy’s mind. Jimmy was just getting to know Frank Ragano back then. It’s not like Bill Bufalino, where they had known each other for many years, did deals together, established a record of mutual respect together. Jimmy had a private jet at his disposal at all times. If he wanted to deliver a message that’s as serious a message as a message can get, he would fly down to Florida. Jimmy kept a nice place down there in Miami Beach. Jimmy most definitely knew how to use a telephone to set up a meeting. That’s how I met Jimmy—on a prearranged phone call at Skinny Razor’s. Now don’t get me wrong, they say Frank Ragano is good people, and Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello put a lot of trust in him as a lawyer. If Frank Ragano said that’s the way he remembered it happened, I guess I have to go with his memory on that. But you’re talking about something here that nobody in their right mind talks about the way he said Jimmy talked about it. If Jimmy said it to Ragano, and Ragano said it to those people, they had to wonder whether Jimmy was thinking clearly if he was talking out loud like that to Frank Ragano. Not to mention the position you put the person in who hears such a thing. Carlos used to have a sign in his office that said that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.