"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (38 page)

On August 19, 1971, the day before Jimmy Hoffa’s rehearing before the parole board, Frank Fitzsimmons held a press conference and praised President Nixon’s economic package as good for the country and good for labor. All the other labor union leaders in the nation who had taken a position, especially AFL-CIO president George Meany, had already come out strongly against Nixon’s economic plans.

The next day, August 20, 1971, James P. Hoffa and his client did not get the reception from the parole board that they had been led to believe they would get. Jimmy Hoffa’s resignations from his union offices were greeted with a yawn. James P. Hoffa was questioned about the job he held with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, as if his job had any relevance to Jimmy Hoffa’s plans for living if paroled. Next, James P. Hoffa was probed about his mother’s job with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ political action committee DRIVE (Democratic Republican Independent Voter Education). When the recently retired Jimmy Hoffa settled his future monthly pension payments for present value, he received a lump sum of $1.7 million. As that figure was certain to irk Sally Bugs’s boss Tony Pro in view of Pro’s jailhouse request of Hoffa for help on his pension, the size of Jimmy’s lump sum irked the parole board. That topic was explored by the board in hostile language and tone. Finally, Jimmy Hoffa’s connections to organized crime were explored in great detail, as if somehow the board were now shocked by it, simply shocked. Despite having voted in July to grant a rehearing on the “new evidence” of Jimmy Hoffa’s retirement from all of his union offices and the “new evidence” of his plans to lecture and teach, the parole board voted unanimously to turn down his request for parole. Hoffa was told he could reapply the following year, in June 1972, coincidentally the month and year of the Watergate burglary that brought down Richard Nixon and sent Attorney General John Mitchell and several other White House staff members to jail.

What were the grim possibilities that the “Get Hoffa Out of Jail Squad” were forced to face and to explore? Had Frank Fitzsimmons orchestrated an elaborate scheme to trick Jimmy Hoffa into resigning from every single one of his many union offices so that Jimmy Hoffa would not be eligible to run for IBT president from jail in July 1971? Had Jimmy Hoffa been led to believe that if he abandoned the idea of running from jail in July 1971 he would gain his freedom from jail in August 1971? Had Hoffa been led to believe that by resigning from his union offices he would be giving the parole board and the Nixon administration a face-saving excuse for paroling him? Did a man who was famous for not compromising fall into this trap out of a desire to return to his heartsick wife and family, to whom he was devoted? Did he fall into this trap because he trusted and believed that with his freedom he could ease back into union positions a little at a time and take back the presidency at the 1976 convention—or sooner if a weak and cowardly Fitzsimmons were literally strong-armed out of office? Had Jimmy Hoffa been outsmarted by the likes of Frank Fitzsimmons for all the world to see? Nixon, Fitzsimmons, and Mitchell all seemed to be playing the same hand, and they seemed to be holding all the aces.

What was Jimmy Hoffa going to get for his money and his support of President Nixon, now that Nixon’s parole board had slammed the window shut on his fingers?

At a Labor Day rally in Detroit, President Frank Fitzsimmons publicly urged his new friend President Richard M. Nixon to pardon Jimmy Hoffa.

On December 16, 1971, with no fanfare and bypassing all the normal channels, attorney Morris Shenker filed a petition for a pardon with the White House. Instead of the petition going through the Department of Justice for a response, and for input from the prosecutors and the FBI, and going to the two sentencing judges for their input as the procedures in effect for years required, the petition was marked “approved” by Attorney General John Mitchell.

“
I went up to Lewisburg to see Jimmy just before Christmas. Morrie Shenker was there with the pardon papers that Nixon was going to sign. I was at another table with a kid. A guard looked the other way and they passed the papers to me as a matter of courtesy, and I read the papers. It said that Jimmy could get out with his good time and all in November 1975, but Nixon was letting him out now. It didn’t say one word about Jimmy not being able to run for office until 1980. I can assure you that I would have picked that up right away. Jimmy was already planning to run in 1976. I might not have a lot of education, but I had been reading union contracts and legal documents for a living for many years. I had read hundreds of documents that were far more complicated than that pardon. All it said was that Jimmy was getting out, finally. We were happy people in that lunchroom, and after a lot of double-crossing by Partin and Fitzsimmons and Nixon and Mitchell, Jimmy was finally getting what he paid for. He was getting out for Christmas. The only thing we were doing was talking about Jimmy taking a vacation in Florida for a few months to get squared away before he went back into action. There was no controversy in Lewisburg that day.

The controversy started when Jimmy got out and went to Detroit and they handed him the final papers signed by Nixon and we all got a good lesson when we saw in plain English that the final double-cross was in. Jimmy couldn’t run until 1980. He would miss the 1976 election. If he had stayed in and did all his time he’d have been out in 1975 in plenty of time for the 1976 convention. This was before Watergate, so who knew the thieves we were dealing with.
”

An Executive Grant of Clemency reducing Hoffa’s sentence from thirteen years to six and a half years was signed by Richard Nixon in record time on December 23, 1971. With his good-time credit the reduction to six and a half years guaranteed Hoffa’s immediate release. That same day Hoffa walked out of the penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and flew to his married daughter Barbara’s home in St. Louis to be with his family for Christmas. From there he returned to his home in Detroit to register with the federal parole and probation office, as Hoffa still would be “on paper,” that is, on parole, until the full six and a half years was up in March 1973. From Detroit Hoffa would be heading to Florida for a three-month respite. While in Detroit, Hoffa and his supporters, including Frank Sheeran, read the following language in the pardon from Richard Nixon:

…the said James R. Hoffa not engage in direct or indirect management of any labor organization prior to March 6, 1980, and if the aforesaid condition is not fulfilled this commutation will be null and void in its entirety…

On January 5, 1972, Jimmy Hoffa flew to Florida to his Blair House apartment in Miami Beach. He was greeted at the airport by Frank Ragano as a sign of respect from Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, who could not show their faces for many reasons. Perhaps the most important reason was that a federal parolee is not permitted to be in the company of organized crime figures or convicted felons. On February 12, 1972, on ABC’s
Issues and Answers,
Jimmy Hoffa said that he personally would be supporting Richard Nixon in 1972. Until his parole period was over in March 1973, he was going to go along to get along. Jimmy Hoffa had had enough experience by now that he did not trust that Richard Nixon’s administration would play fair with his parole if he provoked them by going after Fitzsimmons. Jimmy Hoffa was not going to provoke them.

On July 17, 1972, a month after the Watergate burglary, Frank Fitzsimmons’s executive board formally endorsed President Richard M. Nixon for reelection in November by a vote of 19 to 1. The one vote belonged to Harold Gibbons, the vice president who had enraged Hoffa by flying the flag at half-staff in honor of the fallen President John F. Kennedy. Mrs. Patricia Fitzsimmons, Frank’s wife, was appointed by Nixon to serve on the Arts Committee of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

When he was ready, Jimmy Hoffa’s plan of attack would be centered on a constitutional challenge to the condition to his pardon. His civil-rights attorneys would argue that the president exceeded his authority by adding a condition to the pardon. Under the Constitution a president has the power to pardon or not pardon, but he has no power, express or implied, to pardon in such a way that his pardon could later be rescinded and the recipient returned to jail. A conditional pardon would give a president more power than the Founding Fathers intended he have.

Furthermore, this particular restriction added a punishment of not being allowed to manage a union. Hoffa had had no such restriction even while in jail. Although the rules of the jail made it difficult to do, it was not forbidden. This new punishment had not been given to Hoffa at the time of his two sentencings, and the president did not have the power to increase a punishment handed down by a sentencing judge.

In addition, this condition violated Hoffa’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and of assembly by putting off-limits a valid and legitimate forum for the exercise of these freedoms.

However, because he hated jail and feared that the Nixon administration would more closely monitor his parole if he filed such a lawsuit, Hoffa played ’possum until his parole expired and he went “off paper” in March 1973. For the time being Fitzsimmons could relax.

A lot of allegations and finger-pointing were to come out of the Nixon White House on the topic of how the restriction ended up in the pardon. John Dean, White House counsel and Watergate witness against his confederates, testified that it had been his idea to stick the restriction language in at the last minute. He testified that he was merely being a good lawyer, because when Mitchell asked him to prepare the papers Mitchell casually mentioned that Hoffa had orally agreed to stay out of union activity until 1980.

The other White House counsel and future Watergate jailbird to be suspected of complicity in the restriction language caper was attorney Charles Colson, special counsel to the president, and the man in charge of the infamous Nixon enemy list. John Dean testified that Colson asked him to initiate an IRS investigation into the finances of Harold Gibbons, the only member of the Teamsters executive board not to vote to endorse Nixon for reelection. A memo from Colson to Dean was produced asking for the audit and calling Gibbons an “all-out enemy.” Jimmy Hoffa testified in a deposition, “I blame one man [for the restriction on my pardon]…Charles Colson.” Colson took the Fifth on the topic during the Watergate hearings, although he did admit discussing the pardon with Fitzsimmons before it was granted. It is hard to imagine that the two men did not discuss something as important as the restriction.

Was the restriction a result of Dean being a good lawyer? Was it Colson and Mitchell ordering the language in such a way that Dean thought it was his own idea to add it? If the topic of a restriction were phrased the right way by his superior, any prudent young lawyer would have added the language on his own. John Mitchell had been a Wall Street lawyer; he knew how to massage an associate.

Shortly after Colson resigned from the White House, and before he went to jail, he returned to private practice. Frank Fitzsimmons took the lucrative IBT legal contract away from Edward Bennett Williams and gave it to Charles Colson, thereby ensuring Colson of a $100,000-a-year retainer, minimum.

Since those heady days, Charles Colson had changed his life and founded a Christian organization that sponsors prison visits and encourages the inmates to follow a spiritual path to redemption. While at Delaware’s largest prison to interview Frank Sheeran or some other client I saw a repentant and dignified Charles Colson leaving the prison after visiting with the inmates, Bible in hand.

Jimmy Hoffa, meanwhile, bided his time. Hoffa was going to take no chance that he ever would be sent back to prison. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I spent fifty-eight months in Lewisburg, and I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You’re like an animal in a cage and you’re treated like one.”

 
chapter twenty-four