The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (5 page)

Throughout 1956, Bobby received informal reports that organized crime had infiltrated American labor unions and that many of these unions were deeply corrupt. The worst was said to be the largest union in the country, the Teamsters.
⁴⁵
Earlier attempts by Congress to investigate the Teamsters Union had gotten nowhere because Teamsters president Dave Beck and his lieutenants had fronted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations to key members. But Kennedy’s boss, Senator McClellan, couldn’t be bought or otherwise neutralized. He gave Kennedy and Carmine Bellino, the Kennedy family’s accountant and an aide to both Jack and Bobby, the go-ahead to make a fact-finding trip about union corruption to the West Coast and Chicago.

In late November, they set off for Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle, traveling under assumed names and seeking out reporters, police officers, and criminal informants. In Los Angeles Kennedy first learned about the Mafia system for taking over unions — threats, beatings, payoffs, and the occasional hit — and then the diversion of union funds through captive leadership. The terror tactics were usually both well calibrated and brutal. In L.A., a union organizer who had encroached on mob turf was beaten senseless. He awoke in enormous pain and was taken to the emergency room of a hospital, where doctors removed a large cucumber that had been crammed up his anus. Next time, he had been told, it would be a watermelon.
⁴⁶

Kennedy’s investigation led him to believe that Mafia penetration went far deeper than the usual criminal rackets. He and Bellino found its tentacles everywhere — in unions, police forces, corporations, law firms, political parties, foundations, and even government itself. In Chicago, with subpoenas in hand, they got back on the trail of Dave Beck. On December 20 in a blinding snowstorm, Kennedy and his chief investigator, arms burdened with bundles of documents, hurried out of the Boulevard National Bank Building on Michigan Avenue into a waiting taxi and drove back to the Palmer House, where they were staying. After poring through the documents, they concluded that Beck was a “crook” and that they had the evidence to convict him.

It was an epiphany of sorts for the thirty-one-year-old Kennedy. In
The Enemy Within
, his subsequent best-selling book about his investigation of labor and mob racketeering, he would recount the snowswept scene on Michigan Avenue as Act I of his own awakening to the crisis at hand. Beck, the “respected national figure” who had just been photographed with President Eisenhower outside the White House, was instead a corrupt, self-serving pretender who was amassing a fortune at his union’s expense. The political danger, even the physical danger, of exposing Beck was something to which Robert Kennedy was drawn. He would man the investigative front himself, peruse thousands of documents, subpoena hitmen to his office, and then personally confront them to see how tough they were. He would even pick up a shovel to unearth the remains of a witness who had known too much.

The next morning he and Bellino checked out of the Palmer House and went to the airport only to learn that all flights had been canceled due to the snow and fog. They took a taxi instead to Chicago’s main train station. Bellino boarded a train for Washington. Kennedy boarded one for Boston to attend his family’s holiday reunion in Hyannis Port. During his long train ride to Boston, Bobby resolved to launch a national investigation of the Teamsters and their connections to organized crime. He was clearly excited by the prospect of breaking out of the shadows and distinguishing himself on his own. But when he told Joe Kennedy about his plan, his father responded that it was a terrible idea. What followed, in the recollection of Bobby’s sister Jean, was “an unprecedentedly furious argument” between the two. The old man was “deeply, emotionally opposed.”
⁴⁷

Joe Kennedy knew and feared the Mafia. Jack’s boyhood friend Lemoyne Billings, who was at Hyannis Port that Christmas, also witnessed the blow-up: “The old man saw this as dangerous, not the sort of thing or the sort of people to mess around with,” Billings said later.
⁴⁸
When the elder Kennedy got nowhere with his son, he asked Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a close and trusted mentor to Bobby, to intercede. Douglas did, but also got nowhere. Part of the makeup of the three and one-half-year-old boy who had jumped off the yawl that long-ago summer day was the drive to do or die. It tended to make him emotionally immune to the normal quotient of human fear, and it led him directly into the danger zone.

Two days after Christmas, Bobby left Hyannis Port for Washington, where he called on Senator McClellan to alert him to his findings. Kennedy asked for and got McClellan’s go-ahead to take on the Teamsters. On December 27, Kennedy called the Teamsters’ “marble palace” headquarters on Louisiana Avenue, a stone’s throw from the Capitol, to inform Dave Beck that he was going to subpoena him. The war was on. Later that day, two Teamster officials phoned Kennedy and told him he was “out of his mind.”
⁴⁹
By early January, the McClellan Committee was formed and Bobby, over his father’s objections, prevailed on Jack to become a member.
⁵⁰

The Kennedy clan had a new leader, one who could openly challenge what no other member dared question — the total authority of Joe Kennedy. Despite periodic clashes, Jack preferred to finesse, ignore, or otherwise evade his father’s orders if he chose not to follow them. “I guess Dad has decided that he’s going to be a ventriloquist,” Jack told LeMoyne Billings, “so I guess that leaves me in the role of dummy.”
⁵¹
Daughter-in-law Jackie, with her telling knack for nicknames, caught the lonely, questing persona of the third son — “Saint Bobby.”

In mustering his crusade, Bobby turned to old friends like Kenny O’Donnell and Carmine Bellino, as well as new acquaintances like San Francisco investigative reporter Pierre Salinger and former FBI agent Walter Sheridan. No single person proved so critical to Bobby Kennedy’s career as the indefatigable Angela Novello, who became his secretary. (The total number of investigators and support personnel for the McClellan Committee was to rise to over a hundred by 1959.) Initial press reports were mixed. One headline read: MILLIONAIRE TO RUN SENATE RACKET PROBE.
⁵²

Many years later, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, also on the McClellan Committee, remembered the initial meeting in the old Senate Chambers. “Bobby struck me as a mean little asshole, with his high voice and his uncombed hair. He informed us about the mandate of the Committee as if he were reading a prescription off a bottle of medicine. Karl Mundt [of South Dakota] and I felt like resigning on the spot.”
⁵³
But within weeks, Goldwater had revised that first impression of Kennedy: “Then we learned that he and Bellino and O’Donnell. . . never left the staff offices — I mean,
never
— before midnight, subpoenaing hundreds of witnesses and chasing down thousands of documents. . . . When the committee was formed, we thought it was just a vehicle for Jack’s campaign for president, but I can tell you it turned into a forced march and Bobby was like a Marine platoon leader.”

Within weeks, through documents, subpoenas, and testimony, Kennedy had cornered Beck, a man whose bald, domed skull made him look like “an evil Easter egg.” Kennedy later recounted, “Now he was dead, although still standing. All that was needed was someone to push him over and make him lie down as dead men should. The man to do that was available. His name was James Riddle Hoffa.”
⁵⁴

Jimmy Hoffa, at this time vice president of the Teamsters Union, was a sawed-off cannon of a man who had charmed, threatened, assaulted, and shot his way from local to national power. He was only five feet five inches tall but in every way that counted in his cruel habitat, Hoffa was a titan. Ever since his coal-miner father had died of silicosis when Hoffa was four, he had never stopped fighting. He was intelligent, completely fearless, and spoke openly of an arrest record “about as long as your arm.” The fact that he had nearly been whipped to death with chains by antiunion goons in 1933 gave him cachet as a street warrior as well as an understanding of the ultimate manner of things. His will to power was complete; he neither smoked nor drank, was indifferent to dress (preferring to wear white gym socks with his dark suits), and remained loyal to his wife, Josephine. In his primal way, he regarded politics as war by other means. He ordered up physical violence against opponents the way a lawyer might file a particular motion against the opposing party — for precise effect. He was said to have attacked other men and beat them unconscious with his own hands. When Hoffa aide Robert Scott came to check on his boss one night in a Chicago hotel, he found the door unlocked and decided to look in: “I didn’t get inside the door before Jimmy had rolled out of bed over to a table and came up standing on the other side of the room with a gun in his hand.”
⁵⁵

Hoffa’s central ambition was to unite the disparate and sometimes fiercely independent locals into a national front that could negotiate a single contract for the Teamsters. In this effort, he frequently used gangsters to break locals by threats, payoffs, and violence and to install pliant local leaders. The mob also was effective at extorting money from corporations via strikes and selected violence. The payoff for the Mafia was access to hundreds of millions of dollars of the Teamsters’ pension funds to invest in land, or gambling resorts in Las Vegas or Havana. The Mafia fit into Hoffa’s Manichaean view of the unions against the corporations. In the Sicilian, Italian, Jewish, and Irish mafiosi, he saw ethnics like himself from dirt-poor families who with their fists and street cunning had battled their way to the top. In this struggle, legitimacy necessarily came out of the barrel of the gun. Of his association with the Mafia, Hoffa told one interviewer: “Twenty years ago, the employers had all the hoodlums working for them as strikebreakers. Now we’ve got a few and everybody’s screaming.”
⁵⁶
By 1957, Hoffa had been in active partnership with the Mafia in Detroit and Chicago for over twenty years. His collaboration with the New York families was a more recent development.

In 1957, at age forty-four, Hoffa knew all the tricks, and in Bobby Kennedy he saw a thirty-one-year-old spoiled Harvard busybody who could clear the way for his takeover of the Teamsters. Accordingly, Hoffa provided Kennedy with information about Beck that contributed to his rival’s downfall. By March 1957, under Kennedy’s pounding, the once-supercilious Beck had become a broken man looking for a place to hide. Meanwhile, two Teamsters front men who knew Kennedy set about to work out some sort of modus vivendi between Hoffa and the young prosecutor. In the Washington bestiary, as always, the scavenger is central to the disposition of old carcasses and to the discovery of new ones.

Eddie Cheyfitz, the partner of Teamsters attorney Edward Bennett Williams, arranged a private dinner to work out the right measure of peaceful coexistence. At Cheyfitz’s invitation, Kennedy drove out to his elaborate home in Chevy Chase on February 19, 1957, for a private dinner with Hoffa. He found him “personable, polite and friendly,” if a little boorish: “I do to others what they do to me,” Hoffa boasted to Kennedy, “only worse.” Kennedy must have chuckled to himself at this, for he knew Hoffa was walking into a trap of his own device. Six days earlier, a New York attorney named John Cye Cheasty had visited Kennedy’s office to inform him that Hoffa had offered him a bribe to sign on with the chief counsel as an investigator and then to provide the Teamsters with purloined inside information. After he learned this, Kennedy contacted FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who arranged a sting. The day of the dinner, at the corner of 17th and I Streets, Cheasty delivered the names of four sources to Hoffa. An FBI camera recorded the transaction. As they conversed that evening at Cheyfitz’s home, Bobby felt confident that he was on the verge of taking out another Teamsters criminal. According to Hoffa, after dinner Kennedy challenged him to Indian-wrestle. Hoffa supposedly accepted and pinned Kennedy twice.
⁵⁷

Three weeks later, on March 13, Hoffa was arrested by the FBI at the Dupont Plaza Hotel for violating the federal bribery statute. Kennedy waited around until midnight in a Washington courtroom to witness Hoffa’s arraignment. When Hoffa arrived, the two began a spirited exchange over who could do the most push-ups.
⁵⁸
The encounter testified to a peculiar quality in Bobby’s pathology of political power. Everything was
personal
. As Ethel said, “For him the world is divided into black and white hats. The white hats are for us and the black hats are against us. Bobby can only distinguish good men and bad. Good things, in his eyes, are virility, courage, movement, and anger.” Moreover, the division was not just moral but tribal. The question was not just who was better, but who was tougher.

The press later asked Kennedy whether he was sure the FBI had the evidence. “If Hoffa isn’t convicted, I’ll jump off the Capitol Dome,” Bobby replied, smiling. But Hoffa beat the rap through a dazzling array of extralegal endeavors. The eight black jurors empaneled in the case somehow received copies of Washington’s black newspaper,
Afro-American
, describing Hoffa as a champion of civil rights and pictorially showing him with an African-American attorney, Martha Jefferson. Former heavyweight champion Joe Louis attended the trial for two days and at one point, in full view of the jury, embraced Hoffa. Hoffa himself took the stand and proved a brazen prevaricator; he had merely hired Cheasty as his attorney, he said. At the conclusion of the three-week trial, Hoffa was acquitted, and suggested on the way out of the courtroom that it was time for the junior Kennedy to take a jump. Williams offered to provide a parachute.
⁵⁹
Seven days later, Jimmy Hoffa announced his candidacy for the general presidency of the Teamsters. In September 1957, he clawed, bribed, and bullied his way into the job.