Grinning widely, James Riddle Hoffa, 44, president-elect of the Teamsters Union, hopped out of a Manhattan federal courtroom one day last week, grabbed the telephone and called his wife in Detroit. The good news from Jimmy: a jury, after a four-week trial, failed to agree on whether Hoffa was guilty of conspiring to tap telephones illegally in his Detroit headquarters between 1953 and 1957.
This brush with the law was mighty close. The jury (seven men, five women) voted 11 to 1 for conviction. Juror Earle T. MacHardy, a suburban sugar buyer who had said on selection that his firm's...