Highballing down a well-marked highway last week, Senator John McClellan's labor-rackets committee stopped the caravan to take on some extra cargo, and headed on. Destination: the front door of James Riddle Hoffa, slick, front-running mastermind of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who hopes to take over the presidency from Dave Beck next month. The weighty new cargo, the committee hoped, would prove once and for all that Jimmy Hoffa hooked up with racketeers in what was eventually a successful attempt to seize power in the Teamster organization in New York.
First package in the load was cucumber-shaped Anthony Doria, who despite his vegetable-like appearance, sounded like the world's longest-playing record. For eleven hours, Doria, former international secretary-treasurer of the U.A.W.-A.F.L., virtually overwhelmed the committee and absorbed television viewers with a display of verbal sidestepping, sermonizing, non-sequiturs and assorted mishmash calculated to assure everybody that Racketeer Johnny Dio is just as honest and devoted to clean labor unionism as Anthony Doria himself ("If society had treated Johnny Dio right, he would have had the opportunity of becoming an outstanding leader in labor").
But as he filled up some 500 pages of testimony, Tony Doria never erased any of the committee's charges that Doria 1) had both hands deep in the international's till, and 2) helped Dio transfer phony U.A.W.-A.F.L. charters to the Teamsters Union, thus enabling the racketeers to take over New York's powerful central Teamster outfit, Joint Council 16.
Assorted Surprises. Next came a crate of assorted mugs, who, Committee Counsel Bob Kennedy contended, were rounded up by Dio and his henchmen. They served as officers of the phony locals that were set up to outvote Joint Council 16 President Martin Lacey in 1956 and elect Hoffa's man, John O'Rourke. Among these was one Armando Simontacci, who testified that, all of a sudden, although he had never been a member of the Teamsters, he was told one day by one of Dio's boys that he had been made president of Teamster Local 269.
Q. You were not a member of it, were you?
A. Well, if I was nominated for president, I guess it is the beginning of a membership.
Q. How long did you serve as president? A. I might still be serving as president.
Surprise package was John O'Rourke himself. Sporting a huge diamond ring and a pink, craggy face, O'Rourke, 57, onetime ready-fisted dock worker, had led the committee to feel that he might cooperate with the investigators. He had been declared winner of the contested election, was forced to give it up after Lacey took the case to court—and finally, unopposed, took over Joint Council 16 when ailing Martin Lacey dropped out. O'Rourke's surprise: Fifth Amendment pleas on all pertinent questions, even a refusal to admit that he is president of the council or that he is acquainted with other Teamster officials. Asked South Dakota's Senator Karl Mundt plaintively: "Is there anything you would like to say to help disincriminate yourself? Is the whole story really that bad?" O'Rourke declined to answer, but after the questioning was over, he stepped outside the Senate caucus room, braced himself against a marble pillar and burst into tears.