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"This ain't my kind of place," growled Teamster Boss James Riddle Hoffa. His cold, hard eyes swept across the well-groomed grounds of the Greenbrier Hotel at White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. He spat on the lawn. "We are paying the bill." he said, "but those intellectuals, those lawyers, picked out this place. This is their kind of place. They like to play golf and that stuff."
Jimmy Hoffa's top lawyers, 110 strong, were gathered at the stately Greenbrier last week for a three-day meeting "to figure out how we can live under this new law," as Hoffa put it. Hoffa's fight to emasculate the House labor bill had failed. Teamster Lobbyist Sidney Zagri's warnings of political reprisals had stirred more anger than fear on Capitol Hill. Now, confronted with the prospect that a tough bill might emerge from the House-Senate conference. Hoffa wanted his lawyers to help him find easy ways to evade it.
Tragic & Dangerous. It was fitting that Jimmy Hoffa should be worried about the labor bill: he is the No. 1 reason for legislation aimed at reforming labor. The public demand for Congress to vote tough curbs on labor unions is a direct result of the revelations piled up over the past three years by the Senate's Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, headed by Arkansas Democrat John McClellan. The McClellan committee uncovered plenty of corruption in other unions, notably the Bakery and Confectionery Workers and the Operating Engineers. But among U.S. labor unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America ranks first in size, money, power and sheer, shocking magnitude of corruption.
"Well-nigh incalculable power over our economy." says a McClellan committee report, "is wielded by this union . . . Whoever controls the Teamsters controls much more than the immediate destinies of 1,500,000 union members; he and his lieutenants reach into every household in the land." The fact that Hoffa is the man who controls the Teamsters, the report adds, is "tragic for the Teamsters Union and dangerous for the country."
Up from the Warehouse. Squat, muscular James Riddle Hoffa. 46, once tried to sum up in four short sentences his career after he left school at the end of the seventh grade: "I got a job in a department store—stock boy. Then I got a job at Kroger's. And that's my whole life. Pretty simple life."
It was a lot more complicated than that. But in one sense Hoffa's career indeed followed a simple line: straight up the ladder of labor-union power. He started by organizing his own union at the Kroger grocery-chain warehouse in Detroit, where he unloaded boxcars and trucks. At 19, he took his warehouse workers into a Detroit Teamster local. At 24, he became president of Detroit's Local 299, a post he still holds. In the 1940s he spread out through the Midwest, then moved South and East.