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During the mid-1950s, when fat. greedy Dave Beck was president of the Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa was No. 2 man on the surface but already No. 1 in real power. In 1957 he elbowed discredited Dave Beck aside, got himself elected president with a salary of $50,000 a year, plus $15,000 extra from Local 299, plus a bottomless expense fund. Despite his prosperity, Jimmy Hoffa, with his wife Josephine and their son and daughter, has conspicuously continued to live in the lower-middle-class Detroit house that he bought 20 years ago for $6,800 (it is now worth about $22,000).
"The Best Forgettery." Hoffa's rise to power, and the uses he has made of it, are detailed and documented in the McClellan committee record, sprawling over 44,000 pages of testimony. Backing up the transcripts are truckloads of documents, photostats and recordings gathered by dozens of investigators under the zealous generalship of Committee Counsel Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of Presidential Hopeful John F. Kennedy, himself a McClellan committee member. But for all its awesome bulk, the record has some significant gaps: committee investigators found that many Teamster documents, including all records of Hoffa's own Local 299 for the years prior to 1953, had been destroyed or hidden. Most of the important Teamster officials who testified ducked behind the Fifth Amendment. Hoffa himself never took the Fifth, but he displayed what one Senator called "the best forgettery of anyone I have ever known." In a single committee session, Hoffa pleaded lack of memory in times in response to committee questions.
Despite the obstacles of missing records and feeble memories, the committee doggedly piled up in its first round of hearings in 1957 a record gamy enough to persuade the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to expel the Teamsters Brotherhood from the united labor movement. Since then, the committee has uncovered a lot more of the Hoffa record. At one point during the hearings. Jimmy Hoffa, an aggressively contemptuous witness, told the committee: "I think my record speaks for itself." It surely does. And on the basis of that record, the committee documents several damning general charges with scores of specifically detailed charges.
General Charge No. 2: Hoffa runs a hoodlum empire.
After investigating 124 Teamster officers with criminal records, the committee concluded that a criminal background was a "prerequisite" for "advancement within the Teamster firmament." In cities that he invaded in his drive for power, the committee found, Hoffa teamed up with convicts and thugs. Items:
New York. From his Midwest power base, Hoffa pushed into New York in the mid-1950s with the help of Extortionist John Dioguardi, alias Johnny Dio, boss of a shakedown ring thinly disguised as a labor union. Dio & Co. brought into the labor rackets 40 toughs with a total of 178 arrests on their police dockets. One of them told a Brooklyn machine-shop owner: "You have got to pay us off because you are mine. No matter where you are going to move, you are mine." During Hoffa's struggle to get control of the Teamster joint council in New York, Dio helped him set up seven fake "paper locals" to cast votes in a joint-council election. When Dio went to prison on an extortion rap in 1958, Hoffa gratefully promised to look after Dio's family.