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Teamster money to install his mistress in a Miami house with swimming pool.
The committee tracked down scores of dubious Teamster loans. A bankruptcy-bound Minneapolis department store got a loan of $1,200,000. Two former members of the Michigan state legislature, James P. Hannan and John McElroy, gathered $280,000 in Teamster loans to set up a sanitarium in Detroit. Miami Lawyer Ben Cohen, defender of top mobsters, got a $2,000,000 loan for Florida real-estate ventures.
Costly to all Teamster members in Hoffa's Midwest bailiwick were the lavish health-and-welfare-fund insurance contracts that Hoffa channeled in 1950-51 to Chicago Mobster Paul Dorfman's son Allen, who had no experience in the insurance business. Allen Dorfman's income, as reported on his federal tax returns, soared from $5,200 in 1949 to $166,508 in 1954. Over the years Dorfman agencies have collected more than $3,000,000 in commissions and fees on Teamster insurance, and $1,650,000 of that, according to a studied estimate by the A.F.L.-C.I.O., was excess that the Central States Teamsters could have saved by placing the contracts with established firms.
General Charge No. 4: Teamster officials have crushed democracy within the union's ranks. Items:
St. Louis. Teamster Vice President Harold Gibbons, Hoffa's executive assistant, captured the presidency of Joint Council 13 in St. Louis by bringing Teamster Local 447, Carnival Workers, into the council shortly before the election. The Carnival Workers' jurisdiction was listed as the entire U.S., and there was no reason for the outfit to belong to Joint Council 13 except that Gibbons needed votes.
Nashville. Shortly before an election in 1956, an official from Teamster headquarters in Washington showed up in Nashville, declared all but eleven of the 3,300 members of Local 327 ineligible to run for office.
Pontiac, Mich. When rank-and-file members of Local 614 tried to rebel against corrupt leadership in 1953, Hoffa led several Cadillac loads of goons to Pontiac to break up the insurgents' meeting.
Hoffa's own election to the Teamster presidency, the McClellan committee charges, was a "mockery" of union democracy. By the committee's count, 57% of the delegates who voted for Hoffa at the Teamster convention in Miami in 1957 were picked in ways that violated the Teamster constitution.
Saints & Sin. Despite these facts, Hoffa still has his defenders and even his admirers—and they pop up in some of the oddest places. Last June, for example, Harvard University's Industrial Relations Professor James J. Healy wrote in the Harvard Business School Bulletin that Hoffa may yet "emerge as one of the outstanding labor leaders of all time." True, there are blots on Hoffa's record, Healy admitted, but "some of the greatest saints had their schooling in sin."
Jimmy Hoffa does, in fact, have some minor virtues. He does not smoke or drink. He does not share the liking of many Teamster chieftains for flashy clothes and gaudy night life. He gains appeal by contrast with sybaritic Dave Beck: shirtsleeves, v. Beck's tailor-made suits; tireless vigor, v. Beck's general flabbiness; the modest Hoffa house in Detroit, v. Beck's rambling mansion in a fashionable Seattle suburb.