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The beefy and profane Presser characteristically dismisses the allegations with an expletive. He conceded to TIME that he, his father and Fitzsimmons met with the IRS agents once, in early 1972, but added: "I never talked with them again. I'm certain my dad didn't talk to them either, because he never told me that he did. I can't say what Fitz did." Presser added: "So, I'm a fink? Look, I can't be responsible for what's in Government reports." Presser said this in a limousine carrying him to the Executive Office Building; he ended the interview by entering the building for a meeting with Reagan's aides.
Kleindienst describes the charge that Nixon ordered him to go easy on Fitzsimmons and friends as "absolutely false. The man [Nixon] never mentioned the Teamsters to me." Former White House Aides Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman, who are said to have helped set up the Nixon-Fitzsimmons meeting, insist that they have no recollection of it. A spokesman for Nixon at first told TIME that Nixon also had no memory of a meeting with Fitzsimmons at the White House in late 1972. But when told that the meeting supposedly was arranged by Colson, the spokesman said: "Colson? Oh, now, that's a different set of facts. The former President's statement [of not remembering it] would not apply to that." The spokesman would go no further.
The written reports of the IRS agents tell a detailed story. The tale begins in early 1972, when Daley and Dennis met Fitzsimmons and the Pressers at a Teamsters conference in Miami. The meeting was arranged by one Harry Hall, also known as Harry Haller and Harry Helfgot. He is a professional informer who boasts, accurately, that he has ties with the Teamsters, the Government and organized crime; he has also been imprisoned for passing bad checks, impersonating Government officials and grand theft.
William Presser was then facing indictment on a charge of embezzlement, and Fitzsimmons would later be implicated by FBI wiretaps in a scheme by Los Angeles mobsters to gain access to union funds. Fitzsimmons and the Pressers, according to the reports, met regularly with the agents in Washington, Miami, Cleveland and Las Vegas. They hoped to arrange "targets of exchange"—people that the Government could prosecute instead of themselves or their cronies. These turned out to be Fitzsimmons' enemies. Three whose names occur in the agents' reports were Jimmy Hoffa, the former Teamsters president whom Nixon had just released from prison on condition that he take no part in running the union until 1980; Harold Gibbons, a Hoffa loyalist who was boss of the Teamsters in St. Louis; and Jay Sarno, who had built two Las Vegas casino hotels with loans from Teamster pension funds.