(3 of 4)
Nothing much happened. Fitzsimmons told the IRS agents that Hoffa was intriguing to get the union presidency back, which could have been grounds for sending Hoffa back to prison, but the Government took no action. William Lynch, then head of the Justice Department's organized crime section, recalls that the IRS gave him data about Gibbons from an unnamed "hot informant," presumably Fitzsimmons. Says Lynch: "We sent it out to the department strike force in St. Louis and found that they already had it. It was totally worthless." Sarno was tried in 1975 on a charge of offering a $64,000 bribe to an IRS agent, but was acquitted. It is possible that the IRS dunned some people named by Fitzsimmons and the Pressers for additional taxes, but the Daley-Dennis reports do not elaborate.
In any case, by late 1972 Fitzsimmons complained to the IRS agents that he and his allies were still in trouble and his enemies were not. He threatened to take his complaints directly to President Nixon. Later the Pressers and eventually Fitzsimmons himself told the agents that Colson, Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, who was then White House chief of staff, had set up a meeting between Nixon and Fitzsimmons in one of the private rooms of the White House.* Kleindienst had allegedly been summoned to the session and ordered to review all investigations pending against the Teamsters and to make sure that Fitzsimmons and his allies were not hurt. The meeting supposedly occurred after Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign, to which the Teamsters contributed an estimated $1 million.
Whatever the case, the Justice Department in March 1973 did stop court-sanctioned FBI wiretaps that seemed to be on the brink of disclosing corruption in the Teamsters. The FBI, in an affidavit, asked to continue the wiretaps, saying it had information that Fitzsimmons had been meeting with Los Angeles gangsters who were trying to tap Teamsters health-and-welfare funds, but Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen turned down the request. He said in 1974 that the wiretaps had been "nonproductive." The department, it should be noted, did press the indictment of William Presser, who was tried on the embezzlement charge in 1973 but acquitted.
For years afterward, the Daley-Dennis reports languished in IRS files, though there were several occasions on which they might have become public. In the spring of 1973, just as the Watergate scandal was breaking into the open, the IRS delivered a bundle of the reports to the Justice Department. They included those with Fitzsimmons' account of his alleged meeting with Nixon and Kleindienst. Edward Joyce, then deputy chief of the Justice Department's organized crime section, signed a memo saying that he had received the reports and was studying them. Joyce's superior, Lynch, however, says that Joyce never mentioned the reports to him. Joyce can no longer say if he brought them to the attention of anyone else; he died last year. All that is known is that the reports were returned to the IRS, and no action was taken.