If you are not aware, Phil Berrigan and Dave
Eberhardt of the Baltimore Four draft board raid in Baltimore were in the
Lewisburg, PA Federal Penitentiary with Hoffa, a right-wing Catholic. Kagiso,
Max
Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
The Ghost of Jimmy
Hoffa Won’t Go Away
Steve
Early
October
12, 2019
Jacobin
When I was working
with the Teamster reform movement forty years ago, truck drivers concerned
about union corruption had to proceed warily. In the late 1970s, too many
affiliates of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) were run by
grifters or autocrats of the usual business union sort. If you crossed them,
the result might be collusion with management to get you fired and then
blacklisted.
In other locals
and joint councils, located in areas of organized crime strength, some
Teamster officials were actual associates of the mob. Their reputation for
violent retaliation against union rebels who dared to challenge Teamster
corruption and racketeering was even more intimidating.
Frank Sheeran, a
six-foot-four, 250-pound Teamster official in Delaware, was definitely in the
latter category. After serving in heavy World War II combat, he became a loan
shark and mob muscle man, truck driver, labor organizer, and ultimately, a
convicted felon who served fifteen years in federal prison.
Sheeran was once
little-known outside of Teamster circles. But then former prosecutor Charles
Brandt published a book about his close relationship with Teamster president
James R. Hoffa, linking Sheeran to America’s most famous cold case, the
disappearance and presumed murder of Hoffa in 1975.
Titled I
Heard You Paint Houses, Brandt’s biography was optioned by director Martin
Scorsese, who has now made The Irishman, Hollywood’s third major
film about Hoffa and the Teamsters, opening in theaters on November 1 and on
Netflix later in the month.
The two earlier
Hoffa films were F.I.S.T., a lightly fictionalized account of his
career starring Sylvester Stallone, and Hoffa, a 1992 production
featuring Jack Nicholson in the title role. Both did well at the box office,
while recycling Hoffa’s own factually challenged explanation for Teamster-mob
connections — namely, that workers needed organized crime muscle to overcome
management violence against them during organizing drives.
The Irishman has a
similar Teamster history narrative. It’s already being hailed by reviewers as
a “majestic mob epic” and a candidate for multiple Oscars.
According to the New York Times, Scorsese’s latest is “long
and dark: long like a novel by Dostoyevsky or Dreiser, dark like a painting by
Rembrandt.” The Atlantic calls the $160 million film “a
ruminative and rueful viewing experience . . . an attempt to understand a
man who lived in the background of history while apparently having significant
influence over it.”
With Al Pacino
playing Hoffa and Robert De Niro in the role of Sheeran, the latter is about to
become a far better-known US labor figure. I first learned more about Sheeran
during a furtive 1977 meeting with two Teamsters who belonged to Local 326 in
Wilmington, Delaware. A decade earlier, Hoffa had personally installed
Sheeran as president of this 3,000-member local to reward him for helping the
IBT maintain control over Teamsters Local 107 in Philadelphia.
During the late
1950s and early 1960s, many truck drivers in Philly opposed Hoffa’s heavy-handed
rule. After the IBT was expelled from the AFL-CIO for corruption in 1957,
thousands of them tried to replace the Teamsters with a federation-backed union
but failed to win a decertification election.
In Sheeran’s view,
this challenge to Hoffa was tantamount to treason. “Once you allow dissension
and rebel factions to exist, you are on the way to losing your union,” he told
his biographer. “You can have only one boss. You can have helpers. But you
can’t have nine guys trying to run a local. If you did, the employer would make
side deals and split the union.”
As the Local 326
dissidents I met with confirmed, Sheeran was quite adept at making “side
deals” himself, as the “boss” of Local 326. Like many other members of the
Professional Drivers Council (PROD) and the Teamsters for a Democratic Union
(TDU), those dissidents sought legal help and organizing advice about reforming
the union and ridding it of crooks and gangsters. They suspected, rightly as it
turned out, that Sheeran was on the take.
For example, as
Sheeran later confessed to Brandt, he liked to grant “waivers” to newly
organized trucking companies so they could avoid making pension fund payments
normally required under a first contract. This enabled a friendly employer “to
put his savings on the table [so] you both share it under the table — and
everybody’s taken care of that way.”
A Labor Leasing
Scam
By 1977, thanks to
driver complaints, related lawsuits, and investigative reporting by the Wall
Street Journal, we also knew that Sheeran was negotiating sweetheart
contracts that undercut the Teamsters’ National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA)
in a much more damaging fashion.
The NMFA was, at
the time, one of the biggest industry-wide union contracts in the country,
covering 450,000 Teamsters, including members of Local 326. Its signatories
included both interstate freight haulers, then-regulated as common carriers,
and “private carriers” as well.
A private carrier
was a retail store chain or manufacturer with a sufficiently high volume of
shipping to employ Teamster drivers directly and maintain its own fleet of
trucks. Rather than try to keep these employers under the NMFA, some Teamster
locals like Sheeran’s encouraged them to use a labor broker named Eugene Boffa
Sr.
Boffa and his son
owned labor leasing firms that supplied drivers for big companies like Avon
Products, Iowa Beef, Continental Can, Crown Zellerbach, and J. C. Penney.
Boffa’s contracts with Local 326 and other Teamster affiliates allowed him to
provide pay and benefits far below NMFA standards and shed Teamster drivers as
direct employees. At Iowa Beef, then the nation’s largest meat-packer, a
cut-rate agreement between Boffa and the Teamsters required no pension fund
contributions at all and paid drivers 70 percent less than the NMFA rate.
Outsourcing
appealed to Teamster employers forty years ago for the same reason that
management likes “flexible hiring” arrangements today. As Journal reporter
Jonathan Kwitny wrote, “workers regarded by the company as troublesome can be
dumped regardless of legal justification. And a company that hires Mr. Boffa
can expect freedom from grievances, picket lines, and bothersome Teamster
business agents.”
When Teamster
drivers protested this lack of representation, the vocal ones, like PROD member
Don Harper, got fired. “These two companies framed me because I was a shop
steward,” Harper told me. “I was only doing my job trying to get them to honor
our contract.”
Sheeran,
meanwhile, was riding high in a Boffa-supplied Lincoln Continental and enjoying
a plethora of other perks. His longtime mob godfather Russell Bufalino also
benefited from being “connected with the two major labor leasing companies that
had been allowed by the union to prosper,” according to Steven Brill, author of
a best-selling 1978 book called The Teamsters. As Boffa told
the Wall Street Journal: “I am not averse to doing people favors.”
Rank-and-File
Whistle-Blowing
PROD tried to blow
the whistle on Boffa, Sheeran, and Bufalino in our national rank-and-file
newspaper read by thousands of Teamsters. “IBT Freight Workers Sold Out by
Deals with Labor Broker,” our front page headline screamed. While reform
candidates backed by PROD or TDU (which later merged) were able to oust
incumbents in other locals, Frank Sheeran was forced out only after being
convicted of labor racketeering, mail fraud, obstruction of justice, and taking
bribes from an employer.
At age sixty-one,
Sheeran’s prior luck — he beat two labor-related manslaughter raps — had
clearly run out. He was sentenced to thirty-two years in federal prison.
Bufalino, the Pennsylvania Mafia don played by Joe Pesci in The
Irishman, also spent his dotage in jail after being convicted of extortion
and conspiracy to murder. As recounted in the movie, Hoffa’s own thirteen-year
sentence for jury tampering and pension fund fraud was cut in half by
Republican President Richard Nixon, in return for Teamster political backing
(before Nixon left office in disgrace over Watergate).
During most of
Hoffa’s time in federal prison, he remained Teamster president, while also
collecting salaries for four lesser union positions. When he finally retired as
part of his White House commutation deal, he cashed out of the Teamster
officers’ pension plan with a lump sum of $1.7 million (in 1971 dollars!).
Teamster dues money was also spent on the enormous cost of defending him in
multiple criminal cases. As a Teamster retiree, out on parole, Hoffa
immediately began plotting his return to power — a fatal move because his
longtime mob allies were not in favor of it.
Meanwhile, Hoffa’s
major collective bargaining achievement, the National Master Freight Agreement,
was on the road to ruin. Today, it covers only fifty thousand drivers and
loading dock workers. Deregulation of interstate trucking by President Jimmy
Carter did far more damage to the NMFA than any corrupt scheming by Teamster
locals that became “mobbed up” with Hoffa’s help during his rise to power or
under his presidency. But Sheeran-style “sweetheart contracts” definitely
helped undermine freight industry labor standards.
Hoffa also created
a top-down union structure that still concentrates enormous power and privilege
in the hands of the Teamster president. That man is now Hoffa’s son, a
seventy-eight-year-old union lawyer from Detroit, who makes about $400,000 a
year. Last fall, he decreed that national contracts covering 260,000 UPS
workers were ratified even though a majority of the members voting on
them rejected the unpopular settlement he negotiated.
TDU members have
jousted with “Junior Hoffa” for much of his twenty years in office, in many
other bargaining situations where IBT leaders similarly failed to mount an
effective contract campaign, thwarted strike action, and then “settled short.”
Says TDU cofounder and former national organizer Ken Paff: “The idea that the
Teamsters belongs more to the top officials than its working members is a
legacy of the mob era that we continue to struggle against today.”
The Untold Story
The deadly feuds
and personal betrayals recounted in Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour film took
place during the union’s scandal-scarred heyday, when Teamster clout could have
been used for many good purposes, like improving truck driver safety.
Once again,
Hollywood fails to show how Teamster members were the most betrayed in that era
— by lax contract enforcement, frequent violations of the Landrum-Griffin Act,
outlandish Central States Pension Fund fraud, the looting of local union treasuries,
and corrupt but perfectly legal practices that persist to this very day (like
Hoffa’s awarding of multiple salaries to already overpaid, full-time Teamster
officials to secure their political support).
Also missing
from The Irishman is any hint that threats, intimidation, and
physical violence failed to deter the development of a Teamster reform
movement, which is still alive and kicking today. That singular organizational
achievement will be on display in Chicago, November 1–3, when several hundred
leaders and activists from TDU chapters around the country gather for their 44th annual
strategy session on union democracy and reform struggles in the IBT.
In 1996, a
low-budget independent film called Mother Trucker: The Diana Kilmury
Story showed what it was like to be part of this brave rebel band
during TDU’s early years, when repression by the Teamster officialdom was
particularly intense. Democratic Socialists of America member Dan La
Botz’s 1990 book, Rank-and-File Rebellion covers much of the
same historical terrain, as does his essay in Rebel Rank and File:
Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s.
Forty years ago,
most Teamsters cared far more about their own working conditions and union
representation than who killed Jimmy Hoffa in a mob plot to prevent his
political comeback. The same is true today, when the only Hoffa most Teamsters
know about is his son.
Nevertheless, that
unsolved mystery has long been a subject of mass media fascination and looms
large again in The Irishman. Viewers should remember that the mob
influence, once present in America’s largest private sector union, manifested
itself in far more ways than a former leader’s disappearance. And it was always
most malign in its impact on rank-and-file Teamsters, who then and now, needed
leaders they could trust and a labor organization they could control.
Steve Early was a
Boston-based organizer for the Communications Workers of America for
twenty-seven years. He is the author of Embedded With Organized Labor:
Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home and The
Civil Wars in U.S. Labor.
Jacobin is a
leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on
politics, economics, and culture. If you like this article,
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Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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