But to hear Kennedy when he was grandstanding in front of the McClellan Committee you might have thought I was making as much out of the pension fund as the Kennedys made out of selling whiskey.


Jimmy Hoffa was involved in trade union activities as early as 1932. By 1942 he was elected president of the Michigan Conference of Teamster. Ten years later he was elected vice president of the Teamsters Union with Dave Beck as the President.

In 1956 the Senate Select Committee on Labor began looking into corruption in the Teamsters leadership. The committee included Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater and John Kennedy. Robert Kennedy was added as chief counsel in the investigation.

They found that president Dave Beck had taken about eighty five thousand dollars from the pension fund to pay personal expenses and almost two hundred thousand dollars to pay for work done on his home. The televised hearings and eventual trial of Beck sent him to prison and boosted the public visibility of the Kennedy brothers... and Hoffa became Teamsters president.

Then Robert Kennedy began investigating Jimmy Hoffa. He found that Hoffa misappropriated nine and a half million dollars of union funds or payments from employers. However somehow his attorney convinced the jury he was not guilty. Hoffa did not go to jail at that time but the Teamsters were expelled from the AFL-CIO.

When the 1960 election came around it it no surprise that Hoffa supported Richard Nixon over John Kennedy. Unfortunately not all of his contributions were on the straight and narrow. Again union funds were misused. After the election, Robert Kennedy sent him a copy of his book, the Enemy Withing with the following note: To Jimmy. I'm sending you this book so you won't have to use union funds to buy one. Bobby.

Hoffa had no love for the Kennedy's and it is no surprise that his name comes up in discussion of the Marcello hatred for the two brothers and anything may have done to end their reign

On the way up sometimes you make enemies and an upstanding teamster was in prison for robbery, rape and murder agreed to testify against Hoffa and he was brought to trial in 1962. He was subsequently acquitted, but a mistrial was declared based on evidence of jury tampering. In 1964 Hoffa was tried again and sentenced to eight years in jail.

Hoffa was released in 1971 by President Nixon, but the Teamsters had moved on and chosen his successor. Jimmy Hoffa disappeared without a trace.

The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa
by Dan E. Moldea

Widely considered to be the definitive volume on the career and crimes of Jimmy Hoffa, The Hoffa Wars, by acclaimed investigative journalist Dan E. Moldea, is an eye-opening, extensively researched account of the steady rise and fall of an ingenious, ambitious man who was instrumental in transforming a small union of seventy-five thousand truckers into the most powerful labor brotherhood in world. Shocking disclosures in Moldea’s no-holds-barred account include the devil’s bargain that put Hoffa and his union in the pockets of the Mob, Hoffa’s role in the joint CIA-Mafia plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the deal Hoffa made with US president Richard Nixon that released the disgraced Teamster president from prison eight years early, and the truth behind Hoffa’s eventual disappearance and likely murder. But perhaps the most startling revelation of all concerns the integral part Jimmy Hoffa played, in concert with underworld kingpins Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante, in America’s most terrible twentieth-century crime: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth
by Jack Goldsmith

As a young man, Jack Goldsmith revered his stepfather, longtime Jimmy Hoffa associate Chuckie O’Brien. But as he grew older and pursued a career in law and government, he came to doubt and distance himself from the man long suspected by the FBI of perpetrating Hoffa’s disappearance on behalf of the mob. It was only years later, when Goldsmith was serving as assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration and questioning its misuse of surveillance and other powers, that he began to reconsider his stepfather, and to understand Hoffa’s true legacy.

In Hoffa’s Shadow tells the moving story of how Goldsmith reunited with the stepfather he’d disowned and then set out to unravel one of the twentieth century’s most persistent mysteries and Chuckie’s role in it. Along the way, Goldsmith explores Hoffa’s rise and fall and why the golden age of blue-collar America came to an end, while also casting new light on the century-old surveillance state, the architects of Hoffa’s disappearance, and the heartrending complexities of love and loyalty.

Mob Lawyer: Including the Inside Account of Who Killed Jimmy Hoffa and JFK
by Frank Ragano, Selwyn Raab

Presents an inside account of the deaths of Jimmy Hoffa and JFK and the FBI plot to murder Castro, by a mob-affiliated attorney who spent fifteen years as one of Hoffa's personal lawyers.