An Inconvenient Forgettery

Grim, gruff John McClellan rapped the table with his gavel. Before him in the Senate caucus room sat Teamster Vice President James Riddle Hoffa, his stony face pale, his big fists flexing. It was a weary moment, the climax of 17 hours of question and evasion before McClellan's Senate labor-rackets committee, during which Hoffa wriggled relentlessly over craggy points of absurdity. McClellan began to talk: "For reasons that are apparent to everyone who has followed these hearings, we have reached a point where it seems to be useless and a waste of the committee's time ... We have proceeded to the point where the witness has no memory and he cannot be helpful even when his memory is refreshed."

With that, McClellan ordered a subpoena served on Jimmy ("Mr. Hoffa will be back again") and then read off a damning five-page statement that summed up, for the present at least, the sordid career of one of the most powerful labor leaders in the U.S. Some key items in the committee's indictment: P: Hoffa borrowed money--about $90,000, all told--from a variety of union business agents, a truck owner who employed Teamsters, and Teamster officials. He rarely paid interest, signed notes or offered collateral. In most cases there was no evidence that the payments to Hoffa actually were loans. P: A Hoffa acquaintance set up Test Fleet Corp., a truck-leasing firm, in the maiden names of Hoffa's wife (Josephine Poszywak) and the wife of his pal, Owen Bert Brennan (Alice Johnson). Test Fleet got its trucks through the good offices of a Detroit trucking firm, Commercial Carriers, Inc., which then leased the equipment back from Test Fleet. The wives invested only $4,000 in cash in the venture, borrowed $50,000 more--on a note signed by Commercial Carriers' owner,

Bert Beveridge. Commercial's accountant kept the Test Fleet books for four years at no salary. In eight years the wives got $125,000 in profits for their $4,000 investment. And Commercial Carriers had no trouble at all with Hoffa's union. P: Hoffa and Brennan lent Eugene James $2,000 or $2,500 to start operations of a Detroit jukebox local; in return, "Jimmie" James, later accused by a Senate investigation committee of stealing $900,000 from a welfare fund, put Hoffa's and Brennan's wives on the union payroll (using their maiden names), paid them about $6,000.

P: Hoffa, who continually associated with and employed a gang of ex-convicts, masterminded the chartering of seven phony New York City locals, "knowing these locals to be racket-controlled and devoid of membership." He secretly joined with Johnny Dio, the notorious racketeer, in conspiring to get derogatory information to be used against New York Teamster Vice President Tom Hickey, tried to get Dio a Teamster charter for his taxicab local, even though the legitimate Teamster organization under Hickey was trying to organize the cab drivers.

Coop of Capons. The man who thus stood indicted by the McClellan committee seems on his way to election next month as the president of the 1,400,000-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which--with strategic control over truck transportation--has enormous economic power in the U.S. The point worried members of the McClellan committee. Asked New York's Republican Senator Irving Ives: "What are you going to do after you are elected, if you are elected? You have consorted with all of these bums and these criminals and everything else throughout your career practically. Are you going to continue to do that if you are elected president of the international?" Hoffa cleared his throat. "I intend to conduct myself in keeping with respectability when I become president," he said. To clean up the mess, observed Chairman McClellan, peering over the rims of his glasses, "you will have to make a decided change in Hoffa."

This was a smashing comedown for James Riddle Hoffa. Only 77 hours earlier he had swaggered into the McClellan hearings like a crowing cock into a coop of capons. At first he had arrogantly demanded permission to edit and change the records of the hearings--a barefaced attempt that would enable him to square his imminent testimony with later established fact. For a while Hoffa had even seemed to be in charge. He led Michigan's bumbling Democratic Senator Pat McNamara, Arizona's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater and New York's Ives down a primrose path. There was conservative Goldwater blandly agreeing with Teamster Hoffa ("I am very hopeful that your philosophy prevails") on the role of organized labor in the U.S. economy, in a windy discourse that had both men far beyond their depth. Ives and McNamara were gentle--there are big labor votes in New York and Michigan.

But as other questioners dug into Hoffa's strange business deals and his unsavory connections with hoodlums, the tone changed. Wary of the pitfalls of wiretaps whose contents he could not foretell, Hoffa began to get the kind of amnesia that hoods have long resorted to--before the era of the Fifth Amendment. To every implicating question there came an equivocating answer, or a variety of dazzling disclaimers, e.g., "to the best of my recollection," "I just don't remember," "I don't recall." Listening to this performance for hours, even easy-going Irving Ives exploded. Shooting a grumpy glance down his nose at Hoffa, the New York Senator snorted that Jimmy had "one of the most convenient forgetteries of anybody I have ever seen ... By golly, you have not taken the Fifth, but you are doing a marvelous job crawling around it."

Hoffa continued to crawl. He saw nothing wrong, he said, about the conflicting interests he had been maintaining; he admitted that a dishonest union boss might take advantage of business deals and loans made with employers of truck drivers, but fortunately for the Teamsters, Hoffa protested, he is an honorable man. But he could not recall, for example, where he had borrowed part of $20,000 that he had invested in one company; neither could he remember why he borrowed $5,000 from a businessman who had a Teamster contract.

Courts & Credibility. More astonishing than the committee's blockbuster statement was its closing-hour suggestion that Extortionist Dio provided Hoffa with secret miniature recording devices as well as recording experts. The machines, so ran the implication, may have been worn by witnesses who appeared at a grand-jury session during an investigation of Hoffa in Michigan. Afterwards, had the devices been so used, the witnesses would have carried out complete recordings of the proceedings.

As far as last week's proceedings were concerned, John McClellan announced that he would ask the Department of Justice to examine Hoffa's testimony for evidence of perjury. Courts have ruled that a sense of credibility must apply to "I do not recall," i.e., a major event in a man's life is not an incident lightly forgotten. Such an event might concern, say, the details of a $20,000 loan or the bugging of a grand jury room. Jimmy Hoffa's forgettery might turn out to be inconvenient after all.

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