Dreams & Nightmares

Miami Beach's Eden Roc Hotel is suitably sumptuous for a display of the attributes of success, wealth and power. There, successful, wealthy, powerful Jimmy Hoffa conferred with the executive council of his corrupt Teamsters Union. It was a time for plans, expansion and confidence--not for worrying over the long, unchallenged record of Teamster racketeering dug up by Senator John McClellan's long-frustrated rackets committee. With his retinue of vice presidents, lawyers and investment advisers, jaunty little Jimmy worked on an 8 a.m.-to-1 a.m. schedule, spending lavishly, granting favors, hearing petitioners, mapping campaigns.

Airily, he put up collateral for a $200,000 loan for the striking A.F.L.-C.I.O. flight engineers of Eastern Air Lines--why shouldn't flight engineers be added to Jimmy's dream of a Teamster-dominated joint transport council? He heard requests for loans from four Miami Beach hotels, decided he would grant two. (The Teamsters already have $3,000,000 invested in fancy Miami Beach real estate and plan to double the sum.) He announced plans to organize employees of Sears, Roebuck and of Tampa breweries. Then came Jimmy's bombshell: he had already begun a campaign to recruit the millions of state, county and municipal employees across the land--including the police.

The prospect of the thug-ridden Teamsters' infiltrating the nation's police was not entirely preposterous. In New York City, first target for the Teamsters, Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy said, "Don't underestimate this thing." The Teamsters claim a secret New York membership of 3,000; other authorities say that 300 is more like it.*

With these announcements the Teamster surge ended. In Washington 83-year-old District Court Judge F. Dickinson Letts had been mulling over the frustrations of the three-member board of monitors he appointed in January to supervise a Teamster cleanup. Judge Letts found that the Teamsters had been treating the board's "orders of recommendation" purely as "recommendations," had done nothing substantial to clean up. Henceforth, he ruled, the Teamsters would take "orders" from the monitors. One immediate effect of his ruling is to postpone the convention Hoffa had scheduled for March to have himself re-elected president, a move that would have automatically dissolved the board of monitors.

Replied Hoffa cockily: "What the hell, it just means another fight." It could mean a great deal more than that. If Judge Letts sticks to his guns, the ruling could lead eventually to Hoffa's being kicked out of the Teamsters' presidency. It was the most serious legal step against Teamster corruption since the Senate committee began its exposures, and, in the light of the "big week" in Miami, it came none too soon. "Now we have a blueprint to get something done," said Monitor Chairman Martin F. O'Donoghue. "We haven't even begun to clean up corruption."

* Policemen in several states and cities are forbidden to strike. There has not been an important U.S. police strike since the one in Boston in 1919, which helped push Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge into the presidency because of his stern and popular action against the strikers. Said Silent Cal: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time."

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