October 6, 2025 • 43 mins
As a senator and later as JFK’s attorney general, one of Bobby Kennedy’s signature causes was taking on organized crime. And his Public Enemy No. 1 was always Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa. But the years-long feud between Kennedy and Hoffa was not just about politics — it was personal. And it haunted the Kennedys for decades. To help us unpack it all, we’re joined by Dan O’Sullivan, co-host of The Outfit, a podcast about the mafia’s surprising role in our society.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hey, it's Lyra. What do you know about Jimmy Hoffa.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
There have been several well known movies made about him,
and I feel like I've heard about Jimmy Hoffa my
entire life because he's associated with the Teamsters and the
mafia and JFK in some weird way, and a bunch
of other conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I'm George Savers, I'm Lyra Smith, and this is United
States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination with
the Kennedy dynasty. Every week we go into one aspect
of the Kennedy story, and today we are talking about
Bobby Kennedy and his pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Bobby Kennedy was, of course the original RFK meaning RFK
Junior's father for all our younger listeners, and as a
senator and as JFK's Attorney General, one of his signature
causes was taking on organized crime. At one point, Bobby
bragged about the fact that prosecutions for racketeering by his
Justice Department rose by three hundred percent and convictions of
(01:17):
organized criminals grew by three hundred and fifty percent.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
And Bobby's enemy number one was Jimmy Hoffa.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Jimmy Hoffa was a major figure in the International Brotherhood
of Teamsters and eventually rose through the ranks to be
the president. He was also quite publicly in bed with
the mob. He used two hundred and fifty million dollars
in pension funds to curry favor with the mafia and
make a profit for himself. He also once threatened to
break both of Bobby's arms.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
So the feud between Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa was
not just about politics. It was personal, and its aftermath
hunted the Kennedys for years.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
This week, to help us unpack all of this, were
joined by Dan O'Sullivan, co host of The Outfit, a
podcast about the mafia and their surprising and on how
society works. Dan, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
I was wondering what got you into the mafia history
and how the mafia history has impacted American history.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Thank you for that question.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
And it's such a polite way of saying, why are
you so weird about this topic?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Well, I think it's funny because it's like us with
the Kennedys, right, all right, Yeah, No, it's probably for
a lot of the same reasons.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
You guys are so interested in the Kennedy's right that
you know, on my show, The Outfit with a Lot
of Hope Levenson, our pitch is always every week what
a mob story says about the hidden history of America.
And that is how I view organized crime, that the
history of organized crime in America is kind of this
rosetta stone to understanding a lot of things about it
(02:50):
that are not commonly understood. The era we're going to
talk about, to me is like it's the golden era
of the mafia and of the height of its power influence.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
I don't think organized crime has gone away. I think
it's just changed since then.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
But this is sort of to me when we think
of a mafia exercising power, this was the height of it.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
And when we first wanted to talk about specifically the
rivalry between RFK and Jimmy Hoffa, which we will absolutely
get into, but when we were first talking off Mike,
you were saying, you know, I can talk more broadly
about the relationship between the Kennedys and the mafia. So yeah,
when you hear Kennedy is and the mob What comes
to mind, Well, I.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Think for a lot of people, it will be what
we're going to talk about, right RFK being a mob
buster and all that, which I think is a little
more complicated than that. But for a lot of people
it's going to be Joseph Kennedy the patriarch, and specifically
the idea that he was a bootlegger, a rum runner.
Now he was setting himself up towards the end of
prohibition to be a legal alcohol magnate and essentially buying
(03:51):
low and selling high. I think people would be surprised
by the amounts of business interests that Joseph Kennedy, you know,
father of John Kennedy, father of Bobby Kennedy, had a
Hollywood mogul, heavily involved and I think it was RKAO
had an affair for many years with Gloria Swanson. So
his business interest ranged all over the world, and of
(04:11):
course that he also had a ranging career. He was
ambassador to the UK prior to World War Two, ardent
supporter of appeasing Hitler, not the finest moment, but essentially
as this kind of tycoon, he was very well sourced
and had many contacts in the underworld at that time
that for instance, he had what was at that time
(04:33):
the largest office building in America, the Merchandise Mart Chicago,
still there, and that led to him forging ties not
only to the political machine in Chicago, but also to
the mafia there.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
And then how did that transfer to the next generation
into their political ambitions. I mean, you read one of
the things that sort of repeated as you read about
Bobby's feud with Hafa and Bobby's taking on the mafia
is that ironically the mafia quote unquote helped elect jfk
What does that mean?
Speaker 4 (05:02):
So that would be a reference to what happened in
nineteen sixty, which is the razor thin election between Richard
Nixon and John F.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
Obviously John was not supposed to be the president, right,
it was Joe the pilot, but after he died. I mean,
I don't know if your dad's are like this, mine
is not that the next in line had to be president.
But what that refers to is the razor type margin
and the accusation that Joseph Kennedy used his influence with
(05:32):
the mafia, in particular in Chicago, where Illinois being a
battlefield stayed at that time to sway the election towards
Kennedy to beat Nixon, and that, of course the mob
would get something out of it. And there's a lot
of controversy for whether that deal happened. I think it did.
I would not have done that if I was the mafia,
given what we're going to talk about in today's episode,
(05:53):
and given that Richard Nixon surprisingly also has some deep
organized crime ties. The famous stories about grave yards full
of voters and election shenanigans occurring in Chicago, which just
tipped Illinois into the JFK column, I think are mostly true.
And to talk about the emissary to that next generation.
One of the main connections between organized crime and John F.
(06:16):
Kennedy was Frank Sinatra, who was very close to both
and at that time was a big Kennedy booster. They
would have a falling out later, but Frank Sinatra was
often used by organized crime as a kind of cutout
to the legitimate world, and Frank Sinatra being a mob group,
Hee was happy to play that role. So in nineteen
(06:36):
sixty when the election happens, it's all funding games until
he appoints Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
I think something we will run into a lot, and
which we certainly did in trying to do research for
this episode, is the inconsistency of all historical sources, totally
primary sources. So I'm wondering, you know, as someone who
has thought a lot about this, how do you approach
deciding what is the truth and what isn't when all
these things are happening behind the fifteen closed doors. Everyone
(07:05):
is intentionally sort of weaponizing misinformation in the press and
privately took further their own narrative.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
It's such a great question. I'm doing some research on
some episodes about al Capone coming up, and I'm realizing, Oh,
a bunch of things that, even after a lot of
study I thought were true, are not true. So many
myths get repeated and kind of reified into being the
reality that are not true, or you can trace them
to one source. I mean, the jagger Hoover wearing a
(07:33):
dress thing that we've all heard, right, what's.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
The source of that?
Speaker 4 (07:36):
The source is actually in a quite good book by
a journalist, Sam Anthony Summers, but it's just one witness
saying this, right. I don't think it happened, right, So
that's a perfect example. Are there corroborating witnesses?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Right?
Speaker 4 (07:51):
Are multiple people saying the same thing even though they're
not in the same place. Right, primary firsthand documents, right,
you know Foyer documents from the FBI. Well, an FBI
report is just an FBI special agent telexing it in,
but that can be important corroboration, right. So you know,
I always think of this when I see how easily
(08:12):
misinformation spreads, you know, online. It's really hard, it's really
really hard, and you have to read a lot of stuff,
and I think develop also a muscle to say this
doesn't sound as believable. And if you want to build
up that muscle, read the book The Irishman is based
on and just try to poke holes in it. That'll
(08:32):
be a really good exercise because it won't be hard
and anyone can do that.
Speaker 5 (08:37):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
And we're back with United States of Kennedy. Okay.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
I do think we should get into who Jimmy Hoffa is.
I had name recognition for him, but didn't know exactly
what his story was. So who was Jimmy Hoffa?
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Yeah, so James Hoffa would ascend to be the president
of the Air National Brotherhood of Teamsters, which originated as
a union the latter half of the nineteenth century for
carriage drivers. And you know, obviously they didn't have trucks
back then, and over time it morphed into being truckers,
both local truckers and long haul truckers, these kinds of people,
(09:31):
but it also could be cab drivers. They tried to
organize a lot of anything involving a truck. The name
recognition is interesting in that he was one of the
most famous people in the country. I think the Teamsters
at its height had more union members than the largest
union today has. Given the population change, that's quite a change.
The union density was much higher. And you know, part
(09:52):
of the reason he's so well known is a union
of truckers is incredibly powerful with strike threats, the threat
of what they call secondary strikes. Right, So let's say,
for instance, a longshoreman union goes on strike, they say
they're not going to unload ships. You get some scabs
in there and the trucks keep picking it up, no problem.
(10:14):
But if trucks won't come to the terminal either, now
you have a real problem. And that power he had,
he wielded very mightily, was heavily politically connected.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
But as always, if a union.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Is corrupted and it's powerful, the corrupt masters of that
union can use that same power for their own enrichment,
and that, unfortunately, is what was also happening with the
teamsters from an early point in Jimmy Hoffe's career.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yeah, I think.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
That's the part that took me a few run throughs
to understand, is where's the line between Jimmy Hoffa's corruption
and then just straight up organized crime.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
That's a great question. I would defer to the journalist
who knows more about Jimmy Hoffer than probably anyone else,
a guy named Dan Maldea, who has been literally investigating
the Jimmy Hoffa case for I think fifty one years.
He has a great substack too, which I don't say
that sentence often, but you can check that out. His
view is that Jimmy Hoffa was essentially a racketeer himself,
(11:17):
a gangster. That there's been some revisionism of Jimmy Hoffa.
As you know, he got the nineteen sixty four Master
Freight agreement that was a huge national contract for truckers,
but he was compromised from the beginning, he was ultimately
hurting Teamsters, and as near as I can tell, the
common explanation for when the mob enters Jimmy Hoff's life
(11:39):
is in nineteen forty one, his base of power was
a local Teamsters local in Detroit. Two ninety nine, there
was an attempt by the newly formed CIO later to
become part of the AFL CIO to launch what they
call a raid on his locals members. A raid in
union parlance is we're going to go in and try
(12:01):
to steal your members, essentially for our union. To beat
back this effort, he enlisted mafia members in Detroit through
an interesting source. He had a former girlfriend who was Sicilian,
Sylvia Pagano, and she connected him to the mobsters. She
was also mother to a guy named Chucky O'Brien who
(12:23):
would become like Jimmy hoffa's foster son and may have
played an unwinning role in his disappearance. So he had
very very close ties to Italian Americans and to the
mafia from an early point in his career, and they
never went away. I mean, this is the thing with
the mob. If you let them in once they're there
forever you can't get them out again. And so from
(12:46):
that point on, mobsters had run of the place. As
his national ambitions grew, this grew to include mobsters all
over the country because obviously he needs support from every
geographic region of the country to supplant the prior president.
And so they're treating it like an ATM basically the
Teamsters pension and benefits funds.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
And how is this viewed both inside the unions and
by the general public? I mean, obviously it hits a
fever pitch when he's being you know, interrogated on television,
But before that, is it on some level and open secret?
Is it something that there's a disappointment about within the unions?
How is he seen?
Speaker 2 (13:24):
So?
Speaker 4 (13:24):
First off, he's an absolute autocrat within the Teamsters union itself, right,
and this was not his creation entirely. This had been
what previous presidents had built up. But the idea of
union democracy, I mean, is a very important one that
the Teamsters still have issues with, which is all right,
our members get to determine our leadership and what happens,
(13:47):
you know, what the leadership does. And this was not
really the case with the Teamsters that if you were
a dissident Teamster member or organizer or local leader, you
could expect violence to be visited upon you, right, So
you know, look, he was a very charismatic guy obviously,
and very talented and hard working in a number of ways,
(14:09):
so he did have a genuine base of support, but
it was also aided by the fact that they would
really brutally crush any dissent outside of the Teamsters. It's interesting,
right because a lot of union leaders who have more
integrity and be less corrupt tended to be more left
wing and progressive as well. So again, the environment at
(14:31):
this time of anti communism I think is an important context,
right that Jimmy Hoffa was not one of these guys
playing foot see with the Communist Party or with more
left wing causes. So that's good to a lot of
what they call hard hats and politicians. And really the
hearings targeting the mafia, I mean, there's the Kafaver hearings
(14:52):
in nineteen fifty to fifty one, which kind of demolishes
the lie that there is no mafia, but the other
hearings only really begin after all the scare stuff kind
of runs its course. They need a new coke basically,
and that's what they turn to.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
So that brings us to RFK because he is trying
to make a name for himself. He is appointed to
this subcommittee that was previously McCarthy's committee is now McClellan yes, hm,
And they are focused on first Dave Beck, right, or is.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
It Beck and haff A?
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Are they aware of Haffa at the same level as
Dave Beck, who's the president.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
It's really funny how this happens. In the drug war today,
we have what's called the Kingpin strategy. The idea is
we take out a Choppo Guzman, right, bring them back
for trial, and it's going to disable his drug cartel,
the Cineloa cartel. And in fact, what happens every time
is violence increases because all the lower run guys are
(15:56):
going to compete to control as much of it as
they can. I'll talk a little bit about how Bobby
Kennedy got there in a second. But Dave Beck was
Jimmy Hoff's predecessor as president of the Teamsters union, and
his main thing was he was more personally corrupt in
a way than Haffa was. Like I think he died
a millionaire. He was from the Pacific Northwest, not an
(16:20):
area with much influenced mob activity, and he was kind
of an easy target. He was so obviously financially corrupt
that Kennedy, focusing first on Beck, did succeed in ultimately
dislodging him. However, again, like with the Kingford strategy, what
do you do well, Jimmy Hoffer was trying to replace
Dave Beck, So you aided him immensely in rising to
(16:41):
the national presidency, and Kennedy regretted that after the fact.
You know, so what Bobby Kennedy's role was at this
time his brother was now a Senator from Massachusetts. Bobby Kennedy,
we have this conception of him as this sainted liberal hero,
and it does not a line with any look at
(17:02):
his record that I'm aware of. If you read Rick
Pearlstein's Nixon Land, he is an absolutely cynical figure, even
in his later iteration where he's a progressive Icut And
at that time in particular, I mean, he was very
upset that he had lost out on being chief counsel
to Joseph McCarthy on the Senate subcommittee. That job went
(17:25):
to Roy Cone. You know, Donald Trump's later attorney. One
of the worst people ever basically, so this is who
Bobby Kennedy lost the job to right and on the
Rackets Committee which forms later under an anti union senator
from Arkansas, John McClellan. Then he gets the Chief Council job,
and like Roy Cohne with McCarthy, is basically given a
(17:45):
lot of power, and this is sometimes called the Rackets Committee.
And he starts delving into the underworld, helps take out
Dave Beck, and then his attention turns to Jimmy Hoffeck
because the Teamsters just seem like a can of worms
that has endless worms in it.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, it's funny. In terms of Bobby's political career, the
two I would say big picture things that I came
out of this research thinking is a this entire crusade
was so clearly a way to make his name rather
than some sort of deep moral belief that he had.
And then the second one, and correct me if I'm wrong,
is that it seems to me like he left the
(18:20):
situation way worse than he found it because he first
focused on Beck when Haffa was quote unquote worse, and
then focused on Haffa, and then Fitzimmons came along and
was miles worse. So if the goal was to get
mafia influence out of Labor, he absolutely failed at the end.
Not to jump ahead, but no, no, it's a great point.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
So he formed what was called a get haff A squad, right,
And again, Haffa really is a gangster, right, so he
is very skilled at evading. If you watch the hearings
of him being questioned by Kennedy, which I highly recommend
you can do, you can watch them all online. It's
really funny because Kennedy, I'll ask him a question about
(19:05):
do you recall this phone call? He'll play the phone
call for him after Hoffer says, yeah, no, I don't
really remember, and then he'll play it. He says, yeah,
I have no recollection of that, and he just does
this over and over again, and it makes Kennedy really mad.
Kennedy is kind of out of his element in this stuff.
He's right on like ninety percent of the stuff, but
(19:26):
he's in nept and maybe he doesn't need to be
skilled because it's really about raising his profile, raising his
family's profile. John Kennedy is on that subcommittee at that time,
so maybe it's just that. But the questioning is kind
of pointless. He'll get angry and harangue the guys. He'll
even taunt some of the mafia guys. He'll do things
(19:46):
like question a witness in private, find out they're going
to take the fifth a lot, and then put them
on TV even though they know that already, to make
them look bad. So RFK himself, you know, it's probably
not unlike what Jimmy Hoffa did, where he thought he
was embracing a good cause and he had to do
it this way to do it, but it sort of
(20:08):
corrupts the whole enterprise.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
It doesn't root out the mafia.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
I know Dan Moldea, who I mentioned earlier, thinks highly
of Rfk's mob fighting stuff. I don't really Again, he
knows more about it than anyone on earth, So take
what I'm saying with a grain of salt. But you're right,
I mean mob control of the teamsters actually gets worse
after he finally does get Haffa.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
We're going to take a short break, stay with.
Speaker 6 (20:32):
Us, and we're back with the United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
So let's talk a little bit more about the actual hearing,
because I'm trying to, of course, remember the timeline here
there were hearings that were before JFK was president, and
then there were hearings when Bobby was Attorney General under JFK.
So what are the kind of big medium moments from
those hearings? What do they accomplish? What are the lines
everyone talks about? Famously, Pafa uses the I don't recall
(21:13):
tactic a lot, but he also doesn't play the fifth Yeah,
which is a whole other thing. So where do we
start and where do we end with those hearings?
Speaker 4 (21:22):
So the McClelland Committee, like I said, which is also
known as the Rackets Committee, it's ten senators sit on it.
I think of them only one or two could be
even considered pro union. Other members on the committee include
Barry Goldwater and Joseph McCarthy, who was very close with
the Kennedy family. I think he dated one of their
(21:43):
sisters in fact, So again not always fitting with the
idea we have of them right, But I believe it
starts in nineteen fifty seven. It first targets the Teamsters
and Dave Beck. Dave Beck is dislodged, Haffa replaces him.
They can take you with Haffa. Interestingly, this committee goes
after other unions, but it's not very successful with any
(22:06):
other unions other than the Teamsters, and it's dissolved in fact,
in part because they can't really get anything together and
the labor establishment takes pains to distance themselves from Haffa
and the Teamsters. The Teamsters are expelled from the American
Federation of Labor in an effort that's led by Walter Ruther,
(22:27):
the head of the United Auto Workers, who is everything
Jimmy Hoffa isn't. Ruther is like almost killed multiple times.
Very brave, progressive hero, really deserves to be much more
well known. So also the effect of television, right the
cafaver hearings and the McCarthy hearings had pioneered this, but
(22:47):
this is made for TV, And because McClellan has delegated
so much authority to RFK, it's mostly his voice you're
hearing questioning these guys. So in terms of the highlights,
you know, it's really like reality TV. It's kind of ridiculous.
It's like, you know, Hoffa not pleading the fifth so
to avoid perjury charges, he answers in all these bizarre ways.
(23:10):
Sometimes he's doing it just to literally run out the clock.
Like he'll talk very secuitously, like well, and of course
at that time it was ordered that I should be
made to appear, and like it's just like wasting their time,
and then Kennedy kind of badgering the witnesses honestly.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
At one point he says.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
It must beg a belief that you don't remember things
that any man on the street would remember things, like
you know, that's his great moment. It's really quite stupid.
Later hearings where they drag all the mobsters out, it's
a bit more sinister. We're talking every mafia boss you
can name in the country coming out, and they all
wear sunglasses. They plead the fifth a lot, and they
(23:49):
just look like this sinister cast of characters. One moment
I remember is Robert Kennedy quizzing Sam g and Kanna,
who was a boss with the Chicago mob and geeing
kind of laughs at something and rf cases, I thought,
only little girls giggle, mister g and Kanna, that's a
stupid thing to say. For a bunch of reasons. I
just also don't say that, don't ever say that. That's
(24:11):
not a good idea. So very much for prime time
kind of pro wrestling, antics, you.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Know, and Haffa is openly playing mind games with Bobby.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Yeah, and they call it the stare. That's it.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
I mean, if you watch the videos, Kennedy will ask
a question and Hafa clearly is wearing short sleeve dress
shirts under his blazer, and his blazer arms will ride
up so his bare arms are exposed.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
To the midway. It's just like a cave man like.
Speaker 4 (24:40):
He's obviously not built to wear a suit, which again
is endearing to the audience, right, because what you have
is this guy with this sort of weird He's from Indiana,
but I've never heard anyone with this accent other than him.
He has this weird Midwest accent, and he's answering this
guy with this ridiculous Boston Brahmin accent or whatever, and
he seems to be outsmarting him in the stare. He'll
(25:03):
take a few seconds after Kennedy's done, staring at him
as if to say, you are the stupidest guy on earth, right,
and I have nothing but contempt for you. And a
lot of audiences and teamsters and blue collar people really
like this that it seems like he's outsmarting this preppy,
supercilious guy, which is not entirely wrong. I don't think,
(25:26):
you know, he never really pins him down.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
This keeps coming up with the Kennedy's a lot. All
these stories are always different American archetypes going up against
one another. Bobby is sort of the privileged Boston lawyer,
and then Hafa is the hardened gangster or something. And
then obviously, when it becomes a media event, everyone at
home relates to the person they most want to win.
Speaking of which, how was this all covered in the press.
(25:50):
Was Bobby from the beginning scene as a hero? Did
people cheer him on? Was it divided along class distinctions? Yet?
Speaker 4 (25:58):
So my grandparents for Irish ingrants and John Kennedy's portrait
literally was hanging in their homes. I see the similar
passion among black voters for Obama as the only close
thing today. It means so much more than it does
to other people. So they could sort of do no
wrong with a lot of Irish Catholic voters.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Obviously, Bobby.
Speaker 4 (26:23):
You know, it's interesting No one gives a shit about Bobby,
right Like Jack is going to be the one, So
this is him trying to get his own thing going.
His father certainly doesn't care. He has his one crown
prince that he wants in. So this is Bobby trying
to get the world to care about him, trying to
get something for himself, which I think explains all this
(26:45):
passion and anger going into this. Even though it's all
kind of a nepley handled in terms of the reaction
to it from the public, I think it breaks down
a lot of not evenly along class lines, because obviously
the Catholic thing, the the HAFA leadership thing both appeals
to different segments. I will tell you another master that
(27:06):
RFK is serving here though, is interestingly a Southern anti
union agenda, right, which is much of what is behind
the subcommittee, and there's been increasing legislation throughout the fifties
that is anti union. One of the major consequences of
the committee is another round of anti union legislation which
(27:27):
sort of hardens that package called TAFT hardly. So, you know,
Bobby and Daring himself as well in some respects to
the business world.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
So how much of this was specifically anti union rather
than anti corruption. When you're politically progressive, you think in
these conspiratorial ways where you're like, well, yes, Haffa was bad,
but they were going after the unions because they were
anti labor or something, and I don't want to fall
into that trap. But right, what was the I mean,
you think of Democrats as being pro union traditionally, especially
(27:58):
in that time. What was the undercurrent of just labor
as labor that was running through this whole era.
Speaker 4 (28:07):
So a big issue with the committee, the McClellan committee,
was it seemed to place all the blame for any
labor racketeering, any corruption on the unions, which is really
fifty percent of the story. Employers are also equally victim
and co conspirator in labor racketeering. In fact, you could
(28:29):
argue more responsible in the sense that union members are
the ones who lose out on any kind of corrupt
deal between an employer and a corrupted union.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Right.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
We just recorded an episode on the Disney Animators strike
which involved the mafia, and what you had there was
an attempt to get Hollywood union members under the control
of the Iazzi, which at that time was controlled by
the mob. And that's going to benefit all the movie studios.
Are going to actually save money striking deals with that union,
(29:01):
right because they don't have to pay any good benefits
They really just have to pay bribes to a bunch
of gangsters, and that's ultimately more inexpensive than doing the
right thing by their employees. So this is not a
part of the McClellan committee hearings, right, They're not going
to get into that at all. It's not really any
employer sided stuff, and any honest accounting of union corruption
(29:24):
should do that because that's where the money is.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Right.
Speaker 4 (29:27):
It's great to loot pension funds and do all that,
but labor racketeering is about extracting payoffs from these companies
in exchange for doing nothing for your union members. They
ignored that completely. In terms of the political layout at
that time, you know, it's interesting Democrats, certainly northern Midwestern
Democrats would be pro union, but this was still a
(29:49):
time where we had Dixiecrats Southern and they are not
pro union, right, so there is a cleavage in the
party between those wings, and you know, it is possible
able to cultivate those politicians too, which this committee really did.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Is going after organized crime in unions almost a cop
out in the sense that you are both being pro
labor in that you are trying to clean it up,
but also being anti labor in the sense that you
are focusing on corruption in labor rather than in big
business or whatever. Was that part of the thinking.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Yeah, I mean, and you hear this in the hearings
when you hear McLellan decrying what hoff is doing, and
it's like, yeah, but you don't support unions either, Like
he's saying, oh yourself, and he has this really deep
Southern voice.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
It's like, well, you don't care either. Right.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
So, on the one hand, did Jimmy hoff A conspire
with the gangster Johnny Dio to create these what they
call paper unions, fake unions to run up his vote count?
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Did Johnny Dio later throw acid in the face of
a labor journalist, Yes, do you actually care about your
union members?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
In New York? These tax cab drivers were trying to
get represented.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
No, you do not get real So yeah, I mean
Ronald Reagan would do this later, right, the mob prosecutions
of the eighties under his Justice Department. You know, it
was not a coincidence that so many of them went
after corrupt unions because he also hated unions.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Right, they were still corrupt, though, it must be.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Said, it kind of reminds me of Haffa's argument, or
maybe the argument of people who remained supporters of Haffa's,
that you know, his involvement with the mob wasn't different
from those who are prosecuting him.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
I mean, like you said, it's like the Kennedy's had
mob ties.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
And Hoffma makes the argument that, well, if the politicians
are in bed with the mob, and if everybody who's
in charge is in bed with them, then why shouldn't
I be?
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Then I should be also.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
Yeah, and it has to be really emphasized. The mafia
at that time was a major institution in America, right,
and there were certain parts of business where it was
just endemic, you know, fucking being one of them and
had been for a long time, so cleaning it up
would have required effort of the sort.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
It must be said.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
RFK did try to undertake with aggressive prosecution, and for
a time as Attorney General he did have results. So
that's where he deserves a good deal of credit. I
think as attorney general really aggressively prosecuting these guys. And
if you look at that early sixties period, it does
sort of give a glimpse of an alternate reality where
(32:29):
the mafia had its back broken in the sixties, it
was not inconceivable and not to go totally off the rails.
That ends with November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, where
as Jimmy Hoffe says to a reporter in Nashville that day,
Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now, which is kind
of a chilling thing to say, to be honest.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
We'll be back with more United States at Kennedy after
this break.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
And we're back with United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Now that we're here, can you tell us about the
Jimmy Hoffa conspiracy theory around JFK's assassination.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
Oh boy, okay, that's a big question. You could get
lost in the sauce in this for quite a while,
and I have. I'll give an anecdote by way of
introducing this. Dan Maldea, the journalist I mentioned earlier who's
covered this from the beginning. He had a really funny
story where he's talking to Jimmy Hoffa, junior Haffa's son
who later becomes Teamster's president himself. This was in the
(33:40):
seventies after his father's disappearance, and Maldea says to him, Look,
I'm going to say in my book that I believe
Jimmy Hoffa was involved in the murder of John F.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Kennedy, which he has done a lot of reporting on.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
And Jimmy Hoffa Junior says, Oh, come on with that,
that's such bullshit. Everyone knows my dad was friends with
Jack Ruby, so what. And Maldea says, wait what, He
had no idea, So you volunteered this information to him
that his father knew Jack Ruby and was friends with him.
Obviously Jack Ruby assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald. So I'll
(34:13):
try to restrict myself to saying Maldea's reporting confirm this.
It's been confirmed by other reporters. Jimmy Hoffa at the
very least conspired to kill Robert Kennedy. According to an
informant who later testified against Haffa in Tennessee in the
trial that did send haff.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
At a prison.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
This guy Edward Grady Parton, and Parton said he talked
with me about blowing up Bobby Kennedy's house, about killing
him in his driveway, that this was discussed, that there's
corroborating evidence for this. Haffa is obviously in between the
underworld and the legitimate world.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
There are ties.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Between teamsters and the mob obviously throughout the country, including
with a guy like Jack Ruby, who made numerous calls
in the weeks leading up to the assassination. Two guys
connected to not just organized crime but also the teamsters.
And I know this all sounds a little crazy, but
people should look into the second Congressional investigation of the
(35:14):
Kennedy assassination, which is not as well known as the
Warren Commission, which really more broadly looks at the evidence
and finds evidence for a conspiracy and one involving organized
crime in HAFA. I think it was Bob Blakey who
said that it was a mob hit, and he's the
chief investigator for that second one. And what's the motivation.
The motivation's revenge. Jimmy Hoff is a brutal, vindictive person
(35:35):
who's been harangued for years, and this theory goes that
he aided the mafia was also under assault, to get
them off their backs, get Bobby Kennedy out of the
Attorney general job. This was not the deal when they
helped out the old man. And the way to do
this is one mob boss, Carlo Marcello and New Orleans
(35:55):
who's often linked to this. He says in Sicilian, I
need to get the stone out of my shoe. That
was the saying he used. And the stone in the
shoe is Jack Kennedy, not Bobby. They get rid of Bobby,
they're going to replace him with someone else. They got
to get rid of this administration period. That's the way
this theory goes. And that Haffa aded.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
It all right, So if it's revenge, I do want
to just clarify what had they gotten halfa for it,
because he did eventually go to prison for I think
he did eight years.
Speaker 4 (36:22):
Yeah, so they get him on I believe it was
extortion and fraud charges in Tennessee. Now, look, Haffa have
been involved in all these scummy things right, Like he
had the pension fund is being looted. They're making sweetheart
deals with employers selling out their own union members. They're
doing things like corrupt land deals for vacation homes for
(36:42):
Teamsters officials that are shitty. I it's just bizarre stuff.
So they do get him eventually. The way they get
him is they turn one of his goons, this guy Parton,
into a witness against him, and he tape records. You know,
Hafa and they get him cold. He goes to prison.
In nineteen sixty eight, while he's still in prison, he
(37:03):
is supporting Richard Nixon from prison while the Teamsters are
supporting Humphrey. Nixon wins and Haffa cashes that in by
getting a commutation of his sentence. He has the restriction
he can't re enter union politics till nineteen eighty. He's
going to try to get around that. That was the
condition of him getting out, and then there's this final
(37:24):
war within the Teamsters which really ends with Haffa's disappearance.
But yeah, they get him eventually, and I take that
as a lesson too. Look, if the federal government is
intent on putting someone in prison, they will do it eventually.
You know, even a lot of Robert Kennedy's allies were saying,
this is an abuse of power. You cannot just determine
a guy has to go to prison and then work
(37:45):
around that. And I think a lot of that approach,
which he also brought to the mafia. If you believe
the conspiracy that the mob killed JFK, his treatment of
the Mafia members in that same way probably helped that
murder happen. Just to give one brief example. Carlos Marcello,
the New Orleans mob boss I mentioned earlier, was born
(38:06):
in Tunisia and then his parents immigrated with him to
the US as a young child. Well, Bobby Kennedy ordered
him kidnapped and deported to Guatemala. So you had this
bizarre scene of this New Orleans mafia boss trudging through
the jungle in Guatemala, knowing Bobby Kennedy put him there.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
That's a good way to get yourself killed. I have
to say. All right, So, as Haffa is in prison,
Frank Fitzimmons is rising through the ranks of the Teamsters
and is even more deferential to the mob. And then
a feud between Fitzsimmons and Haffa develops where Haffa is
essentially accusing Fitzimmons of all the things that Bobby accused
(38:48):
him of. You're not doing right by the people that
you are pretending to serve. So, as I said, we
leave the situation a worse place than it was when
Bobby first got involved. And then what happens after that,
I mean, what is the legacy of the relationship between
unions and the mob? All right, So haff is in prison.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
Now Bobby Kennedy got what he wanted, but Frank Fitzsimmons
gets appointed president.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Fitzsimmons is a Haffa, you drone.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
I mean, he's not an inspiring figure in any way.
He's a caretaker, right, you keep the seat warm till
I get back.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And then he decides he doesn't want to give the
seat up.
Speaker 4 (39:26):
And in fact, Fitzimmons, in order to get rid of
the direct contact with the mob of the sort that
Haffa had, he gives more power to the regional directors
of the Teamsters.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
And what that does is it shoves.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
All that trouble off his plate and makes the Teamsters
even more corrupt, because now you have like ten little
fiefdoms where every one of those guys has mob ties
and can do whatever he wants. And he doesn't have
that same autocratic grip on him that Haffa had, So
it actually made the problem worse. Haffa was at least
a strong figure who could resist the mob in some
(40:02):
respects Now that's gone. Fitzimmons is playing golf with Richard Nixon,
and so it leads to this bizarre series of events
where Haffa comes out and no one really wants him
back in the position of power, and Haffa, like you said,
starts getting loud because he wants the job back. And
I think what really moves someone to act is he
(40:24):
starts squawking about stuff that he really shouldn't be squawking about.
It also should be said his disappearance needs to be
put in the context of a few very important murders.
Sam g and Kanna is murdered. John Rizselli, another major
Chicago mobster involved in the CIA and Cuba and all
this stuff, is murdered.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Haffa disappears in between those two.
Speaker 4 (40:48):
All three would have been expected to be witnesses at
Ascetic committee reinvestigating the assassination plots involving the mafia and
CIA and JFK. So they all disappear kind of in
the same one year, year and a half, and they
can't tell whatever they know. In terms of where this
leaves us today, the Teamsters, man, it's interesting to talk
(41:09):
about the Teamsters now because they have had a continual
struggle to clean up. There's a period in the nineties
Jimmy Hoffa junior and sort of the old guard regains power.
Later there's a reform movement within the Teamsters that has
always been suppressed, which succeeds an electing a guy named
Ron Carry as leader of the Teamsters, who my father supported.
(41:32):
He was not a Teamster but another union member, and
I think is a really awesome guy.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Ron Carry was sort.
Speaker 4 (41:38):
Of undone by a criminal case that was very kind
of fishy, and now it's run by Sean O'Brien. It's
a much cleaner union. But interestingly, for those who've been
paying attention, Sean O'Brien is Donald Trump's biggest ally among unions,
even though the current Trump administration is without a doubt,
the most anti union administration in American history. It's torn
(41:58):
up the contracts of millions of federal workers, strip them
of collective bargaining rights, just by dictate and just to
put a dice boll on it. Sean O'Brien is from
lead in Charlestown, Boston, Massachusetts, one of the most mobbed
up locals in the country. So maybe there's a sequel
to this story there too, But you know, maybe everything
old is new again.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
I think that is a really great place to end.
I have to say I've I don't know if i've
ever learned so much in a single hour. Well, wow,
thank you so much. And if anyone is interested in
more stuff like this and more about organized crime in
the history of organized crime Dan. The podcast is called
The Outfit. That's right, The Outfit.
Speaker 4 (42:36):
It's on Headgum and Higher Ground and available wherever podcasts
are found.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
All right, great, well, thank you so much. This was great.
So that's it for this week's episode. Next week we're
talking about the cult classic documentary Grey Gardens.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
So subscribe and follow United States of Kennedy for all
Things Kennedy every week. United States of Kennedy is hosted
by me Lyra Smith and George Severes.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
Research by Dave Rue and Austin Thompson. The original music
by Josh Witzepolski, edited by Graham Gibson, and mixed by
Doug Bain. Our executive producer is Jenna Cagel. United States
of Kennedy is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Hey, it's Lyra. What do you know about Jimmy Hoffa.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
There have been several well known movies made about him,
and I feel like I've heard about Jimmy Hoffa my
entire life because he's associated with the Teamsters and the
mafia and JFK in some weird way, and a bunch
of other conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I'm George Savers, I'm Lyra Smith, and this is United
States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination with
the Kennedy dynasty. Every week we go into one aspect
of the Kennedy story, and today we are talking about
Bobby Kennedy and his pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Bobby Kennedy was, of course the original RFK meaning RFK
Junior's father for all our younger listeners, and as a
senator and as JFK's Attorney General, one of his signature
causes was taking on organized crime. At one point, Bobby
bragged about the fact that prosecutions for racketeering by his
Justice Department rose by three hundred percent and convictions of
(01:17):
organized criminals grew by three hundred and fifty percent.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
And Bobby's enemy number one was Jimmy Hoffa.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Jimmy Hoffa was a major figure in the International Brotherhood
of Teamsters and eventually rose through the ranks to be
the president. He was also quite publicly in bed with
the mob. He used two hundred and fifty million dollars
in pension funds to curry favor with the mafia and
make a profit for himself. He also once threatened to
break both of Bobby's arms.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
So the feud between Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa was
not just about politics. It was personal, and its aftermath
hunted the Kennedys for years.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
This week, to help us unpack all of this, were
joined by Dan O'Sullivan, co host of The Outfit, a
podcast about the mafia and their surprising and on how
society works. Dan, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
I was wondering what got you into the mafia history
and how the mafia history has impacted American history.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Thank you for that question.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
And it's such a polite way of saying, why are
you so weird about this topic?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Well, I think it's funny because it's like us with
the Kennedys, right, all right, Yeah, No, it's probably for
a lot of the same reasons.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
You guys are so interested in the Kennedy's right that
you know, on my show, The Outfit with a Lot
of Hope Levenson, our pitch is always every week what
a mob story says about the hidden history of America.
And that is how I view organized crime, that the
history of organized crime in America is kind of this
rosetta stone to understanding a lot of things about it
(02:50):
that are not commonly understood. The era we're going to
talk about, to me is like it's the golden era
of the mafia and of the height of its power influence.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
I don't think organized crime has gone away. I think
it's just changed since then.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
But this is sort of to me when we think
of a mafia exercising power, this was the height of it.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
And when we first wanted to talk about specifically the
rivalry between RFK and Jimmy Hoffa, which we will absolutely
get into, but when we were first talking off Mike,
you were saying, you know, I can talk more broadly
about the relationship between the Kennedys and the mafia. So yeah,
when you hear Kennedy is and the mob What comes
to mind, Well, I.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Think for a lot of people, it will be what
we're going to talk about, right RFK being a mob
buster and all that, which I think is a little
more complicated than that. But for a lot of people
it's going to be Joseph Kennedy the patriarch, and specifically
the idea that he was a bootlegger, a rum runner.
Now he was setting himself up towards the end of
prohibition to be a legal alcohol magnate and essentially buying
(03:51):
low and selling high. I think people would be surprised
by the amounts of business interests that Joseph Kennedy, you know,
father of John Kennedy, father of Bobby Kennedy, had a
Hollywood mogul, heavily involved and I think it was RKAO
had an affair for many years with Gloria Swanson. So
his business interest ranged all over the world, and of
(04:11):
course that he also had a ranging career. He was
ambassador to the UK prior to World War Two, ardent
supporter of appeasing Hitler, not the finest moment, but essentially
as this kind of tycoon, he was very well sourced
and had many contacts in the underworld at that time
that for instance, he had what was at that time
(04:33):
the largest office building in America, the Merchandise Mart Chicago,
still there, and that led to him forging ties not
only to the political machine in Chicago, but also to
the mafia there.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
And then how did that transfer to the next generation
into their political ambitions. I mean, you read one of
the things that sort of repeated as you read about
Bobby's feud with Hafa and Bobby's taking on the mafia
is that ironically the mafia quote unquote helped elect jfk
What does that mean?
Speaker 4 (05:02):
So that would be a reference to what happened in
nineteen sixty, which is the razor thin election between Richard
Nixon and John F.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Kennedy.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
Obviously John was not supposed to be the president, right,
it was Joe the pilot, but after he died. I mean,
I don't know if your dad's are like this, mine
is not that the next in line had to be president.
But what that refers to is the razor type margin
and the accusation that Joseph Kennedy used his influence with
(05:32):
the mafia, in particular in Chicago, where Illinois being a
battlefield stayed at that time to sway the election towards
Kennedy to beat Nixon, and that, of course the mob
would get something out of it. And there's a lot
of controversy for whether that deal happened. I think it did.
I would not have done that if I was the mafia,
given what we're going to talk about in today's episode,
(05:53):
and given that Richard Nixon surprisingly also has some deep
organized crime ties. The famous stories about grave yards full
of voters and election shenanigans occurring in Chicago, which just
tipped Illinois into the JFK column, I think are mostly true.
And to talk about the emissary to that next generation.
One of the main connections between organized crime and John F.
(06:16):
Kennedy was Frank Sinatra, who was very close to both
and at that time was a big Kennedy booster. They
would have a falling out later, but Frank Sinatra was
often used by organized crime as a kind of cutout
to the legitimate world, and Frank Sinatra being a mob group,
Hee was happy to play that role. So in nineteen
(06:36):
sixty when the election happens, it's all funding games until
he appoints Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
I think something we will run into a lot, and
which we certainly did in trying to do research for
this episode, is the inconsistency of all historical sources, totally
primary sources. So I'm wondering, you know, as someone who
has thought a lot about this, how do you approach
deciding what is the truth and what isn't when all
these things are happening behind the fifteen closed doors. Everyone
(07:05):
is intentionally sort of weaponizing misinformation in the press and
privately took further their own narrative.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
It's such a great question. I'm doing some research on
some episodes about al Capone coming up, and I'm realizing, Oh,
a bunch of things that, even after a lot of
study I thought were true, are not true. So many
myths get repeated and kind of reified into being the
reality that are not true, or you can trace them
to one source. I mean, the jagger Hoover wearing a
(07:33):
dress thing that we've all heard, right, what's.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
The source of that?
Speaker 4 (07:36):
The source is actually in a quite good book by
a journalist, Sam Anthony Summers, but it's just one witness
saying this, right. I don't think it happened, right, So
that's a perfect example. Are there corroborating witnesses?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Right?
Speaker 4 (07:51):
Are multiple people saying the same thing even though they're
not in the same place. Right, primary firsthand documents, right,
you know Foyer documents from the FBI. Well, an FBI
report is just an FBI special agent telexing it in,
but that can be important corroboration, right. So you know,
I always think of this when I see how easily
(08:12):
misinformation spreads, you know, online. It's really hard, it's really
really hard, and you have to read a lot of stuff,
and I think develop also a muscle to say this
doesn't sound as believable. And if you want to build
up that muscle, read the book The Irishman is based
on and just try to poke holes in it. That'll
(08:32):
be a really good exercise because it won't be hard
and anyone can do that.
Speaker 5 (08:37):
We'll be back with more United States of Kennedy after
this break.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
And we're back with United States of Kennedy. Okay.
Speaker 3 (08:57):
I do think we should get into who Jimmy Hoffa is.
I had name recognition for him, but didn't know exactly
what his story was. So who was Jimmy Hoffa?
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Yeah, so James Hoffa would ascend to be the president
of the Air National Brotherhood of Teamsters, which originated as
a union the latter half of the nineteenth century for
carriage drivers. And you know, obviously they didn't have trucks
back then, and over time it morphed into being truckers,
both local truckers and long haul truckers, these kinds of people,
(09:31):
but it also could be cab drivers. They tried to
organize a lot of anything involving a truck. The name
recognition is interesting in that he was one of the
most famous people in the country. I think the Teamsters
at its height had more union members than the largest
union today has. Given the population change, that's quite a change.
The union density was much higher. And you know, part
(09:52):
of the reason he's so well known is a union
of truckers is incredibly powerful with strike threats, the threat
of what they call secondary strikes. Right, So let's say,
for instance, a longshoreman union goes on strike, they say
they're not going to unload ships. You get some scabs
in there and the trucks keep picking it up, no problem.
(10:14):
But if trucks won't come to the terminal either, now
you have a real problem. And that power he had,
he wielded very mightily, was heavily politically connected.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
But as always, if a union.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Is corrupted and it's powerful, the corrupt masters of that
union can use that same power for their own enrichment,
and that, unfortunately, is what was also happening with the
teamsters from an early point in Jimmy Hoffe's career.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yeah, I think.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
That's the part that took me a few run throughs
to understand, is where's the line between Jimmy Hoffa's corruption
and then just straight up organized crime.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
That's a great question. I would defer to the journalist
who knows more about Jimmy Hoffer than probably anyone else,
a guy named Dan Maldea, who has been literally investigating
the Jimmy Hoffa case for I think fifty one years.
He has a great substack too, which I don't say
that sentence often, but you can check that out. His
view is that Jimmy Hoffa was essentially a racketeer himself,
(11:17):
a gangster. That there's been some revisionism of Jimmy Hoffa.
As you know, he got the nineteen sixty four Master
Freight agreement that was a huge national contract for truckers,
but he was compromised from the beginning, he was ultimately
hurting Teamsters, and as near as I can tell, the
common explanation for when the mob enters Jimmy Hoff's life
(11:39):
is in nineteen forty one, his base of power was
a local Teamsters local in Detroit. Two ninety nine, there
was an attempt by the newly formed CIO later to
become part of the AFL CIO to launch what they
call a raid on his locals members. A raid in
union parlance is we're going to go in and try
(12:01):
to steal your members, essentially for our union. To beat
back this effort, he enlisted mafia members in Detroit through
an interesting source. He had a former girlfriend who was Sicilian,
Sylvia Pagano, and she connected him to the mobsters. She
was also mother to a guy named Chucky O'Brien who
(12:23):
would become like Jimmy hoffa's foster son and may have
played an unwinning role in his disappearance. So he had
very very close ties to Italian Americans and to the
mafia from an early point in his career, and they
never went away. I mean, this is the thing with
the mob. If you let them in once they're there
forever you can't get them out again. And so from
(12:46):
that point on, mobsters had run of the place. As
his national ambitions grew, this grew to include mobsters all
over the country because obviously he needs support from every
geographic region of the country to supplant the prior president.
And so they're treating it like an ATM basically the
Teamsters pension and benefits funds.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
And how is this viewed both inside the unions and
by the general public? I mean, obviously it hits a
fever pitch when he's being you know, interrogated on television,
But before that, is it on some level and open secret?
Is it something that there's a disappointment about within the unions?
How is he seen?
Speaker 2 (13:24):
So?
Speaker 4 (13:24):
First off, he's an absolute autocrat within the Teamsters union itself, right,
and this was not his creation entirely. This had been
what previous presidents had built up. But the idea of
union democracy, I mean, is a very important one that
the Teamsters still have issues with, which is all right,
our members get to determine our leadership and what happens,
(13:47):
you know, what the leadership does. And this was not
really the case with the Teamsters that if you were
a dissident Teamster member or organizer or local leader, you
could expect violence to be visited upon you, right, So
you know, look, he was a very charismatic guy obviously,
and very talented and hard working in a number of ways,
(14:09):
so he did have a genuine base of support, but
it was also aided by the fact that they would
really brutally crush any dissent outside of the Teamsters. It's interesting,
right because a lot of union leaders who have more
integrity and be less corrupt tended to be more left
wing and progressive as well. So again, the environment at
(14:31):
this time of anti communism I think is an important context,
right that Jimmy Hoffa was not one of these guys
playing foot see with the Communist Party or with more
left wing causes. So that's good to a lot of
what they call hard hats and politicians. And really the
hearings targeting the mafia, I mean, there's the Kafaver hearings
(14:52):
in nineteen fifty to fifty one, which kind of demolishes
the lie that there is no mafia, but the other
hearings only really begin after all the scare stuff kind
of runs its course. They need a new coke basically,
and that's what they turn to.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
So that brings us to RFK because he is trying
to make a name for himself. He is appointed to
this subcommittee that was previously McCarthy's committee is now McClellan yes, hm,
And they are focused on first Dave Beck, right, or is.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
It Beck and haff A?
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Are they aware of Haffa at the same level as
Dave Beck, who's the president.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
It's really funny how this happens. In the drug war today,
we have what's called the Kingpin strategy. The idea is
we take out a Choppo Guzman, right, bring them back
for trial, and it's going to disable his drug cartel,
the Cineloa cartel. And in fact, what happens every time
is violence increases because all the lower run guys are
(15:56):
going to compete to control as much of it as
they can. I'll talk a little bit about how Bobby
Kennedy got there in a second. But Dave Beck was
Jimmy Hoff's predecessor as president of the Teamsters union, and
his main thing was he was more personally corrupt in
a way than Haffa was. Like I think he died
a millionaire. He was from the Pacific Northwest, not an
(16:20):
area with much influenced mob activity, and he was kind
of an easy target. He was so obviously financially corrupt
that Kennedy, focusing first on Beck, did succeed in ultimately
dislodging him. However, again, like with the Kingford strategy, what
do you do well, Jimmy Hoffer was trying to replace
Dave Beck, So you aided him immensely in rising to
(16:41):
the national presidency, and Kennedy regretted that after the fact.
You know, so what Bobby Kennedy's role was at this
time his brother was now a Senator from Massachusetts. Bobby Kennedy,
we have this conception of him as this sainted liberal hero,
and it does not a line with any look at
(17:02):
his record that I'm aware of. If you read Rick
Pearlstein's Nixon Land, he is an absolutely cynical figure, even
in his later iteration where he's a progressive Icut And
at that time in particular, I mean, he was very
upset that he had lost out on being chief counsel
to Joseph McCarthy on the Senate subcommittee. That job went
(17:25):
to Roy Cone. You know, Donald Trump's later attorney. One
of the worst people ever basically, so this is who
Bobby Kennedy lost the job to right and on the
Rackets Committee which forms later under an anti union senator
from Arkansas, John McClellan. Then he gets the Chief Council job,
and like Roy Cohne with McCarthy, is basically given a
(17:45):
lot of power, and this is sometimes called the Rackets Committee.
And he starts delving into the underworld, helps take out
Dave Beck, and then his attention turns to Jimmy Hoffeck
because the Teamsters just seem like a can of worms
that has endless worms in it.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, it's funny. In terms of Bobby's political career, the
two I would say big picture things that I came
out of this research thinking is a this entire crusade
was so clearly a way to make his name rather
than some sort of deep moral belief that he had.
And then the second one, and correct me if I'm wrong,
is that it seems to me like he left the
(18:20):
situation way worse than he found it because he first
focused on Beck when Haffa was quote unquote worse, and
then focused on Haffa, and then Fitzimmons came along and
was miles worse. So if the goal was to get
mafia influence out of Labor, he absolutely failed at the end.
Not to jump ahead, but no, no, it's a great point.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
So he formed what was called a get haff A squad, right,
And again, Haffa really is a gangster, right, so he
is very skilled at evading. If you watch the hearings
of him being questioned by Kennedy, which I highly recommend
you can do, you can watch them all online. It's
really funny because Kennedy, I'll ask him a question about
(19:05):
do you recall this phone call? He'll play the phone
call for him after Hoffer says, yeah, no, I don't
really remember, and then he'll play it. He says, yeah,
I have no recollection of that, and he just does
this over and over again, and it makes Kennedy really mad.
Kennedy is kind of out of his element in this stuff.
He's right on like ninety percent of the stuff, but
(19:26):
he's in nept and maybe he doesn't need to be
skilled because it's really about raising his profile, raising his
family's profile. John Kennedy is on that subcommittee at that time,
so maybe it's just that. But the questioning is kind
of pointless. He'll get angry and harangue the guys. He'll
even taunt some of the mafia guys. He'll do things
(19:46):
like question a witness in private, find out they're going
to take the fifth a lot, and then put them
on TV even though they know that already, to make
them look bad. So RFK himself, you know, it's probably
not unlike what Jimmy Hoffa did, where he thought he
was embracing a good cause and he had to do
it this way to do it, but it sort of
(20:08):
corrupts the whole enterprise.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
It doesn't root out the mafia.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
I know Dan Moldea, who I mentioned earlier, thinks highly
of Rfk's mob fighting stuff. I don't really Again, he
knows more about it than anyone on earth, So take
what I'm saying with a grain of salt. But you're right,
I mean mob control of the teamsters actually gets worse
after he finally does get Haffa.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
We're going to take a short break, stay with.
Speaker 6 (20:32):
Us, and we're back with the United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
So let's talk a little bit more about the actual hearing,
because I'm trying to, of course, remember the timeline here
there were hearings that were before JFK was president, and
then there were hearings when Bobby was Attorney General under JFK.
So what are the kind of big medium moments from
those hearings? What do they accomplish? What are the lines
everyone talks about? Famously, Pafa uses the I don't recall
(21:13):
tactic a lot, but he also doesn't play the fifth Yeah,
which is a whole other thing. So where do we
start and where do we end with those hearings?
Speaker 4 (21:22):
So the McClelland Committee, like I said, which is also
known as the Rackets Committee, it's ten senators sit on it.
I think of them only one or two could be
even considered pro union. Other members on the committee include
Barry Goldwater and Joseph McCarthy, who was very close with
the Kennedy family. I think he dated one of their
(21:43):
sisters in fact, So again not always fitting with the
idea we have of them right, But I believe it
starts in nineteen fifty seven. It first targets the Teamsters
and Dave Beck. Dave Beck is dislodged, Haffa replaces him.
They can take you with Haffa. Interestingly, this committee goes
after other unions, but it's not very successful with any
(22:06):
other unions other than the Teamsters, and it's dissolved in fact,
in part because they can't really get anything together and
the labor establishment takes pains to distance themselves from Haffa
and the Teamsters. The Teamsters are expelled from the American
Federation of Labor in an effort that's led by Walter Ruther,
(22:27):
the head of the United Auto Workers, who is everything
Jimmy Hoffa isn't. Ruther is like almost killed multiple times.
Very brave, progressive hero, really deserves to be much more
well known. So also the effect of television, right the
cafaver hearings and the McCarthy hearings had pioneered this, but
(22:47):
this is made for TV, And because McClellan has delegated
so much authority to RFK, it's mostly his voice you're
hearing questioning these guys. So in terms of the highlights,
you know, it's really like reality TV. It's kind of ridiculous.
It's like, you know, Hoffa not pleading the fifth so
to avoid perjury charges, he answers in all these bizarre ways.
(23:10):
Sometimes he's doing it just to literally run out the clock.
Like he'll talk very secuitously, like well, and of course
at that time it was ordered that I should be
made to appear, and like it's just like wasting their time,
and then Kennedy kind of badgering the witnesses honestly.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
At one point he says.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
It must beg a belief that you don't remember things
that any man on the street would remember things, like
you know, that's his great moment. It's really quite stupid.
Later hearings where they drag all the mobsters out, it's
a bit more sinister. We're talking every mafia boss you
can name in the country coming out, and they all
wear sunglasses. They plead the fifth a lot, and they
(23:49):
just look like this sinister cast of characters. One moment
I remember is Robert Kennedy quizzing Sam g and Kanna,
who was a boss with the Chicago mob and geeing
kind of laughs at something and rf cases, I thought,
only little girls giggle, mister g and Kanna, that's a
stupid thing to say. For a bunch of reasons. I
just also don't say that, don't ever say that. That's
(24:11):
not a good idea. So very much for prime time
kind of pro wrestling, antics, you.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Know, and Haffa is openly playing mind games with Bobby.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Yeah, and they call it the stare. That's it.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
I mean, if you watch the videos, Kennedy will ask
a question and Hafa clearly is wearing short sleeve dress
shirts under his blazer, and his blazer arms will ride
up so his bare arms are exposed.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
To the midway. It's just like a cave man like.
Speaker 4 (24:40):
He's obviously not built to wear a suit, which again
is endearing to the audience, right, because what you have
is this guy with this sort of weird He's from Indiana,
but I've never heard anyone with this accent other than him.
He has this weird Midwest accent, and he's answering this
guy with this ridiculous Boston Brahmin accent or whatever, and
he seems to be outsmarting him in the stare. He'll
(25:03):
take a few seconds after Kennedy's done, staring at him
as if to say, you are the stupidest guy on earth, right,
and I have nothing but contempt for you. And a
lot of audiences and teamsters and blue collar people really
like this that it seems like he's outsmarting this preppy,
supercilious guy, which is not entirely wrong. I don't think,
(25:26):
you know, he never really pins him down.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
This keeps coming up with the Kennedy's a lot. All
these stories are always different American archetypes going up against
one another. Bobby is sort of the privileged Boston lawyer,
and then Hafa is the hardened gangster or something. And
then obviously, when it becomes a media event, everyone at
home relates to the person they most want to win.
Speaking of which, how was this all covered in the press.
(25:50):
Was Bobby from the beginning scene as a hero? Did
people cheer him on? Was it divided along class distinctions? Yet?
Speaker 4 (25:58):
So my grandparents for Irish ingrants and John Kennedy's portrait
literally was hanging in their homes. I see the similar
passion among black voters for Obama as the only close
thing today. It means so much more than it does
to other people. So they could sort of do no
wrong with a lot of Irish Catholic voters.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Obviously, Bobby.
Speaker 4 (26:23):
You know, it's interesting No one gives a shit about Bobby,
right Like Jack is going to be the one, So
this is him trying to get his own thing going.
His father certainly doesn't care. He has his one crown
prince that he wants in. So this is Bobby trying
to get the world to care about him, trying to
get something for himself, which I think explains all this
(26:45):
passion and anger going into this. Even though it's all
kind of a nepley handled in terms of the reaction
to it from the public, I think it breaks down
a lot of not evenly along class lines, because obviously
the Catholic thing, the the HAFA leadership thing both appeals
to different segments. I will tell you another master that
(27:06):
RFK is serving here though, is interestingly a Southern anti
union agenda, right, which is much of what is behind
the subcommittee, and there's been increasing legislation throughout the fifties
that is anti union. One of the major consequences of
the committee is another round of anti union legislation which
(27:27):
sort of hardens that package called TAFT hardly. So, you know,
Bobby and Daring himself as well in some respects to
the business world.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
So how much of this was specifically anti union rather
than anti corruption. When you're politically progressive, you think in
these conspiratorial ways where you're like, well, yes, Haffa was bad,
but they were going after the unions because they were
anti labor or something, and I don't want to fall
into that trap. But right, what was the I mean,
you think of Democrats as being pro union traditionally, especially
(27:58):
in that time. What was the undercurrent of just labor
as labor that was running through this whole era.
Speaker 4 (28:07):
So a big issue with the committee, the McClellan committee,
was it seemed to place all the blame for any
labor racketeering, any corruption on the unions, which is really
fifty percent of the story. Employers are also equally victim
and co conspirator in labor racketeering. In fact, you could
(28:29):
argue more responsible in the sense that union members are
the ones who lose out on any kind of corrupt
deal between an employer and a corrupted union.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Right.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
We just recorded an episode on the Disney Animators strike
which involved the mafia, and what you had there was
an attempt to get Hollywood union members under the control
of the Iazzi, which at that time was controlled by
the mob. And that's going to benefit all the movie studios.
Are going to actually save money striking deals with that union,
(29:01):
right because they don't have to pay any good benefits
They really just have to pay bribes to a bunch
of gangsters, and that's ultimately more inexpensive than doing the
right thing by their employees. So this is not a
part of the McClellan committee hearings, right, They're not going
to get into that at all. It's not really any
employer sided stuff, and any honest accounting of union corruption
(29:24):
should do that because that's where the money is.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Right.
Speaker 4 (29:27):
It's great to loot pension funds and do all that,
but labor racketeering is about extracting payoffs from these companies
in exchange for doing nothing for your union members. They
ignored that completely. In terms of the political layout at
that time, you know, it's interesting Democrats, certainly northern Midwestern
Democrats would be pro union, but this was still a
(29:49):
time where we had Dixiecrats Southern and they are not
pro union, right, so there is a cleavage in the
party between those wings, and you know, it is possible
able to cultivate those politicians too, which this committee really did.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Is going after organized crime in unions almost a cop
out in the sense that you are both being pro
labor in that you are trying to clean it up,
but also being anti labor in the sense that you
are focusing on corruption in labor rather than in big
business or whatever. Was that part of the thinking.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Yeah, I mean, and you hear this in the hearings
when you hear McLellan decrying what hoff is doing, and
it's like, yeah, but you don't support unions either, Like
he's saying, oh yourself, and he has this really deep
Southern voice.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
It's like, well, you don't care either. Right.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
So, on the one hand, did Jimmy hoff A conspire
with the gangster Johnny Dio to create these what they
call paper unions, fake unions to run up his vote count?
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Did Johnny Dio later throw acid in the face of
a labor journalist, Yes, do you actually care about your
union members?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
In New York? These tax cab drivers were trying to
get represented.
Speaker 4 (31:01):
No, you do not get real So yeah, I mean
Ronald Reagan would do this later, right, the mob prosecutions
of the eighties under his Justice Department. You know, it
was not a coincidence that so many of them went
after corrupt unions because he also hated unions.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Right, they were still corrupt, though, it must be.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Said, it kind of reminds me of Haffa's argument, or
maybe the argument of people who remained supporters of Haffa's,
that you know, his involvement with the mob wasn't different
from those who are prosecuting him.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
I mean, like you said, it's like the Kennedy's had
mob ties.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
And Hoffma makes the argument that, well, if the politicians
are in bed with the mob, and if everybody who's
in charge is in bed with them, then why shouldn't
I be?
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Then I should be also.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
Yeah, and it has to be really emphasized. The mafia
at that time was a major institution in America, right,
and there were certain parts of business where it was
just endemic, you know, fucking being one of them and
had been for a long time, so cleaning it up
would have required effort of the sort.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
It must be said.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
RFK did try to undertake with aggressive prosecution, and for
a time as Attorney General he did have results. So
that's where he deserves a good deal of credit. I
think as attorney general really aggressively prosecuting these guys. And
if you look at that early sixties period, it does
sort of give a glimpse of an alternate reality where
(32:29):
the mafia had its back broken in the sixties, it
was not inconceivable and not to go totally off the rails.
That ends with November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, where
as Jimmy Hoffe says to a reporter in Nashville that day,
Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now, which is kind
of a chilling thing to say, to be honest.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
We'll be back with more United States at Kennedy after
this break.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
And we're back with United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Now that we're here, can you tell us about the
Jimmy Hoffa conspiracy theory around JFK's assassination.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
Oh boy, okay, that's a big question. You could get
lost in the sauce in this for quite a while,
and I have. I'll give an anecdote by way of
introducing this. Dan Maldea, the journalist I mentioned earlier who's
covered this from the beginning. He had a really funny
story where he's talking to Jimmy Hoffa, junior Haffa's son
who later becomes Teamster's president himself. This was in the
(33:40):
seventies after his father's disappearance, and Maldea says to him, Look,
I'm going to say in my book that I believe
Jimmy Hoffa was involved in the murder of John F.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Kennedy, which he has done a lot of reporting on.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
And Jimmy Hoffa Junior says, Oh, come on with that,
that's such bullshit. Everyone knows my dad was friends with
Jack Ruby, so what. And Maldea says, wait what, He
had no idea, So you volunteered this information to him
that his father knew Jack Ruby and was friends with him.
Obviously Jack Ruby assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald. So I'll
(34:13):
try to restrict myself to saying Maldea's reporting confirm this.
It's been confirmed by other reporters. Jimmy Hoffa at the
very least conspired to kill Robert Kennedy. According to an
informant who later testified against Haffa in Tennessee in the
trial that did send haff.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
At a prison.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
This guy Edward Grady Parton, and Parton said he talked
with me about blowing up Bobby Kennedy's house, about killing
him in his driveway, that this was discussed, that there's
corroborating evidence for this. Haffa is obviously in between the
underworld and the legitimate world.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
There are ties.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Between teamsters and the mob obviously throughout the country, including
with a guy like Jack Ruby, who made numerous calls
in the weeks leading up to the assassination. Two guys
connected to not just organized crime but also the teamsters.
And I know this all sounds a little crazy, but
people should look into the second Congressional investigation of the
(35:14):
Kennedy assassination, which is not as well known as the
Warren Commission, which really more broadly looks at the evidence
and finds evidence for a conspiracy and one involving organized
crime in HAFA. I think it was Bob Blakey who
said that it was a mob hit, and he's the
chief investigator for that second one. And what's the motivation.
The motivation's revenge. Jimmy Hoff is a brutal, vindictive person
(35:35):
who's been harangued for years, and this theory goes that
he aided the mafia was also under assault, to get
them off their backs, get Bobby Kennedy out of the
Attorney general job. This was not the deal when they
helped out the old man. And the way to do
this is one mob boss, Carlo Marcello and New Orleans
(35:55):
who's often linked to this. He says in Sicilian, I
need to get the stone out of my shoe. That
was the saying he used. And the stone in the
shoe is Jack Kennedy, not Bobby. They get rid of Bobby,
they're going to replace him with someone else. They got
to get rid of this administration period. That's the way
this theory goes. And that Haffa aded.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
It all right, So if it's revenge, I do want
to just clarify what had they gotten halfa for it,
because he did eventually go to prison for I think
he did eight years.
Speaker 4 (36:22):
Yeah, so they get him on I believe it was
extortion and fraud charges in Tennessee. Now, look, Haffa have
been involved in all these scummy things right, Like he
had the pension fund is being looted. They're making sweetheart
deals with employers selling out their own union members. They're
doing things like corrupt land deals for vacation homes for
(36:42):
Teamsters officials that are shitty. I it's just bizarre stuff.
So they do get him eventually. The way they get
him is they turn one of his goons, this guy Parton,
into a witness against him, and he tape records. You know,
Hafa and they get him cold. He goes to prison.
In nineteen sixty eight, while he's still in prison, he
(37:03):
is supporting Richard Nixon from prison while the Teamsters are
supporting Humphrey. Nixon wins and Haffa cashes that in by
getting a commutation of his sentence. He has the restriction
he can't re enter union politics till nineteen eighty. He's
going to try to get around that. That was the
condition of him getting out, and then there's this final
(37:24):
war within the Teamsters which really ends with Haffa's disappearance.
But yeah, they get him eventually, and I take that
as a lesson too. Look, if the federal government is
intent on putting someone in prison, they will do it eventually.
You know, even a lot of Robert Kennedy's allies were saying,
this is an abuse of power. You cannot just determine
a guy has to go to prison and then work
(37:45):
around that. And I think a lot of that approach,
which he also brought to the mafia. If you believe
the conspiracy that the mob killed JFK, his treatment of
the Mafia members in that same way probably helped that
murder happen. Just to give one brief example. Carlos Marcello,
the New Orleans mob boss I mentioned earlier, was born
(38:06):
in Tunisia and then his parents immigrated with him to
the US as a young child. Well, Bobby Kennedy ordered
him kidnapped and deported to Guatemala. So you had this
bizarre scene of this New Orleans mafia boss trudging through
the jungle in Guatemala, knowing Bobby Kennedy put him there.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
That's a good way to get yourself killed. I have
to say. All right, So, as Haffa is in prison,
Frank Fitzimmons is rising through the ranks of the Teamsters
and is even more deferential to the mob. And then
a feud between Fitzsimmons and Haffa develops where Haffa is
essentially accusing Fitzimmons of all the things that Bobby accused
(38:48):
him of. You're not doing right by the people that
you are pretending to serve. So, as I said, we
leave the situation a worse place than it was when
Bobby first got involved. And then what happens after that,
I mean, what is the legacy of the relationship between
unions and the mob? All right, So haff is in prison.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
Now Bobby Kennedy got what he wanted, but Frank Fitzsimmons
gets appointed president.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Fitzsimmons is a Haffa, you drone.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
I mean, he's not an inspiring figure in any way.
He's a caretaker, right, you keep the seat warm till
I get back.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And then he decides he doesn't want to give the
seat up.
Speaker 4 (39:26):
And in fact, Fitzimmons, in order to get rid of
the direct contact with the mob of the sort that
Haffa had, he gives more power to the regional directors
of the Teamsters.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
And what that does is it shoves.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
All that trouble off his plate and makes the Teamsters
even more corrupt, because now you have like ten little
fiefdoms where every one of those guys has mob ties
and can do whatever he wants. And he doesn't have
that same autocratic grip on him that Haffa had, So
it actually made the problem worse. Haffa was at least
a strong figure who could resist the mob in some
(40:02):
respects Now that's gone. Fitzimmons is playing golf with Richard Nixon,
and so it leads to this bizarre series of events
where Haffa comes out and no one really wants him
back in the position of power, and Haffa, like you said,
starts getting loud because he wants the job back. And
I think what really moves someone to act is he
(40:24):
starts squawking about stuff that he really shouldn't be squawking about.
It also should be said his disappearance needs to be
put in the context of a few very important murders.
Sam g and Kanna is murdered. John Rizselli, another major
Chicago mobster involved in the CIA and Cuba and all
this stuff, is murdered.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Haffa disappears in between those two.
Speaker 4 (40:48):
All three would have been expected to be witnesses at
Ascetic committee reinvestigating the assassination plots involving the mafia and
CIA and JFK. So they all disappear kind of in
the same one year, year and a half, and they
can't tell whatever they know. In terms of where this
leaves us today, the Teamsters, man, it's interesting to talk
(41:09):
about the Teamsters now because they have had a continual
struggle to clean up. There's a period in the nineties
Jimmy Hoffa junior and sort of the old guard regains power.
Later there's a reform movement within the Teamsters that has
always been suppressed, which succeeds an electing a guy named
Ron Carry as leader of the Teamsters, who my father supported.
(41:32):
He was not a Teamster but another union member, and
I think is a really awesome guy.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Ron Carry was sort.
Speaker 4 (41:38):
Of undone by a criminal case that was very kind
of fishy, and now it's run by Sean O'Brien. It's
a much cleaner union. But interestingly, for those who've been
paying attention, Sean O'Brien is Donald Trump's biggest ally among unions,
even though the current Trump administration is without a doubt,
the most anti union administration in American history. It's torn
(41:58):
up the contracts of millions of federal workers, strip them
of collective bargaining rights, just by dictate and just to
put a dice boll on it. Sean O'Brien is from
lead in Charlestown, Boston, Massachusetts, one of the most mobbed
up locals in the country. So maybe there's a sequel
to this story there too, But you know, maybe everything
old is new again.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
I think that is a really great place to end.
I have to say I've I don't know if i've
ever learned so much in a single hour. Well, wow,
thank you so much. And if anyone is interested in
more stuff like this and more about organized crime in
the history of organized crime Dan. The podcast is called
The Outfit. That's right, The Outfit.
Speaker 4 (42:36):
It's on Headgum and Higher Ground and available wherever podcasts
are found.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
All right, great, well, thank you so much. This was great.
So that's it for this week's episode. Next week we're
talking about the cult classic documentary Grey Gardens.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
So subscribe and follow United States of Kennedy for all
Things Kennedy every week. United States of Kennedy is hosted
by me Lyra Smith and George Severes.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
Research by Dave Rue and Austin Thompson. The original music
by Josh Witzepolski, edited by Graham Gibson, and mixed by
Doug Bain. Our executive producer is Jenna Cagel. United States
of Kennedy is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
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