On February 22, 1961, two days after being sworn in as attorney general, Bobby Kennedy had convinced all twenty-seven agencies of the federal government, including the IRS, to begin pooling all their information on the nation’s gangsters and organized crime.
During the months preceding the Test Fleet trial the commissioner of the IRS wrote: “The Attorney General has requested the Service to give top priority to the investigation of the tax affairs of major racketeers.” These racketeers were named and they would receive a “saturation-type investigation.” The commissioner made it clear that the gloves were off: “Full use will be made of available electronic equipment and other technical aids.”
Johnny Roselli was one of the IRS’s first targets. He lived the glamorous life in Hollywood and Las Vegas, yet he had no job nor any visible means of support. Under prior attorneys general it had never occurred to him that he was vulnerable to the government. Roselli told the brother of the former mayor of Los Angeles: “They are looking into me all the time—and threatening people and looking for enemies and looking for friends.” What made Roselli even angrier was that he suspected that Bobby Kennedy knew that Roselli was allied with the CIA in its operations against Castro. Roselli was later quoted as saying, “Here I am helping the government, helping the country, and that little son of a bitch is breaking my balls.”
Around the same time, the IRS assessed Carlos Marcello $835,000 in back taxes and penalties. At that time Marcello was still fighting deportation and was under indictment for perjury and for falsifying his birth certificate. Russell Bufalino was also fighting deportation.
Prior to the Nashville trial Bobby Kennedy had been traveling around the country personally, like a general going to his troops, urging his department to focus on organized crime. He made a list of organized crime targets for the FBI and Justice Department to concentrate on. He expanded that list continually. He went to Congress and got laws passed to make it easier for the FBI to bug these targets and to use wiretaps in court. He got laws passed allowing him to more freely give immunity to cooperating witnesses.
Jury selection began in Test Fleet on the second day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bobby Kennedy was not in Nashville; he was needed at his brother’s side as Jack Kennedy faced down Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and ordered that all offensive nuclear weapons that were on their way in Soviet ships to Cuba be rerouted back to the Soviet Union or the U.S. Navy would open fire. The world was at the brink of nuclear war.
As Walter Sheridan wrote, “I went to sleep in the early morning hours thinking about the very real threat of nuclear war and the possibility that Jimmy Hoffa and I would end up very dead together in Nashville.”
Instead, Walter Sheridan awoke the next day to his first instance of jury tampering. An insurance broker in the panel reported to Judge Miller that a neighbor of his had met with him over the weekend and offered him $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills to vote for acquittal should he be accepted on the jury. Hoffa’s selection of the insurance broker made sense, because insurance men—being in a business that is ultra-suspicious about being ripped off and victimized by criminal fraud—are ordinarily considered death to criminal defense attorneys. They are normally struck before they get a chance to warm the seat. Surely, the government wouldn’t strike the insurance man from the jury if he were selected from the panel.
The prospective juror was excused by Judge Miller after the judge forced the insurance broker to reveal his neighbor’s name.
It was then revealed by a number of the prospective jurors that a man who identified himself as a reporter for the Nashville Banner named Allen had called them to find out their views on Jimmy Hoffa. There was no reporter on the Nashville Banner named Allen. Someone was illegally prying into some of the jurors’ minds in search of jurors who might favor their side of the case. All of those tainted prospective jurors were dismissed.
After the jury had been selected and the trial had begun, Edward Grady Partin reported to Walter Sheridan that an attempt was going to be made by the president of a Nashville Teamsters local to bribe the wife of a Tennessee State Highway Patrol trooper. The wife was seated on the jury. Sheridan checked the data on the jurors and found among them the wife of a trooper. Agents followed the Teamsters official to a deserted road where the state trooper was waiting in his patrol car. The agents watched the two men sit in the trooper’s patrol car and talk.
With this information in hand, but without revealing the source of the tip, the government prosecutors asked the judge to remove the trooper’s wife from the jury, and Judge Miller held a hearing on the prosecution’s request. The government called the agents who had followed the Nashville Teamsters president to his rendezvous with the trooper. The agents were questioned by the judge. The government then called the Teamsters official, and the man was brought in from a side room. According to Walter Sheridan, Jimmy Hoffa flashed the man the five-finger sign, and the official took the Fifth Amendment. Next, the State Highway Patrol trooper was brought into the courtroom. After first denying everything, the trooper admitted, under questioning by Judge Miller, that the Teamsters official had offered him a deal of promotion and advancement with the State Highway Patrol in exchange for an undisclosed favor. The trooper claimed that the Teamsters official never explained to him what that future favor might be.
Judge Miller excused the wife of the trooper and replaced her with an alternate. At her home that night the tearful woman told reporters she had no idea why she had been excused.
Speaking for Tommy Osborn and Frank Ragano and the rest of the team, Attorney Bill Bufalino said, “There was no fix. And if there was, it came directly out of Bobby Kennedy’s office.”
Young attorney Tommy Osborn was in a different sort of case than the one in which he argued about reapportionment before the U.S. Supreme Court. That case had already put him in line to be the next president of the Nashville Bar Association and had helped him land the Hoffa case. The Hoffa case could best establish a national career if he got Jimmy off, and at the same time it was the case that could wreck his career if he became a part of the culture to which he was being exposed.
Photo Insert
Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, circa 1970. Courtesy of Frank Sheeran
Frank Sheeran (left) with war buddy Alex Siegel one month before Siegel was killed in action during the Salerno invasion. Courtesy of Frank Sheeran
Frank Sheeran celebrating the end of World War II with buddy Charlie “Diggsy” Meiers. Courtesy of Frank Sheeran
Sheeran (upper left) with fellow Teamsters organizers at his first job in Detroit. Courtesy of Frank Sheeran
Sheeran (right), sergeant-at-arms at the 1961 Teamsters Convention in Miami Beach, Florida. Courtesy of Frank Sheeran
Jimmy Hoffa squaring off against archenemy Bobby Kennedy at a meeting of the Labor Racket Committee in 1958. © Bettmann/Corbis
Senate investigator John Cye Cheasty (left) slipping Hoffa confidential documents in a sting operation. Hoffa paid $2,000 for this sensitive information. © Bettmann/Corbis
Title page of U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani’s RICO suit against the mob, naming Sheeran as one of only two non-Italians on the Commission of La Cosa Nostra.
Jimmy Hoffa saying good-bye to the marshals that escorted him to the Lewisburg Prison in 1967. © AP/Wide World Photos
The first page of Nixon’s presidential pardon of Hoffa.
John Mitchell’s affadavit to aid Hoffa’s quest to remove the restrictions of Nixon’s presidential pardon.
Frank Sheeran: “I’ll be a Hoffa man ’til they pat my face with a shovel and steal my cufflinks.” Sheeran’s cufflinks were a gift from Russell Bufalino. Courtesy of Frank Sheeran
Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night 1974. Mayor Frank Rizzo (shaking Hoffa’s hand), roofing union boss John McCullough (second from right), and civil rights leader Cecil B. Moore (far right) attending. Courtesy of Frank Sheeran
Russell Bufalino, circa 1968. © Bettmann/Corbis
Anthony �
�Tony Pro” Provenzano with news reporters on August 5, 1975, one day after the Vesuvio meeting. © Bettmann/Corbis
Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio in December 1975 after appearing before the grand jury investigating the Hoffa disappearance. © AP/Wide World Photos
Russell Bufalino (in wheelchair) getting a friendly knockout punch from Sheeran, circa 1986. Courtesy of Frank Sheeran
Sheeran pointing to the building of the former Machus Red Fox restaurant entrance. In the side mirror is the hardware store whose outside pay phone Hoffa used to call his wife. Courtesy of Charles Brandt
The house Jimmy Hoffa entered on July 30, 1975. Courtesy of Charles Brandt
“The Irishman” on his patio in October 2001, a few months before entering a nursing home. Courtesy of Charles Brandt
A Nashville police officer who moonlighted for Tommy Osborn as a private investigator doing legitimate jury pool research told the Get Hoffa Squad that Osborn had told him that he was working on putting one of the jurors into a land development deal. The Get Hoffa Squad found it hard to believe and already had their hands full. They stored the information away for a future day.
Strike three was a black juror whose son had been contacted by a black business agent from Jimmy Hoffa’s home local in Detroit and offered a $10,000 bribe. According to a sworn affidavit the government prepared for Partin’s signature, a $5,000 down payment on the bribe had been delivered and the deal struck before the trial began and the juror selected. Partin revealed in the affidavit that one day Jimmy Hoffa said to him, “I’ve got the colored male juror in my hip pocket. One of my business agents, Larry Campbell, came into Nashville prior to the trial and took care of it.” The sealed affidavit was read by Judge Miller, who then denied the defense access to it, and excused the juror, who was replaced by yet another alternate. By this time, not knowing of Partin’s defection, the defense was sure the government had been bugging and wiretapping them since before the trial had even started.
“I got a call from Bill Isabel that they needed me down there in Nashville, so I drove down. Over the phone he said they were expecting some protesters and they wanted me down there to help out if any protester got out of line with Jimmy. Now this was just something he was saying over the phone, because by then everybody was sure everything was bugged. It was like science fiction down there. What they really wanted me there for was to sit in the courtroom and make my presence felt by the jury in case any of the other ones they had reached out for on the jury got the idea to come out of the woodwork. Now nobody told me that directly, but I knew what it was when they told me to make eye contact with the jurors once in a while.
I stayed in the Andrew Jackson Hotel, but I wasn’t a part of the thing. They had too many cooks already spoiling the broth. I remember the Southern-fried chicken at the hotel restaurant was out of this world. It was always good to see Sam and Bill again. I remember seeing Ed Partin in the restaurant but not thinking anything of it. He was just sitting there with Frank Ragano, and Ragano had no idea he was sitting there with a rat. Imagine the government today putting a planted rat inside your lawyers’ offices. That hotel room they had was their lawyers’ offices and Partin was right in there with them.
Of course, no protesters showed up. The place was loaded with FBI anyway. And then one day, almost to make Bill Isabel’s reason for bringing me down come true, a nut came into the courtroom while I was standing in the back talking to Bill and Sam. It was on a recess and this young guy in a raincoat walks down to the front of the courtroom and gets behind Jimmy and pulls out a gun. I heard this gun going off and the first thing I saw was all the lawyers on both sides of the thing fighting for space while they were diving under the desks like they were foxholes. And there was Jimmy Hoffa charging at the nut with the gun. It turns out the nut had a pellet gun that looked real. It was the kind of gun used to kill squirrels and rabbits. He had fired it and hit Jimmy a couple of times in the back, but Jimmy had on a heavy suit. Jimmy swarmed the nut and decked him good. Chuckie O’Brien jumped on the nut and took him to the floor. Chuckie was a hefty guy and he was letting the nut have it real good. The marshals finally got over there, and one of the marshals sapped the guy with the butt of his revolver, but Chuckie kept whaling away at the guy. The marshals and Jimmy had to pull him off, or he’d have killed the guy.
I told Bill Isabel to be careful what he says next time about some protester getting out of hand. It turns out the guy claimed God told him to go kill Jimmy Hoffa. Everybody’s got a boss, I guess.
The jury wasn’t present in the courtroom for that pellet gun cowboy, but the defense filed for a mistrial. They claimed the nut in the raincoat was an example of how the population of Nashville was riled up against Jimmy Hoffa by all the anti-Hoffa government propaganda that was surrounding the case coming from Bobby Kennedy and his cohorts. It sounded good to me, but the judge denied it.
Bill Isabel told me that Jimmy said, “You always run away from a man with a knife and toward a man with a gun.” I don’t know about that. You have to know the circumstances. He’s right if you can startle the man with the gun, because he doesn’t expect you to come at him. Jimmy did the right thing in these circumstances. But if you go toward the man with a gun who cannot be startled, the closer you get the more you improve his aim. Most of the time you don’t see the knife until you’re cut with it. The best thing is to be a choirboy.
Jimmy said that “everybody’d been searched” by the marshals. That part was true all right. I got searched. The marshals had searched everybody who came into the courtroom. Jimmy said it wasn’t a coincidence that this man had been able to walk right up behind him. The idea was that the government used a nut to whack him. Only this nut was too nutty to be able to get his hands on a real piece. Jimmy knew that nuts were used from time to time by certain people for certain matters. That same year of his Nashville trial Sam Giancana’s friend Frank Sinatra had The Manchurian Candidate in all the theaters. It was a big movie out about the Communists using a nut to kill somebody running for president.
But in real life when a nut is used in America or in Sicily he’s always disposed of right away, on the scene even. Like years later when Crazy Joey Gallo used that black nut to whack Joe Colombo, the boss of the Colombo family in Brooklyn. The nut got off three shots at Joe Colombo at a rally of the Italian-American Civil Rights League at Columbus Circle near Central Park. No doubt everything had been worked out in detail and rehearsed with the nut. He was shown exactly how he was going to be hustled into a car and driven away to safety. Naturally, the nut was laid out right on the sidewalk by certain people after the nut did his job and shot Colombo.
Russell never forgave Crazy Joey Gallo for that—for using a nut that way on Joe Colombo. I always thought Crazy Joey was a fresh kid anyway. Poor Joe Colombo laid in a coma like a vegetable for a long time before he died. That’s the problem with using a nut. They’re not accurate enough. Nuts can cause a lot of suffering. Like the nut who shot George Wallace and left the man paralyzed. Or the nut that shot Reagan and his press secretary, Brady.”
The Nashville trial lasted forty-two days. The jury went out to deliberate just four days before Christmas. While the jury deliberated Walter Sheridan remained concerned that the government had not weeded out all those jurors who had been bribed. There may have been a bribed juror or two that had not been talked about in Edward Grady Partin’s presence.
The jury was sequestered, and on the third day of deliberations they were dismissed by Judge Miller after repeatedly reporting that they were hopelessly deadlocked. However, before allowing them to step out of the jury box he turned from them as they sat in their seats and addressed the courtroom. Among other statements, the record reveals the following comments by Judge Miller.
From the very outset, while the jury was being selected from a list of those summoned for jury service, there were indications that improper contacts had been made and were being made with prospective members of the jury. I have signed orders to conve
ne another grand jury soon after the first of the year to investigate fully and completely all of the incidents connected with this trial indicating illegal attempts to influence jurors and prospective jurors by any person or persons whomsoever and to return indictments where probable cause therefore exists. The system of trial by jury…becomes nothing more than a mockery if unscrupulous persons are allowed to subvert it by improper and unlawful means. I do not intend that such shameful acts to corrupt our jury system shall go unnoticed by this court.
Jimmy Hoffa, on the other hand, told a TV audience on Christmas Eve that it was “a disgrace…for anyone to make a statement that this jury was tampered with.”
chapter eighteen
Just Another Lawyer Now
“In 1963 Jimmy Hoffa told me he was determined to get a Master Freight Agreement by the end of the year. There were a lot of distractions for Jimmy in 1963, but by the end of the year he had it wrapped up. In the first contract we got a 45-cent-an-hour raise. Plus our pensions started going way up. A guy retiring out of a local today gets $3,400 a month. Add that to Social Security and you can live on it. All that came from Jimmy Hoffa that year, even with all the distractions. Once the Master Freight Agreement was signed Jimmy put me on the National Negotiating Committee for the union.
I Heard You Paint Houses : Frank The Irishman Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa Page 18
