The Teamsters – Steven Brill, 1978 ★★

Married to the Mob

When it comes to the history of the American labor movement, the biggest question for many of us is not the interests of workers or what constitutes a fair wage. It’s what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.

James Riddle Hoffa was no ideologue, but even before he became the most famous missing person in my lifetime he was the most notorious and consequential labor figure of his century. In The Teamsters, Steven Brill examines the union and its Hoffa imprint in the immediate aftermath of his 1975 disappearance.

It is a book written in equal parts awe and sadness. At its conclusion, he dubs the Teamsters “one giant might-have-been”:

As the nation’s largest, most powerful union it could have been the nation’s largest, most powerful voice for real economic justice. Had its leaders had a social and political vision that extended beyond invitations to golf at San Clemente, it could have been the nation’s toughest and most effective lobbyist for civil liberties, civil rights and other social-justice concerns.

Jimmy Hoffa, Teamsters president from 1957 to 1971, poses for Life magazine in 1959. Image by Hank Walker from https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/jimmy-hoffa-is-at-the-bottom-of-a-pit-in-new-jersey/.

For much of its history, particularly in the middle part of the 20^th century which is the focus of this book, the Teamsters were an amazing success story, albeit in a Faustian way. They raised salaries for their workers and oversaw huge growth at a time when organized labor began shedding enrollment, yet they did so despite – or perhaps even because of – an unholy alliance with organized crime.

One shocking aspect about The Teamsters is just how openly its leaders acknowledge their underworld ties. To them, fighting the Mob was like arguing with the weather.

Jackie Presser, a key Teamsters figure, tells how his father Bill “tried to build a good union in Ohio” despite employing the consulting services of Allen Dorfman, a known mobster with notoriously sticky fingers:

“But when you ask me why he didn’t stop Dorfman, then I know you’re not thinking. You’re not understanding reality. The reality is that if he had tried to stop Dorfman he’d have gotten his head blown off.”

Jackie Presser makes an entrance as Teamsters president in 1986. A decade before, he was telling Brill what the union needed was better PR. Photo by James Hamilton from https://twitter.com/villagevoice/status/1122528774799724545. 

Brill describes leadership living in “a make-believe world in which they and their loan sharks and hit men were the good guys, and all that they did was somehow at one with the rosary beads their women carried.” Tony Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamsters boss who also worked as a caporegime with the Genovese crime family, set the tone by selling out his union with cheap labor deals and questionable pension loans.

 Yet going by pure results, the Teamsters’ outsized success can not be denied, as much as it pains Brill to admit it:

Until the United Auto Workers broke away from the AFL-CIO in 1968, and even thereafter, in most industries the Teamsters became the only real force for competition in the labor movement. Without the Teamsters, a worker was faced with a monopoly; the AFL-CIO-affiliated unions did not compete with each other. The Teamsters offered an alternative.

Never mind about all that; what about Hoffa? The Teamsters actually gets into Hoffa’s fate early, though it’s easily the weakest part.

In what was hardly news to any of his readers, Brill links Hoffa’s disappearance and murder to Provenzano and other mobsters connected to the Teamsters hierarchy. Hoffa, wanting to resume his union leadership after doing time in prison, was to meet Provenzano at a restaurant near Detroit on July 30, 1975, the day he vanished forever. Much speculation connected Hoffa’s fate to his successor as Teamsters president, Frank Fitzsimmons, though Brill doesn’t push this.

Tony Provenzano meets with the press outside his Florida home a week after Hoffa's disappearance. An anonymous Teamsters executive calls the New Jersey union boss "much more powerful than most people believe." Image from https://www.gettyimages.co.nz/.

Instead, he merely points out how advantageous it was for Fitzsimmons not to have to battle his popular predecessor, and how Fitzsimmons kept Charlie O’Brien on his payroll after O’Brien reputedly helped lure Hoffa to his murder.

The Teamsters feels like a book published to capitalize on the Hoffa case but written by someone who wants instead to tell a bigger story. I respect that; I just wish his book had better justified that direction.

Brill’s writing style is serviceable, though seldom engaging. A lawyer by trade, who went on after this book to found both American Lawyer magazine and Court TV, he writes with precision but without feeling, careful to explain the legal nuances of the Teamsters’ problematic history while presenting his colorful cast of characters in a flat way.

A high point for Mob-based suspense comes when Brill interviews a surprisingly forthcoming Jackie Presser, who later succeeded Fitzsimmons as the Teamsters’ national president. Presser dubs the presidency “an electric chair” rather than a throne:

“They [government prosecutors] got the last two men who sat there [Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa] and sent them to jail, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they got Fitz on something soon. They’re sure trying. On the other hand, if you’re totally honest and if you try to clean up the union like you say I should, and you try to do it fast enough without making accommodations so the government won’t get you, the other guys – the hoods – will get you. Just like they got Hoffa when he threatened them. So that’s a death chair either way.”

Such candor is not rare; Brill is able to get a lot of choice comments from the Teamsters brass he interviews. Even Fitzsimmons gives him some time. Brill finds some good things to say about Fitz, too; though he rates him as clueless and uninspiring overall.

Frank Fitzsimmons, at left, with President Richard Nixon in 1973. The following year, Brill notes Fitzsimmons donated the largest single gift, $25,000, to a fund to fight Nixon's impeachment. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Fitzsimmons.

Brill often makes more of some things than they warrant. Two long chapters are spent on longtime Teamster workers who let Brill ride with them and share their thoughts about the union. They run long and say little; Brill doesn’t even use their real names.

He also spends a chapter on Ron Carey, who was running a New York local with a reputation for cleanness and making fair, tough deals with management. In 1991 Carey became the Teamsters’ national president and would be convicted for corruption, quite a surprise to learn about after the sunny way Carey is built up here.

With the Hoffa disappearance, Brill interviews one of Jimmy’s reputed killers, Salvatore Briguglio, but admits to coming up with little beyond the vaguest head gestures regarding what really happened. Still, he gives this big play, as he does Briguglio’s murder.

As to Hoffa himself, Brill goes easy on the violins. During the McClellan Committee hearings in the 1950s regarding Teamsters-Mob connections, testimony was given about beatdowns administered with Hoffa’s approval, if not direction. Hoffa himself answered all questions, but often with non-answers. When his associates were on the stand, Hoffa would direct their responses by holding up five fingers – directing them for all to see to plead the Fifth, which they did.

Robert F. Kennedy, chief counsel at the McClellan Senate Hearings in 1957, poses with his brother, Senator John F. Kennedy. The testy exchanges between Bobby and Hoffa at these hearings unearthed little evidence but cast the Teamsters in a poor light. Image from https://www.singingwheels.com/the-mcclellan-hearings.html.

Hoffa’s son, James P., an attorney who was keeping his distance from the Teamsters’ hierarchy at the time of this book but since 1998 has been the union’s popular president, claims his father would have returned to the presidency without owing anything to organized crime, and thus run it in an above-board manner. Brill treats this with due skepticism, but writes with feeling about the Hoffa family’s ordeal:

For the family, the absence of the body was nearly as bad as the loss itself. The murderers had inflicted a special kind of torture on the survivors. It allowed them to conjure up a new form of death every day. There could be no ending, no funeral, no rush of grief followed by acceptance, a rebuilding.

Hoffa didn’t bring the Mob into the Teamsters, but he built up their existing alliance into what it became. The origin story Brill lays out is quite surprising; early on its leaders were full-on Marxists, aligned to Trotsky and well to the left of the mainstream American labor movement. Back then, wagons and trains, not trucks, were conveyances of choice for American long-haulers. With the sudden surge of national highways and entrepreneurism after World War II came opportunity the Teamsters seized upon, sometimes violently and with gangster muscle.

Steven Brill later in life. He has published several books on matters ranging from security and schools, and remains a widely-read journalist. Image from https://www.thecommongoodus.org/advisory-board/steven-brill.

Brill seems to pine for a purer, more class-conscious union. He notes several times with evident disgust that the Teamsters had only endorsed two presidential candidates to that point in its history, both Republicans (Eisenhower and Nixon). Every chapter of the book begins by noting an annual golf tournament Fitzsimmons held at a fancy California resort, implicitly calling out the disparity between the fat cats and the rank-and-file.

Yet the Teamsters rank-and-file Brill speaks to admit to having it rather good. They draw healthy wages, work tough jobs with a degree of safety and comfort, and don’t report any problems with their pensions, however overdrawn on mob investments they may be.

A big problem, they admit, is simple embarrassment. “We have a lousy reputation,” one member of Carey’s Local 804 tells Brill. Yet the same man also proudly notes how the Teamsters are taking strides to help members struggling with drugs and alcohol.

The Teamsters suffers from overlength, source bias (witness his hagiographic profile of Carey), and Brill’s tendency to relate fascinating tales in mundane ways, getting into the weeds for pages at a time to score minor points. I went into this book interested only in Hoffa; Brill spent 400 pages not shifting that one jot.