(Introduction
to
the 1993 reprint of Moldea’s 1978 book, The Hoffa
Wars)
The re-publication of The Hoffa
Wars is
a welcome event.
The Hoffa Wars tells an important
story: how a
potentially great force for
good—the unionization of America’s truckers and warehouse
laborers—was captured
by gangsters and converted into a monster that robbed its
members of their
right to a fair wage and pension, robbed businessmen of
their right to a free
marketplace and clamped a high tax on American consumers
every time they went
to the cash register.
Dan
Moldea’s book stands above the
journalistic exposes and glossy tomes that were published
in abundance when the
Hoffa case was the crime of the decade and the Teamsters
were a national
scandal. What
differentiates this book,
and makes it of continuing importance to anyone interested
in the fabric of
American society, is that it is documented as thoroughly
on the streets as it
is in libraries and courthouses.Danny
knew the workingmen who lived this story. He worked with
them. And he
was able to combine this street
experience and personal empathy with the skills of a
professional journalist. Few
writers can bring that combination to
their work.
Every
page shows it. Dan not only knew the
union members, he was able to talk to the mid-level
officers—the local
presidents and vice presidents torn between the graft at
Hoffa’s level and the
needs of the truckers. And he
talked to
them not as other reporters had to, by appointment across
desks. He
talked to them in grungy cafes or on loading
docks, as one of the boys. Reading The
Hoffa
Wars, you don’t have to be told of the
violent atmosphere that influenced
everything about the Teamsters. You feel
it.
I
mostly delighted in reading this book
upon its initial publication in 1978. But
in one chapter, I thought Dan had gone off the deep end.That is where he
suggested that the gangsters
who controlled the Teamsters Union were involved in a
conspiracy to kill
President Kennedy.Yes,
there were some
suspicious coincidences, but it seemed to me the evidence
was too
circumstantial to justify such a radical thought.
Now,
of course, I know Dan was right about
that as he was about other things. Within
a year of the publication of The Hoffa Wars, the
House Assassinations
Committee has pursued the links that connected Lee Oswald
and Jack Ruby through
Carlos Marcello, the Texas-Louisiana Mafia boss. And the committee
had built a solid case that Marcello
had organized the Kennedy assassination, possibly with the
complicity of his
good friends Jimmy Hoffa and Florida Mafia boss Santos
Trafficante. Hoffa had
opened the Teamster coffers he was looting to the thieving
hands of the
Marcello organization. And
the Kennedy
brothers were trying to protect Teamster members, business
people and the
public by bringing this stealing to an end.
In
1992, the case against Marcello, Hoffa
and Trafficante was bolstered by the added testimony of
Frank Ragano, a lawyer
who had represented both Hoffa and Marcello. Ragano says he
carried messages between the
two men about assassinating Kennedy. For
the U.S. Attorney General and Dallas prosecutors to continue
to refuse to
reopen the Kennedy case would now seem a blatant neglect of
duty. A living,
willing witness (Ragano) has offered
eyewitness testimony that a living suspect (Marcello)
conspired to murder
President Kennedy, a crime with no statute of limitations.
This
was not just the crime of a decade,
but the American crime of the century, and Dan Moldea, in The
Hoffa Wars, was
the first person to publicly arrive at what now appears to
be the correct
solution.
I
first came across Danny’s writings on the
Teamsters in a small, northern Ohio newspaper, as I was
starting to research
the union. In
1974, I had written some
articles for my own newspaper, The Wall Street Journal,
on Mafia control
of the food industry. Someone
directed me
to a series of articles that Jim Drinkhall (who later joined
the Journal) was
writing in the magazine Overdrive about Mafia
control of the Teamsters. Drinkhall’s
work excited me, and I delved into
Teamster corruption, which inevitably led me to Danny.
Drinkhall
and Moldea were the two pioneers
in that field. But
while Drinkhall
seemed to have breathtakingly good sources on the gangsters
in Chicago,
Cleveland, Las Vegas, Dallas and elsewhere who gobbled up
the Teamsters loot,
Danny was writing about the bitter effect this corruption
had on decent,
working people. So
I read him, and we talked
on the phone.
I
finally met Dan as the result of a call
he made to me at the Journal two days after Hoffa
was reported missing,
whereabouts unknown. It
was a hot Friday
in early August 1975. Popular
speculation
was that Hoffa had been kidnapped. Dan had a theory: that Hoffa, in the
pattern of some previous
mobsters, had arranged his own disappearance to avoid a
prospective grand jury
appearance and the possible wrath of his underworld
associates. If
so, where would Hoffa be hiding?Dan had pondered
the question, and come up
with the Jack-O-Lantern Lodge in Eagle River, Wisconsin, a
resort on a lake
where Teamster officials sometimes met. The
lodge was occasionally used as a personal retreat by Hoffa
and his chief
moneyman Allen Dorfman.
I
did a little research. As
Dan had told me, Hoffa and Dorfman (who was
also later rubbed out) controlled the Jack-O-Lantern
property. And
beyond that, as Dan had said, the whole
area was known since Prohibition days as a place where
gangsters hid out while on
the lam; Al Capone once hid there. I
decided Dan’s reasoning made some sense, and called him
back. He wanted
to go to Eagle River to look for
Hoffa, but was broke. Would
the Journal
fund him?
Tepidly,
I approached the Journal’s managing
editor, Fred Taylor, describing Dan, and his idea. I said it had the
scent of logic and the genius
of novelty, but was still a very long shot, just a roll of
the dice. Taylor
wanted to go for it. Money was looser in those days, and
finding Hoffa
would be one hell of a scoop. But while
Taylor wasn’t worried about the financial risk, he did
express concern over the
physical risk.I
shrugged it off. Nevertheless,
he instructed me to make sure
that either Danny or I waited in town at a phone while the
other visited the lodge.
If the scout
wasn’t heard from by an
appointed hour, the person at the phone would call Taylor at
home. Lord
knows what Taylor would have done in such
an event, but I agreed and headed for La Guardia.
Airplane
schedules being what they were
and are, I first cast eyes on Dan at O’Hare Airport in
Chicago, where he had
arrived from Cleveland to meet me for the connecting flight
to Eagle River. I
hadn’t really known what to expect, but it
certainly wasn’t what I saw. Dan was of a height and
physique that might make
one of Hoffa’s professional legbreakers drop his tire iron
and flee. A
stranger seeing Dan board a plane to
Wisconsin would have assumed he was reporting for duty to
the Green Bay
Packers.
Furthermore,
he was dressed head to foot
in black, body-clinging clothing and was carrying a rope,
underwater flashlight
and snorkel gear. It
might be necessary,
he explained, to approach the Jack-O-Lantern Lodge
stealthily, underwater from
across the lake. I
immediately decided
that I would be the one who waited in town by the telephone.
We
rented a car and drove slowly by the
entrance of the lodge trying to look as innocent as
possible. The
fences were decorated with Jack-O-Lanterns.
Buildings were
visible in the distance,
but the only signs of life were some German shepherd dogs. The dogs convinced
me I had made the right
decision about who would go and who would wait.
At
about dusk, we pulled into Eagle River,
a sleepy little place that even on a [Saturday] evening at
the height of the
tourist season looked like one of those eerie ghost towns
the guide books send
you to in Colorado. I
forget the name of
the cafe with the public phone where I decided to hole
up—“Betty’s,” I think,
but maybe “Ann’s.” Anyway,
it was
deserted except for me and the waitress.
Dan
was to have called the cafe to assure
me of his safety no later than ten o’clock, which was eleven
New York time; I
didn’t know when Taylor went to bed. Dan
drove off looking confident. I
sipped my
coffee and watched eight o’clock pass. Nine.
It grew to be
five minutes of ten, and I
started wondering what I would say if I had to make the
phone call to Taylor.
At
two minutes of ten, Dan strode into the
cafe looking serious and plopped down across from me,
holding his arm. A
dog had bit him.But
two guards had pulled the dog off. He
was all right. He
wasn’t wet, either. He
had decided to try the gate rather than go
in underwater.He
had fended off the
dogs, talked his way past the guards and gained an audience
with Allen
Dorfman’s mother, an elderly lady who asserted that neither
her son nor Mr.
Hoffa was there. On
the grounds, Dan met
up with some other people and talked to them. There were groups of
kids. That was
important. Hoffa
loved kids, and if Hoffa had been there,
he could not have resisted playing with them. The kids all told
Dan that Mr. Hoffa hadn’t
been around in weeks. That
cinched it
for Dan. We
were barking up the wrong
tree.
We
did make friends with someone at
Betty’s, or Ann’s, or our motel, who drove us around and
showed us the various
cabins in the woods where this or that mobster had allegedly
hidden out in days
gone by.
The
next morning, not wanting to leave
Eagle River empty handed, I violated Taylor’s instructions
and rode up to the
lodge with Dan. The
dogs barked and I
exchanged a few words with Mrs. Dorfman, but failed to
elicit anything that even
a desperate gossip columnist could have elevated to the
status of news. Then
some tough-looking men asked us to leave,
and we did.
And
remained good friends ever since.
This
experience helped me enjoy The
Hoffa Wars when it came out even more than I would
have otherwise.
I hope learning about it has the same effect for you.
The re-publication of The Hoffa
Wars is
a welcome event.