by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “Who Killed Jimmy
Hoffa?” program which followed suffered from its origins as an episode of the
series History Detectives: Special Investigations (a pretentious subtitle which basically means the
established cast of the “History Detectives” program spends an entire episode
on one famous incident in history rather than investigating a whole host of
trivial items in each show) and the fact that the history detectives themselves
— Tukufu Zuberi, Kaiama Glover and Wes Cowan — get way too much screen time, and are singularly boring
people to boot. Nonetheless, the show offers quite a lot of documentary and
archive material, ranging from footage of Hoffa addressing the Teamsters Union
and being interviewed on TV to audio from the Nixon White House tapes of Nixon,
John Mitchell and Charles Colson discussing the controversial pardon Hoffa was
given in 1971 that imposed on him a ban on union activity for nine years. To
recap: Hoffa went to work for the Teamsters in 1939 in Detroit (at a time when
the socialists Farrell Dobbs and the Dunne brothers who had built the union
were being pushed out by organized crime) and, at least according to this
program, was Mob-connected from the beginning. When Hoffa was elected president
in 1957 he hired Frank Sheeran as a hit man and literally eliminated his competition within the union — and
he was regularly investigated by John and Robert Kennedy, first when John was a
U.S. Senator and Robert a staff member for the Senate Labor Committee, then
when John was President and Robert was Attorney General, determined to
prosecute Hoffa for something and ultimately successful at convicting him for jury tampering in a
previous trial and sentencing him to prison.
Then Richard Nixon became
president, and in 1971 he decided to pardon Hoffa — but, at the behest of
Hoffa’s successor as Teamsters president, Frank Fitzsimmons, imposed the ban on
Hoffa rejoining the union. According to Hoffa’s own account, in an
autobiography he completed just before he disappeared but which wasn’t published
until afterwards (and on which his collaborator was, of all people, Oscar
Fraley, who’d also co-written the autobiography of U.S. Prohibition agent
Elliot Ness that became the basis for the hit TV series The Untouchables), the ban on his union activity was inserted into
the pardon deal at the very last minute, and he almost refused to sign it on
that basis. The program argues that Hoffa was killed at the behest of Mob boss
Russell Bufalino, for a bizarre reason: Bufalino, the so-called “Quiet Don” who
made as much of a fetish of avoiding publicity as Al Capone had made of embracing it, was worried that the
Church Committee hearings on CIA abuses would reveal information about how the
Mafia had worked in collaboration with the CIA to attempt to kill Cuban leader
Fidel Castro — so he went out of his way to eliminate the three people who knew
the most about that collaboration: Sam Giancana (who had shared his mistress
Judith Campbell with President Kennedy and Frank Sinatra), Johnny Roselli and
Jimmy Hoffa. It’s a reasonably persuasive case even though it’s something of a
head-scratcher — though as someone who’s long believed the Mafia killed Kennedy
because they were mad at him for not following through with air support for the
Bay of Pigs invasion (the Mob lost a lot of money when Castro took over Cuba and deprived them of the lucrative
revenues from the casinos there), the idea that Hoffa may have been yet another
victim of the government/Mafia connection over Castro seems all too believable.
