Leave It to Jimmy

In New York's Governor Clinton Hotel one February morning, 200 officials of the International Longshoremen's Association beamed with delight as a guest speaker from Detroit rasped out an announcement of a cynical power play. The speaker: tough, chunky James Riddle Hoffa, a vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. His announcement: as part payment for a pact binding the teamsters and longshoremen to joint organizational drives and cooperative action during strikes, three regional teamster groups--the Central, Eastern and Southern Conferences--were prepared to lend the I.L.A. more than $400,000.

Hoffa's proposed alliance with the debt-ridden I.L.A. outraged A.F.L.-C.I.O. brass, who recognized it for what it was: a deadly threat to the three-year-old drive to clean up the New York waterfront. In 1953 the A.F.L. expelled the I.L.A. for flagrant and persistent corruption, and it was the teamsters' union that sparked the International Brotherhood of Longshoremen, a new, "clean" pier union. Now, if Hoffa succeeded in switching teamster support back to the gang-bossed I.L.A., the I.B.L. was almost certainly doomed to extinction. Determined to prevent this, A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany promptly warned the teamsters that he would take "whatever action the circumstances warrant."

Last week, bending before Meany's wrath, Seattle's Dave Beck, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, directed Hoffa to take no further action on the I.L.A. alliance until it had been discussed by the teamsters' executive board in Honolulu this month.

Hoffa's attempted deal with the I.L.A. had demonstrated that his prime interest is not a clean waterfront but a teamster-dominated waterfront. It was characteristic of the methods that have made Jimmy Hoffa, 43, one of the hottest new stars in labor's firmament and the man most likely to succeed the aging (61) Dave Beck as boss of the 1,400,000-man I.B.T.

Special Conception. In many respects little (5 ft. 5 in.) Jimmy Hoffa and the man whose throne he seeks are cut from the same pattern. Both Beck and Hoffa are blocky, apparently tireless men who shun liquor and tobacco. Both operate with the hard-shell pragmatism of 19th century coal barons. Alongside Jimmy Hoffa, however, the table-pounding Beck appears a mild-mannered old man.

Born in Brazil, Ind., Hoffa at four lost his coal prospector father, at 14 quit school to go to work full time. His self-introduction to the labor movement came at 19, when, as a 32-c--an-hour warehouseman for a Detroit grocery chain, he led a successful wildcat strike of fellow employees. Within three years he had taken over Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit, was president of the Michigan Conference of Teamsters.

The fact that a cocky 22-year-old was able to impose his authority on Detroit's truck drivers and warehousemen does not puzzle anyone who has ever done business with Jimmy Hoffa. "Jimmy," says an old foe, "is probably the greatest organizer in the labor movement." Jimmy's conception of organizational talent is a rather special one. "In those early days," he says, "Detroit was the toughest open-shop town in the country ... I was hit so many times with nightsticks, clubs and brass knuckles I can't even remember where the bruises were. But I can hit back, and I did. Guys who tried to break me up got broken up."

Supplementary Income. To supplement his union salary ($21,000 a year), Hoffa has at various times held interests in a brewery, a trotting track, a summer camp, oil leases and (through his wife) a truck leasing company called Test Fleet, Inc. (Test Fleet, unsurprisingly, enjoyed excellent labor relations, and in four years paid dividends of more than $60,000 on an original investment of $4,000.) Between his professional and personal activities, Hoffa has run afoul of the law more times than he or anyone else can remember. Says he: "I got a list of arrests maybe as long as your arm."

Expanding Sphere. In 1952, in return for helping Dave Beck supplant the late Dan Tobin as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Hoffa was made an I.B.T. vice president. Since then Beck has watched with apparent helplessness while Hoffa expanded his sphere of influence. Not long ago, in a bid to get enough votes to control the teamsters' New York Joint Council, Hoffa quietly procured charters for seven small New York locals, dominated by convicted Extortionist Johnny Dio. Nor does Hoffa's ambition stop with control of the I.B.T. as it now stands. Ultimately, as his negotiations with the I.L.A. suggest, he hopes to incorporate the maritime industry in the teamsters' empire.

Last week reputable union leaders who fear Hoffa's influence on the U.S. labor movement had reason to hope that the tough little man from Detroit had finally overreached himself. In New York a fierce rearguard action by Hoffa opponents threatened to throw into the courts Hoffa's scheme for seizing control of the Joint Council; the Hoffa-I.L.A. pact was temporarily stymied. None of this seemed to abash Jimmy Hoffa, a man who has survived the assaults of congressional investigations, the courts and rival union leaders. "Jimmy Hoffa," says Jimmy, "can take care of himself."

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