Jimmy Hoffa

His father was a coal miner who died of lung disease in 1920, when Hoffa was seven. The family moved to Detroit in 1924, and Hoffa left school at 14 to work full time and help feed them. The grocery chain that hired him paid substandard wages, and the men there tried to organize — the one they followed was the teenager. By 1932 he had walked off the job and was organizing for Local 299 of the Teamsters, recruiting by pulling his car alongside truck drivers asleep in their cabs, waking them, and making the pitch. He met his wife, Josephine Poszywak, during a laundry workers' strike and said it felt like being hit in the chest with a blackjack. He never drove a truck for a living.

He took the Teamsters presidency on October 5, 1957. Two months later the AFL-CIO expelled the union by a vote of nearly five to one, with George Meany saying he would take the Teamsters back only without Hoffa. Hoffa organized by quickie strike and secondary boycott, using strength at one company to win at the next, and the membership passed 2.3 million, the largest in the country. In 1964 he pulled virtually every over-the-road driver in North America under one National Master Freight Agreement — a single national contract for the industry, which nobody had ever managed.

Robert Kennedy came at him first as counsel to the McClellan Committee in 1957, failed to convict him, and came again from 1961 as attorney general, running a unit of prosecutors and investigators known as the Get Hoffa squad. The loathing ran both ways and neither man bothered to hide it. It also did not have to be manufactured. Hoffa had made arrangements with gangsters since his first Detroit organizing, and he steered the Teamsters' Central States pension money into Mafia projects, above all the building of Las Vegas — the Stardust, the Fremont, the Dunes, Caesars Palace. Juries convicted him twice in 1964: jury tampering in Tennessee in March, then conspiracy and fraud in Chicago in July for running pension money into a Florida land development that paid him back in kickbacks.

On July 30, 1975 he drove to the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, to meet Anthony Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone. He phoned his wife to say he had been stood up. His unlocked car was there the next morning. Nobody has been charged, no body has been found, and a court declared him legally dead in 1982. Arthur Sloane, his biographer, found opinion split between a latter-day Al Capone and the best thing that ever happened to a truck driver. In 1989 a federal racketeering settlement put the union under court supervision and gave members direct elections. They used them in 1998 to elect his son James, who held the office until 2022.

Jimmy Hoffa's life against the full span of the corpus.

• National Master Freight Agreement other
  One contract covering virtually every over-the-road driver in North America 1964
• The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa book
  His own account of the prosecutions 1970
• Hoffa: The Real Story book
  The autobiography, published a few months after he disappeared 1975

• February 14, 1913 aged 0 Born in Brazil, Indiana His father, a coal miner, died of lung disease in 1920.
• September 25, 1936 aged 23 Marries Josephine Poszywak in Bowling Green, Ohio They had met six months earlier during a laundry workers' strike.
• 1946 aged ~33 Becomes president of Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit He took the office in December 1946, having never worked as a truck driver.
• October 5, 1957 aged 44 Elected general president of the Teamsters Two months later the AFL-CIO expelled the union over his leadership, nearly five to one.
• 1964 aged ~51 Wins the National Master Freight Agreement The first national contract for teamster rates, covering nearly every over-the-road driver in North America.
• March 4, 1964 aged 51 Convicted of jury tampering in Tennessee A second jury, in Chicago, convicted him of conspiracy and fraud over the pension fund on July 26.
• March 7, 1967 aged 54 Begins a 13-year sentence at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary He resigned the Teamsters presidency from prison on June 19, 1971.
• December 23, 1971 aged 58 Richard Nixon commutes the sentence to time served The commutation barred him from managing any labor organization until March 6, 1980, a condition Hoffa said he never agreed to and sued unsuccessfully to void.
• July 30, 1975 aged 62 Last seen at the Machus Red Fox in Bloomfield Township, Michigan Declared legally dead in 1982. No one has been charged and his body has never been found.

• Robert F. Kennedy 1925–1968
  Senator and Attorney General whose 1968 presidential campaign was cut short by assassination. prosecuted by
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. sentence commuted by
• George Meany 1894–1980
  New York plumber who merged the AFL and the CIO in 1955 and ran the combined federation for 24 years, through the peak of American labor and the beginning of its decline. expelled by
• Walter Reuther 1907–1970
  United Auto Workers leader who helped build organized labor into a major economic and political force. rival
• John L. Lewis 1880–1969
  Union leader who built the United Mine Workers and helped found the CIO, expanding industrial unionism and collective bargaining. labor predecessor