9781422284094

His name was James Riddle Hoffa, and a riddle is what he left behind him. There is little doubt that he has been dead now for nearly 30 years, but what became of his body and how he died remains a mystery. On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa, ex-president of the Teamsters Union, left his home at Lake Michigan, saying he was going to a meeting. He told his wife, Josephine, to whom he had been married 39 years, to expect him around 4.00 p.m., because he would be grilling steaks for dinner. But he never returned. The Making of a Union Man Jimmy Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913, the son of a coal miner who died of lung disease in 1920. His mother (from whom he took his middle name) took in laundry. He later said she was a woman “who believed that duty and discipline were spelled with capital Ds.” In 1922, the Hoffas relocated to Clinton, Indiana, and two years later, to Detroit. Jimmy dropped out of school in the ninth grade in 1929. A friend advised him to try to get work in the food industry (“Whatever happens, people have got to eat”), and he found a job unloading railroad cars and trucks for the Kroger Grocery & Baking Company. Conditions were hard, and the foreman was a harsh disciplinarian. One night in the spring of 1931, two of young Hoffa’s workmates were fired for going to a food cart for their dinner. In protest, Hoffa called for a work stoppage just as a load of strawberries arrived. The company was forced to negotiate before the fruit deteriorated and perished; within days, Hoffa had secured union recognition, as Federal Local 19341 of the American Federation of Labor. The following year, he took on the job of full-time organizer for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, taking the Kroger union with him. The Union Boss Hoffa’s rise to presidency of the Teamsters was a long and hard struggle. During the 1930s, union organizing was a difficult and often dangerous activity. Employ- ers hired tough strikebreakers and called in police to disperse strikers’ pickets. Hoffa later described it, saying, “Our cars were bombed out. Three different times, someone broke into the office and destroyed our furniture . . . . Your life was in your hands every day. There was only one way to survive: fight back. And we used to slug it out on the streets . . . . The police were no help. The police would

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UNSOLVED CRIMES