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beat your brains out for even talking union. The cops ha- rassed us every day. If you went on strike, you got your head broken.” In his first year as Team- sters’ organizer, hewas beaten by police or strikebreakers 24 times; and he said that he had once been arrested 18 times during a single 24-hour period of picketing: “Every time I showed up on the picket line, I got thrown in jail. Every time they released me, I went back to the picket line.” These early experiences made Hoffa into a ruthless, uncompromising negotiator with a single-minded, driv- ing ambition. Inevitably, he found himself operatingmore and more on the fringes of the law as the power of the Teamsters—and that of Hoffa himself—increased. In the late 1950s, a Senate inquiry, the McClellan Committee, began looking into improper labor practices, and a convicted racketeer, John Dioguardi, alleged that Hoffa, now vice president of the union, had made use of union funds for his own profit, as well as ac- cepting payoffs from trucking employers.

Long before the Teamsters Union became powerful, labor relations in the United States had a history of violence and intimidation behind them, as shown by this photograph of a picket line of dockers, with its dangling noose as a threat to strike breakers and non-union workers.

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The Disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa