-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Breaking of a President 1974 - The Nixon Connection Marvin Miller, Compiler Therapy Productions, Inc.©1975 LCCCN 7481547 --[8]-- THE JIMMY HOFFA CONNECTION In May 1973, Murray Chotiner publicly took credit for arranging with Nixon a presidential commutation of sentence to get Teamster leader James Hoffa released from federal prison, although Hoffa had only served less than five years of a 13-year sentence. Chotiner bragged: "I did it, I make no apologies for it, and frankly I'm proud of it!" But when Chotiner was charged by a newspaper with also having funneled $875,000 to the Nixon campaign from Teamster officials and Las Vegas gambling interests, Chotiner typically responded with an attack of his own: "Unless there is an immediate retraction, I plan to sue or take whatever action the law allows against whoever is responsible for this horrible libel." The story to which Chotiner objected alleged that the Teamster and gambling contributions were in unreported cash and had been used in part to finance the Watergate burglars. Unwilling to take on the expense of a multi-million dollar lawsuit, the newspaper took the easy way out by retracting the story. So while Chotiner definitely wanted full credit for the commutation, figuring correctly that would get him more legal "business." he didn't want to be implicated at all in the probably illegal payoff flowing from the commutation. Hoffa had gone to jail after six years of investigation by Robert Kennedy, beginning when Kennedy was chief counsel to the McClellan Rackets Investigating Committee from 1955 to 1958, and concluding while Kennedy was Attorney General in his brother's presidency, from 1960 into the Johnson administration. The first investigation of the Teamsters began as a result of the already mentioned McClellan investigation into clothing manufacturers who paid bribes to get government contracts for uniforms. Chotiner had been called as a witness about these bribes but refused to talk. No legal action was taken against the master-mind of Nixon's campaigns as an accomodation by the Democratic-dominated McClellan Committee. But when the name of Hoffa associate Johnny Dio (Dioguardi) was mentioned during the hearings, the idea developed of probing the extent of labor racketeering in the powerful Teamsters Union. Some of the Republicans on the committee were particularly interested in developing legislation to limit the power of trade unions. JOHNNY DIO Johnny Dio was a good person with whom to begin an investigation of labor racketeering because he had a long record. In the 1930's he had been convicted of extortion and terrorism after a series of episodes involving the strongarming of trucking companies. After serving three years in Sing Sing, he operated and owned a number of garment manufacturing concerns and was an associate of Louis Lepke. Dio was also involved in the leadership of a small auto-workers union local set up to oppose Walter Reuther's large CIO-affiliated United Auto Workers. Operating under the guise of a labor official, Dio began to enrich himself at the expense of his black and Puerto Rican members, who paid initiation fees and dues but got nothing except "contracts" providing for the minimum wage. Dio's true attitude toward unions was displayed in 1950 when he sold one of his non-union garment factories and was paid an additional $11,200 by the new owner to guarantee that the factory would remain non-union. This fact became known when Dio was charged with not reporting this payment as taxable income. In 1952 Dio was attempting to organize New York's 30,000 taxi-drivers into his auto-workers' local, and Hoffa became interested in recruiting Dio into the Teamsters Union to replace the anti-Hoffa local leadership. The taxi-drivers represented a potential $1,000,000 in annual dues. Perhaps the most famous crime linked to Johnny Dio was the acid-blinding of newspaper columnist Victor Riesel. Dio was indicted for having hired Abraham Telvi to throw the sulphuric acid in Riesel's face. The case never went to trial because witnesses refused to testify and Telvi himself was murdered, the prosecutor alleging publicly but. without proof that Dio ordered the murder and intimidation of witnesses. ALLEN DORFMAN Dio's auto workers' local, interestingly enough, was brought into existence in 1950 by pressure from Paul "Red" Dorfman, a Capone mob member from Chicago who had just set up his son, Allen, in the insurance business. Allen Dorfman made $3,000,000 in the next eight years just by handling the Teamsters' insurance business, and it has been suggested that in exchange for this bonanza, Hoffa received valuable contacts in the Chicago underworld. Allen Dorfman seems to be involved in all of the Teamsters' real estate and pension fund loans as well, and he is suspected of being the Teamsters' official link with organized crime. Three weeks after Hoffa went to prison, Allen Dorfman took over Hoffa's role as dispenser of the pension funds. It took 20 years for the Justice Department to build a case against Allen Dorfman. He was finally indicted in 1971 for receiving a $55,000 kickback from a Teamster pension fund loan. THE JFK ASSASSINATION Paul Dorfman has one interesting connection which should be mentioned, if only in passing. The senior Dorfman was president of the Waste Handlers local union in Chicago in 1949. The other official of this union at this time, also with extensive Chicago crime connections, was Jack Ruby. In 1963, Ruby appears in Dallas, Texas, as the assassin who suspiciously kills Lee Harvey Oswald before he can say anything about the murder of President Kennedy. But like Oswald, Ruby was presented to the country as a demented loner. Hardly anyone knows about Ruby's Chicago connections; or his two trips to Cuba in 1959 to "get some gambling connections there" at a time when Watergate burglar Frank Fiorini alias Sturgis was Castro's supervisor of gambling concessions; or his history of gun-running to Cuba, or his peculiar calls in November 1963 to Teamster officials like Barney Baker, Dusty Miller of the Teamsters' Southern Conference, and Teamster bondsman Irwin Weiner. Those who believe that organized crime had some involvement with the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, as journalist Ed Reid suggests in his book The Grim Reapers or Los Angeles radio newsman Peter Noyes writes about in his recent Legacy of Doubt, believe that the Warren Commission may have engaged in their own cover-up some time before Watergate. Peter Noyes, in particular, traces the movements of a Lansky courier, Jim Braden, who was arrested at the assassination site when President Kennedy was shot, and who is sufficiently high in the mob to be among the select group of 100 charter members of Moe Dalitz' La Costa Country Club in San Diego. Noyes develops some compelling questions about the man known variously as Eugene Hale Brading, Jim Braden, Harry Eugene Bradley, James Bradley Lee, Gene Brady, and James Lee Cole. A ROGUE'S GALLERY At the time of the McClellan hearings in 1956, Johnny Dio was involved in the leadership of seven Teamster locals in New York City, four of which had no membership. The paper locals had been set up by Hoffa so he could have their votes to challenge the existing Teamsters Joint Council leadership in New York. The McClellan Committee reported that: "The officers and directors of these locals read like a rogue's gallery of the New York labor movement. They include such convicted extortionists as Joseph Cohen, Nathan Carmel, Aaron Kleinemann, Milton Levine, Dominic Santa Maria, Harry Davidoff, Sam Goldstein and Max Chester. So phony were these locals that, in the mad dash which occurred in the Teamsters to get them chartered, officials were chosen who had never been members of the union, false addresses were given for the offices, and the stationery of five of the locals was jointly printed and kept under wraps in the offices of one of the locals." The McClellan Committee observed that perhaps 150 men with organized crime contacts played an important role in the Teamsters Union with Hoffa's approval. For example, Antonio "Tony Ducks" Corallo controlled four Teamsters locals; Anthony Provenzano was president of Local 560 in Hoboken, New Jersey; Joseph Parisi, with a background of eleven arrests including a conspiracy charge with Lucky Luciano and Louis Lepke, was secretary-treasure of Local 17; Robert "Barney" Baker, who had previously worked for Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky and Joe Adonis in a Florida gambling casino; and Joseph Glimco, president of Chicago Local 777, a close fiend of Tony Accardo and Jake Guzik. Most of these men were involved in abuses of union funds and extortion from employers. After hearing testimony from 100 of these men on their crime careers and rela[t]ions with Hoffa, the Committee summed it up in 1958 by saying: "James Hoffa, from his early years in the labor movement, has formed an alliance with the kingpins of the nation's underworld, a partnership which has moved him swiftly up through the ranks of the Teamster hierarchy to his present powerful post ... Hoffa's first association was with the Detroit mob. He parlayed this into his equally close connections with underworld figures in Illinois, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Nevada and other parts of the country . . . Hoffa speaks of 'rehabilitation' as the justification for his consorting with criminals and hoodlums. If an occasional law violator had found his way into the Teamsters' organization, this might be a noble sentiment. But on the basis of these bearings, it appears to the Committee that a criminal background was a prerequisite for job placement and advancement in the Teamsters' firmament." THE McCLELLAN COMMITTEE In all fairness, however, it must be said that the McClellan Committee did not conduct its investigation with clean hands. Conservative Republican Senators Irving Ives, Barry Goldwater, Carl Curtis and Karl Mundt displayed more of an interest in developing legislation to limit the power of trade unions rather than simply helping the unions get rid of parasitic labor racketeers so workingmen and women would be adequately represented. And there were many charges that Robert Kennedy was gathering his evidence through the use of illegal wiretaps and other civil liberties violations. The printed record of the committee reveals that, in general, the Teamsters were being treated as a criminal conspiracy rather than a legitimate labor union of more than 1,500,000 members which had been infiltrated by a numerically small but significant criminal element. And at the very time the committee was publicizing Hoffa's corruption, many of the rank and file were willing to forgive Hoffa his graft and questionable friends because, in their opinion, he was performing the function of a trade union leader: getting his membership more money and making the union more powerful for future negotiations. (Others in and out of the Teamsters might say, of course, that the lack of internal democracy instituted by Hoffa and his criminal friends usually made it impossible to ascertain the true feelings of the rank and file toward Hoffa). It took a long time and many court trials before Kennedy and the McClellan Committee put Hoffa behind bars and, looking back, it is very questionable if imprisoning Hoffa broke the ties between the Teamsters and organized crime. Before Hoffa had even appeared as a witness, the McClellan Committee had lost a court case in which they tried to prove that Hoffa had bribed a committee lawyer to obtain committee documents for Hoffa. Even when the committee had films showing Hoffa handing money to the lawyer, Hoffa convinced the jury he was being persecuted, that the lawyer was in his employ first, and the committee, in effect, had bribed his attorney with a job. McClellan admitted that "The government attorneys seemingly were over-confident. They failed, in our opinion, to prepare adequately for the vigorous examinations that the facts warranted and the circumstances required in a case of this importance." And Kennedy, who had promised at a press conference that "if Hoffa isn't convicted, I'll jump off the Capitol," remained on the ground and intensified his efforts to jail Hoffa. The McClellan Committee then supported a court effort by a small group of Teamsters to prevent Hoffa from being seated as president of the union. When that didn't work, the government prosecutors charged that Hoffa had illegally arranged to have the telephones in his Detroit headquarters wiretapped. Halfway through the trial, the government had to drop the case because the Supreme Court ruled that the federal prosecutors couldn't avoid the ban on illegal federal wiretapping by using wiretaps obtained by state officials. Without those wiretaps, there was no case against Hoffa. When Kennedy became Attorney General, dozens of grand juries were impaneled around the country to investigate the Teamsters. A special unit was set up in the Justice Department to investigate the Teamsters and prepare cases for prosecution. And still, when Hoffa was put on trial in 1962 for extorting money from a company employing Teamsters, the trial ended in a hung jury. Hoffa was then tried for attempting to bribe one of the jurors. Teamster official Edward Grady Partin told the details of the plot because he was upset that Hoffa had tried to recruit him to assassinate Robert Kennedy. On the basis of Partin's testimony, Hoffa was finally convicted and sentenced to 8 years in prison. Then, in 1964, Hoffa was again convicted, this time for diverting $1,700,000 of a $20,000,000 pension fund loan to his own use. After all his appeals on both convictions were exhausted, and Life magazine publicized an alleged attempt by New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to bribe Partin to change his testimony against Hoffa for $1,000,000, did Hoffa enter federal prison in March 1967 to begin serving his "13-year" sentence. HOFFA'S LIFE IN PRISON The best insight into Hoffa's life in prison is given by a fellow prisoner of his, Vincent Teresa, in the book, My Life in the Mafia (Doubleday, 1973). Teresa was the No. 3 man in his Mafia family and its top money-maker. He decided to break the Mafia code of silence while in prison because his family was being mistreated by his criminal associates. Teresa was imprisoned at Lewisberg with Hoffa for several months in 1969 until he decided to turn informer And had to be moved out of Lewisberg for his own protection. Hoffa had been in prison for over two years when Teresa first met him. In this fragment from Teresa's book, it's possible to get an amazing look at Hoffa's strengths, fears, and above all a picture of Hoffa's contacts while in prison with Meyer Lansky and others: "Hoffa was a pretty decent guy, really. He was treated good at the prison because of Lillo (Galente, the Mafia prisoner boss at Lewisberg) but he didn't get or ask for special privileges. (Two weeks after Hoffa was imprisoned, a local Teamster boss tried to bribe a prison official to get special treatment for Hoffa. It is reported that the bribe was refused). He was in maximum security because he wanted to be. He was afraid of the blacks. He didn't want to get involved with them. He stayed in a cell right across the hall from me. He was well protected and you couldn't have got him out of there with dynamite. "He worked in the mattress shop, turning out one mattress a day. He's go to work at 8 a.m., take an hour for lunch, and be finished by 2 p.m. "I'll say this for Jimmy. He helped many a guy who was ready to be paroled. They wouldn't have made it but for him. He'd send word out to union officials be knew, and they'd provide a job for the guy, put him to work on a truck or a loading platform. "Jimmy was pretty well liked by all of us. He offered me a job one time. 'You come to work for me, Vinnie,' be said. 'I'll make you public relations director. With your gift of gab, you'll be terrific.' The job he offered paid thirty grand a year with a new car, and he promised another five grand a year after the first year on the job. "Jimmy was convinced I wouldn't be at Lewisberg long ... Then he asked me if I had any money stashed. Now, at this time I didn't know that Joe Black had stolen everything I had. I wasn't even aware that Blanche wasn't getting weekly support money from the mob ... So I told Hoffa I had a few bucks put aside and I had prospects of getting more. 'But what good is it?' I said. 'I can't spend it-they'll watch me like a hawk and grab it.' "Hoffa shook his head and asked me if I'd ever heard of a guy named Lou Poller. Poller worked for the Miami National Bank, and his specialty was taking money that had been gotten illegally and 'washing' it-cleaning it up and legitimizing it. Whatever money you'd put with Poller, he'd take 10 percent. It might take him a year or two, but if you gave him ten million or one million, that money would be invested for you in something legitimate. You'd be able to pay taxes on it. No one knew how he did it-he had his own ways-but he was a master at it. Hoffa offered to write me a letter of introduction to Poller. "Poller, I found out later, was one of Meyer Lansky's men, and he washed the mob's money through the bank. It came out in the form of real estate, apartment buildings, and business ownership, like motels or hotels or mobile-home companies. The government could trace all day and never find anything illegal. He did the same thing for some other mob people that Phil Simon did for Jerry Angiulo, Patriarca and Tameleo. Simon was hooked up with Lansky and worked at the same bank as Poller did. That bank was used to wash millions and millions of dollars for the mob. I never got a chance to use the letter to Poller, who took off for Israel with Lansky. Joe Black and Bobby Cardillo took off with all the millions I had coming." THE MIAMI NATIONAL BANK Lou Poller was not a simple employee at the Miami National Bank, as Teresa implies, but its original founder. And Hoffa, far from being a mere user of the bank's facilities, actually controlled this bank for a substantial period of time. In 1959, three years after the bank was founded, the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund made a loan of $2,000,000 to Lou Poller. The bank was then functionally controlled by Hoffa, who would authorize all large pension fund loans personally even though the fund had its own officers distinct from the union. Loans then became available through the bank for various enterprises vouched for by the Teamsters. In 1964, Sam Cohen, a close associate of Meyer Lansky, made a sizeable loan to the bank. By 1966 the Teamster loan was paid and Lansky's men were in full control of the bank. Cohen is a partner of Miami businessman Morris Lansburgh, who made his money selling World War Two surplus and now likes to be photographed next to one or another of his two Rolls Royce limousines. Cohen and Lansburgh between them own eight Miami Beach hotels including the plush Eden Roe. The two partners also lease Daniel Ludwig's King's Inn on Grand Bahama, and bought the Flamingo in Las Vegas from Albert Parvin, paying Lansky a $200,000 finder's fee. Robert Morgenthau, former U.S. Attorney for New York, discovered that Lansky was using the Exchange and Investment Bank of Switzerland in tandem with the Miami National Bank to launder funds illegally skimmed from the counting rooms in gambling casinos or amassed in other illegal ways that made the money unreportable for income tax purposes. Lou Poller was one of the owners of record of the Exchange and Investment Bank of Switzerland along with Ben Siegelbaum and Ed Levinson. In the section of this volume called The Chotiner Connection mention was made of Lansky front-man Ed Levinson as being a business associate of Maxwell Rabb, a close friend of Nixon's and formerly secretary of Eisenhower's cabinet. A 1969 federal indictment charges Lansky, Cohen, Lansburgh and six others with using the Miami National Bank to skim funds. According to Morgenthau, Cohen cleaned more than $2,000,000 in gambling skim from the Flamingo by sending it through the Miami National Bank and the Exchange and Investment Bank of Switzerland. NIXON AND CHOTINER INVOLVED In this tangled web of crime figures, hotel owners, banks, and a trade union leader with hundreds of millions at his disposal to invest—a full life-portrait of organized crime in the middle of the 20th Century-it is not accidental that the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, and his one-time political adviser, Murray Chotiner, appear in the cast of characters. As shall be shown, Nixon made a lot of his money in Florida real estate, and dealt more with other banks than the Miami National Bank. But in 1970, Nixon appointed a former director of the Miami National Bank, James Lawrence King, to be a federal judge. One of King's first cases involved the passage of stolen IBM stock through Bebe Rebozo's Key Biscayne Bank. King was evidently going to dismiss this case quietly, a great favor both to Rebozo, who allegedly knew the stock was stolen before he sold it , and to Nixon, whose brother was somehow involved. However some newsmen began to investigate the situation and it is one of the smaller Watergate-related scandals. one that points directly to organized crime involvement in stolen securities. Another contact of the Nixon-Chotiner team to the Miami National Bank involves Leonard Bursten, a former Milwaukee lawyer who met Nixon and Chotiner in Washington when Bursten went to work for Senator Joe McCarthy's Investigating Committee. Bursten later became a director of the Miami National Bank and was involved in an attempt to improve the Fisher Island real estate in which Nixon had a financial interest. Then Bursten appears in Los Angeles involved with the Beverly Ridge Estate development in Beverly Hills. This project suspiciously went into bankruptcy after receiving over $12,000,000 in Teamster pension funds. Bursten and two other men were convicted for illegal activities in connection with the failure of the development and Bursten was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. However, Chotiner called the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles in early 1973 and, magically, Bursten's sentence was reduced to straight probation. THE OBJECTIONS TO CLEMENCY Not all Republicans were in favor of giving Hoffa clemency but Richard Nixon had special debts to pay. The U.S. Parole Board had rejected Hoffa's parole application three times previously, after expressing concern that Hoffa's wife and son were still on the Teamsters' payroll for salaries totalling nearly $100,000 a year, while Hoffa had received a $1,700,000 lump-sum retirement settlement. (Hoffa's wife and son were fired from their Teamster jobs in May 1974). Henry Peterson, who had previously served as head of the Organized Crime Section in the Justice Department, had advised the board that Hoffa was intimately connected with organized crime and should not be paroled. Clark Mollenhoff, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who was Nixon's appointed special White House assistant to keep his administration free from corruption, also had advised Nixon, then Attorney General John Mitchell and other White House aides that Hoffa should not receive clemency. Mollenhoff had spent fifteen years of his career as an investigative journalist writing about the Teamsters, Hoffa, and organized crime. Strongly speaking against parole for Hoffa, Mollenhoff said: "It is as futile to base any hope on a reformation of James R. Hoffa as it would be to hope for Tony Accardo or Meyer Lansky to give up the brutal power they possess." Hoffa walked out of prison on December 23, 1971. By the stroke of a pen, President Nixon had freed Hoffa without the usual consultations with the sentencing judges, the prosecutors or his own Justice Department. And Nixon received the petition for commutation only one week before acting on it. Six weeks after his release from prison, Hoffa told a national television audience that "President Nixon is the best qualified man at the present time for the presidency of the United States, in my own personal opinion." EXCHANGING FAVORS Nixon and the Teamsters, with the mob somewhere in the background, actually exchanged a series of favors in connection with Hoffa's release. For one thing, the President needed at least one major union to support his wage-price guidelines in the Spring of 1971. Teamsters President Frank Fitzsimmons joined the five labor representatives on the new Pay Board set up by the new Secretary of the Treasury, John Connally. Then the Teamsters needed, and got, two concessions. Dave Beck, Hoffa's predecessor as Teamster president, had served some prison time as a result of the McClellan Committee investigation of him. He still owed the government $1.3 million in taxes, penalties and interest which by 1972 was immediately collectible or the IRS would seize his properties. In an unprecendented written agreement, Treasury Secretary Connally granted Beck a five-year moratorium on his debt. The second favor had to do with Fitzsimmons' son Richard, a Detroit Teamster official who had been charged with misappropriating union funds. Not long after the mutual aid pact was negotiated, the Justice Department in Washington told the U.S. attorney in charge of the case in Detroit to drop the charges because the evidence was "thin." On June 21, 1971, within minutes after Hoffa announced his resignation as General President of the Teamsters, part of the pact, President Nixon walked into the Executive Board of the Teamsters meeting in Miami and sat down next to Fitzsimmons. Photographs of Nixon seated at the meeting were permitted although the meeting was closed to reporters. Fitzsimmons was immediately selected to replace Hoffa on a temporary basis until the union convention. The big payoff came on July 17, 1972, when Fitzsimmons and the Teamsters Executive Board met at La Costa Country Club near San Diego. For the first time in its history, the Teamsters pledged that its huge membership would support a Republican Presidential campaign. It was estimated that more than $250,000 would be collected for the campaign from Teamster officials alone. Was this the money that Chotiner didn't transmit? WHAT PRICE TEAMSTERS SUPPORT? On July 9, 1971 The New York Times carried an editorial titled "What Price Teamster Support," which said in part: The budding love affair between the Nixon Administration and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has some ugly overtones. The ardor with which the President and Secretary of Labor Hodgson have been wooing the two million member union, exiled from the rest of the labor movement in 1957 for hoodlum domination, would be questionable enough if it were regarded solely as a bid for political and financial support in next year's presidential election. But in the cynical environment that enshrouds this rich union, no amount of official denials can erase suspicion of a deal to free Teamster boss James R. Hoffa, now one third of the way through a total sentence of thirteen years for jury-fixing and pension fraud. Just three months have gone by since the United States Board of Parole rejected a plea to let Hoffa out of jail. Since then, the former Teamsters president has resigned from all his posts, thus clearing the way for the election at the union's convention in Miami Beach yesterday of his hand picked successor, Frank E. Fitzsimmons, whose only discernible distinction in his union career has been absolute subservience to Mr. Hoffa. . . The convention brought no slightest hint of resolve on the Teamsters' part to clean up the corruption disclosed by the McClellan Committee more than a 'decade ago. On the contrary, the convention reelected a vice-president who pleaded guilty to taking illegal payments from employers only a few months ago, and who was spared imprisonment only because his physician told a Federal judge he was too ill to serve. Also re-elected was another vice president awaiting trial on Federal charges of counterfeiting... All in all, it is a sorry aggregation that the Administration is clutching to its bosom . . . Before going to the penitentiary, the ex-Teamster chief often boasted that every man-and especially every politician-could be bought. That suspicion must not cloud the ultimate decision on his plea for freedom. On August 20, 1971, the Parole Board again denied parole to Hoffa, despite a pleading speech by Hoffa's son, James, and the Teamsters felt betrayed. One Hoffa attorney said, "At least when Bob Kennedy gave his word he kept it." Frank Fitzsimmons held a meeting with Attorney General John Mitchell about the failure of the Parole Board to grant Hoffa's favor, and publicly called upon President Nixon to grant Hoffa a pardon. And on December 23, 1971, President Nixon issued not a pardon, but a commutation of sentence making him eligible for immediate release as long as certain restrictions were observed. THE COMMUTATION The commutation of sentence states: "The President on the above date commuted the sentence of subject to six-and-one-half years imprisonment upon the condition that subject not engage in direct or indirect management of any labor organization prior to March 6, 1980, and, if this condition is not fulfilled, this commutation will be null and void in its entirety and the subject shall be recommitted to prison under the original judgements of conviction and remain until the consecutive sentences of eight years imprisonment imposed in the Eastern District of Tennessee on March 12, 1964, and the five years imprisonment imposed in the Northern District of Illinois on July 14, 1969, which consecutive sentences total 13 years imprisonment, shall have been served by him in accordance with law or until he is otherwise released in accordance with law." Hoffa, who wants to resume his union position, now states that he was never informed of this restriction on his activity before being released from prison and filed a suit charging President Nixon, Attorney General William Saxbe, Teamster President Frank Fitzsimmons, former White House special counsel Charles W. Colson, and others with a conspiracy to violate his rights. U.S. District Judge John Pratt ruled that Nixon could not be part of the suit and, on June 20, 1974, further ruled it was within the right of the President to grant clemency with a condition that the original judge did not attach. Hoffa says that if he had known of the restriction, which assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Katz agrees was not told to Hoffa prior to his release, he would have refused the commutation and remained in jail until his release, possibly in 1974. That way he could have immediately run for leadership of his local and attempted to unseat Frank Fitzsimmons as national president in 1976. Hoffa plans to appeal the decision, and may well win since former White House counsel John W. Dean III has filed a deposition saying that he acted alone in adding the restriction on Hoffa's activities, without consulting President Nixon or anyone else in the White House apart from a brief discussion with former Attorney General John Mitchell. Dean never submitted Mitchell's "letter of advice" to the President, which did not include the restriction, but gave the President instead a memorandum of his own with the recommendation. The President, of course, had to approve the final wording, leaving the interesting implication that there may well be a conspiracy to try to forget Hoffa between Fitzsimmons, happy with his new job; Nixon, happy with his new labor boss; and the mob, happy with less publicity. THE FBI IS DEMORALIZED But the new mutual pact may leave the public as loser. An FBI agent recently told Los Angeles Times reporters Jack Nelson and Bill Hazlett that: "This whole thing of the Teamsters and the mob and the White House is one of the scariest things I've ever seen. It has demoralized the Bureau. We don't know what to expect out of the Justice Department." The FBI agent quoted above was referring to the following sequence of events: On February 8, 1973, Frank Fitzsimmons met in Palm Springs at the Bob Hope Desert Classic golf tournament with Sam Sciortino, Peter H. Milano, and Joe Lamandri, all identified by the FBI as members of the California Mafia. The topic of discussion was a new Teamsters' prepaid health plan, expected to amount to a possible $1 billion annual business, and real estate transactions in Orange and San Diego Counties involving more than $40,000,000 in commercial property-all financed by Teamster pension fund loans. In the next days Fitzsimmons met with a Chicago enforcer, Anthony Spilotro; Marshall Ca[l]ifano, another enforcer; Tony Accardo, Chicago Mafia boss; Lou Rosanova and three associates-he is currently executive director of the Teamster-owned Savannah Inn and Country Club, and a top Chicago hoodlum. The three associates were Lloyd J. Pitzer of Los Angeles, Charles E. Greller of Chicago and Richard Strummer. By an FBI wiretap, it was learned that Rosanova had set up an office in Beverly Hills called People's Industrial Consultants to handle the kickbacks to be paid under the health plan. On February 12th, Fitzsimmons again met with Rosanova, this time at the Teamster-financed, mob-operated La Costa Country Club north of San Diego. Incidentally, that same weekend, John Dean III, John Mitchell and John Ehrlichman were also meeting at this haven for organized crime to work out some of the Watergate cover-up details. But what worried the FBI agent most was that on the morning of February 13th, Fitzsimmons drove to El Toro Marine Air Station and joined Nixon on board Air Force One for the flight to Washington. And a few days later, the Justice Department shut down the FBI's court-authorized wiretaps which let them know of the new plans of Fitzsimmons and organized crime to once again use the Teamster pension funds as the bankroll for the underworld. And the tragedy is that the Central States Pension Fund, reduced to almost zero liquidity because of mob rip-offs, bankruptcies, bad investments, extortions, defaulted loans, is already having trouble paying pensions to the retired truck-drivers. THE PAROLE OF CALVIN KOVENS One week after Hoffa walked out of prison as a free man, former U.S. Senator George A. Smathers, now a Washington lobbyist, telephoned White House aide Charles Colson about the plight of Calvin Kovens. Kovens was a co-defendant of Hoffa in the Teamster pension fund fraud case for which Hoffa was sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Kovens had received a three-year sentence. As soon as Smathers began talking about this subject, Colson turned on his tape recorder and sent a transcript to Dean along with a memorandum which stated: "The attached is much too hot for me to handle. Smathers called me, I assumed, just to talk politics. The moment he began to get into the subject, I turned on the recorder. Hence you have the full transcript attached. Obviously he makes a very good point and I would assume if there is anything we can do properly, we should. On the other hand, in view of the personalities involved here, I would think this has to be handled with extreme care ... I would appreciate your earliest advice as to what we should do. Please discuss with me before getting this too far along. I do think, however, in view of Smathers' decision to support the President next year, that we had better attend to this and not let it slip. . . " What alarmed Colson was Smathers' insistence that something be done by the White House to get Kovens paroled. "I was talking with Bebe (Rebozo) about it and said, 'Bebe, it looks to me that this would be a pretty good thing to do He's (Kovens) the most popular Jew in Dade County, South Florida . . . This I know would at least give the President, and those who are going to help in this area, a very strong basis for going to the Jewish community and saying: For God sake, the one guy that went to bat for him was the President . . . Bebe said, 'I think he, (President Nixon) ought to do it.' I said, 'I agree, there's no negatives on this, it's all pluses.' " Eight days after Smathers' call, Kovens was released from prison for medical reasons. And shortly thereafter, Kovens made a $30,000 campaign contribution to Nixon. John Dean later released the transcript and Colson's memorandum to government Watergate investigators. THE SUN VALLEY SCANDAL Kovens was a Miami builder indicted with Hoffa and six other men in a complicated fraud involving a planned Teamsters' retirement community in Sun Valley, Florida. While Teamster members were being urged to buy homes in the area, Hoffa secretly was a 22.5 per cent owner of the original real estate. The Florida National Bank had been induced to make a series of loans enabling Hoffa and his partners to obtain and develop Sun Valley when Hoffa arranged for $500,000 of Teamsters Union funds to be deposited in a no-interest account in the bank. When the McClellan Committee revealed its suspicion that Hoffa had improperly used Teamster money for his own personal advantage, Hoffa began to manipulate the Teamster pension fund to raise money to pay the bank and get out of the deal. The problem was that the bank had frozen the Teamsters Union deposit made by Jimmy Hoffa's Local 299 because the Sun Valley development was obviously being mishandled. Only five houses on one street had been built although a considerable time had elapsed, which was inadequate security for the bank's loans. (Eventually, the whole development was to file bankruptcy). And Local 299's leadership began to suspect that they would be charged with mishandling Teamster funds, and wanted their money back. At this point in time the Central States Teamsters Pension Fund controlled by Hoffa had about $200,000,000 in assets. At present, less than twenty years later, this fund shows assets of one-and--half-billion dollars. However, the fund doesn't have much cash because of bad investment policies which succeeded in lining the pockets of organized crime leaders with dollars while the fund was left with worthless securities and claims on bankrupt projects. The Sun Valley disaster alone looted the fund of over $20,000,000. In order to pay back the Florida National Bank, Local 299 and other creditors, Hoffa began to authorize a series of loans from the pension fund to individuals who agreed to kick back 10 per cent of their loans to Hoffa and his associates. Kovens and the other defendants in the trial which finally explored these complicated transactions collected these illegal kickbacks, which were then used to pay Sun Valley creditors. Kovens additionally profited from some of these loans, which in most cases would not normally have been approved by any reputable lending institution because of the risky nature of the projects, by being awarded the construction contracts involved. Ultimately the bank was paid back and released the frozen account of Local 299. But by this time the pension fund had made non-recoverable loans of $20,000,000 and the Sun Valley partners including Hoffa had received about $1,700,000 in kickbacks which. they used to cover their previous misdeeds. A sum of $42,000 even went to Local 299 from the illegal kickbacks to cover the interest that would have been normally earned if Hoffa had not diverted the local's money into a non-interest account for his own personal advantage. Finally, the Justice Department investigators who had been spurred on by Robert Kennedy pierced the veil and proved in court that Hoffa and the seven other men on trial had conspired to commit fraud. However, it took from 1958 to 1969 for this matter to wind its way through the courts. And during these eleven years Nixon's friend, and later Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, intervened to stall the proceedings, along with U.S. Senator Hiram Fong of Hawaii and other government officials contacted by Sidney Zagri, the political director of the Teamsters. "DEAR DICK" In one blatant case of interference in, 1959, then Attorney General Rogers (Nixon was Vice-President) had the Justice Department Criminal Division chief, Malcolm Wilkie, call the grand jury room where U.S. Attorney Jim Dowd was summing up his case asking for an indictment. Dowd interrupted his summation and left the grand jury hearing room to take the emergency call from Washington. Dowd was directed not to seek the indictment but to return to Washington with his files for further study of the case. Dowd was stunned but did as he was told. The background of this interference was a prior meeting in Miami Beach between former California Republican Congressman Allan Oakley Hunter and Hoffa, arranged by a Washington lobbyist and friend of Nixon. After Hunter told Hoffa he was not speaking for Nixon-and both men took off their coats to prove they were not recording the conversation—they got down to business. Hunter assured Hoffa that although Nixon "could naturally not condone" many of the things that had gone on in the Teamsters, Nixon did not "have the knife out" for him personally, and bore no preconceived prejudices against him. In an eight-page "Dear Dick" letter one week later in which Hunter reported to Nixon about this conversation, Hunter said that Hoffa had only one specific request: "He didn't know how it could be done, but he felt that Judge Dickenson Letts ... should be taken out of the case (because he was) too old, incompetent and completely prejudiced." Hunter concluded the letter by saying that Hoffa "gave the impression that as between those candidates for President on the horizon at the present time, he personally favored you." As an indication that Rogers' subsequent sudden intervention into the grand jury hearing was directly inspired by Nixon, Hunter's letter to Nixon contained the following paragraph: "Hoffa is definitely of the opinion that the Department of Justice under Attorney General Rogers is harassing him and that the large number of investigators and attorneys who have been assigned for special duty in connection with the Teamsters Union activities are working up nothing more than nuisance-suits. This, he charges, is discriminatory and unfair. Again, he said, he expects no privileges or special treatment; he just wants to be treated like anyone else. These nuisance suits, he says, have cost the Teamsters Union a great deal of money. He said that the Florida land case, for example, he would win, but that it would cost money and might involve considerable time in court. He said that it's an easy thing to get a grand jury indictment, but convictions are a different matter. He says that as far as he is personally concerned he has absolutely no worries because he leads a clean life, pays his taxes, and obeys the law." Of course, Hoffa did not win the Florida land case-although it took ten more years until indictments were obtained, a trial held, and appeals exhausted. And Hoffa and Kovens did get special treatment from Nixon and Rebozo leading to early release from prison-again after a considerable time during which Hoffa believed that Nixon was double-crossing him. To this day Hoffa believes Nixon double-crossed him in imposing the restrictions which are keeping Hoffa out of union office. Hoffa believes this happened because Nixon is pleased with the political support given him by the present Teamster President Frank Fitzsimmons, who is also doing a satisfactory job in keeping the channels open to organized crime. pps. 291-301 --[photo captions]-- Former Louisiana Teamster Business Manager Edward Grady Partin put Jimmy Hoffa behind bars when he told of Hoffa's plot to bribe jurors. Partin became thoroughly disgusted with the then Teamster President when Hoffa asked him how to obtain a plastic bomb or a silencer for a rifle so former Attorney General Robert Kennedy could be assassinated. Partin told his story to Life Magazine who printed it (May 15,1964) when Partin took and passed a lie detector test. Partin refused a $1, 000, 000 bribe to change his testimony. Former Teamster President James R. Hoffa (right) had his 13 year prison sentence cut in half by a Presidential Commutation in a complicated exchange of favors which included Teamster financial and political support for Nixon's re-election, dropping of federal charges against another Teamster official, a 5 year moratorium on a $1,300,000 tax bill, and removal of embarrassing FBI wiretaps on discussions between Teamster leaders and organized crime figures. Former Presidential Advisor Murray Chotiner claimed that he arranged to get Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa out of jail in 1971 with a Presidential commutation. This photograph shows the man who allegedly was Nixon's link to organized crime moving in 1971 into his new office upstairs from the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Senator John McClellan, Chairman of the Senate Rackets Investigating Committee (left) meets with Robert Kennedy, Committee Counsel. These two men put the spotlight on the crimes of Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa in 1956. Hoffa didn't go to jail until 1967. Jack Ruby, shown here as he was gunning down Lee Harvey Oswald, in 1963, was an associate of Chicago crime figure Paul Dorfman, the father of Teamster financial contact, Allen Dorfman. Eugene Brading, also known as Jim Braden, and many other aliases, is an alleged Lansky courier who was arrested at Dealey Plaza in Dallas after the assassination of President Kennedy. He is a charter member of the Teamster-financed, mob-operated La Costa Country Club near San Diego, California. This photograph shows Brading in 1951 when he was posing as an oil operator and swindled a wealthy New Mexico widow out of $48,000 when she married an associate of his. Frank Fiorini, alias Sturgis, one of the Watergate Burglars, (right) is shown here in 1959 at a rebel training camp near Santiago, Cuba. In the year shown, Fiorini was a soldier of fortune still attached to Fidel Castro. Soon after, Castro was to appoint him as supervisor of the Cuban gambling casinos and, in that capacity, was possibly visited by Jack Ruby. Fiorini is not a Cuban but a third-generation ItalianAmerican from Philadelphia. Frank found his cover name "Sturgis" in a book Bimini Run, written by his old CIA friend E. Howard Hunt. Fiorini was to become an antiCastro raider. Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo, a Mafia leader, had control of four Teamster locals. During the McClellan investigation, Robert Kennedy said of Tony Ducks: "He has been arrested twelve times, ranging from robbery, grand larceny and narcotics. He was identified before the committee as an important figure in narcotics, and he was a close friend of Johnny (Dio) Dioguardi. My question is, Have you made any investigation of him? . . . Have you taken any steps against Mr. Tony Ducks Corallo? " Hoffa: "As of now, no." Johnny Dio (right), a close fiend of Teamster President, Jimmy Hoffa, is shown here with his attorney, William Kleinman when he appeared as a witness before the McClellan Senate Rackets Investigating Committee. In 1969 a New York meat company hired Johnny Dio in the capacity of a "salesman" in the hope of buying labor peace. In a short time he had become the most powerful man in the company and used strong arm methods to force all the supermarket-customers to accept "green, sweaty meat" with a no-return policy. The ultimate loser was the consumer. James R. Hoffa (right) on the day he was freed from the federal penitentiary at Lewisberg, Pennsylvania-December 23, 1971. With him at a press conference is his attorney, Morris Shenker. Senator Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) in Capitol Hill office in 1967, the year Hoffa finally went to jail. President Richard Nixon received advice against giving Hoffa clemency because of the Teamster's organized crime connections. But Nixon had enough connections of his own that he didn't take the advice, especially from the special White House assistant in charge of fighting corruption. Secretary of the Treasury John Connally wanted Teamster President Fitzsimmons on his Pay Board in 1971 to give the board a pro-labor coloration. Frank E. Fitzsimmons is shown just before he was elected President of the Teamsters Union at their 1971 Convention in Miami Beach. After he got the job, Fitzsimmons didn't want to give it back to Hoffa. Calvin Kovens, co-defendant with Jimmy Hoffa in a Teamsters pension fund fraud case, got paroled for medical reasons eight days after former Florida Senator George Smathers called White House aide Charles Colson. Smathers told Colson that Bebe Rebozo thought it would be a good idea if "the most popular Jew in Dade County, South Florida" got out of prison. Frank E. Fitzsimmons (left), Teamster President, with James P. Hoffa, son of the former President when everyone was still friends. In May 1974, Hoffa Jr. lost his union job and Fitzsimmons didn't want Hoffa Sr. back either. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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