"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (32 page)

Unfortunately for Hoffa, these were comments about actual jury-tampering events that had been proven to have transpired by the testimony of the bribed jurors. No amount of explaining could have helped him. The only explanation he could have given to satisfy a jury would have been an unequivocal denial that he had ever made such comments to the likes of Edward Grady Partin. But Hoffa’s fear of electronic surveillance took that option away from him. Hoffa’s performance on that Chattanooga witness stand was not vintage, in-your-face Jimmy Hoffa.

The rest of the defense was even weaker. Hoffa and his attorneys had clearly been unprepared for the bombshell surprise witness.

Frank Fitzsimmons testified for Hoffa that he had sent the black business agent Larry Campbell to Nashville to do some union organizing. This was weak testimony to imply that Campbell was not there for the purpose of jury tampering. Somehow it was intended to refute Partin’s testimony that Hoffa said, “I’ve got the colored male juror in my hip pocket. One of my business agents, Larry Campbell, came into Nashville prior to the trial and took care of it.”

Another defense witness was called to say that Edward Grady Partin was a dope addict. As weak as that evidence was on its face, it served the prosecution further by allowing the government to destroy it. The prosecution had Partin evaluated by two drug experts, physicians who treated addicts, who came to court to testify that there was no evidence that Partin was then on narcotics or that he had ever used them in his life.

In its desperation, and in a state of high paranoia, the defense filed a motion for a mistrial, accusing the government of employing electronic and nonelectronic surveillance against the defense team. The motions were supported by affidavits from experts in electronic surveillance and photographs of alleged FBI surveillance. Only one of the photographs had an FBI agent in it, and he happened to be a passing motorist. All the other photographs were of ordinary citizens of Chattanooga taking snapshots of the celebrity defendants. During an argument on the motion one of the defense attorneys, Jacques Schiffer, challenged prosecutor James Neal to a duel. Schiffer said, “You don’t say that again unless you mean to back it up. I will meet you anywhere with anything. We will see who turns yellow first.” Ultimately, the judge ruled that the motion for a mistrial based on alleged surveillance of the defense team by the FBI was “utterly without merit.”

Next the defense filed a motion for a mistrial, alleging that the jury had overheard that same defense attorney, Jacques Schiffer, loudly arguing a legal point and that some of the jurors were overheard to be critical of Schiffer’s boisterous and aggressive tactics. At the time of the alleged incident the jury was sequestered in the jury room and was not permitted to hear the legal arguments taking place in the courtroom. But for the loud volume of the defense attorney’s argument, the jury would not have heard anything Schiffer had said. In support of its motion the defense alleged that defense attorney Frank Ragano, at the height of Schiffer’s thunderous oration, had left the counsel table and gone back to the jury room door to listen to the jury to see if it could hear the arguments by Schiffer. An incredulous judge pointed out to Ragano that what he had done violated the sanctity of the jury room and that instead of manufacturing evidence for a mistrial he should have asked his cocounsel to quiet down, as the judge had been asking him to do throughout the trial.

In his closing summation, government prosecutor James Neal told the jury that what had occurred in Nashville was “one of the greatest assaults on the jury system known to mankind.” As for the truthfulness of his star witness, Neal succinctly told the jury, “The reason the government says Partin is telling the truth is because it checked and found out that all he said was happening, and what he said was going to happen, did happen.”

James Haggerty, the lead attorney for Jimmy Hoffa, called it all “a foul and filthy frame-up.” Haggerty then played the Bobby card. By mentioning Bobby Kennedy and choosing words that would evoke slavery, Haggerty sought to appeal to a perceived Southern prejudice against Bobby Kennedy for his having put the Justice Department squarely behind integration and in support of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Haggerty accused the man sitting in the back of the courtroom, a man who had not testified in the trial, Walter Sheridan, of being “the architect of the diabolical plot” against Jimmy Hoffa and of being “the servant of his master, Robert Kennedy.”

The next defense summation also attacked Robert Kennedy and his “axe man Walter Sheridan.”

The jury was not seduced away from the truth. Allen Dorfman, the marine combat veteran of the war in the Pacific, whose jury-tampering role had been minimal, was found not guilty. Jimmy Hoffa and three others who had done Hoffa’s bidding were found guilty. In two separate trials, two other men who had acted on Hoffa’s behalf were found guilty.

At sentencing on March 12, 1964, defense attorney Jacques Schiffer was sentenced to sixty days in jail for contempt of court. Attorney Frank Ragano received a public reprimand for standing outside the jury room door with his ear to the door to listen in on the jury.

Hoffa’s three guilty codefendants in his trial got three years each. At sentencing in one of the separate trials, a Hoffa jury fixer got five years. At sentencing in the other separate trial, the Nashville lawyer, Tommy Osborn, who had crossed over the line into jury tampering for his client Jimmy Hoffa, got three and a half years.

Jimmy Hoffa, the architect of it all and the only person who could have profited from it all, got a sentence of eight years.

Judge Frank W. Wilson, in pronouncing sentence, said:

Mr. Hoffa, it is the opinion of this court…that [in those jury-tampering incidents] of which you stand convicted…you [acted] knowingly and you [acted] corruptly [even] after the trial judge reported to you his information with regard to an alleged attempt to bribe a juror…. [I]t is difficult for the Court to imagine under those circumstances a more willful violation of the law. Most defendants that stand before this Court for sentencing…have either violated the property rights of other individuals or have violated the personal rights of other individuals.

…You stand here convicted of having tampered, really, with the very soul of this nation.

 
chapter twenty
 

Hoffa’s Comedy Troupe

“
Partin was no good to them dead. They needed him alive. He had to be able to sign an affidavit. They needed him to swear that all the things he said against Jimmy at the trial were lies that he got from a script fed to him by Bobby Kennedy’s people in the Get Hoffa Squad. Partin had to say that he did all of this because he had kidnapping charges hanging over his head and not because Jimmy had made threats to whack Bobby. That was Jimmy’s best chance on that jury-tampering matter. Partin knew nobody was going to kiss him as long as he strung them along. Partin gave Jimmy’s lawyers useless affidavits and even a deposition. In the end, they never really got him to say that he railroaded Jimmy Hoffa. All they ever got out of him about railroading amounted to no more than, “Partin, me boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?”
”

Another reason Hoffa needed Partin alive for many years to come had to do with Hoffa’s chances down the line before the parole board or for a presidential pardon. In his autobiography Jimmy Hoffa wrote that on March 27, 1971, Partin had given his lawyers a deposition that amounted to “a twenty-nine page confession.” From Hoffa’s written version alone it is clear to anyone who understands these things that it was not a “confession” of any railroading by Partin and the government. Furthermore, whatever it was, the deposition was given in exchange for the Hoffa camp putting Partin in a potentially lucrative business deal with Audie Murphy, the movie actor and “most decorated hero of World War II.”

Still suffering nightmares from the war, Murphy had fallen on hard times. He had filed for bankruptcy in 1968 and had been acquitted on an assault-with-intent-to-murder charge in 1970. Still, to a southerner like Partin, the decorated soldier from Tennessee was a shining star. Hoffa brazenly wrote that for the deal to turn out profitable for Audie Murphy and Partin, an unspecified favor was needed from Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa wrote that shortly after the deposition, “Senator George Murphy [California Republican and former movie actor] personally took [the deposition] to Attorney General John Mitchell, and Audie Murphy gave it to President Nixon.”

“
I never met Audie Murphy, not with Jimmy and not overseas. We were in the same operations over there but in different divisions. He was a heavy drinker after the war like me. I heard he had business with Jimmy, but I didn’t know what kind of business. He died in a crash of a small plane. Jimmy was in the coal business for a while, but I don’t think Audie Murphy was in that.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1964 in Philadelphia, the rebels in the Voice threatened to sue the International if anymore money was spent on Jimmy’s legal fees. Over a million already had been spent on the Chattanooga jury-tampering trial. And now the Chicago Sun Valley trial was coming up right around the corner. There would most definitely be more than a little bit of fees and expenses on that one with everything that was at stake. Jimmy had reserved a floor at the Sherman House Hotel in Chicago, and they had a full-time chef lined up to cook for everybody. The Chicago trial was going to go on for months. They had half a platoon of lawyers. None of this was free. All this had to be paid for.

Jimmy told the International Executive Board not to worry about the Voice. He said that the lawyer for the International, Edward Bennett Williams, had told Jimmy that footing the legal bills was a perfectly legal union expense. Edward Bennett Williams was the lawyer Jimmy had used in the trial in Washington over trying to bribe the McClellan Committee investigator, where they brought Joe Louis into the courtroom and they sent Bobby Kennedy a parachute when they won. Jimmy gave Edward Bennett Williams the Teamsters business as a reward for the trial, and he figured Williams would go along with this. The International checked with Williams, and he told them that he had never said anything like that to Jimmy, and that paying the bills when Jimmy got convicted was not legal under the union’s constitution.

I know I got reimbursed whenever I beat a rap, but I paid my own bills when I lost. Or I should say, somebody would hold a benefit and I’d get envelopes. I did collect a fair amount of private money to help out with my legal fees and expenses on those two cases I did lose. But in the end you’re still short when you lose.

The trial in Chicago started about a month after Jimmy was sentenced to an eight-year bit in Chattanooga. I happened to be in Chicago for a part of that trial, and I stopped in and waited in the hallway for a break. I wished Jimmy luck and saw a big crowd of people coming out, mostly Teamsters, no alleged mob figures, not even Joey Glimco, who was also a Teamster. I chatted with Barney Baker. He was 6'6" and weighed about 350. He was a heavy eater. Believe it or not he boxed as a middleweight. He was supposed to have had something to do with getting Joe Louis to that trial in Washington. Jimmy liked him. He sold ties. He had a lot of neckties for sale all the time. Barney had a lot of balls. He’d be available to help. He was a good muscle man. He got investigated in the Warren Report thing because they traced some calls between him and Jack Ruby a few days before the Dallas matter.

Bill Bufalino was at the trial as a spectator, and Frank Ragano was there representing one of the other codefendants. Jimmy usually didn’t listen to lawyers. Jimmy told them what he wanted done. And Jimmy had a good memory. He could tell the lawyers what the witnesses said two weeks ago better than the lawyers could tell from their notes. If the lawyer told Jimmy something he didn’t want to hear, he’d say, “Well, you make it right.” But in the hallway it looked to me like he might be doing a little more listening.