Killing Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa was an enemy of orthodox society.

Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa

threatened John Kennedy,

Robert Kennedy, or both.

Hoffa was actually a full fledged informant

by the end.

Hoffa's association with organized crime

just quadrupled the threat to this country.

That the Teamsters were protecting

these drug traffickers.

We have no information as,

as to the fact that he is alive,

but we don't know that he is dead either.

More than 200 FBI agents

are involved in the search for Hoffa.

It is one of the most famous

and enduring American mysteries.

What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?

Hoffa is seen getting into this car,

and the car is seen driving away, never to be seen again.

Hoffa vanished,

and with this disappearance really started

the most fascinating mystery

in the criminal annals of America.

Jimmy Hoffa was born and raised

in coal mining towns in Southern Indiana

in the 1910s and 1920s,

hardscrabble towns filled with coal miners and bootleggers,

a lot of whites from the South

and emigrated to Southern Indiana.

By the 1920s, it became a hub

of the Ku Klux Klan nationally

and where violence really determined a lot of conflicts.

In the towns he grew up in,

there were more saloons than there were churches.

His mother was a single mother,

who was forced to take in laundry from neighbors

to support the family.

Hoffa lived on the edge

throughout his childhood and early adulthood,

and I think that also defined his outlook on life

and his career.

So Jimmy Hoffa and his family

arrived in Detroit in 1924,

looking for better economic opportunities.

Detroit was one of the fastest growing cities

in the country.

It was also one of the most violent.

You had the Italians with several groups,

the River Gang, the East Side Gang,

the West Side Gang,

the Jewish Purple Gang.

And then you had other factions,

such as the Lizard Gang,

which is a Polish gang out of Hamtramck.

A gangland economic boom that was taking place

not just in Detroit but around the country,

that was the situation that Hoffa was coming up in

as a young man.

Then the Depression hit,

and it hit Detroit harder than almost anywhere.

Half the city was out of work,

bread lines in the street.

Thousands of people would show up

for a single job opening.

Hoffa was lucky to get a job

as a warehouse worker unloading crates

on a dock at Kroger's.

He lived in a world in which

poverty and unemployment was the norm

and in which violence often determined

the outcome of class struggle.

In 1932, the very bottom year of the Great Depression,

the year of the national crime wave,

John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde,

Jimmy Hoffa was about 19 years old,

and he did something pretty amazing.

He organized his first strike.

I think it's important to see Jimmy Hoffa

as always having been an entrepreneur

and looking at the labor movement as an entrepreneur.

He saw the potential for a strike

not as a means to redo the economy

or even redo the management of Kroger's

but as a means simply to make higher wages.

Workers striking, refusing to work was leveraged

for simply economic means.

Hoffa was seeing the American system

exposed all around him,

Wall Street taking advantage of Main Street,

and the rise of gangsters and bandits.

Land speculators, banks gobbling up land

foreclosing on small farmers.

For many people, men like John Dillinger and Al Capone

became the heroes.

Doing whatever it took to get ahead in life,

that was what was important.

Jimmy Hoffa is growing up in the Midwest

during the Great Depression.

He's aware of the outlaw personality.

He's part of the community

that is marginalized.

These communities are responding

to people like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd.

So by the time that Jimmy Hoffa becomes involved

in labor politics,

this is an important part of his character.

I think the lesson that Jimmy Hoffa learned

from the Depression was to fight tooth and nail

for everything you could get

because Big Business and the government

were not the friends of the working man.

His career thrived in large part

in a very unregulated economy and political atmosphere

in Detroit in the 1930s.

He saw, in fact, that workers could succeed

more often than not

in that sort of jungle environment.

Rum owners and guys

who were moving liquor into the country,

they needed trucks.

The Teamsters were driving those trucks.

You've got the Nexus right there of the Mob,

corruption, and laborers.

And when Prohibition ends,

that connections remain,

and it just grows out of that.

Often, owners, business owners

would hire thugs with baseball bats and clubs

and sometimes pistols

to intimidate or beat union organizers.

And quite often, those union organizers would fight back

with violence as well,

and so many of these battles are fought in the streets.

Management and ownership

breaking promises and breaking legs,

it is morally acceptable to fight fire with fire.

The Mob was muscle,

and the Mob worked for whoever would hire them.

In terms of the organized labor movement,

there were times when Corporate America,

whether it's the garment industry or whatever,

would hire Mob muscle to intimidate the unions.

So it wasn't like the Mobsters were embracing

organized labor movement in America.

The Mobsters went wherever there was a payday.

And workers often found

that they could win those conflicts.

In particular, Hoffa found that those conflicts

could be settled through their willingness

to fight industries.

For union rank and file,

Jimmy Hoffa is a Robin Hood,

and like Robin Hood,

he may have to resort to extralegal acts.

He may have to get his hands dirty.

But in the end, his workers

and these marginalized communities are better off.

Hoffa was most likely involved

in car bombings.

You had to keep scabs out of those workplaces.

You had to keep replacement workers out,

or else you had no power as a union leader.

The first real documented proof

of Hoffa's connection with the Mob

comes in about 1937.

Hoffa was married by this time,

but he had an ex-girlfriend

who was sort of a gangster moll,

Sylvia Pagano, a.k.a. Sylvia Paris.

At the time,

Pagano is dating Frankie "Three Fingers" Coppola,

a bootlegger from Los Angeles

who has a criminal record extending back

to his youth in Sicily.

Pagano introduces Coppola to Hoffa,

and they become friends right away.

Frank Coppola associated with Santo Perrone,

a Detroit Sicilian Mobster

who was known for providing goons and muscle

to either unions or to businesses,

again, playing both sides of the fence

in various union battles in the 1930s.

They come up with a plan.

The Mob can provide muscle to back

this union movement that is struggling.

The odds are against them.

The Mob will offer access to muscle

to defend the workers, to counterattack.

The Teamsters, at this time,

were engaged in a brutal strike

with the Kroger's Supermarket chain,

people being shot,

heads being busted,

and supposedly, Hoffa asked his new friend,

Santo Perrone,

to hold his goons back and not help Kroger

while the Teamsters tried to fight this struggle.

The old adage about Hoffa was that

he wound up going to the Mob