Out of the Trap

When FBI agents arrested squat, tough Teamster James Riddle Hoffa in Washington last March, it looked as if the U.S. Government might have an airtight case against him. Jimmy Hoffa, 44, chairman of the Central States Teamster Conference and most powerful of the International Teamsters Union's vice presidents, had blundered thuddingly into a trap set by the Senate's labor-rackets investigating committee. Committee Counsel Robert F. Kennedy (younger brother of Mas-sachusett's Senator Jack Kennedy) confidently vowed to jump off the Capitol dome if Hoffa wriggled out of the charges brought against him by the federal grand jury: bribery, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice.

Last week, with dazzling help from Washington's cleverest and busiest criminal lawyer, beaming Jimmy Hoffa wriggled free after all. Grinned his lawyer, rich, boyish (37) Edward Bennett Williams:* "I'm going to send Bobby Kennedy a parachute."

Hello to the Champ. Back in February, before Kennedy had any need for a parachute, Wall Street Lawyer John Cye Cheasty, wartime naval intelligence officer, went to him with an astonishing story. Jimmy Hoffa, said Cheasty, had offered him $18,000 to get a job with the Senate labor-rackets committee and serve as Hoffa's spy during the investigation into the gamy dealings of Teamster President Dave Beck. Counsel Kennedy and Arkansas' Committee Chairman John L. McClellan quickly arranged a job for Cheasty, and he agreed to help catch Hoffa in a trap. During the next few weeks, with FBI agents lurking in the background, Cheasty passed Hoffa a clutch of committee documents, and Hoffa turned over bundles of bills in return. In all, it added up to $3,000. When the agents nabbed him one evening in Washington's Dupont Plaza Hotel, Jimmy was carrying in an inside coat pocket a document that Cheasty had handed him a few moments before.

With such evidence stacked against his client, Lawyer Williams took great care in picking jurymen, ended up with a working-class panel of eight Negroes, four whites. Then he proceeded to paint an emotional, vivid-hued contrast between Cheasty and Hoffa. Cheasty, went the Williams defense, was a "liar" and an "informer"; Hoffa was a man who "fought many battles for labor" and "never betrayed a trust." Jimmy himself took the witness stand and, with Williams asking helpful questions, blandly testified that he had hired Cheasty solely as a lawyer to help represent teamsters under investigation. Not until he was arrested, Jimmy testified, did he find that Cheasty held a .committee job.

By playing up the fact that Cheasty once worked for a Florida legislative commission dealing with a Negro bus boycott, Williams skillfully managed to make him appear anti-Negro. Heightening the picture, ex-Heavyweight Champ Joe Louis, a Detroit acquaintance of Fight Fan Hoffa, turned up as a visitor to the courtroom. Every now and then Joe helpfully left his spectator's seat to chat with Hoffa at the defense table. The Justice Department countered by bringing in a Negro attor ney to sit at the prosecution table, but he was no match for Joe.

The jury's verdict: not guilty.

Goodbye to Bets. Beaming Jimmy Hoffa announced right there in the courtroom that he was going to call a teamster meeting in Chicago this week to decide his "future activities in the union." It seemed that, with discredited Dave Beck scheduled to bow out in September, Jimmy Hoffa was about ready to run openly for Beck's $50,000-a-year job as president of the nation's biggest labor union (1,400,000 members).

The verdict that cleared away the biggest roadblock in Jimmy Hoffa's path left McClellan committee Senators dismayed and disgusted. "Joe Louis makes a pretty good defense attorney," snapped Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater. "A miscarriage of justice," rumbled New York Republican Irving Ives, but "Mr. Hoffa's troubles are far from ended." Ahead of Jimmy loom sessions with the McClellan committee, plus a federal trial on charges of having illegal recording devices attached to telephones in his Detroit headquarters. After Hoffa's acquittal last week, a gloomy committee staffer ventured that a forthcoming investigation of teamster links with New York labor racketeers might lead to new charges against Jimmy. "But don't bet on it," the staffer warned. "Don't ever bet on anything again."

* Among his clients: Underworld Overlord Frank Costello, Teamster Boss Dave Beck, the late Senator Joe McCarthy. Among his triumphs: arguing the first libel suit ever won against Columnist Drew Pearson, beating a Post Office ban on Confidential.

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