Somebody Got Him

"Somewhere," complained Defense Attorney Maurice Walsh, in what was probably the most unsurprising disclosure of the century, "somebody wants to get Hoffa awfully bad." As everybody knows, that somebody is Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and lately Bobby has been doing right well. Last March a federal court in Chattanooga convicted Teamster Boss James R. Hoffa of jury tampering, fined him $10,000 and sentenced him to eight years in prison. Hoffa was freed on appeal, but he had barely enough time to pick up a change of socks before hustling off to Chicago for another trial. When that one ended last week, after 90 days and 42,000 pages of testimony, Hoffa was nailed again on four counts of fraud and conspiracy. He faces up to 20 years in stir and $13,000 in fines when he is sentenced in the next few weeks.

Hoffa has been tried in federal courts six times--and has been convicted twice --in the last seven years, but none of the others has matched the complexity of the Chicago trial. Six co-defendants and Hoffa were accused, in a 53-page indictment, of mail and wire fraud, fraudulently borrowing $25 million from a Teamster pension fund and siphoning off $1,700,000 of that money for their own use. The money was used to help bail Hoffa out of a failing, mud-fouled retirement project called Sun Valley, near Florida's Cape Kennedy.

Hoffa is certain to appeal his conviction, but in the meantime he has other problems. Such as money. In the last few years, the Teamsters have spent perhaps $1,000,000 defending their beleaguered boss, but in May a move was launched to make Hoffa pay his own legal bills. Hoffa huffed that he would pay "out of my own pocket," but that takes some mighty deep pockets, even with his $75,000-a-year salary and his other well stocked resourses. Tran scripts of the Chicago testimony alone may cost him $19,500.

Hoffa's other headache is how to keep the control of his 1,700,000-member union. He figures to spend much of the next two years in appeals courts, and there have been noisy but thus far ineffectual rumbles of rebellion from Teamster locals across the U.S. "I think he should be man enough to resign," said Philadelphia's Teamster Vice President John Backhus. "He's done too much damage to the union's reputation." Nevertheless, when the 15-man Teamster executive board meets in two weeks, chances are remote that insurgents will be able to muster the ten votes they need to expel Hoffa.

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