COLUMN ONE : Hoffa: Will the Son Also Rise? : 'Jimmy Jr.' wants to become Teamsters chief and revive his father's legacy. Critics say he is running on a family name that represents a history of corruption.

By DONALD W. NAUSS

Nov. 8, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

FREMONT, Calif. — “Jimmy Hoffa was many things to many people.”

--James P. Hoffa, eulogizing his father, July 30, 1995

Dozens of big rigs, engines humming and lights ablaze in the pre-dawn chill, are lined up for loading outside the Allied-Sysco warehouse as a short, stocky figure emerges from the darkness.

Moving into the dim warehouse surrounded by a blue-jacketed retinue, he greets the bleary-eyed workers with a firm handshake: “Hi. I’m Jimmy Hoffa. I’m running for Teamsters president. I need your vote.”

Hoffa, who has his father’s steely blue eyes but not his rock-hard physique, steps onto a raised wooden pallet that serves as a makeshift stage and bellows out his message: “We are in a financial crisis! We have no strike benefits! We have poor contracts! We have to do better. I am going to heal this union.”

This is Hoffa territory and the crowd responds warmly. Some purchase Hoffa buttons, T-shirts and caps, while others pledge their support in next year’s election against Ron Carey, the incumbent president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

“We need to get this union strong and back together,” said Ron Peterson, a trucker for 25 years. “His dad did it once and his son can do it again.”

Endorsements like these are what give James Phillip Hoffa--the 54-year-old son of the infamous labor leader--hope that he can reclaim the office his father once held and died trying to regain. James R. Hoffa is presumed to have been murdered by the Mafia in 1975.

Much has changed in the two decades since. Deregulation has roiled the trucking business. Labor’s influence has declined. The financially troubled, corruption-riddled Teamsters operate under government oversight. The union has lost a third of its members. A civil war divides its ranks.

The closely watched election, scheduled for November, 1996, amounts to a referendum on the federal government’s effort to cleanse the Teamsters and to plant democracy among its members. It’s also important to the struggling U.S. labor movement, which desperately needs a strong, united Teamsters union behind its social and legislative agenda. With 1.4 million members, the Teamsters are the nation’s largest private-sector union.

The bare-knuckle race pits two strong-willed men against each other. Steeped in Teamsters’ history, Hoffa is on a personal crusade to resurrect the power and good name of the union and his family; Carey is trying to restore his reputation as a reformer above reproach.

The younger Hoffa is a soft-spoken labor lawyer whose name is of such mythic proportions that its mere mention still sets off charged debates. He is “Jimmy Jr.” to his backers, “Junior Hoffa” to his detractors.

For some, the Hoffa name evokes a romantic memory of a time when Teamsters were well-paid kings of the road with the power to cripple commerce nationwide with a single strike.

To others, the name represents a legacy of corruption and intimidation that led to sweetheart deals with employers, pension fund loans to mobsters and excessive salaries for union leaders.

“Hoffa means corruption,” said Ken Paff, national organizer for the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a reform group that backs Carey. Hoffa, he said, is a puppet for the union’s anti-reform “old guard.”

Hoffa dismisses such attacks as partisan smears. “My father was a great man,” he says. “In the Teamsters family, the Hoffa name is revered. The Hoffa name means a strong union.”

Influence Lives On

The walls of Jimmy Hoffa’s sparse union office in Detroit are adorned with a portrait of his father and a poster from the film “Hoffa,” which starred Jack Nicholson.

“It wasn’t a very good movie,” his son said. “I didn’t like the depiction of my father. He came across as a tough, profane guy. He was charismatic. He was a warm person.”

The senior Hoffa was all of those things. Son of an Indiana mine worker, he dropped out of junior high school but rose to prominence as a Detroit labor organizer. A tough negotiator popular with members, he became the Teamsters president in 1957.

During his 10-year reign, he won hefty wage and benefit increases. Even today many veteran Teamsters regard him as a working-class hero. “He may have done some bad things, but what he did for us workers was good,” said Gary Hern, a trucker for Consolidated Freightways in Oakland.

But Hoffa’s extensive underworld ties drew scrutiny. As U.S. attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy targeted him for investigation, and he was convicted of jury tampering and fraud. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 1967, but the term was commuted by President Richard Nixon in 1971.

He was trying to regain control of the Teamsters when he vanished from a restaurant parking lot in a Detroit suburb. Federal investigators believe he was slain on orders from New Jersey mobsters who wanted to keep in place his more pliable successor, Frank Fitzsimmons. Hoffa’s son says his father’s body probably was disposed of at a slaughterhouse.

On July 30, the 20th anniversary of Hoffa’s disappearance, his family held a memorial service attended by about 600 friends and union members. “This was the funeral he never had,” said his son. “The whole idea was closure.”

But for the Teamsters, Hoffa’s influence lives on. Going back 40 years, four of the Teamsters’ eight presidents have been indicted, with three (including Hoffa) going to jail. Corruption was so deep that in 1988 the federal government filed a massive racketeering lawsuit alleging the Teamsters had formed a “devil’s pact” with the mob.

To avoid a federal trusteeship, the union leadership signed a consent decree in 1989 allowing the first direct presidential election and setting up an independent Investigative Review Board to root out corruption.

Carey, a former United Parcel Service driver, was elected in 1991 on a promise of reform. He sold the union’s jets and cut his salary by a third, to $150,000. Under Carey, 52 locals have been put in trusteeship and more than 400 Teamsters have been ousted for wrongdoing. He has made the Teamsters’ voice heard on Capitol Hill and has not hesitated to strike big companies, such as Ryder Systems.

Even so, Carey has failed to unite the union. Mutterings of flagging clout, lost membership and financial mismanagement have left him vulnerable. “I cannot stand by and let the union my father built be destroyed,” said Hoffa.

Tough Adversary

As a kid, Hoffa spent many Saturdays at the union hall as his father talked to members and listened to their problems. On Sundays, his father would take the family for a drive, but work often intervened.

“Invariably we would wind up on a picket line somewhere and I would stand by the fire barrel with my father,” he recalled.

Raised on Detroit’s west side, the younger Hoffa was an honors student and all-star football player. He attended Michigan State University, where he played football and studied economics. Summers were spent working as a Teamster along the Detroit River.

As his father’s legal woes mounted, Hoffa became intrigued by the legal system. He graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1966. The following year his father entered federal prison. His son visited him every weekend and worked on political and legal efforts to free him.

Soon after, he opened a law office in Detroit, thriving on a $30,000-a-year salary provided by union locals loyal to his father. After his father vanished, Hoffa settled into a comfortable upper-middle-class life, financed in part by a $600,000 inheritance from his father’s estate. He and his wife, Virginia, who was his college girlfriend, bought a $200,000 home in a wooded subdivision in nearby Troy and sent their two sons to private schools.

As a lawyer, he mostly handled routine workers’ compensation cases and grievances but also was involved in contract negotiations and federal court cases. Even opposing attorneys admit he is a tough adversary.

“He learned how to fight well from his father,” said Detroit labor lawyer Barbara Harvey, who has represented dissident Teamsters against Hoffa. “But I don’t think he always has the members’ interest at heart.”

Hoffa quit his law practice in 1993 to take a $50,000-a-year job as executive assistant to Larry Brennan, president of the Teamsters’ Joint Council 43. This provided him the needed springboard to launch his presidential bid.

Name Recognition

With the election still a year away, the Hoffa campaign is already in full swing and long-term Teamster observers believe he has at least an even chance of winning.

The strategy is clear: Use name recognition to attract media attention and put Carey on the defensive by attacking his record. “We want to make it a referendum on Carey’s presidency,” said Hoffa’s campaign manager, Tom Pazzi. “They want to make it a referendum on what Hoffa’s dad did in 1967.”

During a recent five-day swing through Northern California, Hoffa rattled off a list of complaints against Carey: He has nearly bankrupted the union. He let the strike fund lapse. He is power-hungry and uses his office to punish political opponents. He has negotiated weak contracts, such as the 1994 national freight contract that allowed shippers to increase rail use.

“Carey is a disaster,” Hoffa said. “He is incompetent.”

Carey retorts that he inherited the union’s financial problems and that he has made strides in repairing the damage. This year, for the first time since 1983, the union’s expenditures will not exceed income, he said.

The strike fund went bust in 1991 because the Teamsters’ leadership increased the weekly benefit from $55 to $200 with no way to fund it. Carey proposed a dues increase to restore the fund, but the membership rejected it.

He restored the $55 benefit recently with savings from cutbacks elsewhere, including $11 million from the elimination of the union’s four area conferences, which coordinated regional activities of the joint councils and were bases of the younger Hoffa’s support.

Carey said he increased organizing activities and developed corporate campaigns to bring more pressure on employers. Any contract concessions only come in exchange for other benefits, such as greater job security, he said.

Most important, Carey said, he is restoring the union’s integrity and image by rooting out corruption. But his initiatives are often resisted by the old guard. “Everything I do, they try to undermine it,” he said.

Alleged Mob Ties

While questions have been raised about his own integrity, Carey does not hesitate to link Hoffa with corruption. When it comes to Hoffa, Carey believes the apple has not fallen far from the tree.

“You have to look at the people who surround him,” he said. “The people who are on his slate tell a larger story of nepotism, multiple salaries.”

Carey charges that Hoffa has taken money from mobsters. The allegation comes from a book written by Frank Ragano, a lawyer for Hoffa’s father. Ragano wrote that he collected $5,000 each from mobsters Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcellos for a wedding gift for the younger Hoffa--who, he said, got a total of $200,000 at his wedding.

“That’s a bad joke,” said Robert Bach, Hoffa’s college roommate, best man and stockbroker. He added that the cash gifts totaled less than $20,000.

Hoffa denies ever receiving any mob money.

Carey also brings up Hoffa’s investment in a limited partnership with Allen Dorfman, an alleged mob associate who steered union pension fund loans to gangsters. Hoffa said Dorfman--assassinated in 1983--was one of several partners in the investment, which was made more than 25 years ago. He said he had no contact with Dorfman and sold his interest after a year for a $5,000 loss.

Questions are also raised by Carey about Hoffa associates Richard Leebove and George Geller, former followers of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche.

In turn, it was Geller, a lawyer who has represented Hoffa, and Leebove, who handles public relations for Hoffa’s campaign, who raised corruption charges against Carey. Their efforts, in part, prompted the Investigative Review Board--the three-member panel headed by former federal Judge Frederick Lacey--to probe allegations that Carey had organized crime ties.

The most serious charge was based on statements from Alphonse D’Arco, former acting head of the Lucchese crime family and now a government informant in the federal witness protection program. D’Arco told investigators that Carey was in league with New York’s Mafia families.

The IRB issued an 85-page report in mid-1994 that cleared Carey of any wrongdoing. But questions persist, largely because of a letter Lacey sent--before the conclusion of the probe--that chided an investigator for trying to bring Carey down. Geller and Leebove alleged the investigation was “a whitewash.”

Carey says the matter is closed. “I’ve been cleared,” he said.

Divided Membership

After a day of campaigning, Jimmy Hoffa circulates among a friendly crowd of 250 Teamsters, who have shelled out at least $50 a piece to attend a fund-raiser at Local 70 in Oakland.

He may not have his father’s presence, but Hoffa can deliver a rousing speech. With a faded portrait of his father behind him, he recites Carey’s sins and then evokes his father’s spirit.

“My poor father must be sitting in heaven saying, ‘What the hell is going on!’ ” he shouts, as the crowd rises and cadenced chants of “Hoffa! Hoffa!” fill the auditorium.

It’s as if the room is in a time warp going back three decades to when the elder Hoffa first came here and won over the skeptical union leaders with the force of his personality.

But this is 1995 and the Hoffa magic no longer works everywhere. Even in his hometown, Ron Owens, president of Local 299, the old Hoffa power base, is running on the Carey slate. Many rank-and-filers are too young to remember the elder Hoffa. Others are not impressed with the son.

“Carey is doing a good job,” said Eddie Nott, a UPS driver in downtown Detroit. “All Hoffa has going for him is his father’s name.”

Still, it is a name so widely recognized and one that is putting a scare into Carey and his backers. And Hoffa, motivated by the memory of his father, would like nothing more than to have a chance to prove that he can restore the Teamsters’ strength and pride.

“Jimmy will have to prove himself on his own,” said his sister, Barbara Hoffa Crancer, a state court judge in St. Louis, who believes her brother will win. “The times are different, the challenges are different.”