On the surface, this election resembles the one on Nov.5, except that incumbent Ron Carey and challenger James Hoffa Jr. are bludgeoning each other like a couple of . . . Teamsters. In this campaign, “debate” consists of Carey’s calling Hoffa “a front man for the mob,” then Hoffa’s replying, no, it’s Carey who is mobbed up. “Polling” means phoning the other candidate’s supporters and shouting obscenities. “Mailings” include crude forgeries. And remember, these two are among the most honest Teamster leaders since World War II; Carey’s a reformer, and “Junior” Hoffa, son of the legendary labor boss who mysteriously disappeared in 1975, has never even been investigated by the Feds, which is quite an accomplishment for a Teamster.
This is not his father’s Teamsters union. Only about one third of the more than 1.5 million Teamsters are truckers. Teamsters today also represent everyone from zookeepers to police officers to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck at Disney World. Now in its fiery final days, this election is not just colorful but pivotal for organized labor. Carey’s five years as president have brought aggressive efforts (under federal supervision) to root out corruption; he also engineered the Teamsters’ re-entry into the AFL-CIO, forging a tight bond with labor chief John Sweeney. Together, they have expanded organizing efforts and backed the Democratic Party. Hoffa, a Michigan labor lawyer with little experience in the union his father helped build, offers the prospect of fresh, telegenic leadership with a celebrity gloss, which could boost labor’s profile–or make it a juicier target for management and Republicans angry with Big Labor for spending so much money (albeit unsuccessfully) to win back the Congress.
When the mailed-in ballots are counted on Dec. 10, the Teamsters will enter uncharted territory. “If we don’t win, the Teamsters union is going to go into eclipse,” says Hoffa. “It will probably be merged with some other union down the road.” Carey says that if he loses, the Teamsters would “go right back to the weakness and corruption that have brought so much shame to this union.” Each candidate claims to be more militant than the other. Hoffa charges that Carey sold out the membership on contracts, let the union nearly fall into bankruptcy and is using the Feds to target pro-Hoffa locals on trumped-up charges. Carey says that he has actually recouped mem- bership, and he charges that Hoffa’s negligible Teamster ties and occasional past legal work for management make him an “empty suit” as a union leader.
Economic conditions are fundamentally different from when Hoffa Sr. negotiated national contracts in the 1950s and 1960s that sometimes tripled wages. The union lost 500,000 drivers after trucking deregulation in the early 1980s. By 1991, the federal government had assumed the power to take over locals on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing. But “the nostalgia of members reflects more than just an assumption that somehow the halcyon days are coming back,” says Greg Tarpinian, a New York labor economist and consultant who is supporting Hoffa. “It also reflects a desire for a more united and stronger union.
Of course, if his name were Jimmy Hoffman, the former Michigan State football player wouldn’t be a serious candidate today. It’s a sign of the weakness of the American labor movement–and the strength of the celebrity culture–that an old mystery could so dominate the coverage of an important union election. Had Hoffa’s body ever been found after he disappeared outside a suburban Detroit restaurant, the mythic appeal of his name would almost certainly have faded, regardless of his contributions to the building of a blue-collar middle class. Instead, Hoffa Jr. is a brand name, riding around on occasion with Jack Nicholson (star of the film “Hoffa,” which downplayed the late Teamster chief’s criminality) and instantly recognizable to the rank and file who weren’t even born when his father ruled. The story that Hoffa is buried under the end zone at Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands is almost certainly a myth, but it sure turns out the crowds to see the son.
Hoffa Jr. insists that he and his family (his sister is a judge in St. Louis) still don’t know what happened to Dad, though he has said in the past that the Mafia killed him. Now he will acknowledge only that he has been ““fought tooth and nail by the government; they will not give us any records, which I find startling.’’ Nor will Hoffa concede that his father had mob ties, despite convictions for fraud and jury tampering and voluminous evidence that he took money from–and gave money to–organized-crime figures. “I don’t think he was a crook,” says Hoffa, who was 34 when his father disappeared. “People are now writing books about him, saying he was one of the outstanding labor leaders of the 20th century.”
Junior himself has mostly steered clear of unsavory connections–with one major exception. In his late 20s, Hoffa entered an investment partnership with Allen Dorfman, a notorious Chicago mob figure who was gunned down gangland style in 1983. This wouldn’t be so significant except that Hoffa continues to claim that he never suspected Dorfman was a mobster, despite congressional hearings and publicity indicating otherwise.
Hoffa’s campaign pledge to make the Teamsters “corruption free” (with the help of ex-FBI agents he promises to hire to police the union) would carry more weight if he came to terms more honestly with the darker side of the union’s history. If he doesn’t, he risks letting himself–and the union–be stigmatized. “The name “Hoffa’ stifled our organizing for 20 years,” says Dave Eckstein, a Carey supporter. “If Junior wins, the first thing management will say in any organizing drive is “Look, the mob’s back’.”
But Hoffa, a vivid and effective campaigner, has succeeded at putting the blander Carey on the defensive on everything from the incumbent’s real-estate holdings to charges of Carey’s own mob connections. It turns out that Carey’s father, an original United Parcel Service driver, bequeathed him a few shares of stock he’d bought in the 1930s that are now worth millions. That information should have been disclosed before Carey, himself a onetime UPS driver, negotiated big union contracts with UPS.
One mob informant much cited by Hoffa claimed to investigators that before becoming union president, Carey gave the Mafia a wide berth in his New York local, a practice that nowadays could cost a local Teamsters boss his job. While this has tarnished Carey’s halo, his record during five years in office strongly suggests that he is no friend of la Cosa Nostra. More officially, the federal Independent Review Board (composed of retired federal judges) has cleared Carey of all charges. Even so, Carey has played so fast and loose with his allegation that Hoffa is “in bed with the mob” that Hoffa now says he will bring a slander suit against him.
The incumbent is at once profane and philosophical about his embattled presidency. “I gave them an olive branch and they rammed it up my a–,” Carey says of the union’s old guard. “But obviously if they weren’t screaming, I’d think I was doing something wrong. We dealt a body blow to corruption.” Carey is not above using the Feds for his own political purposes. The government removed Hoffa’s running mate, Bill Hogan of Chicago, from his local for nepotism (18 family members on the payrolls)–but only after he was nominated, thereby providing maximum embarrassment to Hoffa.
Of course, Carey, too, would like to see the government’s supervision of the Teamsters end soon. The Feds charge hundreds of dollars an hour in legal fees when they place locals in trusteeship, leaving the union cleaner but much poorer. As usual, when it comes to the Teamsters, everyone’s got a racket.
title: “A Bare Knuckled Brawl” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-13” author: “Connie Rodriguez”
The two antagonists may talk this week, when Weld comes to Washington to seek support from the Senate. He would like to call on Helms, though the chairman isn’t saying if he will deign to see the governor. ““All I want is a hearing,’’ Weld told NEWSWEEK. ““Anyone who says he doesn’t want to give it to me is a Helms Republican.’’ The betting is that Weld is a lost cause. That doesn’t seem to faze Weld, who is married to the great-granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt and has a Rooseveltian exuberance about life in the arena. Weld would clearly love a fight, the more public the better. ““This,’’ he says, ““is about the future of the Republican Party.''
Actually, it’s about the past. Weld versus Helms stirs up ancient GOP hatreds. Helms and Weld stand on opposite sides of a sociological and ideological divide: Wall Street versus Main Street, mink coat versus cloth coat, Eastern establishment versus the sun belt. A former radio host, Helms has been elected to five terms from North Carolina by appealing to Christian values and, when necessary, manipulating racial fears. Weld is a Brahmin and a libertarian (he is pro-choice and pro-gay rights) who makes no effort to disguise his silver-spoon upbringing. Asked if he had a hard time dealing with losing his 1996 Senate campaign, Weld answered dryly, ““It was not my first defeat. There was the Rhodes scholarship. The Marshall scholarship. The Harvard Law Review. My life is a tangled wreck of failures.’’ He wanted Mexico because, after six years, he has become bored in Boston. In his first term, he had brilliantly dug the state out of a fiscal hole, but lately there has been a lot of time for squash.
The Clinton administration chose Weld for reasons high and low. Appointing a Republican was a noble show of bipartisanship. It also got Weld out of the way so Democrat Joe Kennedy could run for governor in 1998. But two weeks ago Weld sensed that Clinton was waffling. It began to look as if Albright, who has assiduously courted Helms, was trying to find a compromise country for Weld - say, India (the administration refuses to confirm the reports). No deal, said Weld, who speaks Spanish. He held a press conference to accuse Helms of ““ideological extortion.’’ The tough talk shamed the Clintonites into sending up Weld’s name, but no one thinks the president will use up chits with Helms to win an embassy for Weld. Clinton needs the balky chairman on more important matters, like NATO expansion.
GOP senators are not racing to Weld’s defense; they suspect he is grandstanding. And for the far right, this is pay-back time. In 1988 Weld quit as assistant attorney general, accusing his boss, Ed Meese, of corruption. Conservatives were furious. ““Weld is a dilettante. He’s not one of us,’’ says Elliott Abrams, a former Reaganite. ““We went into the Republican Party to drive out people like Weld.’’ But Weld says he is thinking about quitting as governor in order to wage his campaign against Helms full time. And if he quits the governorship and still fails to become ambassador? ““The private sector,’’ he says with a shrug. ““Finance.''
