He is a labor racketeer in Detroit.
He's running drugs out of Cuba.
He's all over the place.
The United States deports Coppola in 1948.
Communist Party is popular in Italy.
The labor unions are gaining strength in Italy,
and the U.S. State Department has a very real concern
that Italy will fall into communist hands.
And back in Sicily, he's a political power broker.
He has unique connections to Italian senators.
His brother is a powerful member of the clergy in Sicily.
Al: Even before the Nazis surrendered,
the Cold War was begining,
and the U.S. government was making deals with criminals
in former Fascism Europe
to help fight a dirty war against communism.
In Italy, this was known as Operation Gladio.
Mafia boss of bosses, Lucky Luciano,
was working with the U.S. government,
and so was Jimmy Hoffa's old friend, Frank Coppola.
Dan: Coppola and Luciano got together
and created a drug network.
From Montreal, there were two routes.
One was straight South into New York,
where it was handled by
a guy from the Bonanno crime family,
a guy named Carmine Galante,
and then across Canada, over the Detroit River into Detroit.
Dr. Buccellato: Congressional committee reports identified
Priziola and Quasarano as two of the most significant
and important drug traffickers in North America.
Dan: And Jimmy Hoffa, in order to give these guys
a facade of legitimacy,
he set up a dummy local for them,
Teamsters local for them to operate out of.
Dr. Buccellato: And the evidence suggests
that for quite some time,
New York Mafiosi were buying their heroin
from the Detroit suppliers.
Did Hoffa know about the narcotics trafficking?
I can't prove that.
I suspect that someone as smart as Hoffa
would not want to know about what was going on,
but I've interviewed retired federal agents from FBN,
and they contend that within their offices,
it was well known that the Teamsters
were protecting these drug traffickers.
Al: In 1952, Dave Beck became
the new president of the Teamsters,
and Jimmy Hoffa became vice president.
This was the peak moment
for the union movement in the United States,
the most members, the strongest voice,
the most power.
Dr. Russell: And government leaders and business leaders
both wanted to curb that.
They wanted to curb the union movement.
And it's crucial to understand that that period
coincided with the rise in labor regulation,
especially from the federal government.
So in the '30s, when Hoffa was coming up,
he was faced with constant competition from other unions,
which forced him to be militant and accountable
to his members.
It forced him to be a good union leader.
By the 1950s, it was all but impossible
for unions to compete against one another.
Al: So now with no outside elements left to fight,
Jimmy Hoffa turns his attentions inward.
He goes after his own president, Dave Beck.
And Hoffa makes a deal with some really bad people,
including a New York racketeer named Johnny Dio.
Dio was infamous.
He had been implicated in an acid attack
on crusading journalist, Victor Riesel,
where acid was thrown in his face
and he was blinded permanently.
George: Did the American labor movement
go off track to a certain degree?
Yeah, for sure, it did.
But did corporate America go off track?
Sure, it did.
It's almost a human condition
when you've got that much power,
that much status, that much wealth.
Al: So meanwhile, Hoffa has an un-yet known nemesis
crisscrossing the country trying to bring him down,
Bobby Kennedy,
who's working for John McClellan,
a senator running a Senate investigation
into labor and union corruption.
Dr. Russell: The McClellan hearings was also a means
through which to attack the union movement
in terms of public relations,
that the movement was full of goons and criminals,
people like Jimmy Hoffa,
and that's really the purpose it served.
Al: Hoffa knew he was next to be called
in front of the Senate,
but he had a plan.
He tried to plant a spy right inside Bobby Kennedy's office.
Dan: Hoffa, trying to keep tabs
on what the Senate committee was doing,
was introduced to a guy named John Cye Cheasty.
Cheasty was an honest guy,
and he went to Bobby Kennedy's people,
and he said, "Listen, Jimmy Hoffa has come to me
"and made me this offer."
Al: So Kennedy and Cheasty set Hoffa up.
When he goes to pass the money off to Cheasty,
the FBI is there to arrest him.
Dan: He gives the documents to Jimmy Hoffa.
Jimmy Hoffa gives him the money.
This is all memorialized on film,
and Hoffa is indicted, charged with extortion.
Keith: He was represented by Edward Bennett Williams,
who was the premiere criminal defense attorney in America.
He, being Williams, arranged to have
Joe Lewis sit in the front row.
And when the jury selection was going on,
he shook hands with Joe Lewis.
It's difficult again today
to go back to realize what a symbol
to the African-American community Joe Lewis was
in the '50s and the '60s,
and this was a carefully orchestrated event
to give Jimmy Hoffa some credibility.
Dan: The jury comes out,
and sure enough, Jimmy Hoffa is acquitted.
Al: August of '57, fresh off his victory at trial,
Jimmy Hoffa is finally called
in front of the McClellan Committee on Labor Corruption,
and he and Bobby Kennedy go at it.
Dan: The hatred between Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa
was of mythical proportions.
Dr. Russell: Kennedy really had
a paternalist image of the world.
He was a wealthy boy who was raised
with this idea of noblesse oblige,
the idea that the wealthy
are obligated to help their lessers.
He had to remove the dictators who were oppressing
the people of the Third World.
He had to remove the dictators from within the unions
who were oppressing the working class,
like Jimmy Hoffa.
Al: I think Bobby Kennedy saw all this as a chance
to get himself some national exposure,
probably at his father, Joe Kennedy's suggestion.
By creating a mythology of Hoffa
being so dangerous to America,
a tactic he learned at the feet of Joe McCarthy,
who was actually a family friend of the Kennedys,
he made himself into a hero protecting America
from the bad men like Jimmy Hoffa.
Dan: Bobby Kennedy thought that Jimmy Hoffa
was an enemy of orthodox society.
He believed that with Hoffa having the ability
to shut down this country with his control
over the trucking union
that he was a national security threat.
and he believed that Hoffa's association
with organized crime
just quadrupled the threat to this country.
Consequently, Jimmy Hoffa was a person
who had to be stopped.
Dr. Russell: He was also a very Christian man,
with the idea that the holy should save and redeem
and uplift those who have not been saved.
He saw the whole world as a group of people
inferior to himself
who needed to be raised to his level.
Dr. Buccellato: I don't think Hoffa ever viewed himself
as a racketeer.
In fact, to the extent that he acknowledged
his relationships with the underworld,
he was actually unapologetic about it.
Robert Kennedy: Did you say,
"That SOB, I'll break his back?"
Jimmy Hoffa: Who?
Robert Kennedy: You.
Jimmy Hoffa: Say it to who?
Robert Kennedy: To anyone.
Did you make that statement after these people
testified before the committee?
Whose back were you going to break, Mr. Hoffa?
Jimmy Hoffa: Figurative speech.
I don't even know who I was talking about,
and I don't know what you're talking about.
Al: As for Bobby, his father, Joe's money and influence,
were the only reason the Kennedy brothers
were such rising stars on the political scene
at such a young age.
Dr. Russell: The federal government really had no business
in intervening in that.
But Bobby Kennedy saw to it anyway,
and in many ways,
he and the Democratic leadership,
with the CIO leadership,
really put a web of constraints about,
around the labor movement
that destroyed labor activism.
Al: Some of his close associates claimed
he would write a check to the boss and archdiocese,
say, for a million dollars.
The archdiocese would take 900,000 in cash
from the parishioners' contributions
and give it to Kennedy.
Kennedy then could write off his million dollar donation,
and he had 900,000 in cash to pass around
and grease palms
to help his two sons get elected.
So it must have been a real bitter pill
for Jimmy Hoffa to swallow
to sit in front of that Senate committee
and be browbeaten (sinister music)
by the likes of the son of Joe Kennedy.
The hearings eventually ended,
and Teamster president, Dave Beck, got indicted
and sent to prison,
and Jimmy Hoffa became Teamsters president.
So now, Jimmy Hoffa has the power,
and it's time to pay back
the people who helped him get there,
and one of the ways he could do that
was with the Teamsters pension fund.
Dan: Which was operated by a hastily thrown together
insurance company called Union Casualty,
which was run by a guy named Paul Dorfman
and his son, Allan Dorfman.
Keith: Huge amounts of the Las Vegas Strip
were financed with loans from the Central State Pension fund
which was under the control of Jimmy Hoffa.