Dismissal of the Hoffa perjury case

The dismissal of the Hoffa perjury case came after a constitutional ruling stripped the prosecution of the wiretap evidence on which its indictment depended. The case had grown out of allegations that Jimmy Hoffa lied to the McClellan Committee about bugging incidents; when the recordings and evidence derived from them could no longer be used, the perjury charge was dismissed. The reversal turned a seemingly available fallback prosecution into a case without admissible proof.

The Indictment and Its Evidence

The perjury charge was separate from the pending federal indictment over the bugging itself. That earlier case concerned Hoffa’s hiring of a friend of Johnny Dio to wiretap and bug Teamsters offices, an effort to discover whether union officers were feeding information to the McClellan Committee. Owen Bert Brennan, Hoffa’s partner in the Test Fleet and Sun Valley ventures, was his coconspirator in the bugging offense. Bobby Kennedy brought the Washington perjury indictment on the allegation that Hoffa had lied about the incidents in his committee testimony.

The distinction between the two prosecutions mattered. The bugging case addressed the conduct of arranging surveillance; the perjury case depended on proving a false statement through conversations captured by a separate wiretap. The prosecution’s case against Hoffa therefore rested not only on what the recordings appeared to show, but also on whether the recordings could lawfully be used.

From Wiretap Trials to Dismissal

A New York City jury first considered the bugging charges in late 1957 and deadlocked eleven to one. At the retrial, a juror reported an attempted bribe, was replaced by an alternate, and the jury found Hoffa not guilty. That acquittal did not immediately end the government’s effort: Bobby Kennedy still had the perjury indictment, which relied on wiretapped conversations between Johnny Dio and Hoffa.

The wiretap had been authorized under New York State law and was valid under the law then in force. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state-sanctioned wiretaps of this kind were unconstitutional. The ruling also barred not only the intercepted material itself but evidence derived from it under the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine. With the central evidentiary source excluded, the prosecution had no admissible evidence left with which to pursue the perjury charge, and the indictment was dismissed.

Consequences and Historical Significance

The result was a sharp contrast: Hoffa was acquitted of the bugging charges, while the separate perjury case ended because the constitutional ruling removed the evidence required to try it. The dismissal was not a finding that the alleged lie had been disproved; it reflected the legal limits on how the government could prove its case. In the book’s account, the ruling exemplifies how a change in constitutional doctrine could undo a prosecution even when the underlying wiretap had been authorized under existing state law.

Sheeran later recalled that after the wiretap trial people joked that no parachute could have saved Bobby Kennedy when he jumped off the Capitol. The remark captures the public reversal as Sheeran remembered it: Kennedy’s campaign against Hoffa had lost the bugging trial, and the remaining perjury indictment soon disappeared as well. The account presents the dismissal not as a final resolution of every allegation surrounding Hoffa, but as the point at which this prosecution could no longer proceed.