John Mitchell

John Mitchell, President Nixon’s attorney general, occupies a consequential place in Frank Sheeran’s account of Jimmy Hoffa’s attempts to leave prison and regain power in the Teamsters. Sheeran presents Mitchell not only as a senior government official but as a direct participant in the private transactions surrounding Hoffa’s pardon: a man who accepted a suitcase, supplied an affidavit, and later carried a warning to Hoffa through Sheeran. The account’s central tension is the distance between Mitchell’s public authority and the clandestine political dealings attributed to him.

Attorney General and the appeal

Mitchell enters the story first amid the aftermath of Hoffa’s unsuccessful appeal. Nine days after Justice Potter Stewart issued the Supreme Court opinion against Hoffa, publisher William Loeb wrote Stewart that an unnamed high government official had told him Bobby Kennedy used illegal wiretaps in his pursuit of Hoffa. Loeb did not disclose in the letter that he had been promised a large loan from the Teamsters pension fund, which he later received. The book does not identify Mitchell as the official who made the allegation or as a participant in arranging Loeb’s letter; that episode instead establishes the atmosphere of pressure and influence around Hoffa’s legal fight.

Mitchell’s own documented role in this part of the narrative emerges later, in the pardon maneuvering. While Hoffa was imprisoned, attorney Morris Shenker represented him in pursuing a presidential pardon, alongside work on his parole strategy. The legal process described in the book would eventually place Mitchell, as attorney general, at the point where an exceptional petition could be advanced outside the ordinary channels.

The prison and the private channels

Hoffa entered the Federal Correctional Institution, Lewisburg, on March 7, 1967. Prison rules sharply limited contact: inmates had three hours of monthly visits from approved nonlawyer relatives, could write only to seven listed relatives and lawyers, had no telephone privileges, and had their mail screened. Union officers could neither visit nor write to Hoffa. Active-case lawyers, however, were not subject to the same visitation limit. Hoffa’s son, a union lawyer, could visit as often as weekly, while Frank Ragano, Shenker, and Bill Bufalino also visited in professional capacities. These visits created a sanctioned route for legal and political communication into and out of the prison.

Sheeran recalls a less formal arrangement operating alongside it. Hoffa would arrange supposed job interviews for young inmates who could not use their allotted visiting time, bringing them to meet Sheeran in the dining hall while Hoffa consulted with a lawyer at a neighboring table. That setting matters to Mitchell’s story because Sheeran places his own contacts with government officials within the same prison landscape: lawyers, union business, and political negotiation could converge around an ordinary visitation table.

Suitcases and the pardon

Sheeran recounts driving from Philadelphia to the Washington Hilton with a bag in his Lincoln. He had installed a seventy-five-gallon auxiliary gas tank in the trunk, a precaution against having to stop if federal agents followed him. At the hotel, he carried the bag into the lobby himself and waited in an easy chair. Mitchell arrived, sat beside him, and made ordinary conversation about the weather, the drive, and Sheeran’s union position. Sheeran said he was president of Teamsters Local 326 in Wilmington, a post he had regained in the 1970 election by a three-to-one margin. Mitchell wished him a safe drive back to the union hall, then said, “Nothing comes cheap.”

Mitchell stood and took the suitcase. When Sheeran asked whether he wanted to go somewhere to count the money, Mitchell replied, “If I had to count it, they wouldn’t have sent you.” Sheeran later heard that Mitchell was also putting pressure on Edward Partin, whom the Justice Department was pursuing on other matters. He believed the money was intended to help with parole or a pardon, while technically half a million dollars was for President Nixon’s reelection. The account does not establish a precise allocation between those purposes, but it makes the political and personal stakes of the delivery explicit.

On December 16, 1971, Shenker filed a pardon petition at the White House. Rather than follow the established route through the Justice Department, prosecutors, the FBI, and the sentencing judges, the petition was marked approved by Mitchell. Shortly before Christmas, Sheeran says he visited Hoffa at Lewisburg while Shenker was there with the pardon papers. A guard looked the other way as the papers were passed to Sheeran, who read them at another table. He recalls that they authorized Hoffa’s early release but said nothing about a bar on running for union office until 1980. Sheeran says he would have noticed such a provision and that those present expected Hoffa to take a Florida vacation before returning to union activity. In this telling, the prison lunchroom’s relief was founded on the belief that Hoffa was getting what he had paid for.

The affidavit and the reversal

Sheeran describes a second delivery later that year. After a call from Hoffa, he met the Redhead at the Branding Iron Restaurant and received a suitcase containing $270,000. He drove to the Market Inn, where an unknown man directed him to a house. Mitchell answered the door; Sheeran handed over the bag and received an envelope containing an affidavit. This time, he recalls, there was no small talk. Sheeran drove back to Philadelphia, met Russell Bufalino at a restaurant, and says Bufalino read the affidavit and took care of it afterward.

In the sworn statement, Mitchell denied that he or, to his knowledge, any Justice Department official had initiated or suggested including restrictions on Hoffa’s labor activities in the presidential commutation. He also denied that President Nixon had proposed such restrictions to him or, to his knowledge, to another department official during his tenure. The affidavit thus sits in sharp contrast with the earlier account of money delivered to Mitchell in connection with the pardon effort and with Sheeran’s claim that the first pardon papers contained no union-office restriction. The book records the contradiction without resolving it through independent testimony from Mitchell.

A warning about Hoffa’s return

By 1974, Hoffa was suing to remove the restriction that kept him from union leadership. Sheeran says he had offered to join the lawsuit as an active Teamster and had discussed supporting Hoffa’s attempt to run for the presidency in 1976. In the same period, Hoffa’s allies were working to preserve a route back into the union through Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit: if the restriction were removed, Hoffa could become a business agent and qualify as a delegate to the convention.

Around May or June, Mitchell appeared without warning at Sheeran’s Teamsters Local 326 office near the train station. He said he had only a minute and asked Sheeran to convey a message: “Tell Jimmy I was asking for him. Tell him to just enjoy his pension and play with his grandchildren and to forget about running.” Sheeran answered that he would pass it on. The message’s courteous phrasing does not soften its practical meaning: Mitchell was urging Hoffa to give up the very political return that the lawsuit and the Local 299 plan sought to make possible. In Sheeran’s narrative, Mitchell’s role therefore shifts from facilitating Hoffa’s release to communicating the limits placed on Hoffa’s ambitions. The same official associated with the pardon and the disputed restriction becomes the bearer of a warning against challenging it.