Nashville became the pivotal setting for the Test Fleet prosecution of Jimmy Hoffa: the city’s federal courthouse hosted a trial over an old labor-racketeering charge, while the nearby Andrew Jackson Hotel served as Hoffa’s headquarters and a center of activity around the jury. What unfolded there was not simply a courtroom contest. Attempts to influence prospective jurors, reported from within Hoffa’s entourage, turned the trial into the starting point of the jury-tampering case that would ultimately send him to prison.

Trial Setting and Hoffa’s Base

The Test Fleet case was scheduled to begin on October 22, 1962. The charge, brought under the Taft–Hartley Act, concerned a car-hauling company placed in the names of Hoffa’s wife and the wife of the late Owen Bert Brennan. The business activity at issue had ended five years earlier and had already been investigated by the McClellan Committee and the Justice Department. Prosecutors nevertheless argued that the company was part of a longer arrangement to pay Hoffa after he settled a strike favorably for the employer who would do business with it. The stakes at the outset were limited by the charge itself: Test Fleet was a misdemeanor.

Hoffa established his base at the Andrew Jackson Hotel, a short distance down the street from the federal courthouse. His legal operation extended between the courtroom and the hotel. Lawyers attended proceedings, while others remained at the hotel to advise and research; Hoffa also had union allies and friends there, including Chuckie O’Brien, described as his foster son, and Allen Dorfman, his representative on the pension fund. Some members of the nonlegal entourage were Nashville locals who could offer information about prospective jurors during selection, before professional jury advisers had become common. The gathering had multiple purposes, not all confined to the formal defense of the case.

Jury Selection and Reported Approaches

The jury was selected as the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world close to nuclear war. Bobby Kennedy was away from Nashville, assisting his brother during the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Walter Sheridan, who was in the city, later recalled the unsettling contrast between the possibility of nuclear conflict and the prospect that he and Hoffa might die in the local trial drama. The next day, the jury process produced its first reported bribery incident.

An insurance broker on the panel told Judge William E. Miller that a neighbor had offered him $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills to vote for acquittal if selected. The broker’s occupation made him an unexpected potential juror from the defense perspective: insurance professionals were considered especially alert to fraud and therefore difficult for criminal defendants to retain. Judge Miller required the broker to identify his neighbor and then excused him. Other prospective jurors said that a man claiming to be a Nashville Banner reporter named Allen had contacted them to ask their opinions of Hoffa. No reporter by that name worked for the newspaper. The suspected canvassing was treated as an attempt to identify jurors favorable to one side, and the affected prospective jurors were dismissed.

The Hotel, the Informant, and the Two Trials

The hotel’s importance extended beyond Hoffa’s legal headquarters. During the Test Fleet proceedings, Edward Grady Partin served as a guard at the door of Hoffa’s suite while also reporting information to the Get Hoffa Squad through Walter Sheridan. Sheridan acknowledged that Partin had been given a recording device for calls with Hoffa and had been told to watch for efforts to bribe jurors. The government later maintained that Partin had volunteered to attend and had been instructed to report evidence of the separate, ongoing crime of jury tampering, not information about the Test Fleet defense itself.

The book presents the courtroom case as only one of two dramas unfolding over the ensuing weeks. The other was the jury interference that Partin reported while the trial proceeded. After forty-two days, the jury deliberated for three days and repeatedly said it was hopelessly deadlocked. Judge Miller dismissed it, but first addressed the courtroom about the improper contacts that had shadowed jury selection. He announced plans for a grand jury to investigate the incidents and warned that allowing unscrupulous people to corrupt jury proceedings would make the system a mockery. The failed Test Fleet trial had not ended the matter: although its original charge was a misdemeanor, discovered jury tampering could expose Hoffa to felony prosecution.

From Nashville to Chattanooga and the Supreme Court

The jury-tampering case remained tied to Nashville even after the next trial was moved elsewhere. In November 1963, a Nashville police officer reported an attempt to tamper with a member of the jury pool for Hoffa’s upcoming trial. This time, the Get Hoffa Squad obtained a recording. Judge Miller confronted Hoffa’s lead lawyer, Tommy Osborn, with the allegation that he had solicited the officer to arrange a $10,000 juror bribe, divided between selection and a later declaration of deadlock. Osborn first denied the accusation, then acknowledged that the recorded voice was his while maintaining that the officer had suggested the idea and that he had not intended to carry it out. He faced a proceeding that could have disbarred him; he was later convicted in a separate trial and served a short prison sentence.

The jury-tampering trial was postponed until January 1964 and transferred from Nashville to Chattanooga because of unspecified developments in Nashville. Partin’s role in the earlier Nashville proceedings became central to the ensuing constitutional dispute: the defense argued that his presence at the Andrew Jackson Hotel had violated Hoffa’s right to counsel. After Hoffa’s conviction in Chattanooga, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear that novel issue. The Court rejected his appeal on the merits, while Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented and called the government’s covert use of Partin unfair to federal law enforcement. Nashville thus remained crucial to the case even after the trial moved: it was where the alleged jury scheme took shape, where the hotel and courthouse became competing centers of activity, and where the evidence that drove the later prosecution was gathered.