U.S. Department of Justice

The U.S. Department of Justice is presented as the institutional engine of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign against organized crime: a department that brought federal investigators and prosecutors into a coordinated effort, made Jimmy Hoffa its leading target, and used informants and surveillance in cases where the boundary between investigation and defense access became contested. Its record in the book is not simply one of prosecutions. It is also a story of concentrated executive direction, courtroom disputes over investigative methods, and a campaign whose momentum changed after the assassination of JFK.

A Department Reoriented Against Organized Crime

After JFK won the presidency by a narrow margin, he appointed his brother Bobby Kennedy attorney general. The appointment placed the U.S. Department of Justice, the United States attorneys, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the attorney general’s authority. The book describes the decision to make the department’s mission the eradication of organized crime as a historic commitment of the office.

On February 22, 1961, two days after taking office, Bobby Kennedy persuaded all twenty-seven federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, to pool information about gangsters and organized crime. The coordination made the department’s effort broader than a series of separate criminal cases: federal agencies were to share information, while the Justice Department and the FBI concentrated attention on named targets. The IRS commissioner gave major racketeers top priority for tax investigations, including saturation investigations and the use of available electronic equipment and other technical aids.

Bobby Kennedy personally urged department staff around the country to focus on organized crime. He developed and continually expanded a target list for the FBI and the Justice Department, and sought laws that would make it easier for the FBI to bug targets and use wiretaps in court. He also obtained broader authority to grant immunity to cooperating witnesses. These measures joined investigative resources to prosecutorial strategy: surveillance and cooperation were not incidental tools, but part of the federal campaign’s operating method.

The Get Hoffa Squad and the Nashville Investigation

Within the Justice Department, Bobby Kennedy formed a team of lawyers and investigators called the Get Hoffa Squad. He chose its members himself and placed Walter Sheridan, his former right-hand man during the McClellan Committee hearings, in charge. The squad’s narrow mandate made Jimmy Hoffa the campaign’s especially prominent target. By the time the Test Fleet trial approached, the government had already tried Hoffa in three jury trials without convicting him; the book notes suspicions of jury tampering in those earlier proceedings.

The Test Fleet case was scheduled for October 22, 1962, in Nashville. It concerned a car-hauling company put in the names of Hoffa’s wife and the late Owen Bert Brennan’s wife, and activity that had ended five years earlier and had already been investigated by the McClellan Committee and the Justice Department. The government alleged that the enterprise formed part of a long-range plan to pay Hoffa after he had settled a strike favorably for an employer who would then do business with the company. The charge against Hoffa was a misdemeanor; proof of jury tampering could bring felony charges and raise the stakes substantially.

The squad’s methods became a central issue. Edward Grady Partin went to Nashville and served as a guard at the door of Hoffa’s suite. Sheridan acknowledged that the team supplied Partin with a recording device for calls with Hoffa and instructed him to watch for attempts to bribe jurors. During jury selection, an insurance broker reported that a neighbor had offered him $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills to vote for acquittal if selected. The judge excused him after requiring him to identify the neighbor. Prospective jurors also reported calls from someone claiming to be a Nashville Banner reporter named Allen, although the paper had no reporter by that name; the tainted prospects were dismissed. The incidents exposed the jury to attempted outside interference even as the government’s own use of an informant later became a defense challenge.

Partin, the Chattanooga Trial, and Appellate Review

In the later Chattanooga jury-tampering trial, Partin’s role came into the open on the final day, after nearly three months of proceedings. The defense argued that prosecutors had planted him inside Hoffa’s circle and that this violated Hoffa’s constitutional right to counsel. The government maintained that Partin had volunteered to attend the Nashville trial and had reported to Sheridan, not to the prosecutors. According to the government’s account, Partin had been asked to watch for evidence of the continuing crime of jury tampering, not to gather information about the Test Fleet case or Hoffa’s defense.

After a four-hour hearing, the judge accepted the government’s account and allowed Partin to testify before the jury. Partin connected Hoffa to specific jury-tampering attempts by recounting Hoffa’s boasts about efforts that had happened or were about to happen. In his closing argument, prosecutor James Neal characterized the Nashville conduct as a grave assault on the jury system and argued that investigators had checked Partin’s account against events. Hoffa’s lawyer James Haggerty called the case a frame-up and attacked Sheridan as the architect of the prosecution’s plot. The trial therefore turned on two competing questions: whether the government had improperly penetrated the defense camp, and whether Partin’s testimony established Hoffa’s role in jury interference.

Hoffa appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the constitutional question of whether Partin’s presence at the Andrew Jackson Hotel had violated the right to counsel. The prosecution team was uncertain about the result after oral argument. The Court ultimately ruled against Hoffa on the merits. Justice William Brennan joined the majority opinion, written by Justice Potter Stewart; Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented, calling the government’s clandestine use of Partin an affront to fair federal law enforcement. The decision left the conviction standing while preserving a sharp disagreement over the propriety of the government’s method.

Continuity, Institutional Limits, and the Pardon

The assassination of JFK interrupted the campaign at its highest level. Bobby Kennedy was in Washington, chairing a two-day meeting of federal attorneys on the next phase of the organized-crime effort, when he learned during a lunch break that his brother had been shot in Dallas. The chief of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Section later described the program as stopping at that moment. The book distinguishes that loss of political momentum from the department’s remaining work on Hoffa’s pending cases: Bobby Kennedy stayed attorney general until those trials were over, and the Get Hoffa Squad remained intact under Sheridan as supervisor and chief strategist. The squad anticipated back-to-back trials in Chattanooga and Chicago in 1964.

The department’s role also appears in the exceptional route taken by Hoffa’s 1971 pardon petition. Morris Shenker filed it at the White House on December 16, bypassing the ordinary process through the Justice Department, which would have sought input from prosecutors, the FBI, and the sentencing judges. Attorney General John Mitchell marked the petition approved. The episode reveals a contrast with the earlier campaign: an institution that had coordinated federal resources to pursue Hoffa was now bypassed in a consequential decision about his release.

Later Forensic Evidence and the Limits of Confirmation

The Justice Department’s investigative reach reappears through the FBI Laboratory’s examination of flooring from the house where Frank Sheeran said he killed Hoffa. After Fox News arranged an initial Luminol examination that found eight small indications of blood along a trail from the vestibule toward the kitchen, the Bloomfield Township Police Department removed sections of flooring and sent them to the FBI laboratory. In February 2005, the laboratory reported human male blood but found that its DNA did not match Hoffa’s. Oakland County prosecutor David Gorcyca said the result neither corroborated nor refuted Sheeran’s confession. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden, by contrast, regarded the confession as supported by the forensic evidence and emphasized that the DNA finding did not speak against it.

The department’s institutional footprint thus extends from coordinated intelligence and high-profile prosecutions to later forensic testing, but the evidence does not collapse into a single verdict about its methods or results. The Supreme Court upheld Hoffa’s conviction while Warren objected to the informant operation; the FBI laboratory identified human blood without identifying it as Hoffa’s. Across those episodes, the department’s power is shown as substantial but mediated by judges, constitutional claims, political change, and evidence that can support competing interpretations.