Walter Sheridan

Walter Sheridan was Robert F. Kennedy’s right-hand man in the campaign against Jimmy Hoffa, but his importance in the account extends beyond his proximity to Kennedy. As head of the Get Hoffa Squad, Sheridan connected investigators, prosecutors, and their informant Edward Grady Partin, while his later book made him a chronicler—and, in the telling of Hoffa’s defenders, a participant—in the legal battle. His career in these passages is shaped by a persistent contest over what counts as legitimate investigation: gathering evidence of ongoing jury tampering, or intruding on the defense; exposing corruption, or pursuing a political enemy.

Position and Public Record

Sheridan worked closely with Robert F. Kennedy during the investigations of Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. His role was not confined to the courtroom: he headed the Get Hoffa Squad, coordinated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and served as an intermediary for Partin. The account also presents him as a participant in the political transition that followed Robert F. Kennedy’s departure from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Sheridan later wrote The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, published in 1972. Its account of Hoffa’s dealings with the McClellan Committee became significant not only as a record of earlier events but as a fresh judgment on Hoffa’s reliability. The book appeared while Hoffa was alive and had recently left prison, and its disclosures, as the book’s narrator argues, carried implications for how Hoffa’s associates might assess him.

Hoffa and the McClellan Committee

Sheridan’s book reported that, when the McClellan Committee was formed in early 1957 to investigate then-Teamsters president Dave Beck, Hoffa secretly supplied Robert F. Kennedy with information about Beck’s wrongdoing. According to Sheridan, Hoffa arranged for one of Beck’s own attorneys to pass the information to Kennedy. Sheridan also wrote that Hoffa had the same attorney arrange a meeting at which Hoffa would offer to cooperate with the committee.

The narrator treats those disclosures as consequential and ethically troubling. In his analysis, the account suggests that Beck’s attorney secretly breached a duty to a client, and that Kennedy’s acceptance of the information could have warranted scrutiny. These are the narrator’s implications drawn from Sheridan’s sentences, not a finding of an ethics proceeding. The passage further argues that, in the late 1950s, Hoffa’s willingness to sacrifice Beck to the investigation could serve his own interests: Beck was the committee’s target, while Hoffa could position himself as a source of useful information.

The later consequences were different. The book’s description of Hoffa as a betrayer, combined with Hoffa’s subsequent public threat to expose mob influence in the Teamsters pension fund, is presented as damaging to the trust on which his relationships with powerful criminal figures depended. The narrator speculates that those men would have noticed Sheridan’s account when it appeared. That retrospective interpretation gives the book a second function: it records a strategy that may have helped Hoffa in the committee’s early phase while preserving evidence that could later be used against his standing among allies.

The Cheasty Sting and Partin’s Reports

In February 1957, Hoffa approached New York investigator John Cye Cheasty with an offer: take a job with the committee and report its activities to him. The proposed payment was $24,000 over a year, at $2,000 a month, and Hoffa provided $1,000 toward Cheasty’s expenses. Cheasty instead reported the attempted bribery. Robert F. Kennedy hired him at an annual salary of $5,000, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation equipped the operation with microphones and cameras. When Cheasty later arranged an exchange of committee documents for another installment, Hoffa handed him $2,000 near DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. and was arrested with the documents. The account identifies Sheridan’s later work with the Get Hoffa Squad, but does not assign him a direct operational role in this particular sting.

Sheridan’s documented role becomes direct in the account of Partin. After Partin reported that Hoffa had discussed killing Robert F. Kennedy, Sheridan asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to administer a lie-detector test. Partin passed, and Sheridan reported the alleged threat to Kennedy. The report was consequential enough to reach President John F. Kennedy, who privately told journalist Ben Bradlee that Hoffa was plotting against his brother. Bradlee did not publish the story after Robert F. Kennedy asked him not to, concerned that publicity would frighten potential witnesses in the organized-crime cases he was supervising.

During the Test Fleet trial in Nashville, Sheridan acknowledged that Partin had been given a recording device to tape any calls with Hoffa. Sheridan also instructed Partin to watch for attempts to bribe jurors. The account places those instructions against an unusual background: the trial began during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Sheridan later wrote that he had gone to sleep thinking about both nuclear war and the possibility that he and Hoffa might die in Nashville.

The first reported jury-tampering incident involved an insurance broker on the prospective-juror panel. He told Judge Miller 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. Other prospective jurors said a man claiming to be a reporter for the Nashville Banner, named Allen, had contacted them about their views on Hoffa; the account states that no such reporter worked there, and the tainted prospects were dismissed. Sheridan’s retrospective description presents the insurance broker’s report as his first encounter with jury tampering in the case, while the episode itself shows the evidence emerging publicly in court.

Partin at Trial and the Dispute over Fairness

Partin’s role became the central procedural controversy in the later Chattanooga jury-tampering trial. He was kept out of sight in a cabin on Lookout Mountain and appeared as the government’s final witness, three months into the proceedings, when Hoffa’s defense seemed to be holding firm. The defense objected that Partin had been planted inside Hoffa’s circle and that his presence violated Hoffa’s constitutional right to counsel.

The government’s account, as reported in the narrative, was that Partin went to the trial voluntarily, did not report to prosecutors, and instead communicated with Sheridan, a nonlawyer and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent. Sheridan had asked him to watch for evidence of the continuing crime of jury tampering. Partin reported such evidence to Sheridan, who relayed it to prosecutors, who in turn reported it to the judge. The government also maintained that Partin had not discussed with Sheridan anything he heard in Nashville about the Test Fleet case or Hoffa’s defense in that case.

After a four-hour hearing, the judge accepted the government’s account and allowed Partin to testify. Partin connected Hoffa to particular jury-bribery efforts by recounting Hoffa’s boasts about attempts that had occurred or were about to occur. Prosecutor James Neal argued in closing that the government had checked Partin’s statements and found that events he described as already happening, and those he predicted, did happen. Hoffa’s lead attorney called the prosecution a frame-up and accused Sheridan of engineering a plot on Robert F. Kennedy’s behalf. The contrast was stark: Sheridan’s investigative relationship with Partin supplied the testimony that strengthened the prosecution, and at the same time gave the defense a basis to question whether the investigation had crossed a constitutional line.

Appeals, Accusations, and the Chicago Case

The Chattanooga appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court on the question of Hoffa’s right to counsel and Partin’s presence at the Andrew Jackson Hotel. Sheridan later wrote that the prosecution team was uncertain how the justices would rule after oral argument. The Court ultimately rejected Hoffa’s appeal on the merits. Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented, calling the government’s clandestine use of Partin an affront to fairness in federal law enforcement. Sheridan’s account thus records both the government’s defense of its methods and a forceful judicial objection to them.

The dispute continued in a motion alleging government wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping. A freelance wiretapper, Benjamin Nichols, claimed in an affidavit that Sheridan had paid him to bug jurors’ phones in Chattanooga. The account points out a basic problem with the allegation: there were no phones in jurors’ rooms there or elsewhere in the country. It presents the claim as a dubious addition to Hoffa’s legal campaign, not as established conduct by Sheridan.

Sheridan also supplied a later interpretation of the Chicago pension-fund case. The trial concerned Hoffa’s use of union funds to repay money previously pledged as collateral in connection with a Florida development investment. The prosecution presented evidence of efforts to raise repayment money, including a purported $650,000 payment to a construction company that did not exist; the named laborer, Cecil Black, earned $125 a week and received none of it. Hoffa denied signing the trust agreement, then testified that he had never signed a legal document as J.R. Hoffa. A lease for a Miami Beach penthouse, which he acknowledged signing, bore that very signature.

Sheridan summarized the case as Hoffa using pension money to extricate himself from a situation created by his earlier misuse of members’ money. The narrator quantifies the sequence as $400,000 taken from union members and another $500,000 used to repay them before the matter became a legal issue. Hoffa and seven associates were found guilty on July 26, 1964; on August 17 he received an additional five-year sentence, consecutive to the eight-year term from Chattanooga. The account uses Sheridan’s analysis to make the Chicago case more than a question of disputed signatures: the crucial issue was the recycling of workers’ pension funds to cover an earlier obligation involving those same workers’ money.

Departure and Continuing Aftermath

On August 25, 1964, a week after Hoffa received the additional sentence, Robert F. Kennedy resigned as attorney general and announced his run for the U.S. Senate from New York. Sheridan resigned from the U.S. Department of Justice to help with the campaign. His departure marks a change from investigator and case coordinator to political aide, but the account keeps his earlier role in view through the contested evidence and testimony associated with him.

The narrative later returns to Sheridan amid efforts by Hoffa’s allies to undermine the case. One recollection says Frank Ragano was supposed to obtain an affidavit from Partin claiming the government had set Hoffa up, while a New Orleans district attorney arrested both Partin and Sheridan for bribery during the period. The speaker says those arrests were meant to help Hoffa by discrediting Sheridan in the press, and attributes the assistance to Carlos Marcello. The same speaker explicitly says he was not party to discussions about the district attorney. The account therefore presents the arrests and alleged strategy as part of a recollection, not as a settled demonstration of Sheridan’s guilt or of a proven arrangement.

Sheridan’s narrative role is consequently double-edged. He is the government’s organizer of surveillance and the channel through which Partin’s observations reached prosecutors; he is also a witness to the legal and political fight whose methods were attacked by Hoffa’s lawyers and criticized by a Supreme Court dissenter. His later writing preserves details that complicate the public image of Hoffa, including the early offer to cooperate against Beck, while the accusations directed at Sheridan show how readily the investigator himself became part of the struggle over credibility. The case’s central question—whether an effective pursuit of Hoffa could remain fair—runs through both his official work and the contested memory of it.