Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination

The Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination is presented as a legal right with sharply different practical consequences for the people questioned in the book. Some witnesses invoked it directly and refused to answer; Jimmy Hoffa, facing the risk that doing so would cost him his union position, instead met questions with evasions. The contrast makes the privilege more than a courtroom formula: it marks the difficult boundary between silence, compelled explanation, and the strategies people use to protect themselves.

A right with unequal costs

The book describes Jimmy Hoffa as unable to take the Fifth Amendment without forfeiting his job. When questioning put him in the position of answering about his associates and finances, he therefore did not simply refuse to respond. He offered answers that obscured rather than clarified, often claiming a faulty memory. The privilege was available as a constitutional protection, but Hoffa’s union role gave invoking it an immediate institutional cost.

That constraint is clearest in the contrast with Johnny Dio. At the McClellan Committee hearings, Dio took the Fifth Amendment on every question, including whether he had ever met Hoffa. Hoffa, by contrast, faced questions about wiretapped conversations with Dio and denied remembering ever asking him for favors. Asked about the recordings, he replied, “To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember.” The answer mimicked recollection while withholding a substantive response, illustrating how his position shaped his means of resistance.

Committee questioning and evasive answers

The committee hearings placed the privilege in public view. The book juxtaposes Dio’s categorical refusals with Hoffa’s verbal maneuvering under questioning by Bobby Kennedy. When asked where he had obtained $20,000 for a business investment, Hoffa said it came from individuals; when pressed to identify them, he said he could not recall the particular lenders at that moment, while asserting that he had requested and possessed records of his loans. The answer offered an account of documentation without naming the people the question sought to identify.

This difference also gave the hearing room a political and rhetorical charge. Dio’s invocation was plain: he declined to answer. Hoffa’s replies attempted to satisfy the demand to speak while avoiding a usable answer. The book treats that distinction as consequential because Hoffa could not adopt Dio’s direct course without jeopardizing his union position.

Invocation as a repeated tactic

The book describes Joey Glimco as another figure who took the Fifth throughout the McClellan Committee hearings, including when asked whether he knew Hoffa. His appearance in this pattern is recounted when Russell Bufalino explains to Frank Sheeran who Glimco was: a Chicago labor figure with a criminal record and a connection to the Chicago outfit. The repeated invocation links committee testimony to the wider network of labor and organized crime figures whose relationships were under scrutiny.

Ed Partin’s use of the privilege shows it operating differently across stages of a case. After attending the Nashville Test Fleet trial as part of Hoffa’s entourage, Partin was summoned before a grand jury and, following the Hoffa camp’s position, took the Fifth. Bill Bufalino wrote the exact language for him on a card to carry into the grand jury room. The prepared card turns invocation into a coordinated response, rather than a spontaneous answer to a question.

Partin later became a government witness in the Chattanooga jury-tampering trial. The prosecutors called him on the final day, after three months of proceedings, and the defense challenged his testimony on the ground that he had been planted inside Hoffa’s circle. The judge accepted the government’s account of how Partin had come to attend the trial and allowed him to testify. Partin then described Hoffa’s statements about attempts to bribe jurors. His earlier reliance on the Fifth Amendment and his later testimony against Hoffa show how a witness’s role—and the information he was prepared to disclose—could change over the course of the proceedings.

Legal protection and procedural conflict

The book’s account does not reduce the privilege to a simple measure of guilt or innocence. Dio’s repeated refusals, Hoffa’s evasive recollections, and Partin’s prepared grand-jury response are distinct ways of navigating questioning, shaped by their different positions and interests. The later dispute over Partin’s presence at the Andrew Jackson Hotel also brought the broader constitutional issue of Hoffa’s right to counsel before the Supreme Court. The Court rejected Hoffa’s appeal, while Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented and described the government’s clandestine use of Partin as an affront to fair federal law enforcement.

Across these episodes, the Fifth Amendment privilege sits within a contest over who must answer, what an answer can establish, and what consequences follow from refusing or evading. Its practical force is shown not only in the protection it affords, but also in the pressures that surround its use: employment, coordinated legal strategy, investigative methods, and the changing loyalties of witnesses.