Get Hoffa Squad

The Get Hoffa Squad was a Justice Department unit formed by Robert F. Kennedy to target Jimmy Hoffa, with Walter Sheridan directing a handpicked team of lawyers and investigators. Its narrow remit and unobtrusive name belied the reach of its work: the squad cultivated information from inside Hoffa’s circle, investigated threats and jury tampering, and became a central figure in the legal fight over whether those methods respected Hoffa’s right to counsel.

Formation and Mandate

Robert F. Kennedy created the squad after taking charge of the Justice Department. Sheridan, his trusted associate from the McClellan Committee hearings, led the team; Kennedy personally selected its members. The squad was given what the account describes as a very limited job, and its understated name, the Get Hoffa Squad, made its target explicit without announcing a broader institutional mission.

The unit operated within a wider federal campaign against organized crime. On February 22, 1961, two days after becoming attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy persuaded all twenty-seven federal agencies, including the IRS, to pool information on gangsters and organized crime. That coordinated approach supplied the larger setting for the squad’s work: investigation was not confined to one prosecution or one agency, but drew on information gathered across the government. The squad, however, was specifically focused on Hoffa.

Partin and the Investigation

One early and consequential report came from Edward Grady Partin, a Teamsters official who told the squad that Hoffa had discussed killing Robert F. Kennedy. Sheridan regarded the account as extraordinary and asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to administer a lie detector test to Partin. Partin passed emphatically, and Sheridan reported the alleged threats to the attorney general. The episode placed the squad between intelligence-gathering and prosecution: Partin’s account concerned a possible threat, but his later access to Hoffa would also produce evidence about alleged jury interference.

Ahead of Hoffa’s Test Fleet trial, the squad arranged for Partin to join Hoffa’s entourage in Nashville. Sheridan acknowledged that the team supplied him with a recording device for calls with Hoffa and instructed him to watch for attempts to bribe jurors. The account records the squad’s denial that it violated Hoffa’s constitutional rights by encouraging Partin to attend. Sheridan’s admission about the recorder, and the assignment to look for jury tampering, nevertheless became important to the defense’s later claim that the government had placed a source inside its camp.

The stakes grew when jury selection exposed apparent efforts to influence prospective jurors. An insurance broker told the judge that a neighbor had offered him $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills to vote for acquittal if selected. Other prospective jurors reported calls from a supposed Nashville Banner reporter named Allen, although no such reporter worked for the paper. Those whose selection appeared tainted were dismissed. The incidents made the squad’s instruction to Partin directly relevant to an active investigation of jury tampering, rather than merely a search for information about Hoffa’s defense.

The Chattanooga Trial

Partin’s role remained hidden while the Chattanooga jury-tampering trial proceeded. The government did not have to identify its witnesses in advance, and Partin was kept in a cabin on Lookout Mountain. For much of the trial, Hoffa appeared confident; the government called witnesses against his alleged accomplices, while, from the defense’s perspective, no witness yet seemed able to connect Hoffa himself to the case.

On the final day, after roughly three months of proceedings, the government called Partin. His sudden appearance prompted the defense to seek exclusion of his testimony, arguing that prosecutors had planted a mole in Hoffa’s defense camp and violated the constitutional right to counsel. The government offered a narrower account: Partin had gone to the trial voluntarily, reported to Sheridan rather than to the prosecutors, and was instructed to report evidence of ongoing jury tampering. According to that account, he had not discussed with Sheridan what he heard about the Test Fleet case or Hoffa’s defense.

The judge accepted the government’s account after a four-hour hearing and allowed Partin to testify. Partin then described Hoffa’s alleged boasts about efforts to bribe jurors, including attempts he said Hoffa had discussed before they occurred or while they were underway. The testimony connected Hoffa to the jury-tampering episodes and transformed the case in the courtroom. In closing, prosecutor James Neal argued that the evidence confirmed Partin’s account: what Partin said had happened, and what he said would happen, did happen. Hoffa’s lead attorney, James Haggerty, instead called the prosecution a frame-up and attacked Sheridan as the architect of a plot against Hoffa.

Constitutional Dispute and Significance

The controversy outlasted the trial. Hoffa’s appeal raised the question of whether Partin’s presence at the Andrew Jackson Hotel violated Hoffa’s constitutional right to counsel. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the novel issue amid a period of expanding criminal-rights protections. Sheridan later described an effort by a Teamsters official to pressure Justice William Brennan through a threat against his brother’s brewery. The Court nevertheless ruled against Hoffa on the merits. 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 the quality and fairness of federal law enforcement.

The squad’s significance therefore lies not only in its pursuit of Hoffa but in the contested means by which it pursued him. Its assignment to Partin was presented by the government as an effort to detect an ongoing crime, while the defense portrayed the same access as an intrusion into confidential legal preparation. The judge accepted the government’s explanation, and the Supreme Court rejected Hoffa’s appeal, but Warren’s dissent preserved the opposing institutional judgment. In the account, the squad stands at the boundary between targeted investigation and the protections owed to a defendant—and its most consequential evidence emerged from operating precisely at that boundary.