Hoffa resigns his Teamsters posts in 1971

Hoffa resigns his Teamsters posts in 1971 as part of an effort to secure parole from prison, and the move abruptly converted his struggle to reclaim union power into a public transfer of authority to Fitz. Hoffa’s letter of endorsement and his lawyer’s later account of his retirement gave the parole board grounds to reconsider his application, but the promised opening led only to another rejection. The episode leaves a sharp uncertainty at its center: whether Hoffa chose retirement in good faith or was maneuvered into surrendering offices he expected to regain.

Announcement and Endorsement

On May 28, 1971, Audie Murphy died in a small-plane crash while viewing the site of a business deal involving Hoffa’s forces. Hoffa had expected Murphy to help him deal with Ed Partin; with Murphy’s death, that anticipated assistance disappeared. Six days later, Fitz, accompanied by the young James P. Hoffa, held a press conference at the Playboy Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach. He announced that he had received a letter from Hoffa declaring that he would not run for reelection and endorsing Fitz, his old friend from Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit and the union’s general vice president, for president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

The announcement presented the succession as Hoffa’s own choice, made through a letter and expressed as support for a longtime associate. Yet it also marked a striking retreat by a man whose hold on the union had been central to his public identity. The endorsement made Fitz the beneficiary of Hoffa’s withdrawal even as the parole effort gave that withdrawal an immediate practical purpose.

Resignation and the Parole Bid

At the executive board’s quarterly meeting in Miami on June 21, Fitz announced that Hoffa had resigned as president and appointed him acting president until the convention. Reporters were excluded, but newspaper photographers were admitted. Richard Nixon entered the room and sat beside Fitz as the photographers took pictures, placing the union’s change of leadership in a conspicuous political setting.

Two days later, James P. Hoffa wrote to the executive board on behalf of his client. His letter listed the offices relinquished: president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, president of Local 299 in Detroit, president of Joint Council 43, president of the Michigan Conference of Teamsters, and chairman of the Central States Conference of Teamsters. He described his father’s plans, if released, as living on his pension and undertaking lecturing and teaching. The resignation was therefore not simply a departure from the national presidency; it was presented as a withdrawal from the union posts that might otherwise have made parole appear to be a route back to power.

At a preliminary hearing on July 7, the parole board accepted the resignations and proposed retirement as new evidence and granted Hoffa a full rehearing for August 20. That decision briefly made the strategy seem effective: the formal relinquishing of office had changed the status of his application, if not yet its outcome.

Rehearing and Reversal

At the July 1971 convention in Miami Beach, Hoffa’s absence was visible in the imagery of the union. His picture was displayed outside the convention center but missing from inside. Frank Sheeran brought the picture in and hung it prominently beside Fitz’s. Sheeran said he did not remove Fitz’s picture because the hostility between the two camps remained unspoken in public and he would not act without Hoffa’s approval. The gesture made the struggle over the presidency tangible: Hoffa had resigned, but his supporters had not erased him from the union’s symbolic landscape.

The August 20 rehearing ended in a unanimous denial. The board treated the resignations as unpersuasive, questioned James P. Hoffa about his own Teamsters job and his mother’s work with the union’s DRIVE political action committee, and examined Hoffa’s organized-crime connections. It also focused on the $1.7 million lump sum Hoffa received when he settled the present value of his future monthly pension payments. The book notes that this sum would have irked Tony Pro, who had asked Hoffa for help with his own pension while in jail; the parole board, too, addressed the payment in hostile terms. Hoffa could reapply in June 1972.

The Unsettled Bargain

The account does not establish that Fitz orchestrated a scheme or that Hoffa was promised parole in exchange for resigning. Instead, it lays out those possibilities as questions: whether Hoffa was led to believe that stepping aside would secure his release, whether he hoped to return gradually to union office and reclaim the presidency by the 1976 convention, and whether devotion to his wife and family helped make the compromise acceptable. It also raises the possibility that he trusted Fitz and the administration to honor a bargain.

The sequence leaves the resignation suspended between voluntary retirement and political dispossession. Hoffa’s offices passed to Fitz, his request for parole failed, and the text depicts Nixon, Fitz, and Attorney General John Mitchell as appearing to hold the advantage. Hoffa had supplied both a public endorsement and a formal list of relinquished posts; what he would receive in return remained unanswered.