The Hoffa–Brennan wiretapping trial tested whether Jimmy Hoffa and his business partner Owen Bert Brennan had arranged illegal surveillance of Teamsters offices. The case grew from Hoffa’s drive to control what union officers might tell the McClellan Committee, but its acquittal did not end the legal pressure: a separate perjury indictment also depended on the wiretap evidence and was eventually dismissed after a Supreme Court ruling invalidated it.

Indictment and Motive

Hoffa’s concern that his own officers might provide the McClellan Committee with information against him led to a federal indictment for hiring a friend of Johnny Dio to wiretap and bug Teamsters offices. The account draws a pointed comparison with Hoffa’s conduct toward Dave Beck: he wanted to ensure that none of his officers were informing on him, as he had done against Beck.

Brennan was charged alongside Hoffa as a coconspirator. He was Hoffa’s partner in the Test Fleet and Sun Valley ventures, and the book identifies his possible legal exposure involving those ventures as a reason he had much at stake. The surveillance case thus joined union politics to the partners’ business entanglements.

Trial and Acquittal

Ten days after news of the Apalachin conference reached the public, a federal jury was impaneled in New York City to try Hoffa and Brennan. That first jury deadlocked, voting eleven to one. A second jury was promptly assembled, but the proceedings were again marked by an allegation of interference: one juror came forward to report an attempt to bribe him. He was excused and replaced by an alternate. The second jury found Hoffa not guilty.

The acquittal dealt a major setback to Bobby Kennedy, who had brought the case. In the book’s retrospective account, Frank Sheeran recalls that after the trial people joked that no parachute could save Kennedy if he jumped from the Capitol. The line records the public relish with which Hoffa’s supporters greeted the reversal, rather than establishing anything about the trial’s legal merits.

The Separate Perjury Case

The wiretapping trial was distinct from a Washington perjury indictment that Bobby Kennedy had brought because Hoffa had lied about the bugging incidents in testimony before the McClellan Committee. That case relied on wiretapped conversations between Hoffa and Johnny Dio. The wiretap had been authorized under New York law, but the Supreme Court later ruled that state-sanctioned wiretaps of this kind were unconstitutional and that evidence obtained from them was inadmissible as “fruit of the poisonous tree.” With no admissible evidence remaining, the perjury indictment was dismissed.

The two cases therefore ended differently but were connected by the same surveillance: Hoffa was acquitted in the bugging trial, and the wiretap evidence that supported the separate perjury charge could not be used after the constitutional ruling. The book presents that sequence as a turning point in the prosecution’s efforts to convict him, while distinguishing the jury’s verdict from the later legal question over admissibility.