March 7, 1967

March 7, 1967, was the day Jimmy Hoffa entered Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, three years and three days after his conviction for jury tampering. His incarceration was a major change in his circumstances, but not an immediate end to his power: the book presents prison as a place where formal restrictions and continuing influence existed side by side. The date therefore marks not only the beginning of a sentence, but a test of how much of Hoffa’s public and private authority could survive behind bars.

Entry and the question of power

At 3:30 p.m., the laughter surrounding the prospect of Hoffa’s imprisonment gave way to the fact of his arrival. The March 17 issue of Life published a photo essay about him, including an image of a Valentine heart bearing his picture and the words “Always Thinking of You.” The Valentine had hung for years on Walter Sheridan’s office door at the Department of Justice. Its placement carried an added association: Valentine’s Day was also Hoffa’s birthday and the date of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago.

The magazine asked whether imprisonment meant the end of Hoffa’s power in the union or merely a pause. The book sustains that uncertainty rather than treating his entry as a clean transfer of control. Frank Sheeran, a “Hoffa man” active in union conflict in Philadelphia, is described as among the first Teamsters leaders to feel a new chill after Hoffa went in. Meanwhile, Frank Fitzsimmons assumed leadership, leaving open whether the change was only a transfer of title or a substantive shift in authority.

The prison’s formal boundaries

Lewisburg imposed concrete limits on contact. Hoffa was allowed three hours of monthly visitation with nonlawyers on an approved list restricted to family members. Inmates had no phone privileges, could write to only seven people from a list of relatives and lawyers, and had their incoming and outgoing mail screened. Union officers were barred from visiting or writing to him. These rules made prison a serious obstacle to ordinary communication and direct union business.

Legal proceedings created an important exception. Hoffa’s appeals in the Chicago case were still pending when he arrived, and active-case lawyers could visit without the same restriction. His son, who was a union lawyer, could see him as often as once a week. Frank Ragano visited, consulted with Hoffa, and carried messages to union and mob figures; Morris Shenker worked on parole strategy and the delicate effort to secure a presidential pardon; and Bill Bufalino visited as lawyer and adviser. Although a parole hearing would not be available until November 1969, two and a half years after Hoffa’s arrival, the continuing legal activity kept a network of visitors and intermediaries in motion.

Business and routine behind bars

The book depicts Hoffa using the prison’s limited visiting arrangements to keep relationships and business alive. The visitation room was also a dining hall. Young inmates who lacked relatives able to travel to Pennsylvania could not make use of their allotted visiting time, so Hoffa arranged construction “job interviews” for some of them with Sheeran. The men met at a table beside Hoffa, who was consulting with one of his lawyers. Sheeran recalled using a tug on his shirt as a signal for the young inmate to leave for the “buck house,” giving him and Hoffa a chance to talk business while a guard looked the other way. Sheeran said that the guards benefited at Christmas and that prison controls later tightened amid publicity and changes in the inmate population.

These dealings sat alongside less formal visits. For three dollars, visitors could join inmates for lunch; Wednesday’s meal was spaghetti and meatballs, and Sheeran gave his meatballs to Hoffa as a treat. Sometimes they talked business, and sometimes the visit was simply social. Hoffa also learned in prison from associates around Tony Pro how to spike a watermelon with rum, a trick he had not known Sheeran and Bill Isabel had used at the Edgewater in Chicago. Meals, favors, signals, and small disclosures gave the prison day a social texture even as the official rules restricted contact.

A sentence that continued beyond Lewisburg

The book’s account of March 7 also looks forward to the ways incarceration and confinement recurred in Sheeran’s later life. During the Reagan years, he served federal time at the United States penitentiary at Sandstone, Minnesota, where winter wind chill could reach seventy below zero. He described being called out by the FBI in the middle of the night and walking a quarter of a mile outdoors, holding a yellow rope to keep from being blown down. With arthritis worsening in his back, the walk was especially difficult.

Sheeran said agents offered to move him closer to his daughters if he cooperated. He wore a ring set with the birthstone of each of his four daughters, but recalled turning back along the yellow line to his block rather than agreeing. The following day, he called his lawyer so the visit from federal agents would be put on the record. This later episode does not erase the differences between his confinement and Hoffa’s; it extends the book’s account of prison as a place where physical restriction, official pressure, family ties, and attempts to preserve one’s own terms of conduct could converge.