The McClellan Committee hearings on labor racketeering and organized crime brought union corruption and Mafia power into the national living room, while sharpening the conflict between Jimmy Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy. Prompted by public outrage over the blinding of investigative reporter Victor Riesel, the hearings examined the ties between labor leaders and racketeers, made televised testimony part of the struggle over organized crime, and later gave Joseph Valachi a platform to reveal the Mafia’s commission structure. In Frank Sheeran’s retrospective account, the hearings are both a public investigation and the opening of a personal and political war around Hoffa.

Origins and Public Stakes

In May 1956, Victor Riesel, an investigative reporter for the New York Journal American, featured anti-Hoffa Teamsters on his daily radio show. After leaving Lindy’s restaurant near Times Square, Riesel was approached on the sidewalk by a man who threw acid in his face. The attack blinded him. The account identifies labor racketeer and Hoffa ally Johnny Dio as having ordered the assault; Dio was charged, but the charges were dropped after the acid thrower was found dead and other witnesses refused to cooperate.

Riesel’s blindness became an image that carried the issue beyond union politics. Wearing dark glasses, he continued appearing on television to urge labor reform. The sight of a blinded reporter still speaking out outraged the country and helped prompt the United States Senate to conduct live televised hearings on racketeering’s influence in the labor movement. The hearings took their name from the Arkansas senator who presided, John L. McClellan. Their public force depended not only on what was said under questioning, but on the visible contrast between a witness injured for his reporting and the political power of those accused of corrupting labor.

The committee included Senator Barry Goldwater and Senator John F. Kennedy, both future presidential candidates. Its chief counsel and principal interrogator was Bobby Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s younger brother. The hearings made him a national figure in the campaign against organized crime and, in the book’s account, helped turn him into Jimmy Hoffa’s mortal enemy.

Hoffa and Dio Under Examination

The hearings placed two different responses to questioning side by side. Johnny Dio took the Fifth Amendment when asked questions, including whether he had ever met Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa, because of his union position, could not invoke the same privilege without forfeiting his job. He instead answered through evasions and claims of failing memory. When confronted with wiretap recordings of conversations with Dio, he denied remembering asking Dio for favors, remarking, “To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember.” The line condensed the hearings’ central spectacle: recorded conversations set against a witness’s professed inability to recall them.

The inquiry also brought Hoffa’s financial explanations under scrutiny. Asked by Bobby Kennedy where he had obtained $20,000 in cash for a business venture, Hoffa replied, “From individuals.” Pressed to name them, he said he could not identify the lenders offhand, but that he had records of loans he had made over the period in which he entered the ventures. The exchange widened the committee’s inquiry from Hoffa’s associations to the money behind his business dealings.

The account also sets Hoffa’s public defenses against a private expression of hostility toward Riesel. On hearing that Riesel had been blinded, Hoffa told his staff, “That son of a bitch Victor Riesel. He just had some acid thrown on him. It’s too bad he didn’t have it thrown on the goddamn hands he types with.” The contrast is stark: the public hearings displayed Hoffa’s evasions, while this reported remark portrayed his contempt for the journalist whose attack had helped bring the hearings into being.

Valachi and the Commission Revealed

The hearings’ reach extended beyond Hoffa’s own testimony. In September 1963, Joseph Valachi appeared on television before the McClellan Committee and disclosed details of Mafia organization and practice. The book describes his testimony as the culmination of a chain that began in federal prison: Valachi, a low-level member serving time on a drug charge, feared that his boss, Vito Genovese, suspected him of being an informant. After Genovese gave him what Valachi understood as the Mafia’s “kiss of death,” Valachi killed an inmate he mistakenly believed had come to murder him. Facing the death penalty, he then agreed to disclose what he knew in exchange for a life sentence.

Before Valachi testified, Bobby Kennedy appeared as the first witness and told the committee that information from Valachi had established the existence of a Cosa Nostra commission, the accountability of leaders in major cities to that commission, and the identities of its active members. Kennedy called the intelligence “the greatest intelligence breakthrough in the history of organized crime in America.” The claim made the hearings more than an inquiry into individual union figures: the televised proceedings offered the public a picture of organized crime as a coordinated national structure.

Sheeran recalls the broadcast as a kind of wartime publicity campaign. After Valachi’s appearance, viewers in bathhouses and private Italian clubs across the country watched closely, and the public campaign against organized crime seemed poised to grow. The hearing’s power thus lay partly in exposure itself: information formerly guarded within criminal networks was presented to a mass audience, while the state displayed its new knowledge as evidence of investigative success.

Political and Legal Afterlife

In The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy described the committee’s encounters with notorious gangsters and racketeers, then singled out Hoffa and some of his lieutenants: “there was no group that better fits the prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than Jimmy Hoffa and some of his chief lieutenants in and out of the union.” That judgment captures the sharp divide the hearings made public. Hoffa presented accusations of racketeering as a smokescreen against workers; Kennedy treated Hoffa’s circle as an example of the very criminal influence the committee was investigating.

The hearings also established a political relationship that outlasted the televised sessions. Bobby Kennedy’s aggressive work made him Hoffa’s adversary, and the book connects the committee’s revelations to the later federal drive against Hoffa. Years afterward, Walter Sheridan’s Get Hoffa Squad used an informant and recording device in the Nashville Test Fleet case, an operation that led to a dispute over Hoffa’s right to counsel and eventually reached the Supreme Court. That later case was not itself a McClellan Committee hearing, but it shows how the investigative methods and antagonism associated with the committee continued into the legal campaign against Hoffa.

Retrospective Meaning

The hearings recur in Sheeran’s account as a turning point in what could be publicly known about unions, racketeering, and Mafia organization. Riesel’s dark glasses made the cost of reporting visible; Hoffa’s answers made evasion visible; Valachi’s televised disclosures made a hidden hierarchy visible. The sequence also complicates any simple division between labor reform and organized-crime enforcement: the committee confronted real criminal power, while its work became inseparable from Bobby Kennedy’s personal and political struggle with Hoffa.

The book’s retrospective narration places these public scenes alongside private loyalties and later suspicions. Its account of the hearings therefore does not treat television exposure as the end of the story. The committee named relationships and structures that had previously remained obscured, but the conflict continued through prosecutions, disputes over investigative tactics, and Hoffa’s enduring struggle with the Justice Department. The hearings’ significance lies in that double movement: they opened criminal networks to public view and helped set in motion a contest whose consequences extended well beyond the committee room.