Nothing Comes Cheap

“Nothing Comes Cheap” is the chapter title and John Mitchell’s terse description of a suitcase handoff at the Washington Hilton. In the scene, the phrase gives a name to the cost and opacity of Jimmy Hoffa’s hoped-for release: money moves through a carefully staged encounter, while the narrator later separates that payment from another arrangement for Hoffa’s parole.

The Phrase and the Handoff

The chapter places the phrase inside a conversation designed to appear ordinary. The narrator carries his own bag into the hotel lobby and waits in an easy chair. Mitchell arrives, sits nearby, and makes small talk about the weather and the drive. Asked whether he belongs to a union, the narrator says he is president of Teamsters Local 326 in Wilmington, Delaware; he had won the 1970 election by a three-to-one margin and regained his local. Mitchell then wishes him a safe drive back to the union hall and says, “Nothing comes cheap.”

Mitchell stands holding the suitcase. The narrator asks, “Don’t you want to go somewhere and count it?” Mitchell replies, “If I had to count it, they wouldn’t have sent you.” The exchange makes the bag’s contents legible without a counting scene: Mitchell trusts the delivery, and the transaction remains wrapped in the appearance of casual conversation. The title phrase turns that discreet handoff into a blunt statement about the price attached to political outcomes.

What the Money Was For

The narrator does not present the purpose of the suitcase money as wholly certain. He says he had heard Mitchell was pressuring Ed Partin through the Department of Justice, but believed this particular money was for Hoffa’s parole or pardon rather than Partin. He adds a qualification: technically, “half a big one” was for President Nixon’s reelection. The account thus connects the payment to political financing while retaining the narrator’s uncertainty about its precise purpose.

The passage then supplies a separate fact that Hoffa did not know at the time and that emerged later. Salvatore Briguglio had brought another “half a big one” from Tony Pro on Fitz’s behalf. That money was also intended to get Hoffa out, but through parole carrying a restriction that barred him from running for union office until his full prison sentence expired in March 1980. The two sums should not be collapsed into one payment: the narrative distinguishes the suitcase delivery from the later-disclosed arrangement involving Briguglio, Tony Pro, and Fitz.

Cost, Secrecy, and the Title

The phrase’s force comes from the distance between its plain wording and the concealed arrangements around it. In the lobby, Mitchell’s remark can pass as a casual observation; paired with the suitcase and the unhurried refusal to count its contents, it becomes a compressed acknowledgment of an exchange. The narrator’s later qualification complicates any simple reading of who paid for what, and the revelation of the second payment shows that Hoffa’s release was bound up with competing channels and conditions.

The cost was not only financial. The parole arrangement described here would free Hoffa while keeping him from seeking union office through the remainder of his sentence, making release conditional on continued exclusion from the institution he had led. “Nothing comes cheap” therefore gathers the chapter’s concrete details—the bag, the hotel-lobby performance, the reelection money, and the restriction—into a recurring logic of bargains whose benefits arrive attached to limits.