Robert F. Kennedy

Robert F. Kennedy is presented as the driving force behind the book’s account of the federal campaign against Jimmy Hoffa and organized crime. First as chief counsel to the McClellan Committee and then as attorney general, he made investigation, interrogation, informants, and coordinated law enforcement into a sustained challenge to the power Hoffa wielded through the Teamsters. Their conflict was personal as well as institutional: Kennedy pursued Hoffa through repeated investigations and trials, while Hoffa resented him and, according to a witness, spoke of killing him.

Identity and Public Role

Kennedy entered the narrative as a member of the United States Senate committee investigating racketeering in the labor movement. He became its chief counsel and principal interrogator, serving in that role during the first three years of what the book describes as a six-year campaign against organized crime. His public manner was combative. In hearings, he pressed witnesses who repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, and his questioning made the committee a visible arena for confrontation between federal investigators, mob figures, and Teamsters leadership.

The book presents Kennedy’s approach as more than a sequence of hearings. He sought to make organized crime a federal concern rather than leave it to local police, and to bring investigative resources to bear across jurisdictions. That ambition gave the committee proceedings a broader significance: the questions put to individual witnesses were also part of an effort to expose the connections between criminal organizations, labor racketeering, and union power.

The Committee and Its Confrontations

The televised hearings followed the 1956 acid attack that blinded investigative reporter Victor Riesel. The book recounts that Riesel had featured anti-Hoffa Teamsters on his radio program and had campaigned against criminal influence in labor unions. When public anger over his blinding helped prompt the Senate hearings, Kennedy became their chief counsel and principal interrogator. The account identifies his aggressive work there as the beginning of his role as Hoffa’s principal adversary.

Kennedy’s questioning of Sam Giancana captures the confrontational style attributed to him. He accused Giancana of being the chief gunman for the group that succeeded the Capone mob, then challenged him after Giancana laughed and again refused to answer under the Fifth Amendment. The exchange showed Kennedy using ridicule as well as legal questioning against witnesses who treated silence as a shield. The book also emphasizes the danger in that posture: Giancana was associated with brutal murders, including the torture and killing of Gus Greenbaum and his wife. Kennedy’s encounters with such men were not merely theatrical disputes over testimony; they unfolded against the violence used to discipline people within organized crime.

Hoffa’s own appearances before the committee sharpened the contrast between the two men. Unlike Johnny Dio, Hoffa could not invoke the Fifth Amendment without forfeiting his union position. He answered questions with evasions and professed failures of memory, including when confronted with recordings of conversations with Dio. Kennedy also asked him about $20,000 in cash invested in a business venture and about the identities of the people from whom he had borrowed it. The exchange, as recounted in the book, left Hoffa’s account of the money opaque rather than resolving the question.

Building the Campaign Against Hoffa

After John F. Kennedy was elected president, he appointed his brother attorney general. Robert F. Kennedy thereby took charge of the Justice Department, the United States attorneys, and the FBI. The book describes the organized-crime effort that followed as a new federal commitment to eradication. Kennedy selected a group of lawyers and investigators and placed Walter Sheridan, his former right-hand man from the committee hearings, in charge. Its deliberately pointed name was the Get Hoffa Squad.

That unit’s pursuit of Hoffa included the 1957 bribery case involving an offer to pay committee investigator John Cye Cheasty for inside information. Kennedy gave Cheasty a committee job; the FBI installed microphones and cameras as the planned exchange proceeded. When Hoffa handed Cheasty $2,000 near DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C., investigators photographed the transaction and arrested Hoffa. At the subsequent trial, Kennedy’s confidence in the prosecution was conspicuous: when asked what he would do if Hoffa were acquitted, he replied that he had never considered that possibility and said he would jump off the Capitol. The episode shows the campaign’s reliance on evidence gathering and surveillance, as well as Kennedy’s public certainty that the case was strong.

Kennedy’s pursuit continued through cases concerning Hoffa’s alleged jury tampering and the use of Teamsters pension money. The book connects pressure applied during the McClellan Committee hearings to Hoffa’s efforts to repay a $400,000 deposit that had been pledged as collateral, and to later scrambling for funds. In the Chicago pension-fund case, the prosecution argued that union money had been used to repair the consequences of Hoffa’s earlier misuse of union funds. The jury found Hoffa and seven associates guilty in July 1964; the following month, he received an additional five-year sentence to run consecutively with his eight-year Chattanooga sentence.

Conflict, Threats, and Political Consequences

The conflict was not confined to courtrooms. In the summer of 1962, Hoffa told Edward Grady Partin, a Teamsters official, that he knew where to obtain plastic explosives and a gun silencer, and described how Kennedy might be killed. Partin reported the conversation to the Get Hoffa Squad. Walter Sheridan asked the FBI to administer a lie-detector test, which Partin passed emphatically, and reported the threat to Kennedy. The account therefore presents the alleged threat through Partin’s report and the investigation that followed, rather than as a public act by Hoffa.

Kennedy’s campaign had consequences beyond the cases against Hoffa. By the time Kennedy announced his 1964 run for the United States Senate from New York, the book credits his efforts with the indictment of 201 Teamsters officials and the conviction of 126. It also describes increased public scrutiny of mob figures, including the 1966 arrests of men from across the country at La Stella restaurant. The arrests did not result in charges, and the same group returned to the restaurant a month later with its lawyer. The episode illustrates both the reach and the limits of heightened surveillance and public exposure.

Legacy and Limits

Kennedy resigned as attorney general on August 25, 1964, and announced his Senate campaign. The book portrays his investigative model as an enduring institutional change: gathering intelligence, concentrating on selected targets, making arrangements with informants, using electronic surveillance, and pooling information among government agencies that might otherwise compete. In this account, organized crime ceased to be treated simply as a local policing problem, and federal agencies adopted methods that shaped later efforts to combat it.

The narrative does not present those methods as beyond dispute. Hoffa’s appeal raised whether Partin’s presence had violated Hoffa’s constitutional right to counsel. The Supreme Court rejected Hoffa’s appeal on the merits, but Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented, calling the government’s clandestine use of Partin an affront to fair law enforcement. That later dispute marks an important tension in Kennedy’s campaign: the investigation’s reach and effectiveness helped define federal enforcement, while the means used against Hoffa remained open to constitutional criticism. Kennedy’s legacy in the book is consequently both institutional and adversarial—a lasting change in how the government pursued organized crime, forged through a highly personal contest with Hoffa.