Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States enters the narrative at a decisive point in Jimmy Hoffa’s attempt to overturn his jury-tampering conviction: it considered whether the government had violated his right to counsel by placing Edward Grady Partin near Hoffa and his defense during the earlier Test Fleet trial. The Court ruled against Hoffa on the merits. Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented, calling the government’s use of Partin an affront to fair law enforcement, but the conviction stood, and Hoffa entered federal prison in March 1967.

The constitutional question

Hoffa’s appeal grew out of the government’s use of Partin during the Test Fleet proceedings in Nashville. The trial, scheduled to begin on October 22, 1962, concerned a car-hauling company placed in the names of the wives of Hoffa and Owen Bert Brennan. Prosecutors alleged that the company formed part of a long-range arrangement to pay Hoffa after he settled a strike favorably for an employer who later did business with it. The charges concerned activity from five years earlier, already investigated by the McClellan Committee and the Justice Department.

The Get Hoffa Squad encouraged Partin to join Hoffa’s entourage in Nashville, where he served as a guard at the door to Hoffa’s suite. Walter Sheridan acknowledged that he supplied Partin with a recording device and told him to watch for attempts to bribe jurors. The government maintained that Partin went to the trial voluntarily and was not planted by prosecutors; it also said that he reported evidence of jury tampering to Sheridan, not information about the Test Fleet case or Hoffa’s defense. The constitutional issue before the Supreme Court was whether Partin’s presence at the Andrew Jackson Hotel had intruded on Hoffa’s right to counsel.

The disputed conduct unfolded against a trial already shadowed by allegations of jury interference. During jury selection, an insurance broker reported that a neighbor had offered him $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills to vote for acquittal if seated. The judge excused him after obtaining the neighbor’s name. Other prospective jurors said a supposed Nashville Banner reporter named Allen had contacted them about their views of Hoffa; no reporter by that name worked for the paper, and the tainted candidates were dismissed. These incidents supplied the larger setting for Sheridan’s instruction that Partin look for further efforts to influence jurors.

Appeal, pressure, and decision

The appeal reached the Supreme Court during what the book describes as The criminal law revolution (1961–1971), a period in which constitutional protections for criminal defendants were being developed and tested. The Court agreed to hear the case because it raised a novel question about the right to counsel. Joseph A. Fanelli, a seasoned appellate lawyer newly associated with Hoffa’s team, handled the appeal. After oral argument, Sheridan’s account was that the prosecution team could not tell how the justices would rule.

Hoffa’s associates then attempted to pressure Justice William Brennan. Sheridan recounted that a Teamsters official approached Brennan’s brother, who owned a brewery, and warned that the brewery would be closed if Brennan did not vote the right way. The Supreme Court nevertheless ruled against Hoffa on the merits. Brennan joined the majority opinion, written by Justice Potter Stewart. Warren wrote the dissent and voted to reverse the conviction, describing the government’s clandestine use of Partin as “an affront to the quality and fairness of federal law enforcement.” The split made the ruling more than a procedural endpoint: the same conduct could be accepted by the majority as insufficient to overturn Hoffa’s conviction and condemned by the Chief Justice as damaging to the fairness of federal enforcement.

Attempts to reopen the case

Nine days after Stewart’s opinion, William Loeb, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader and an old college friend of Stewart, wrote to the justice on Hoffa’s behalf. Loeb relayed an unnamed high government official’s claim that Bobby Kennedy had used illegal wiretaps in his pursuit of Hoffa. The account notes that Loeb did not disclose in his letter that he had been promised a large loan from the Teamsters pension fund, which he later received. Had it been proved that Hoffa’s lawyers had arranged for Loeb to write, they could have faced ethics proceedings; the matter was not pursued.

Hoffa’s lawyers filed a motion for rehearing, a routine request that the Court rarely granted. While it remained pending, they submitted what the narrative calls a novel motion alleging government wiretapping, electronic eavesdropping, and other intrusions. Its supporting affidavit came from Benjamin “Bud” Nichols, a freelance eavesdropping expert. Nichols claimed that Sheridan had paid him to bug jurors’ phones in Chattanooga and that he had planted the devices at Sheridan’s direction. The allegation had a basic factual problem: jurors’ rooms in Chattanooga, as elsewhere in the country, had no phones. The episode extended the appeal from a serious constitutional dispute into a sequence of increasingly questionable efforts to challenge the prosecution’s conduct.

The conviction stands

The Supreme Court’s refusal to reverse left Hoffa’s jury-tampering conviction in force. At 3:30 p.m. on March 7, 1967—three years and three days after the conviction—he entered Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. The date and the long interval between verdict and imprisonment mark the practical consequence of the Court’s decision: the appeal had kept the constitutional question alive, but it had not restored Hoffa’s freedom.

A Life magazine photo essay published ten days later presented Hoffa as “A Swaggering Man on a Long Cold Walk.” One photograph showed a Valentine heart bearing his picture and the words “Always Thinking of You,” a decoration that had hung for years on Sheridan’s Justice Department office door. The image joined the legal contest to the personal antagonism surrounding it: while the Court’s ruling closed Hoffa’s route to reversal at that stage, the book leaves open whether imprisonment meant the end of his influence or only a pause.