Teamsters Pension Fund

The Teamsters Pension Fund occupies two sharply contrasting roles in the book: it provides a retirement benefit for Teamsters workers, yet its accumulated assets also become a channel for lending to organized-crime figures. James R. Hoffa’s influence over the fund helped make it a source of union power and private advantage; the ensuing contest over who would control the union was inseparable from the question of who could direct its money.

Creation and Worker Benefits

In 1955, James R. Hoffa established a pension fund financed by regular employer contributions for Teamsters employees. Before its creation, many truck drivers had little to rely on in retirement beyond Social Security. The arrangement therefore answered a concrete need: companies contributed for each hour worked, accumulating money toward workers’ later years.

The fund’s growth was rapid because contributions continued while many covered workers had not yet retired. Sheeran recalled that it held about $200 million when he joined the union and had reached a billion dollars by the time he retired. Its scale made it more than a retirement account: it represented a growing pool of capital whose administration could shape the balance of power within the union and beyond it.

The 1963 Master Freight Agreement strengthened the benefits associated with the fund. It brought a 45-cent-per-hour wage increase and substantial pension improvements, and Hoffa placed Sheeran on the union’s National Negotiating Committee after the agreement was signed. At the time of Sheeran’s account, a retiree from a local could receive $3,400 a month in pension benefits, in addition to Social Security. The fund’s worker-facing purpose was thus tied to collective bargaining and to the national agreement that sought common wages and benefits across the Teamsters.

Lending and the Fund’s Other Use

The fund also became a source of loans to La Cosa Nostra. Sheeran described Hoffa as wanting control over how the fund was arranged so that people he approved could borrow from it. The loans were not described as unsecured gifts: fund managers charged interest, and the loans were secured. But the ability to decide who could borrow, and on what terms, gave the fund’s administrators influence over borrowers whose interests extended well beyond ordinary retirement planning.

Sheeran’s account depicts a lending network in which organized-crime figures brought customers and received a share of the proceeds. Borrowers were charged 10 percent of a loan, with that percentage divided between the bosses and Hoffa; Hoffa also took off-the-books finder’s fees, or points, for approving loans. Among the figures named in connection with this business were Russell Bufalino, Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana, Tony Provenzano, and Johnny Dio. The loans were therefore both financial transactions and a means of linking the union’s investment resources to a broader criminal network.

Teamsters-financed ventures included construction projects and casinos in Havana and Las Vegas. The book presents these developments as evidence of the fund’s reach: a retirement pool built from contributions tied to hours worked could finance projects associated with powerful borrowers. The arrangement made the fund’s expanding assets attractive to those able to influence lending, even as the pension system continued to serve workers’ future income.

Control, Conflict, and Aftermath

The difference between Hoffa’s lending terms and those under his successor became a point of conflict. When Hoffa was in control, Sheeran said, borrowers could obtain loans, but on Hoffa’s terms, and Hoffa took points under the table. After Hoffa went to jail, Fitz became the union’s leader; Sheeran characterized him as permissive toward favored borrowers and recalled that they could obtain large, easy loans. At a meeting at Broadway Eddie’s, Russell Bufalino urged Hoffa to stop seeking the union presidency, noting that certain people were satisfied with Fitz. Sheeran understood that satisfaction to reflect the easier access to the fund. Hoffa refused to abandon the contest, saying that he did not want Fitz to have the union.

After his 1971 release under a presidential commutation, Hoffa sought to reclaim the Teamsters presidency and publicly threatened to expose organized crime’s presence in the union and prevent its use of the pension fund. Sheeran regarded this as deeply hypocritical: in his telling, Hoffa had brought organized-crime figures into the union and the fund in the first place. The contradiction illustrates how the fund’s purpose could be invoked from opposing positions—as a worker benefit to protect, and as an institution whose lending power was contested by men who had helped make it a source of influence.

Hoffa’s commutation barred him from direct or indirect management of any labor organization before March 6, 1980. The order did not name the Teamsters Pension Fund separately, but the restriction curtailed his ability to regain control of the union that governed it. The fund’s significance in the narrative lies in this conjunction: worker pensions accumulated into immense financial power, and control over that power became part of the larger struggle for control of the Teamsters.