The criminal law revolution (1961–1971)

The criminal law revolution (1961–1971) is the book’s description of a decade in which criminal rights were created where, in its account, none had previously existed. The phrase names more than a shift in doctrine: the trials of Jimmy Hoffa show constitutional protections being tested against undercover investigation, suspected jury tampering, and the government’s use of an informant embedded in Hoffa’s orbit. The later dispute over Hoffa’s appeal made the tension explicit: how far could law enforcement go to uncover a crime without violating the right to counsel or the fairness of a trial?

A decade defined by new criminal protections

The book places Hoffa’s appeal at the height of the criminal law revolution and presents it as a novel constitutional question. The dispute concerned whether Edward Grady Partin’s presence at the Andrew Jackson Hotel violated Hoffa’s right to counsel. That question arose from the government’s use of Partin during the Test Fleet proceedings, where the official charge was a misdemeanor but evidence of jury tampering could expose a more serious felony.

The Test Fleet case had been scheduled for October 22, 1962. It concerned a car-hauling company placed in the names of the wives of Hoffa and Owen Bert Brennan, and activity that had ended five years earlier and had already been investigated by the McClellan Committee and the Justice Department. Prosecutors argued that Test Fleet formed part of a long-range arrangement to pay Hoffa after he settled a strike favorably for an employer that later did business with the company. The book thus sets a contested labor-racketeering theory beside a separate and consequential question: whether the trial itself would be tainted by efforts to influence jurors.

Investigation inside the trial

The Get Hoffa Squad encouraged Partin to travel to Nashville and join Hoffa’s entourage. Partin guarded the door to Hoffa’s suite; Walter Sheridan acknowledged that the government supplied him with a recording device for calls with Hoffa and instructed him to watch for attempts to bribe jurors. The operation took place after three earlier jury trials engineered by Bobby Kennedy had failed to convict Hoffa, amid suspicions that juries had been tampered with.

The first reported warning came during jury selection, which began on the second day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bobby Kennedy was away from Nashville, assisting President John F. Kennedy as the crisis brought the threat of nuclear war into the courtroom’s background. Sheridan later wrote, “I went to sleep in the early morning hours thinking about the very real threat of nuclear war and the possibility that Jimmy Hoffa and I would end up very dead together in Nashville.” The next day, an insurance broker told the judge that a neighbor had offered him $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills to vote for acquittal if selected. The broker was excused after identifying the neighbor. Other prospective jurors said a supposed Nashville Banner reporter named Allen had called to ask their views of Hoffa; no reporter by that name worked for the paper, and the tainted panelists were dismissed.

Partin’s role became a constitutional flashpoint when he appeared as the government’s final witness, three months into the later Chattanooga jury-tampering trial. The defense said the government had planted a mole in Hoffa’s camp, violating his right to counsel, and sought to exclude Partin’s testimony. The government maintained that Partin had volunteered to attend, reported to Sheridan rather than to prosecutors, and had been told to look for evidence of the ongoing crime of jury tampering—not to discuss the Test Fleet case or Hoffa’s defense. After a four-hour hearing, the judge accepted that account and allowed Partin to testify. Hoffa glared at him; Partin proceeded to recount Hoffa’s alleged boasts about attempts to bribe jurors before or while they occurred.

In closing, prosecutor James Neal called the events “one of the greatest assaults on the jury system known to mankind.” He argued that Partin’s account was reliable because the government had checked it against what happened. The defense called the prosecution a frame-up and attacked Sheridan as Bobby Kennedy’s instrument. These opposing presentations exposed the case’s central difficulty: the government said it had uncovered and verified jury interference, while the defense argued that the means of uncovering it had compromised the accused’s constitutional rights.

The appeal and its limits

The Chattanooga appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court during the period the book calls the criminal law revolution. Hoffa’s appellate lawyer, Joseph A. Fanelli, argued the novel right-to-counsel issue, and Sheridan recalled that the prosecution team was unsure how the justices would rule after argument. Meanwhile, a Teamsters official tried to pressure Justice William Brennan through Brennan’s brother, threatening to close the brother’s brewery if Brennan did not vote the right way. The pressure did not alter the result: the Court rejected Hoffa’s appeal on the merits. Brennan joined the majority, written by Justice Potter Stewart; Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented, calling the government’s covert use of Partin “an affront to the quality and fairness of federal law enforcement.” The disagreement marks a limit as well as an advance: the new constitutional question received judicial review, but the Court did not find that the government’s conduct required reversal.

Procedure, power, and later evidence

The book also sets formal legal process against the political arrangements surrounding Hoffa’s release. On December 16, 1971, shortly after the decade named by the term, Morris Shenker filed a pardon petition directly with the White House. Rather than follow the established route through the Justice Department, prosecutors, the FBI, and the sentencing judges, the petition was marked approved by Attorney General John Mitchell. This episode is not the same as the courtroom dispute over Partin, but it extends the book’s contrast between prescribed procedure and the practical exercise of power.

The book’s later account of its own evidence reflects similar concern with the legal status of testimony. The author says that interviews with Frank Sheeran were conducted with an effort to preserve Sheeran’s rights so that his words would not count as a legally admissible confession. A disputed 1978 report of a phone confession to Steven Brill remained unresolved: the FBI believed Sheeran had confessed and sought the tape, while Brill publicly denied possessing one. Years later, the FBI released a 349-page summary of the Hoffa case, heavily censored, after pressure and a decade-long access lawsuit by Hoffa’s children. These later episodes do not establish the outcome of the 1961–1971 legal changes; they show how the book distinguishes between testimony, admissible proof, and a public record that remains incomplete.

That distinction also matters in the physical evidence reported after publication. Luminol testing at the house where Sheeran said he shot Hoffa revealed eight small indications of blood along a trail from the vestibule toward the kitchen. Subsequent FBI testing found human male blood but DNA that did not match Hoffa. The Oakland County prosecutor said the result neither corroborated nor refuted Sheeran’s confession. Read beside the appeal, the finding underscores the book’s recurring problem of proof: legal judgments, witness accounts, government records, and forensic traces may bear on the same story without resolving it in the same way.