United States Department of Justice

The United States Department of Justice is the federal institution at the center of the book’s account of the government’s long campaign against Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. Its prosecutors pursued Hoffa through repeated trials, used informants and surveillance to investigate suspected jury tampering, and helped establish a broader federal approach to organized crime. The narrative also examines the limits of those methods: a landmark challenge to the government’s use of an informant failed, while the route by which Hoffa received a presidential pardon bypassed ordinary Justice Department procedures.

A campaign against Hoffa

Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department pursued Hoffa after three earlier jury trials had failed to convict him. By the time Kennedy announced his run for the United States Senate, the book reports that his effort had produced indictments against 201 Teamsters officials and convictions against 126. The department’s attention was not limited to Hoffa himself; it treated the union and its officials as part of a wider organized-crime problem.

The Test Fleet case brought that campaign into a Nashville courtroom. The charge concerned a car-hauling company put in the names of the wives of Hoffa and Owen Bert Brennan, based on business activity that had ended five years earlier and had already been examined by the McClellan Committee and the department. Prosecutors argued that the company formed part of a long-range arrangement to pay Hoffa after he settled a strike favorably for an employer that later did business with Test Fleet. The underlying charge was a misdemeanor, but a discovery of jury tampering could expose Hoffa to a felony prosecution.

Informants, surveillance, and jury tampering

The department’s investigative tactics blurred the boundary between pursuing a new crime and gaining access to the defense’s surroundings. The Get Hoffa Squad encouraged Edward Grady Partin to attend the Nashville trial and join Hoffa’s entourage. Partin served as a guard outside Hoffa’s suite, while Walter Sheridan acknowledged that he supplied Partin with a recording device and instructed him to watch for attempts to bribe jurors. The book records the government’s later position that Partin volunteered, reported to Sheridan rather than to prosecutors, and passed along evidence of ongoing jury tampering—not information about the Test Fleet charge or Hoffa’s defense.

A prospective juror reported that a neighbor had offered him $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills to vote for acquittal if selected. The judge excused him after obtaining the neighbor’s name. 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. These incidents gave the government a separate jury-tampering case to pursue. In closing, prosecutor James Neal called the conduct an assault on the jury system and argued that Partin’s account was credible because events he said were planned or underway were subsequently verified.

Partin’s role became a constitutional issue in the later Chattanooga jury-tampering trial. After three months of proceedings, the government called him as its final witness. The defense alleged that prosecutors had planted a mole in Hoffa’s camp and sought to exclude his testimony as an infringement of the right to counsel. The judge held a four-hour hearing, accepted the government’s account of Partin’s role, and allowed him to testify. Partin then described Hoffa’s own statements about attempts to bribe jurors, including boasts made before or during those attempts. The jury convicted Hoffa; the government’s use of Partin nevertheless remained a contested feature of the case.

Judicial review and disputed methods

The appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court as criminal-procedure rights were undergoing rapid development. The central question was whether Partin’s presence at the Andrew Jackson Hotel had violated Hoffa’s constitutional right to counsel. The Court ruled against Hoffa on the merits. Justice Potter Stewart wrote the majority opinion, while Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented, calling the government’s clandestine use of Partin an affront to fair federal law enforcement. The book thus distinguishes the Court’s legal ruling from the continuing dispute over the propriety of the investigative tactic.

After the ruling, Hoffa’s lawyers filed a further motion alleging government wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping. An affidavit by Benjamin Nichols claimed that Sheridan had paid him to bug jurors’ phones in Chattanooga. The account points out a basic defect: jurors’ rooms there, as elsewhere in the country, had no phones. The episode illustrates how allegations of surveillance became part of the legal contest even when the supporting account was implausible. Hoffa entered Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary on March 7, 1967, after his appeals in the jury-tampering case had been exhausted.

Pardon, institutional procedure, and political controversy

The department’s role in Hoffa’s release differed sharply from its prosecution of him. On December 16, 1971, Morris Shenker submitted a pardon petition directly to the White House. Under the procedures described in the book, a petition ordinarily went through the Justice Department for a response, with input from prosecutors, the FBI, and the sentencing judges. This one bypassed those steps and was marked approved by Attorney General John Mitchell.

The pardon later became entangled with a restriction barring Hoffa from union activity until 1980. White House counsel John Dean testified that he had inserted the language after Mitchell told him Hoffa had orally agreed to stay out of union affairs. Charles Colson was also implicated in the ensuing allegations; Hoffa blamed him, while Colson invoked the Fifth Amendment on the matter during the Watergate hearings. The competing accounts make the restriction a political and procedural controversy, not simply an administrative detail. The narrative also reports that Hoffa delayed challenging it until his parole expired in March 1973, fearing closer monitoring by the Nixon administration.

Legacy and later scrutiny

The book credits Bobby Kennedy’s campaign with helping shape subsequent federal action against organized crime: gathering intelligence, concentrating on targets, making deals with informants, using electronic surveillance, and coordinating information across government agencies. That description presents the Justice Department’s methods as consequential beyond the Hoffa cases, while also emphasizing that the effort did not eradicate organized crime. The book’s image is of power damaged but not eliminated.

Later investigations into Hoffa’s disappearance renewed questions about federal enforcement and institutional transparency. In 1982, cases brought by the Department of Labor and the FBI resulted in Frank Sheeran receiving sentences totaling thirty-two years. The narrator questions why federal resources remained concentrated on a small group of suspects and raises the possibility that someone was supplying information to the FBI; the passage poses that as an unresolved question, not a demonstrated fact.

In 2002 the FBI transferred the Hoffa case to the Oakland County prosecutor, David Gorcyca. Despite at least three requests beginning in June 2004, the relevant portions of the FBI’s seventy-volume, sixteen-thousand-page file concerning Sheeran, Sal Briguglio, and the Andretta brothers were not released to the prosecutor, and a request for a federal grand jury was denied. Separately, Fox News arranged Luminol testing at the house where Sheeran said he shot Hoffa. The floorboards showed eight small indications of blood in a trail from the vestibule toward the kitchen. Subsequent FBI laboratory testing found human male blood in the flooring but no DNA match to Hoffa. The local prosecutor said the result neither corroborated nor refuted Sheeran’s confession. These later episodes extend the article’s portrait of federal justice from prosecution and surveillance to the unresolved question of what evidence government agencies would share—and what the available evidence could finally establish.