William E. Miller

William E. Miller is presented as the trial judge whose measured rulings brought the jury-tampering crisis around Jimmy Hoffa’s Nashville proceedings into the courtroom. He faced suspicious approaches to prospective jurors, an alleged effort to influence a sitting juror, and a later accusation involving Hoffa’s own lawyer. His record in the account is defined less by a single verdict than by a sequence of interventions: investigating what could be established, removing jurors whose impartiality was compromised, and ordering further inquiry into the conduct surrounding the trial.

The Test Fleet trial and the jury pool

Miller presided over the Test Fleet case, in which Hoffa was charged under the Taft–Hartley Act in connection with a car-hauling company set up in the names of the wives of Hoffa and Owen Bert Brennan. The prosecution connected the company to a strike settlement Hoffa had negotiated favorably for an employer who later did business with Test Fleet. The underlying activity had ended five years earlier and had already been investigated by the McClellan Committee and the Justice Department. The case was a misdemeanor, but suspected interference with the jury could expose a more serious felony.

The account characterizes Miller as respected for fairness and unlikely to favor either side. That reputation mattered as jury selection began during the Cuban Missile Crisis, while Bobby Kennedy was away from Nashville attending to the national emergency. Miller was soon confronted with the first reported attempt to influence the panel: an insurance broker said a neighbor had offered him $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills to vote for acquittal if selected. Miller pressed the prospective juror to identify the neighbor, then excused him. The episode also illustrates the complication of choosing a jury in a case where a seemingly unfavorable juror might nevertheless be retained because the prosecution would be unlikely to strike him.

Other prospective jurors reported that a man claiming to be a Nashville Banner reporter named Allen had called to ask their views of Hoffa. No such reporter existed. The tainted prospects were dismissed. These incidents gave the jury-selection process an atmosphere in which even a purported inquiry into a juror’s opinions could be an effort to find or shape a favorable panel.

The hearing over a sitting juror

After the trial began, Edward Grady Partin told Walter Sheridan that a Nashville Teamsters local president might try to bribe the wife of a state highway patrol trooper serving on the jury. Agents watched the union official meet the trooper in a patrol car on a deserted road. Prosecutors then asked Miller to remove the juror’s wife without disclosing the source of the tip, and he convened a hearing.

Miller questioned the agents who had followed the official. When the union official was brought into court, Hoffa flashed him a five-finger sign; the man invoked the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. The trooper initially denied wrongdoing but, under Miller’s questioning, acknowledged that the official had offered him promotion and advancement in exchange for an unspecified future favor. He maintained that the favor itself had not been explained. Miller excused the trooper’s wife and substituted an alternate. At home that night, she told reporters through tears that she did not know why she had been removed.

The ruling protected the jury from a possible attempt at influence, but the episode also exposed how incomplete the available account could be: the trooper described an offer without identifying the favor it was meant to secure, while the source of the original warning remained undisclosed in the hearing. Bill Bufalino, speaking for Hoffa’s lawyers, rejected the allegation of a fix and suggested that any fixing would have come from Bobby Kennedy’s office. Miller’s action, by contrast, was concrete and procedural: he removed the juror after examining the evidence presented to him.

Deadlock and an order to investigate

The Test Fleet trial lasted forty-two days. The jury was sequestered and, on the third day of deliberations, repeatedly reported that it could not reach a verdict. Miller dismissed it. Before the jurors left the box, he addressed the courtroom about indications that improper contacts had been made with prospective jurors from the beginning of selection. He had signed orders convening another grand jury after the first of the year to investigate the incidents and return indictments where probable cause existed. He warned that trial by jury would become a mockery if unscrupulous people could subvert it without consequence.

The order distinguished an unresolved criminal case from a resolved finding of responsibility. The jury had not convicted Hoffa, and Miller’s remarks called for investigation rather than declaring who was guilty of the attempted interference. Hoffa, speaking to a television audience on Christmas Eve, called it a disgrace to say the jury had been tampered with. The contrast between Miller’s public warning and Hoffa’s denial left the events contested even as the judge insisted that they not go unexamined.

Osborn, Chattanooga, and the limits of the record

The jury-tampering case was later postponed until January 1964, and its venue was changed from Nashville to Chattanooga because, as the account puts it, something was going on in Nashville. Before that trial, a Nashville police officer again reported an alleged effort to bribe a prospective juror, this time implicating Tommy Osborn, Hoffa’s lead attorney in the Test Fleet case. The Get Hoffa Squad obtained a tape recording and reported the allegation to Miller, who was then chief judge of the court.

Miller called Osborn into his chambers and confronted him with the allegation that he had solicited a police officer to approach a prospective juror with a $10,000 offer: $5,000 if the person was selected and another $5,000 if the jury later declared itself hopelessly deadlocked. Osborn first denied it. Miller told him that the officer had secretly recorded a conversation confirming the report, and Osborn was given a rule to show cause why he should not be disbarred. After consulting Bill Bufalino and Frank Ragano, Osborn returned and acknowledged that the voice on the tape was his, while disputing the officer’s account of the conversation’s meaning. On November 20, 1963, Miller disbarred him.

The consequences extended beyond the Nashville proceedings. In the later Chattanooga trial, the Supreme Court of the United States considered 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; Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented, describing the government’s clandestine use of Partin as an affront to fair law enforcement. That appellate dispute concerned the government’s investigative methods, not a finding that Miller had acted improperly. Within the book’s account, Miller’s significance lies in the pressure placed on a trial judge to preserve the jury process amid evidence of attempted manipulation on more than one side, while leaving contested allegations for investigation and judgment rather than treating suspicion as proof.