Originally Posted by OakAsFan
Originally Posted by hoodlum
Originally Posted by OakAsFan
The Hoffa Wars, by Dan Moldea, is a really good book about Hoffa and the mob, too. Mostly about rebels trying to reform the Teamsters, but it spares no details about Hoffa and the IBT's mob connections, from 1930's Detroit, to his fallout with Tony Pro, to currying favor with Galante in prison just before disappearing.

I have an issue of PLAYBOY ,JULY 1975 ,the PLAYBOY interview is Jimmy Hoffa & in the interview he says " I never had, nor will I never need bodyguards"...Ironically ,he disappeared THAT month the issue was published!


When Frank Fitzsimmons decentralized the Teamsters, enabling the mobsters to control their locals without any oversight from the nationals, Hoffa became absolutely useless. His only move was to just stay out of dodge. He was delusional. He thought he was a mob boss himself, and he made threats. It probably wasn't so much the threats that got him killed, but how much he knew. He was once tight with Tony Provenzano and the Giacalones of Detroit. That's Westside and pretty much all of the midwest families, considering Detroit's influence. He was untouchable. In his final days he only had Carmine Galante's ear, and even Carmine sold him out.

I don't think Hoffa was altogether a bad person. Idealists in the labor movement love to bash him but he had no choice but to cut the mob into the Teamsters. The auto manufacturers were sending goon squads by the hundreds to break up strikes. People were being beaten to death. In the 1930s, if you didn't have some bad guy muscle on your side, you may as well have stayed in your home. A lot of Hoffa's modern day critics just don't understand what the country was like then.

Hoffa's rise to power coincided with the mob's. The bigger he got, the bigger the mob got, and vice versa. You can't blame him for believing he was part of the machine. But he was an outsider. Like Joe Pesci says in Casino. He wasn't one of them. He wasn't Italian. Just like the other Irish and Jewish associates, you have to know your time to walk away. The writing was on the wall for him and he overstayed his welcome, just like Siegel.



" watch what you say around this guy, he's got a big mouth" sam giancana to an outfit soldier about frank Sinatra. [ from the book "my way"