Hoffa, who was about fifty, was sitting next to me. He’d been happy to meet Helen (“Sally Rand! You was my first crush!”) before she got shuttled to the back row with the wives. Around us was an array of lawyers and thieves-with considerable crossover-including not just Dorfman but heavy-set, bespectacled, respectable-looking attorney William Bufalino, a master at telling Jim what he wanted to hear; and fat, frog-like Joey Glimco, a scowling Outfit killer turned labor leader. None of them spoke to me, though Dorfman nodded.
Absent was Hoffa’s menacing three-hundred-plus-pound bodyguard, Barney Baker, convicted extortionist, the terms of whose parole prevented participation in anything union-related. Apparently including football games.
“So whaddya think of these seats?” Hoffa asked.
His grin was hard to read. Funny thing about that vaguely Oriental mug of his-the features were those of a roughneck, all right, but there was a pixie sparkle to his eyes and his smile.
I did not play yes-man to Jim, unless it really mattered. If my livelihood, say, or maybe my life wasn’t on the line, I played the role of trusted truth sayer.
So I said, “Well, they stink, Jim. If this was the Cubs playing, we’d be in clover.”
“I know, I know.”
He shook his head like it was a naughty child, the glistening black chopped-off porcupine quills of his butch impervious to the motion or for that matter the wind off Lake Michigan.
“Blame Dorfman,” he said, loud enough for the lawyer to hear. “What the fuck are they playin’ football for at Wrigley Field, anyway? Do they play basketball in a swimming pool?”
Hoffa had a point. Even if that famous red sign out front was changed from HOME OF THE CUBS to HOME OF THE BEARS for football season, this was still a baseball park. To go gridiron meant reconfiguring the field, leaving us with box seats that were heaven for baseball season-right behind home plate-but hell for football, where those same seats put us at a corner of the end zone. That made the cheap seats-temporary bleachers out in right field-worthy of envy.
Not that I gave a damn. I was not a football fan, neither college nor pro, and I wasn’t even a baseball fan, really. And to the degree that I did care about the latter, I preferred the White Sox, if for no other reason than owner Bill Veeck was a pal who occasionally threw a job the A-1’s way.
But I knew enough to follow the game, even if I was already bored. We were still in the first quarter, and the only excitement so far, if you could call it that, was a forty-five-yard field goal for the Bears by Roger LeClerc. But they’d been down at the other end of the field, so whoop de do.
Hoffa seemed in pretty high spirits, though, a small miracle considering he had two major federal indictments hanging over him, one for fraud, the other for jury tampering. I’d seen him twice this year, and both times he had seemed short-tempered and moody, even for him.
Not that I ever really had any trouble with Hoffa.
We had hit it off right from the start-he was Dutch-Irish, I was half Irish, half German Jew. My father had been a West Side unionist whose rabble-rousing activities in Chicago were legend. That sat well with Jim, who often spoke as if he’d known my old man (he hadn’t, and my father would have abhorred Hoffa’s shady dealings).
So Jim had never suspected, a few years back, that I was working as a double agent for the rackets committee. Well, he had a good reason for that: he thought I was working as his double agent.
I know, I know … it’s hard to believe he actually figured he could buy off a Chicago detective.…
Still, there was much to admire about James Riddle Hoffa. His background had been (to use one of my old man’s favorite expressions) rougher than a cob, his coal miner father dying young, his hardworking mother making ends meet by polishing radiator caps in an auto plant.
As a teenager Jim pulled down fifteen bucks a week unloading trucks for a grocery chain. But it pissed him off that he didn’t get paid for the time he spent waiting for the truckloads of fruits and vegetables to arrive … so he organized a wildcat strike. He was sixteen. Soon he was on the Teamsters payroll where, obviously, he still was.
Say what you will, the little bulldog was one effective union leader, negotiating any number of generous contracts for his members. But his ties to the mob-not to mention the Republicans-had made him a target for the Kennedys. And soon Jack and particularly Bobby became this working-class Ahab’s white whale.
And, funny thing-he was theirs.
“Booby’s entire fucking law experience,” Hoffa had once ranted to me, “Booby” being his contemptuous way of referring to Robert Kennedy, “was servin’ as counsel on that one fucking candy-ass committee! And his brother appoints him attorney goddamn general? Hypocritical little silver-spoon shits! And their old man was the biggest bootlegger of ’em all!”
Indeed, Bobby’s first big action as AG was to start up the “Get Hoffa Squad.” More than twenty prosecutors and investigators were on staff full-time to make cases against Hoffa, and not just recent offenses, but going back and opening up cases the Eisenhower administration had dropped.
What I knew that perhaps Hoffa did not was that the “Get Hoffa Squad” was merely part of Bobby’s overall campaign, Operation Big Squeeze, aimed at the Mafia and their allies.
Like the Teamsters.
“You know who has good seats?” Hoffa asked.
“No. Who?”
He wiggled a finger toward the fifty-yard line. “That pal of yours. From Milwaukee.”
Hoffa turned his face to the field, but I kept looking his way. The Teamster boss was still smiling, if faintly. Around us, his guys were drinking beer and gnawing hot dogs and enjoying the game despite the shitty seats, and the women in their private row were chattering, ignoring the game, asking Sally Rand lots of questions, Helen obviously charming them. A gust of wind came up and I was chilled but I’d been chilled before the gust.
So-Ruby really had made me as Tom Ellison’s chaperone.
And Jake or Jack or whatever the fuck you want to call him had reported back to somebody who had got word to Hoffa-how many steps that had taken, how many somebodies, I had no idea.
But Hoffa knew.
From the moment I’d looked in the envelope his goon had delivered last night, I had wondered if the job for Tom was why I’d been invited today, hoping of course that it wasn’t. That Hoffa had happened to be in Chicago, where after all the fraud case was to be tried, maybe here to confer with his legal team, and thought of his old Chicago buddy Nate Heller, and sent a couple of tickets over, and … not really. My gut had told me Hoffa had to know.
Just the same, having him look at me and so casually mention Tom, sitting on the fifty-yard line, scared the crap out of me.
“This game sucks green donkey dick,” Hoffa pronounced. “I gotta pee. How about you, Heller? You probably gotta pee, too.”
“Now that you mention it.”
I slid out of the seats and moved to the opening in the railing, stepped out and then waited for Hoffa, because he would, of course, lead the way. Up the steps he went, often pausing and shaking hands, even stopping to talk, a confident, even cocky little figure in his workingman’s jacket, high-water pants, and white socks. And every guy he shook hands with winced, which did not surprise me, because that banty rooster had a grip like a vise.
Me, I just followed along like the flunky I was.
At the top of the steps, at the mouth of the inner stadium, he said, “Let’s go to my office,” and then I was following him down the high-ceilinged cement walkway, footsteps echoing, until we were inside a large men’s room with its troughs and stalls. You would think the game was exciting, because right now no one else was in there, just the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.