LABOR: Out of the Trap

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When FBI agents arrested squat, tough Teamster James Riddle Hoffa in Washington last March, it looked as if the U.S. Government might have an airtight case against him. Jimmy Hoffa, 44, chairman of the Central States Teamster Conference and most powerful of the International Teamsters Union's vice presidents, had blundered thuddingly into a trap set by the Senate's labor-rackets investigating committee. Committee Counsel Robert F. Kennedy (younger brother of Mas-sachusett's Senator Jack Kennedy) confidently vowed to jump off the Capitol dome if Hoffa wriggled out of the charges brought against him by the federal grand jury: bribery, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice.

Last week, with dazzling help from Washington's cleverest and busiest criminal lawyer, beaming Jimmy Hoffa wriggled free after all. Grinned his lawyer, rich, boyish (37) Edward Bennett Williams:* "I'm going to send Bobby Kennedy a parachute."

Hello to the Champ. Back in February, before Kennedy had any need for a parachute, Wall Street Lawyer John Cye Cheasty, wartime naval intelligence officer, went to him with an astonishing story. Jimmy Hoffa, said Cheasty, had offered him $18,000 to get a job with the Senate labor-rackets committee and serve as Hoffa's spy during the investigation into the gamy dealings of Teamster President Dave Beck. Counsel Kennedy and Arkansas' Committee Chairman John L. McClellan quickly arranged a job for Cheasty, and he agreed to help catch Hoffa in a trap. During the next few weeks, with FBI agents lurking in the background, Cheasty passed Hoffa a clutch of committee documents, and Hoffa turned over bundles of bills in return. In all, it added up to $3,000. When the agents nabbed him one evening in Washington's Dupont Plaza Hotel, Jimmy was carrying in an inside coat pocket a document that Cheasty had handed him a few moments before.

With such evidence stacked against his client, Lawyer Williams took great care in picking jurymen, ended up with a working-class panel of eight Negroes, four whites. Then he proceeded to paint an emotional, vivid-hued contrast between Cheasty and Hoffa. Cheasty, went the Williams defense, was a "liar" and an "informer"; Hoffa was a man who "fought many battles for labor" and "never betrayed a trust." Jimmy himself took the witness stand and, with Williams asking helpful questions, blandly testified that he had hired Cheasty solely as a lawyer to help represent teamsters under investigation. Not until he was arrested, Jimmy testified, did he find that Cheasty held a .committee job.

By playing up the fact that Cheasty once worked for a Florida legislative commission dealing with a Negro bus boycott, Williams skillfully managed to make him appear anti-Negro. Heightening the picture, ex-Heavyweight Champ Joe Louis, a Detroit acquaintance of Fight Fan Hoffa, turned up as a visitor to the courtroom. Every now and then Joe helpfully left his spectator's seat to chat with Hoffa at the defense table. The Justice Department countered by bringing in a Negro attor ney to sit at the prosecution table, but he was no match for Joe.

The jury's verdict: not guilty.