LABOR: Down with Integrity

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In Miami Beach Auditorium one day last week, a band bugled out a rousing version of When the Saints Go Marching In, and in marched nearly 2,000 delegates to the quinquennial convention of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, as unsaintly a crew as U.S. labor has to offer. They were there to elect—or rather, ratify —a president. The man they wanted was a man they loved: James Riddle Hoffa, 44, pal of gangsters, target of national scorn and innumerable investigations, soon to appear in New York to defend himself on charges of wiretapping and perjury.

Before Hoffa would accept the crown, he insisted that the Teamsters run through a charade designed to show that the Teamsters believe in fair play. Even the burliest of the delegates knew that the convention stood in the grim glare of public opinion, thanks to disclosures of Teamster corruption by John McClellan's Senate labor-rackets committee. With supreme cynicism, Jimmy and his boys pretended to clean their fingernails.

Beck v. Beck. First was a gentle coup de grâce to be administered to outgoing President Dave Beck. Fat Dave, once the unchallenged Teamster baron who patted little Jimmy Hoffa on the head, was to be booted into retirement (with an annual $50,000 pension) because of his outsize financial shenanigans, because he had been accused of fleecing a Teamster's widow, and because he had stood in the way of ambitious Jimmy. Bellowed Beck, in an hour-long swan song: "To thine own self be true! I would like to see the man who can stand up—who is without sin—and cast that first stone. God never created me in the crucible of infallibility."

With Beck out of the way, Hoffa coped with credentials troubles. One group of insurgents had claimed in court that more than half the delegates had been illegally chosen. Hoffa saw to it that the credentials committee, headed by Kansas City Teamster Roy Williams, scratched 139 of the more doubtful delegates, and stamped the rest approved. (Williams' reward for loyal service: promise of chairmanship of the Central States Conference.) This thumping pretense served only to prove Hoffa's confidence of victory. "Are you running scared?" asked a newsman. Snapped Jimmy in a steely voice: "I never run scared at nothin', and I don't intend to start at this late date."

Integrity v. Thirst. Jimmy had some actual opponents for the job, but they were feeble and halfhearted. Chief among them: Chicago Teamsters Tom Haggerty and Bill Lee. Trying at first to campaign on moral grounds, Haggerty opened campaign headquarters in the gargantuan Fontainebleau Hotel, dispensed several cases of liquor before he discovered that the Teamster delegates were less morally indignant over Hoffa's actions than they were thirsty. "We got a new slogan," rasped one Hoffaman: " 'Haggerty for integrity. Hoffa for president.' " Bill Lee, too, ran a losing battle, for among other things, he boasted the doubtful backing of Western Conference Teamster Boss Frank Brewster, a corruption-stained baron who had long fought Hoffa's climb to power. Didn't everybody know that Jimmy was going to sacrifice Brewster to the wolves before convention's end? (He did.)