Jimmy Hoffa: How America's Most Powerful Union Boss Made A Deal With The Mob And Paid With His Life

Jimmy Hoffa was born with nothing, built everything, and then vanished without a trace. This is the book that tells the whole story, from the beginning to the brutal end, and it holds nothing back. Jimmy Hoffa grew up in poverty in a small Indiana town, lost his father at seven years old, dropped out of school at fourteen, and went to work on a loading dock in Detroit with no connections, no money, and no plan beyond surviving the week. What he had instead was something that cannot be taught and cannot be bought. He had an instinct for power so sharp it frightened the people around him, a will so strong that federal prosecutors spent an entire decade trying to break it and failed, and a fighting spirit so deep that even four and a half years inside a federal penitentiary could not extinguish it. Jimmy Hoffa took the Teamsters union from a regional organization into the most powerful labor force in American history, put two million working men and women in a position to demand fair wages, decent conditions, and basic human dignity from industries that had spent generations treating them as disposable, and negotiated agreements that changed the economic lives of ordinary Americans in ways that are still felt today. Jimmy Hoffa did all of that. He also made deals with the most dangerous organized crime figures in the country, handed hundreds of millions of dollars in worker pension funds to mob connected enterprises, maintained relationships with killers and criminals across two decades of federal surveillance, and ultimately paid for every one of those decisions with his life on a summer afternoon in Michigan when he got into a car and was never seen again.Nobody who reads about Jimmy Hoffa forgets him. That is the thing about this story. Once you understand who he really was, not the cartoon version, not the punchline, not the shorthand reference for organized crime that his name has become in popular culture, but the actual human being who came from actual poverty and built actual power and made actual choices with actual consequences, you cannot look away. Jimmy Hoffa negotiated contracts that fed families. Jimmy Hoffa stole from those same families through pension fund corruption that enriched criminals. Jimmy Hoffa stood up to United States senators in nationally televised hearings and made them look small. Jimmy Hoffa went to prison and ran his operation from inside a federal cell. Jimmy Hoffa walked out of Lewisburg with one consuming obsession which was getting back what had been taken from him, and that obsession, that absolute refusal to accept the limits that powerful men had placed on him, is what finally got him killed. The union halls of Detroit in the 1930s where men swung bats and settled arguments with their fists and Jimmy Hoffa was always the last one standing. The smoke filled rooms where Jimmy Hoffa sat across from mob bosses and made agreements that would compromise everything he had built. The Senate hearing rooms where Robert Kennedy stared at Jimmy Hoffa with open contempt and Jimmy Hoffa stared back with something worse. The federal courtroom where the jury tampering verdict came down and the long appeal process that Jimmy Hoffa pursued with the energy of a man who simply refused to believe the system could hold him. The prison yard at Lewisburg where Jimmy Hoffa ran five miles a day and waited. The parking lot at the Machus Red Fox restaurant where Jimmy Hoffa waited one last time for men who were never going to show up the way he expected. This book goes everywhere this story goes, and it takes you with it every step of the way. Read more