Jimmy Hoffa (1913-1982) was the powerful President of America’s largest labor union, the 2.3- million-member Teamsters, in the middle of the 20th Century. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy – in the years between when he worked for Joe McCarthy and when he became a liberal icon – went after Hoffa as a symbol of labor corruption. Several trials in the 1950s and early 1960s resulted in acquittals, but a six-week trial in Chattanooga in 1964 - on charges that he had bribed jurors in a 1962 Nashville trial – resulted in a conviction and a 13-year sentence. Hoffa was imprisoned in 1967 and pardoned by President Nixon in 1971. He disappeared in 1975. This book focuses on the Chattanooga trial but also covers the Nashville trial and the context of these climactic Tennessee judicial proceedings. The author, Maury Nicely, is an attorney from Chattanooga.
Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2019. 443 pages with an Index, Bibliography, Notes and photos. Hardback with pictorial cover