Nixon Freed Jimmy Hoffa — One Typed Sentence Didn't

0:10
December twenty-third, nineteen seventy-one.
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A single sheet of government paper, eight and a half by eleven, under the seal of the executive office.
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Lawyers call it an individual warrant of executive clemency, and for James Riddle Hoffa it carried two decisions.
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There will be a parking lot in this story's future, and a legend. That belongs to another film. This one is the paper.
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Here is what the paper was built on.
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In nineteen sixty-four, two federal juries convicted Hoffa in separate trials.
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Eight years for tampering with a Tennessee jury.
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Five more in the case the government called Sun Valley, the one about the Teamsters pension money.
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The sentences ran one after the other, thirteen years in total.
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Behind the prosecutions stood a unit the press called the Get Hoffa Squad,
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federal attorneys set loose by Robert Kennedy's Justice Department with one assignment:
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end this man's career.
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Appeals dragged for two more years.
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On the twelfth of December, nineteen sixty-six, the Supreme Court let the verdicts stand.
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The math of Jimmy Hoffa's life now had a fixed end date, and the government knew it.
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On the seventh of March, nineteen sixty-seven, Hoffa walked into the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania,
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to begin serving all thirteen years.
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The Bureau of Prisons opened a file and did the arithmetic.
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Counted forward, day by day, that sentence expired on the sixth of March, nineteen eighty. Hold that date.
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The sixth of March, nineteen eighty.
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It is the hinge of everything in this story:
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a day printed on no cell wall, thirteen years away,
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already doing its arithmetic on the man.
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Lewisburg was a hard institution, and it held him beside other hard men.
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One inmate in those years, according to the reporting, was Anthony Provenzano,
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a Teamsters boss out of New Jersey doing his own federal time.
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Four years, nine months, sixteen days.
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That is what Hoffa served, counted from the March morning of nineteen sixty-seven to the December
3:03
afternoon when the paperwork arrived.
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Inside, he stayed Hoffa.
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Teamster insiders told reporters he had ways of getting his wishes out through the walls.
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The official door was the parole board, and the parole board said no.
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It granted him a rehearing, and on the twentieth of August, nineteen seventy-one, it denied
3:27
him again, deferring any further look until June of nineteen seventy-two.
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So by the book, Jimmy Hoffa had a cell, a number, and a calendar, and the calendar said June.
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Then the paperwork began to move by another route entirely, out of public sight, away from the parole board.
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A sentence can end two ways:
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a parole board weighing behavior, or a president wielding clemency.
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In the fall of nineteen seventy-one, the second route opened.
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According to a former Justice Department investigator who had once hunted Hoffa, the application
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moved with remarkable speed.
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In a nineteen seventy-three book, that investigator, W. J.
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Sheridan, wrote that the president signed within a week of the application reaching the attorney
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general, and that the Justice Department's criminal division was never consulted.
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That is Sheridan's account, a hostile one.
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Treat it as allegation.
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What the record itself shows is stranger than any allegation.
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When the file moved from the Justice Department up to the White House, it carried no condition at all.
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Somebody added the leash later.
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The paper trail survives because Hoffa's lawyers later forced it into open court.
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The pardon attorney at the Justice Department prepared a recommendation to grant the commutation,
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what they call a letter of advice, and forwarded it for the attorney general's signature.
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That letter recommended no restriction on union office,
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no restriction on union activity.
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Nothing.
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The attorney general signed it, and the file went up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House,
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where clemency files went to be changed.
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There it reached the president's counsel, John Dean.
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The court record says his jurisdiction extended to such matters.
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Between that office and the finished warrant, a sentence appears that no Justice Department
5:39
official ever recommended.
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Here is the finished document.
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The individual warrant of executive clemency for James R.
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Hoffa, dated the twenty-third of December, nineteen seventy-one.
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It commuted his combined consecutive sentences, quote, to a term of six and one-half years' imprisonment.
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Then came the condition,
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and you should hear it exactly as it was typed.
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Quote:
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upon the condition that the said James R.
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Hoffa not engage in direct or indirect management of any labor organization prior to March sixth, nineteen eighty.
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Six and a half years set his body free that afternoon.
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The one sentence ran past that afternoon, past him, for eight years and two months more, all
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the way to the original end of his sentence.
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Read the wording closely.
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Direct or indirect management. Not office.
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Not title.
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Management, which is what Hoffa did the way other men breathe.
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The wording closed every door:
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no presidency, no back room, no phone calls, no nephew holding the seat warm.
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And the enforcement clause sat right beside it in the record.
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Break the condition and the commutation collapses:
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back to Lewisburg to serve the balance of the thirteen years.
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The leash had teeth printed into it.
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That is the thing about this document.
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It was both at once.
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One side of the sheet held the gift, and written into the same sheet was the cage, its door
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left open for him.
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At four-ten in the afternoon of December twenty-third, nineteen seventy-one, the time entered
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into the court record,
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Jimmy Hoffa signed a mandatory release certificate and walked out of Lewisburg.
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Four years, nine months, sixteen days after he walked in.
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There were cameras at the gate and a car waiting.
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Hoffa, fifty-eight years old, told reporters he had no designs on running the union again.
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The steering wheel, he said, was in good hands, the hands of Frank Fitzsimmons, the man he had left in charge.
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It was the statement of a man walking free.
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What he did not say at the gate, and what the court later found he did not yet hold in writing,
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was the leash already fastened to him.
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Understand what he was walking away from.
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The International Brotherhood of Teamsters had two million members and a pension fund counted in billions.
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It was the largest union in the country, and it had been built, deal by deal, to answer to one voice.
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That voice had just come out of a cell, and the union moved like it knew.
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One senior officer put it plainly to a reporter that week:
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Jimmy will always be Number One with the Teamster rank and file.
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The paper said indirect management was forbidden.
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The union's instinct said the arrangement still stood.
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Between those two facts,
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every fight of the next three years had already been decided.
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The only question was which fact would win.
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While Hoffa was inside,
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the machinery had been retooled.
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In nineteen seventy-one he resigned the presidency.
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In June,
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Frank Fitzsimmons took the office in his own right, and in July the convention elected him to it outright.
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That same summer, the union revised its constitution to hand the president broad power over political money.
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Fitzsimmons took a seat on a pay board at the White House.
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Hoffa's wife,
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Josephine, headed the women's division of the union's political arm.
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Everyone in that system understood which way the current ran.
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A White House that freed Hoffa had also, quietly,
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made certain the chair was occupied, and bolted down to the floor, long before the gate opened.
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Now watch the document itself, because it does not let him go.
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Hoffa admitted in court papers what happened that first evening.
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He was in St.
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Louis when he heard about the condition, over the media, that same night, the twenty-third of December.
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Four days later, on the twenty-seventh, the chief probation officer for the Eastern District
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of Michigan found him, formally advised him of the condition, and handed him its text.
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On the eleventh of January, nineteen seventy-two, the individual warrant itself arrived by certified mail.
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Hoffa refused to sign for it.
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The federal government had freed him, and now its paper chased him from city to city like a
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process server, and he would not give it a signature.
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The release made front pages, and the front pages noticed the fine print.
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The terms of the commutation,
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the New York Times observed,
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left unclear what role,
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if any,
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the man who had dominated a two-million-member union could play in its affairs.
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Outside the union, enemies smelled a flaw before the ink was dry.
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William Loeb, a conservative publisher then at war with the president, hinted that a lawsuit
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might be brought to remove the limits put on Hoffa's return.
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The lawsuit would have to wait three years for its plaintiff.
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But the flaw hunters were right about one thing:
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there was going to be a fight over this sentence, and it was going to end up in a courtroom.
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By nineteen seventy-four, Hoffa had settled on his own version of events,
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and he told it to an interviewer.
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He left Lewisburg, he said,
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on the twenty-second of December, the day he signed the commutation order.
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He said that order placed him on restriction only until March of nineteen seventy-three, the
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ordinary parole date, and that he first heard about the nineteen eighty restriction the next day.
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Quote:
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I refused to sign it.
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I don't think it's enforceable.
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The court found the evidence in dispute on when he knew what.
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But one point nobody contested:
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he walked out a free man who believed the union was still his, carrying a sentence he said he
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never agreed to.
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So who wrote the sentence?
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Three answers surfaced,
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and none of them came from the man who signed the warrant.
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John Mitchell, the attorney general in December of nineteen seventy-one, gave Hoffa's lawyers
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a notarized affidavit.
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Neither he nor anyone at the Justice Department, he said,
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initiated or suggested the restriction.
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Not even the president, Mitchell added, to his knowledge.
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The pardon attorney told a different story:
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the restriction went into the order, he said,
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because John Dean, the president's counsel, told him to put it there.
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And Hoffa's lawsuit went further still, alleging that Charles Colson added the condition as
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part of a deal with Frank Fitzsimmons.
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That is the suit talking, allegation,
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not record.
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But all three answers share one fact:
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nobody at the Justice Department claims the sentence.
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Beyond the record there is the shadow record,
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and a careful film keeps them apart.
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In nineteen seventy-three, W. J.
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Sheridan wrote that Hoffa's release followed a chronology of bribery,
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threats,
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and political intrigue reaching into the White House.
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There have been unproven claims of cash,
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hundreds of thousands of dollars moving between the Teamsters world and the Nixon world in both directions.
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None of it was ever established in a courtroom, and that should be said plainly.
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What is established is only this:
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the fastest of fast tracks worked for exactly one prisoner, and that prisoner was worth a great
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deal to a great many people.
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A commutation is supposed to arrive as a gift.
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This one arrived rigged like a stage.
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On the fifth of February, nineteen seventy-four, Hoffa filed a formal application with the attorney general,
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asking that the condition be removed.
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The application went nowhere fast.
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So on the thirteenth of March, nineteen seventy-four, Jimmy Hoffa sued the president of the United States.
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The case was filed in federal district court in Washington, against President Nixon and Attorney
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General William Saxbe:
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Hoffa against Saxbe.
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A convicted man, three years out of Lewisburg, demanding that the highest office in the country
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strike one sentence from his freedom.
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It may have been the strangest civil filing of that entire decade,
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a man already released from prison suing the government to get out from under the longest shadow
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prison had ever cast.
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The complaint argued the condition violated the First Amendment,
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speech and association,
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and amounted to additional punishment and a bill of attainder aimed at one named citizen.
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His lawyers called the restriction without precedent among presidential grants of clemency.
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The suit carried the missing author's file into court:
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Mitchell's affidavit,
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the pardon attorney's account of Dean, the allegation against Colson.
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A paper trail pointing at the White House while the Justice Department pointed away from itself.
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And Hoffa told the court what the prize was.
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He planned to run for the presidency of Local two ninety-nine in Detroit that year, and after
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that for the international presidency at the nineteen seventy-six convention, against Fitzsimmons.
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In July of nineteen seventy-four, Judge John H.
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Pratt of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued his opinion.
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It ran dozens of pages,
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and it began by giving the president nearly everything he asked for.
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The pardon power in Article Two of the Constitution,
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the court held, is broad, and it is not for the courts to inquire into the rationale of the president's decision.
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Whatever moved Nixon to attach the leash,
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the court would not look.
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Then came the verdict on the leash itself:
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the condition was within the president's power, it was reasonable, and it stood.
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Jimmy Hoffa lost every claim he brought to court, and the leash stayed exactly where it was.
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The reasoning was surgical.
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The condition,
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Judge Pratt wrote,
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targets management, conduct, not speech.
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And the test for reasonableness sat in plain sight:
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Hoffa's crimes had grown directly out of his union office.
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The court pointed to precedent.
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The Supreme Court had already let the state of New York bar convicted felons from union office.
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What a legislature could do, the judge reasoned, the president could do through clemency.
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And the leash carried a built-in mercy the court refused to ignore.
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It ran only to the sixth of March, nineteen eighty, the day his thirteen-year sentence would
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have ended anyway.
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Not one day past the original sentence.
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The cruelest paragraph was about acceptance.
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You cannot take the gift and refuse the string:
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a prisoner offered a commutation can accept the whole or reject the whole.
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Hoffa had walked out.
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He had stayed out.
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His conduct, the court found, showed acceptance, despite his continuing awareness of the condition.
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No due-process hearing was owed him before the condition was attached.
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He had refused to sign for the registered warrant.
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None of it mattered.
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The court held that the commutation,
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condition and all, had been accepted within the meaning of the Constitution.
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So the refusal Hoffa had worn like a badge for three years,
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the line about refusing to sign, turned out in legal terms to be nothing at all.
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The paper did not need his signature.
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Notice what the ruling also buried.
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The authorship question, Mitchell against Dean, the pardon attorney's story,
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Hoffa's suit against Colson, was never answered.
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The court said it could not inquire into the president's rationale.
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The mystery was ruled out of bounds by the referee.
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Somewhere in the White House in December of nineteen seventy-one, someone had typed the sentence
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that cost Jimmy Hoffa the rest of his life.
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The judicial system of the United States had just said, formally, that it did not need to know who.
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And the leash, meanwhile,
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had been stamped lawful by a federal judge, with eight years and two months of it still left to run.
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The clock resumed, and it did not care who was holding it.
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The court record concedes one thing in Hoffa's favor:
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from the day of his release through the date of the ruling, he had abided by the condition,
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at least on the surface.
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No office.
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No title.
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No official act anyone could prove.
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But the surface was where the condition lived, and everyone knew what ran underneath it.
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meetings,
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allies,
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pressure on the men who held the seats he wanted.
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The convention of nineteen seventy-six sat on the calendar like a trial date.
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Between Hoffa and that convention stood one sentence, and after July of nineteen seventy-four,
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no court was going to remove it.
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The leash ran toward the sixth of March, nineteen eighty.
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Every strategy Hoffa had pointed at beating that date:
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the lawsuit, the local, the convention challenge.
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By the summer of nineteen seventy-five, he was still fighting the condition.
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Then the calendar moved without him.
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On the thirtieth of July, nineteen seventy-five, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared.
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You know that story, everybody does, and it belongs to another telling.
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Ours stops here, at the edge of the parking lot, where the paper stops.
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What he was doing that summer is documented:
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chasing the presidency,
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fighting the condition,
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pressing men who no longer wanted to be pressed.
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What happened at the end of it is not ours to stage.
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On the sixth of March, nineteen eighty, the thirteen-year sentence James R.
21:19
Hoffa received in nineteen sixty-four finally ended by simple arithmetic.
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The condition expired the same day.
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It was the date the sentence was always going to die.
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Here is the arithmetic the court record leaves behind.
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Even without the commutation,
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even with good-time credit deducted, Hoffa's mandatory release would have fallen on the twenty-eighth
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of November, nineteen seventy-five, four months after the day he disappeared.
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The commutation was supposed to buy him freedom early.
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In the end it bought him three and a half years of street,
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and it bought the institution a clean transition.
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Not one day of the paper's term was ever remitted.
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History remembered Jimmy Hoffa as a mystery:
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a man who vanished, a case that never closed.
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The record in this film suggests something colder.
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Before the mystery, there was the punishment, and the punishment was administrative.
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A parking lot can swallow a man.
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Only paper can hold him past his own death.
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You can still read the leash:
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it survives as footnote two in a federal court opinion, word for word, dated the twenty-third
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of December, nineteen seventy-one.
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Four years, nine months, sixteen days bought him a limousine at the gate.
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The rest of his life was leased to him, in writing, until the sixth of March, nineteen eighty. The paper.
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Not the parking lot.

Nixon Freed Jimmy Hoffa — One Typed Sentence Didn't

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Nixon Freed Jimmy Hoffa — One Typed Sentence Didn't

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