And the American Dream Did the Rest

IF STEVE BRILL were the type who sings in the shower, he would never have written a book which accomplishes the remarkable: pissing off both Frank Fitzsimmons, boss of the Teamsters Union, and Pete Camerata, leading light of the dissident group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU).

It was a hot day in New York, see, in July 1976, and Steve Brill was taking a shower. He was a successful young magazine writer for Clay Felker's New York (remember "The Pathetic Lies of Jimmy Carter"?), and the top non-fiction editor at Simon & Schuster wanted him to do a book. It was pickyer-topic time, but a succession of three-martini business lunches with the editor had elicited only a few "Gee, that'd make a great magazine article" ideas. Then, a radio announcer droned through the suds of Brill's quiet shower with a "piddling little item" about some Teamsters' local striking in upstate New York.

It hit him. Longtime Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa was still missing; foul play was suspected. The feds were investigating the union's pension funds for financial, uh, irregularities (like loans to mobsters, unsecured loans to friends, etc.). The biggest labor union in the United States. Bang.

One of every hundred Americans, one of every twenty American families, and one of every ten American union members is a dues-paying member of Frank Fitzsimmons' union. Teamsters are cafeteria workers at Penn State, sanitationmen in New York City,...zookeepers in San Diego,...cartoonists in Hollywood,...McDonald's hamburger-bun makers in Tennessee,...brewers in Milwaukee,...and 450,000 truckers and warehousemen around the country who drive and store everything from diapers to coffins.

Brill went at the Teamsters in the manner of a magazine writer. The book consists of nine profiles of Teamsters and associates--looking at the institution through the people in it. The characters include Fitzsimmons, Tony Provenzano (the New Jersey Teamster/mobster who Brill says orchestrated Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance), Jimmy Hoffa Jr. (a Detroit labor lawyer outsider, waiting for his father to float to the top), Ron Carey (a rare, honest Teamster local president in New York), Allen Dorfman (who made millions from his insurance monopoly with the Teamsters, then helped loot the pension funds), Jackie Presser (Cleveland Teamster boss, jockeying to succeed Fitzsimmons), Harold Gibbons (progressive St. Louis Teamster leader, who Brill says could have turned the union around if he hadn't sold out to fast cars and women), and two pseudonymous rank'n'filers.

THE PROFILES are shrewdly done, combining quotes and description with union history and investigative reporting on Teamster finances, graft, murder, and power struggles.

The key chapters for Brill are the two on rank'n'filers and the profile of Harold Gibbons. Charlie McGuire works as a refrigeration warehouseman in New Jersey--he finally got so fed up with his local leadership that he joined the Nader-originated reform group PROD. Al Barkett works as an over-the-road driver in Ohio--he makes $28,000 a year, and as Brill says, "You give a guy that kind of money and you sure don't get a dissident." Brill understands as well as anyone the litanies of corruption, intimidation, and dictatorial control by Teamster bosses that can turn the Teamsters into dissidents. But at the same time, Brill entertains few illusions about the power of American Dream-style prosperity, on the order of $28,000 a year, to undercut reform and maintain the status quo.

For Brill, the Teamsters are a metaphor for American society. The Harold Gibbons chapter that closes the book brings this out even more than the stories of the two rank'n'filer Teamsters. Gibbons was a socialist St. Louis Teamster leader, who pioneered in providing his members with a food co-op, his retirees with low-cost subsidized housing, St. Louis with mass transit, and who even supported busing to help eliminate segregated schools before the 1954 Supreme Court decision. And Gibbons supported McGovern in 1972 against the Teamster tide for Nixon. But he backed down when it came to challenging Hoffa or Fitzsimmons for union leadership--he was co-opted by the good life, a villa in Palm Springs, the perquisites of a high Teamster salary, a Lincoln Continental.

THE MAJOR CRITICISM of the book has come from the PROD and TDU dissidents, who claim that Brill just doesn't deal with the possibilities for reform in the union. The dissidents would rather Brill had looked into reform movements in other unions, the Mineworkers' anti-Tony Boyle campaign, say, or the Sadlowski insurgency in the Steelworkers, to figure out why such movements succeed or fail. That kind of analysis would have been much more useful than any series of profiles of the bosses, the dissidents say.

Brill responds that the press over-covers the dissidents anyway, far out of proportion to their number (PROD and TDU combined have roughly 10,000 members out of 2.3 million Teamsters). Brill says the dissidents really wanted him to make a hero, "a new Sylvester Stallone," out of Pete Camerata, the TDU leader whose microphone was cut off and head beat in for trying to criticize the Teamster leadership at the 1976 convention in Las Vegas. Instead, Brill let the chips fall, pointing out that PROD's newsletter in the early days carried a false union label, even though a non-union shop printed it, and that, of all the Teamsters he interviewed, only a PROD leader pressed him for money.

"Neither TDU nor PROD is going to get the support of the Al Barketts of the world, unless they become so bourgeois that they decimate their purpose," Brill says. "Same with the tax revolt business, the middle class is saying we want more for us, screw the poor. That same attitude is why you won't have reform in the Teamsters." Brill points out that the course was set long ago, when Jimmy Hoffa cooperated with organized crime to achieve power in the union, when he acquiesced and participated in the corruption, extortion, and violence that cemented his power. If Walter Reuther, organizing the United Auto Workers at the same time and in the same city as Hoffa, didn't need the Mafia and their kind of tactics then Hoffa didn't either. Hoffa chose his own poison.

But the talk show hosts don't usually discuss the prospects for reform, or the details of corruption--everybody's more interested in Brill's solution to the Hoffa disappearance. On a radio talk show in Seattle, a caller maintained that Brill was wrong, that Hoffa was still alive. "Why, I was just down in Argentina this summer, and I was in a bar, and there was Jimmy Hoffa, belly up to the bar, sipping a beer and chatting with Adolph Hitler." Brill told the caller, "Hey, fella, I think you got a bigger story there than just Jimmy Hoffa."