Hoffa

Arthur Sloane, as a Harvard graduate student, first met Jimmy Hoffa in 1962 and he has been fascinated by this powerful and contradictory figure ever since. Nearly three decades after that first encounter, Sloane has written a biography of the late Teamster leader, having been given full access to Hoffa’s family, friends, and professional associates. Hoffa is a portrait of one of the most influential figures in American labour. It covers in detail all the facets of Hoffa’s remarkable life and death: his rise to total dominance over the largest, strongest, and wealthiest union in American history; his neat Victorian personal habits; the legal problems that plagued his later years; and, of course, the shadowy event surrounding his presumed Mafia murder in 1975. Jimmy Hoffa’s middle name was Riddle, and as Sloane points out, he was indeed a mass of contradictions. To many, Hoffa was a kind of latter day Al Capone, the dictator-president of a corrupt and overly powerful Teamsters Union. To others, he was a devoted family man and a workaholic union leader, who was both accessible to his truck driver constituents and successful in improving working conditions for them. In fact, each of these perspectives, Sloane observes, is far too limited to tell the full story of this complicated man.