The Teamsters

Fülszöveg

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The Teamsters takes us to the heart of the most powerful, most controversial labor union in America in a story so intricately plotted and richly peopled that it reads as if it were a novel. The work of a brUliant young reporter. The Teamsters takes us inside the murder of limmy Hoffa. Inside the pension fund that became the underworld's bank and financed some of the most famous vacation properties in the world. Inside the history of the union, a history filled with violence, irony, and drama. Inside the lives of the men who run the union, as well as the rank and file, whose contributions give the Teamsters their enormous power in the nation's economy.
The Teamsters provides the never-reported facts about the Hoffa murder and tells the whole story of the union's alliance with organized crime. But it is more than a story of violence and swindles. It's also the story of what this union has accomplished for its 2.3 million members, who range from zoo keepers to... Tovább

Fülszöveg

'I • ' 1 I . '
The Teamsters takes us to the heart of the most powerful, most controversial labor union in America in a story so intricately plotted and richly peopled that it reads as if it were a novel. The work of a brUliant young reporter. The Teamsters takes us inside the murder of limmy Hoffa. Inside the pension fund that became the underworld's bank and financed some of the most famous vacation properties in the world. Inside the history of the union, a history filled with violence, irony, and drama. Inside the lives of the men who run the union, as well as the rank and file, whose contributions give the Teamsters their enormous power in the nation's economy.
The Teamsters provides the never-reported facts about the Hoffa murder and tells the whole story of the union's alliance with organized crime. But it is more than a story of violence and swindles. It's also the story of what this union has accomplished for its 2.3 million members, who range from zoo keepers to oil-pipeline workers and a half million truckers and warehousemen.
Steven Brill tells the Teamster story by relating the intensely personal stories of real people-nine men who together represent all that is good and bad about the giant imion:
—limmy Hoffa, Ir., the son of the missing luiion boss, a soft-spoken young lawyer tormented, in the aftermath of his father's probable murder, by instincts of pride and revenge:
—Frank Fitzsimmons, the union's general president, the man whom Hoffa picked as his stand-in when he went to prison, but who wouldn't let Hoffa come back and is now himself the target of government investigations and the victim of disloyalty among his ambitious underlings:
—Tony Provenzano, the hot-tempered mobster who has run Teamster affairs in New lersey since the 1950's, and has just been convicted of arranging the murder oi a union rival;
—Ron Carey, the scrupulously honest president of a Teamster local in New York, frustrated by higher-ups in the regional and national Teamster offices who sneer at him as a naive "kid" and make sure that he can't move up in the hierarchy;
—Allen Dorfman, the insurance executive and convicted pension-fund kickback artist who
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serves as the mob's liaison to the Teamsters' Central States pension fund but is now scared that government pressure and publicity have limited his usefulness to the underworld;
—A1 Barkett, a 57-year-old over-the-road driver in Ohio who's living nicely on $28,000 a year, has raised a family he's proud of, and thinks the union has done great things for him;
—Charlie McGuire, a 60-year-old New Jersey Teamster who works in a frozen-food warehouse and who, despite the advances he's made since his first childhood job as an apple picker, has become a bitter Teamster dissident;
—Jackie Presser, the son of veteran Ohio Teamster boss Bill Presser and now himself an international vice-president of the union, a clever and ambitious infighter who's trying to nudge Fitzsimmons out of the way and move into that top spot—and in the process is walking a dangerous tightrope;
—and Harold Gibbons, the St. Louis Teamster leader, a dedicated socialist and handsome ladies' man, who, in one of the strange Teamster alliances, was Hoffa's top aide until an incident following the assassination of John Kennedy split them apart. Now a bitter man shunted aside by Fitzsimmons, Gibbons is the symbol of all that the Teamsters might have become and why they did not
An amazing cast of characters in a union powerful enough to paralyze the nation.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Brill is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School. He was a contributing editor at New York magazine and is now a contributing editor and law columnist for Esquiie. He is the author of FiieaTm Abuse: A Research and Policy Report. Vissza