James Riddle Hoffa was an American labor union leader who served as the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1957 until 1971. He is believed to have been murdered by the Mafia and was declared legally dead in 1982. He played a major role in the growth and the development of the union, which eventually became the largest by membership in the United States, with over 2. 3 million members at its peak.
About Jimmy Hoffa in brief
James Riddle Hoffa was an American labor union leader who served as the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1957 until 1971. Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, a connection that continued until his disappearance in 1975. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud in 1964 in two separate trials. He is believed to have been murdered by the Mafia and was declared legally dead in 1982. He played a major role in the growth and the development of the union, which eventually became the largest by membership in the United States, with over 2. 3 million members at its peak, during his terms as its leader. The Teamsters, founded in 1903, had 75,000 members in 1933. The number grew steadily during World War II and in the postwar boom to top a million members by 1951. The union’s skillful use of quickie strikes, secondary boycotts, and other means of leveraging union strength at one company, then to move to organize workers, and finally to win contract demands at other companies, eventually brought the Teamsters to a position of being one of the most powerful unions in the U.S. Trucking unions in that era were heavily influenced by—and many cases controlled by—organized crime, he had to make accommodations and arrangements with many gangsters. Although he never actually worked as a truck driver, he became a president of Local 299 in the late 1940s, and he became the union’s president in December 1946.
He died of a heart attack on July 30, 1975, in Detroit, Michigan, and is buried in a plot owned by his wife, Josephine Poszywak, who was 18 at the time of his death. The couple had two children: a daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, and a son, James P. Hoffa. The Hoffas paid USD 6,800 in 1939 for a modest home in northwestern Detroit. The family later owned a simple summer lakefront cottage in Orion Township, Michigan,. north of Detroit, north of Michigan, in the summer of 1950s and 1960s. It is believed that Hoffa worked to defend the teamsters from raids by other unions, including the Industrial Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Congress of American Trade Unions. He also worked to expand the union itself from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, when he became president of local 299 in December 1940s. The teamsters organized truck drivers and warehousemen throughout the Midwest and then nationwide. By 1952, he was the national vice-president of the IBT and was its general president between 1957 and 1971. In mid-1971, he resigned as president of the union as part of a commutation agreement with US President Richard Nixon and was released later that year. In 1980, he unsuccessfully tried to regain support and to return to IBT leadership, but he was barred from union activities until 1980.
You want to know more about Jimmy Hoffa?
This page is based on the article Jimmy Hoffa published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 14, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
