The Secret Page 11

  But Buddy didn’t like what Jimmy Hoffa had done. He moved between me and Hoffa with the sleek grace of the born street fighter, and he slammed a hard punch into Hoffa’s solar plexus.

  Hoffa bent over and began to vomit.

  His thugs pulled guns.

  Buddy had expected that. By the time their guns were in their hands, he had a left arm around Hoffa’s upper body, and his right hand pressed the gleaming blade of a razor against his throat.

  “Tell your boys to wait in the lobby,” Buddy said.

  Hoffa grunted and pointed.

  It could have been an interesting battle, I always thought—the cocky little union gangster with his thousand thugs against the slick, black, street-smart slasher whose guys could come out of a thousand doorways on any street, from between the cars in any parking lot.

  The battle was never fought. Hoffa went to the slammer to wait for his close friend President Nixon to give him executive clemency. For a while the world had things other than Jimmy Hoffa to think about.

  26

  When his good friend the President commuted his sentence, Jimmy Hoffa showed up again. It was a condition of his commutation that he could not try to recover the presidency of the Teamsters. He expected Nixon to cancel the ban in time. Even after Nixon resigned, Jimmy confidently expected President Ford would remove the condition.

  In the meantime, he drew a pension from the union of one and a half million dollars a year. The money was burning holes in his pockets, and he set out to look for investments.

  Coal mining was one of his ideas, and he did ultimately manage to buy into a mining operation. But he was looking around, looking for something to raid, and to our bad fortune his cold, snakelike eyes fell on Cheeks.

  I don’t know if it was because he remembered and resented what Buddy had done to defend me—which, incidentally, Buddy remembered very well—or if someone had pointed us out to him as a growing company that could be raided without an immense amount of capital. All I know is that Jimmy Hoffa began looking for ways to acquire my company.

  He couldn’t buy stock. The sole stockholders were myself, Giselle, and Sal Nero. He couldn’t push us through our creditors. We were by no means overextended. His connections were no better than ours. Through Sal we had a good relationship with the Carlinos.

  So, being Jimmy Hoffa, he decided to muscle us. He was no longer the head of the Teamsters, but old Teamster tactics came into play against us.

  Merchandise began to disappear off our trucks. Our drivers had more accidents than they’d ever had before. They got cut off in traffic and were forced off the road. Rocks fell down from overpasses and smashed their windshields. Their tires were slashed.

  Sal was furious. He put wise guys on me and Giselle as bodyguards. They were unable to be inconspicuous. I guess he didn’t want them to be.

  Buddy put bodyguards on Len. They were inconspicuous. Len never knew they were there.

  * * *

  Hoffa was in the process of making horrible mistakes. The reason was that he was not smart. He was a thug. He had bullied his way to the top of his union. He had supposed he could bully his way past Bobby Kennedy, who was as tough as he was, only ten times smarter. He had actually cocked a fist at Bobby one day in a Senate hearing room. If he had thrown that punch, there where his thugs couldn’t help him, Bobby would have broken his nose or jaw, maybe both. I’m a little sorry it didn’t happen.

  Trying to bully Cheeks, he enraged Sal Nero, which was not a good idea.

  But that was not the only bullying he was trying to do.

  I was with Sal when we sat down with a few men to talk over what to do about Jimmy Hoffa. They introduced themselves by their nicknames. Sal was the Fireman because his huge penis reminded men of a firehose. Why Frankie Shots was so called I do not know. The Fat Man had his name for obvious reasons. Tony Pro was so called because his name was Anthony Provenzano.

  Tony Pro presided over the meeting. He was a member of the Genovese family. Sal was of the Carlino family, but that didn’t make any difference because—as I have said—Sal had always been careful not to make enemies in any family.

  “He wants what you got, Tony,” said the Fat Man. That meant control of the Teamsters, since Tony Pro was a big man in the union, with his power based in the New Jersey Teamsters.

  “Soon as he gets the Bum to lift the condition,” said Tony Pro. The Bum was Gerald Ford—the Stumblebum in their lingo.

  “That’ll take a big envelope,” said Frankie Shots. He meant it would take a major payoff.

  “The question is—” Tony Pro started to say.

  “The question is,” Sal interrupted him, “what are we gonna do about Jimmy? I mean, he’s tryin’ to muscle my partner here into sellin’ his business. I don’t like that, and I’m not going to stand for it. He’s not going to muscle my friends.”

  That gave me a clue as to why I was sitting there in that meeting of capos. I was a right guy who was being muscled by Hoffa, and Sal wanted his pals to see I was a right guy and a victim. I never thought of myself as a man who generated sympathy, but that, apparently, was why I was there.

  “It’s not just Jerry here,” said the Fat Man. “Jimmy’s musclin’ an’ musclin’. Nobody’s business is safe from that son of a bitch.”

  “He’s threatenin’ to talk about what he knows,” said Tony Pro. “So, I guess we know what has to be done. I mean, does anybody have any doubt about what has to be done?”

  They weren’t unanimous—Frankie Shots dissented—but I sat there that evening and heard Jimmy Hoffa sentenced to death.

  27

  Before he died, Sal told me how it was done. I believe what he told me. Other people have other ideas about what happened to James Riddle Hoffa, but I think Sal told me the truth.

  For one reason, I had heard the sentence pronounced. I can think of no reason whatever why Sal would have lied to me. He wasn’t bragging. He wasn’t a man given to bragging, and telling his part in the death of Hoffa was not something he would brag about. He might brag about the size of his cock but not about killing a man.

  “The big point, y’understand, was that Jimmy had to back away from union politics. He wanted to be president of the Teamsters again, and apart from the money he could throw around, he knew too much. Like, he knew about how the pension fund had been used, and stuff like that. He knew where everybody’s skeletons were. He was—What’s the words they use? He was a loose cannon. He had to be whacked out. Dammit, he had to be! Nobody had no choice. Too many guys were at risk with him runnin’ around loose.”

  “I was there when you decided,” I reminded him. “Don’t you remember? I was there with you and Tony Provenzano and Frankie Shots and the Fat Man.”

  “Oh … yeah, well, sure.” Sal frowned. By now there were some holes in his memory. “Okay. The job fell to Tony Pro and me. Tony Provenzano was the kind of guy you could trust with a job like that. Some guys had tough names but couldn’t be trusted when the shit was happenin’. I trusted Tony Pro, and he trusted me. Can you guess how surprised I was when he called on me to help him? I mean, Jerry, I’d made my bones, like you know, but I was no hit man. Well … neither was Tony. But this job needed top-notch guys. ‘Hey, Fireman,’ he said, ‘let’s you and me settle this thing. We don’t need any help. We don’t want any help. A couple guys like us can solve our problem. Deal? So we didn’t ask anybody’s by-your-leave. We just set out to do it. He called Jimmy Hoffa and set up a meeting in Detroit, and off to Detroit we went—just the two of us with nobody’s okay.”

  “Could you have gotten the okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. But it would have taken too long, and too many guys would have had to know about it. We got us a car, a titty-pink Cadillac, a pimpmobile. We taped our biscuits up in the chassis, where they wouldn’t be found if we got stopped for speedin’ or somethin’. Mine was a forty-four magnum, a goddam cannon. Tony’s was a what they called a street-sweeper, a mini-Uzi. We were equipped like a goddamn army.”

/>   This was years later, remember, when he was telling me this. Sal died in bed. He was not the first guy who ever wanted to get something off his chest when he knew he was going. That’s another reason why I believe him.

  “We took our time driving to Detroit. We stayed overnight in Youngstown, Ohio, where I got laid but good. I used to play a game with waitresses. I’d say, ‘I’ll show you my cock. If you can honestly tell me you ever saw a bigger one and will name the guy who’s got it, I’ll give you a hundred bucks. If you never saw a bigger one, you still get the hundred, but you got to put out for me.’ Some of them were so fascinated with the damn thing, they’d have paid me a hundred. It hasn’t always been an advantage, Jerry. To be honest, I guess it’s more often been a disadvantage. But what could I do? You can’t get an inch or three cut off.

  “Anyway, besides gettin’ laid, we planned how we’d do the job. The fact that Hoffa was so damn cocky was gonna help. He was so cocky he was careless.

  “We got to Detroit. Jimmy’d known Tony was comin’—though he didn’t know I was comin’; I doubt he knew who I was—and suggested they meet at a steak-house called Machus Red Fox, just outside Detroit, on the road to the airport. Tony told him he was drivin’ a titty-pink Caddy and would meet him in the parking lot. He said they’d talk in the car and then go in for lunch. Which suited Jimmy just fine. It was one of his favorite eateries, and he had friends there—in case Tony had any bad ideas.

  “Tony let me out up the road, and I walked to the Red Fox and went in to check it out. Guys there were expectin’ somebody. Hey, I got patted down by a couple of wise guys, just for comin’ through the door. They could tell I didn’t have a biscuit, so I sat at the bar and had a beer. Then I went out, walked around to where I couldn’t be seen, and got in the back seat of the Cadillac.

  “I got down on the floor, out of sight. Tony told me he was comin’, so I was ready when Jimmy Hoffa opens the door and climbs in on the passenger side.

  “He got just one thing said. ‘I’m not backin’ down, Tony. I’m gonna do it, and you’re gonna help me. You know why. You’re gonna help me or I’m gonna put you where I was: in a federal slammer. Any doubt about that?’

  “At that point I blasted him, right through the seat of the car. The slug from that cannon went through the seat back, through Jimmy, and wound up in the dashboard of the Caddy—along with some small parts of Jimmy. Hey! Jimmy Hoffa never knew what hit him. We made it easy for him, truth be known.

  “He had two thugs with him, bodyguards. They came runnin’ up just in time to face Tony’s Uzi and my forty-four mag. They stopped and looked at each other, and then they shrugged and walked back to their car and drove off. It was a blue Buick, I remember. They could see their boss had been whacked out. It had been their job to prevent that happenin’, not to shoot it out with the guys that did it. There was no percentage for them in tryin’ to take some kinda revenge. They knew exactly who they were and what they’d been hired for, and revenge was no part of it—any more than loyalty had been a part of it. Nobody was loyal to Jimmy. Nobody was sorry he was gone. Hell, I’d probably left readable fingerprints on my beer bottle, but nobody said a word to the cops about it—so far as I know, anyway.”

  Sal chuckled weakly. “Y’know, all we had to do was prop him up in the seat and fasten the seat belt and shoulder harness. He had a hole in him big enough to drive a truck through, but I covered that with an old raincoat we’d brought along for the purpose. I pulled on his hair to make him sit up and look alive, and we drove out of Michigan with Jimmy sitting there looking natural, almost smiling. We drove all the way across Ohio with that body sitting there. Sometimes I had to wonder if he wouldn’t open his mouth and say something. I’ll tell ya something, Jerry. It was spooky.”

  Sal turned grim.

  “You want to know what we did with him? Well, he ain’t in the Meadowlands, and he ain’t under the goalpost in Giants Stadium. We drove him to Youngstown, where Sal had made arrangements. He handed some guys a pretty big envelope, and we watched while they dumped Jimmy into an open-hearth furnace just before a big pour of molten pig iron. Hell, we didn’t even take off his wrist-watch. It melted in two seconds.”

  Sal grinned. “You wanta know where Jimmy Hoffa is? Well, he might have been in the fender of your ’seventy-six Chevy. He was just a tiny little bit of excess carbon in that open-hearth steel.

  “The same envelope paid for gettin’ rid of the biscuits and the titty-pink Caddy. The mag and the Uzi went in the furnace with Jimmy. The Caddy was smashed flat and wound up in a furnace itself. The steel industry don’t waste nothin’.”

  28

  LEN

  I am damn lucky Sue Ellen and I did not have a child. She wanted to, but by the time we were in a position to think about it—that is to say, by the time I graduated from law school—I knew I did not want to have a child by her and be committed to living with her for the rest of my life.

  Blinded by the sex we shared, blinded also by the sympathy and guilt I felt for getting her pregnant, I had overlooked our differences and had failed to realize how difficult marriage was going to be for us. She was a very different person from me, in fact entirely different from the woman I had supposed she was when I fell in love with her.

  She was shallow in many ways—though it is difficult to think of someone as shallow who elected so challenging a study as Chinese. Still, she was shallow. She bought fads as if they were eternal truths.

  For example, she got interested in Eastern religions. For a while I thought she was going to shave her head and become a Krishna. She went around the house humming, “Hare, hare, krishna, krishna”—until I told her she was driving me nuts and she didn’t believe in it anyway, so cool it. I was a little surprised that she did cool it, which told me that what I had suspected had been right: Like many other things in Sue Ellen’s life, Hare Krishna was a fad, a little game.

  For a brief time she decided that, not only would she become a vegetarian, she would not wear shoes or belts made of leather. Somebody promoted this idea to her, and she bought it. I unsold her pretty damn quick. She began to make us meals with meat again, and shortly she took to wearing the dog collar I mentioned before—and it was sure as hell made of leather.

  She was a sexpot. I for damn sure had no complaint about her in that respect. But that, too, was a little game. I’m not sure where she found boundaries between reality and fantasies—or if she found any. I am not sure if she thought my hard-on was evidence, not just of arousal, but of love.

  In truth, I had a hard time making that distinction myself.

  She got into S-M. She would bare her butt, stretch out across my lap, and tell me to spank her. If I didn’t turn her cheeks red, she’d be petulant, like a child denied candy. I can’t say I liked that. I guess I can’t say I disliked it, either.

  I have to say of myself that I was confused. On the one hand, I was kept aroused and sometimes was lifted to heights of passion, which would have been damn difficult to give up. On the other hand, I sensed there was something mechanical, artificial about it, that it did not represent as strong or deep a relationship as its surface appearance suggested.

  Mollie had taught her to give head like a pro, which she did, happily and vigorously and repeatedly, volunteering to do it even when I had something else in mind, even when I would rather have gone to sleep. I suppose guys think life will be heaven if they can just find a woman willing to suck them off whenever they want it. Believe me, it isn’t so. Fantasy and reality.

  When I met her she had been uncomfortably self-conscious about her outsized breasts, which were not all she had; she had long legs and a tight, twitchy butt. Now—under Mollie’s tutelage—she had become exorbitantly proud of her boobs. One night we drove to a beer joint near the Bridgeport Airport in Stratford, where—though I hadn’t been told what to expect—they were having a wet T-shirt contest. Sue Ellen happily entered the competition, went backstage to take off her sweater and bra, and came out in a white T-shi
rt, as did Mollie; and when the master of ceremonies exuberantly sprayed Sue Ellen’s T-shirt with warm water, the room went wild. She took the applause that won the contest, and when the man suggested she strip off the T-shirt, she did. She strutted around the stage, laughing and flaunting, making those outsized hooters bounce up and down, while guys stood on chairs to cheer.

  That got her arrested. She and Mollie thought it immensely funny. She even thought it funny when she was handcuffed and driven to the justice court in a paddy wagon. I posted a hundred-dollar bond for her in Stratford and drove her home.

  Her comment? “Why shouldn’t a woman be allowed to show her boobs? I’d appeal the damn case if it wouldn’t drive my daddy up the wall.”

  Fancy that. Fancy Hale & Dorr defending a partner’s daughter on a charge of indecent exposure! I can just see it now. Joseph Welch’s law firm defending—Defending someone else, maybe. Defending Sue Ellen …

  Right. I don’t want to say anything negative about Hale & Dorr. I graduated high in my class, not at the top, and Sue Ellen expected me to be welcomed into her father’s distinguished firm. The firm might have welcomed me. But her father had, in effect, a veto; and he didn’t want a son of Jerry Cooper in his firm. He was subtle about it and imagined I would not understand how he had worked it, vetoing me while expressing the warmest sympathy. I got the message.

  He had done his homework on my father. His problem was not so much that my father was in the business of selling lingerie, some of it boldly erotic. It was that he didn’t like some of my father’s history and associates. He had learned who my great-uncle Harry was. He knew about the Plescassier Martins. He knew the name Paul Renard and the name Charlie Han. He associated my father with the name Betty Logan. He did not know, I guess, that I myself had one day sat down to lunch with Don Alberto Patrioto.

  What he most disliked was the name Sal Nero. My father has since told me that Sal was the man who pulled the trigger that killed Jimmy Hoffa. Sue Ellen’s father obviously did not know that. In point of fact, no one knew that. It was the subject of endless television “unsolved mysteries” shows.