Open caseA New Hunt for Jimmy Hoffa

Published 3 October 2019

Jimmy Hoffa, the brilliant but ruthless head of the Teamsters Union, had a taste for corruption and a knack for making powerful enemies, including his frequent business partners, the Mafia, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. After President Nixon commuted his federal prison sentence, Hoffa planned to retake control of the Teamsters, much to the alarm of the mob. Then, one July day in 1975, Hoffa vanished without a trace from a restaurant parking lot outside of Detroit. Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith – whose stepfather, Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, had been the FBI’s earliest suspect — has just published a book on the Hoffa mystery. Goldsmith invested years in researching the mystery not only to clear O’Brien’s name (O’Brien was never charged), but also to try and figure out what happened to Hoffa.

Jimmy Hoffa, the brilliant but ruthless head of the Teamsters Union, had a taste for corruption and a knack for making powerful enemies, including his frequent business partners, the Mafia, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. After President Nixon commuted his federal prison sentence, Hoffa planned to retake control of the Teamsters, much to the alarm of the mob. Then, one July day in 1975, Hoffa vanished without a trace from a restaurant parking lot outside of Detroit, a mystery that has inspired books, TV shows, movies (the most recent is Martin Scorsese’s film, “The Irishman”), and a raft of conspiracy theories. Jack L. Goldsmith, Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, was no Hoffa conspiracy buff, but he had good reason to think that Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, Hoffa’s right-hand man and one of the FBI’s earliest suspects, had been falsely accused of driving Hoffa to his killers. First O’Brien’s alibi, although not airtight, eventually checked out enough that the FBI never charged him. And second, O’Brien is Goldsmith’s stepfather. In a new book, In Hoffa’s Shadow, Goldsmith dug through government and court records, FBI wiretap transcripts, and he spoke to dozens of FBI agents, prosecutors, and Hoffa experts to see whether, decades later, he could clear his stepdad’s name — and maybe even figure out what happened to Hoffa.

Goldsmith talked with Christina Pazzanese of the Harvard Gazette.

Christina Pazzanese: You describe the book as a story about “how an uneducated serial lawbreaker with mob values nourished his vulnerable stepson at a crucial stage in his life and set him on a path that led him to a career at the DOJ and Harvard Law School.” From college until you left the Department of Justice in 2004, you were estranged from your stepdad for 20 years because you felt his connection to Hoffa would damage your legal career. Why did you want to write this book? Was it an atonement of sorts?