Target Lancer

CHAPTER 5

Sunday, October 27, 1963

Late morning at Wrigley Field, sunny but cool with typical gusts off the lake, made for perfect football weather-about sixty degrees, pleasantly crisp, just right for light jackets. But with a noon game, you saw plenty of guys salted around the stands in ties and suits or sport coats, having come directly from church. And everybody, including me, wore a hat.

Everybody but our host, who wore his butch haircut like a badge of honor.

Jimmy Hoffa’s box seat worth of questionable cronies-with a row of their overdressed, overly made-up wives at the back of the metal railed-off area-had not come from church. Neither had my date and I.

Her dark-blonde hair up and in curls, Helen was in a navy-blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar with cameo brooch, looking more like a particularly demure sorority sister than the world’s most famous fan dancer. I was in a collarless gray McGregor woolen jacket, zipped to my throat, looking like a priest in some very modern, nonexistent sect.

About a dozen of us were snugged into these box seats, which did not belong to the Teamsters, exactly-they were courtesy of attorney Allen Dorfman’s insurance agency, which handled the union’s pension fund. A slim, solemn, hawkish-looking guy with Groucho eyebrows, Dorfman was the son of Red Dorfman (not present), a longtime Outfit crony currently playing on Giancana’s team.

Red’s son Allen was one of the few of this little group in a sport coat, but without tie, shirt open, if button-down. Most of the rest were in heavy jackets and caps, attire you might unload a truck in. But for the cap, the same was true of Hoffa, his coat a lumberjack red-and-black plaid.

Maybe that was image. Hoffa was an everyman by nature and inclination, and anybody stopping by the box to say hello and wave-whether calling him a respectful “Mr. Hoffa” or a too-familiar “Jimmy”-got a smile and a wave back.

People were always surprised by Hoffa-by his size, which despite his broad-shouldered brawn added up only to five feet five and maybe 150 pounds; but also by his friendliness, since TV watchers had often seen him mad, like when he battled reporters or alternately smirked and snarled at Bobby Kennedy in that famous rackets committee hearing.

Hoffa, who was about fifty, was sitting next to me. He’d been happy to meet Helen (“Sally Rand! You was my first crush!”) before she got shuttled to the back row with the wives. Around us was an array of lawyers and thieves-with considerable crossover-including not just Dorfman but heavy-set, bespectacled, respectable-looking attorney William Bufalino, a master at telling Jim what he wanted to hear; and fat, frog-like Joey Glimco, a scowling Outfit killer turned labor leader. None of them spoke to me, though Dorfman nodded.

Absent was Hoffa’s menacing three-hundred-plus-pound bodyguard, Barney Baker, convicted extortionist, the terms of whose parole prevented participation in anything union-related. Apparently including football games.

“So whaddya think of these seats?” Hoffa asked.

His grin was hard to read. Funny thing about that vaguely Oriental mug of his-the features were those of a roughneck, all right, but there was a pixie sparkle to his eyes and his smile.

I did not play yes-man to Jim, unless it really mattered. If my livelihood, say, or maybe my life wasn’t on the line, I played the role of trusted truth sayer.

So I said, “Well, they stink, Jim. If this was the Cubs playing, we’d be in clover.”

“I know, I know.”

He shook his head like it was a naughty child, the glistening black chopped-off porcupine quills of his butch impervious to the motion or for that matter the wind off Lake Michigan.

“Blame Dorfman,” he said, loud enough for the lawyer to hear. “What the fuck are they playin’ football for at Wrigley Field, anyway? Do they play basketball in a swimming pool?”

Hoffa had a point. Even if that famous red sign out front was changed from HOME OF THE CUBS to HOME OF THE BEARS for football season, this was still a baseball park. To go gridiron meant reconfiguring the field, leaving us with box seats that were heaven for baseball season-right behind home plate-but hell for football, where those same seats put us at a corner of the end zone. That made the cheap seats-temporary bleachers out in right field-worthy of envy.

Not that I gave a damn. I was not a football fan, neither college nor pro, and I wasn’t even a baseball fan, really. And to the degree that I did care about the latter, I preferred the White Sox, if for no other reason than owner Bill Veeck was a pal who occasionally threw a job the A-1’s way.

But I knew enough to follow the game, even if I was already bored. We were still in the first quarter, and the only excitement so far, if you could call it that, was a forty-five-yard field goal for the Bears by Roger LeClerc. But they’d been down at the other end of the field, so whoop de do.

Hoffa seemed in pretty high spirits, though, a small miracle considering he had two major federal indictments hanging over him, one for fraud, the other for jury tampering. I’d seen him twice this year, and both times he had seemed short-tempered and moody, even for him.

Not that I ever really had any trouble with Hoffa.

We had hit it off right from the start-he was Dutch-Irish, I was half Irish, half German Jew. My father had been a West Side unionist whose rabble-rousing activities in Chicago were legend. That sat well with Jim, who often spoke as if he’d known my old man (he hadn’t, and my father would have abhorred Hoffa’s shady dealings).

So Jim had never suspected, a few years back, that I was working as a double agent for the rackets committee. Well, he had a good reason for that: he thought I was working as his double agent.

I know, I know … it’s hard to believe he actually figured he could buy off a Chicago detective.…

Still, there was much to admire about James Riddle Hoffa. His background had been (to use one of my old man’s favorite expressions) rougher than a cob, his coal miner father dying young, his hardworking mother making ends meet by polishing radiator caps in an auto plant.

As a teenager Jim pulled down fifteen bucks a week unloading trucks for a grocery chain. But it pissed him off that he didn’t get paid for the time he spent waiting for the truckloads of fruits and vegetables to arrive … so he organized a wildcat strike. He was sixteen. Soon he was on the Teamsters payroll where, obviously, he still was.

Say what you will, the little bulldog was one effective union leader, negotiating any number of generous contracts for his members. But his ties to the mob-not to mention the Republicans-had made him a target for the Kennedys. And soon Jack and particularly Bobby became this working-class Ahab’s white whale.

And, funny thing-he was theirs.

“Booby’s entire fucking law experience,” Hoffa had once ranted to me, “Booby” being his contemptuous way of referring to Robert Kennedy, “was servin’ as counsel on that one fucking candy-ass committee! And his brother appoints him attorney goddamn general? Hypocritical little silver-spoon shits! And their old man was the biggest bootlegger of ’em all!”

Indeed, Bobby’s first big action as AG was to start up the “Get Hoffa Squad.” More than twenty prosecutors and investigators were on staff full-time to make cases against Hoffa, and not just recent offenses, but going back and opening up cases the Eisenhower administration had dropped.

What I knew that perhaps Hoffa did not was that the “Get Hoffa Squad” was merely part of Bobby’s overall campaign, Operation Big Squeeze, aimed at the Mafia and their allies.

Like the Teamsters.

“You know who has good seats?” Hoffa asked.

“No. Who?”

He wiggled a finger toward the fifty-yard line. “That pal of yours. From Milwaukee.”

Hoffa turned his face to the field, but I kept looking his way. The Teamster boss was still smiling, if faintly. Around us, his guys were drinking beer and gnawing hot dogs and enjoying the game despite the shitty seats, and the women in their private row were chattering, ignoring the game, asking Sally Rand lots of questions, Helen obviously charming them. A gust of wind came up and I was chilled but I’d been chilled before the gust.

So-Ruby really had made me as Tom Ellison’s chaperone.

And Jake or Jack or whatever the fuck you want to call him had reported back to somebody who had got word to Hoffa-how many steps that had taken, how many somebodies, I had no idea.

But Hoffa knew.

From the moment I’d looked in the envelope his goon had delivered last night, I had wondered if the job for Tom was why I’d been invited today, hoping of course that it wasn’t. That Hoffa had happened to be in Chicago, where after all the fraud case was to be tried, maybe here to confer with his legal team, and thought of his old Chicago buddy Nate Heller, and sent a couple of tickets over, and … not really. My gut had told me Hoffa had to know.

Just the same, having him look at me and so casually mention Tom, sitting on the fifty-yard line, scared the crap out of me.

“This game sucks green donkey dick,” Hoffa pronounced. “I gotta pee. How about you, Heller? You probably gotta pee, too.”

“Now that you mention it.”

I slid out of the seats and moved to the opening in the railing, stepped out and then waited for Hoffa, because he would, of course, lead the way. Up the steps he went, often pausing and shaking hands, even stopping to talk, a confident, even cocky little figure in his workingman’s jacket, high-water pants, and white socks. And every guy he shook hands with winced, which did not surprise me, because that banty rooster had a grip like a vise.

Me, I just followed along like the flunky I was.

At the top of the steps, at the mouth of the inner stadium, he said, “Let’s go to my office,” and then I was following him down the high-ceilinged cement walkway, footsteps echoing, until we were inside a large men’s room with its troughs and stalls. You would think the game was exciting, because right now no one else was in there, just the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

And me.

We stood in the middle of the echoey chamber, but we didn’t echo. He kept his voice down, and I did the same, in case anybody came in, and more than a few did, during our brief discussion. About half of them seemed to recognize Jim, but nobody had the nerve to interrupt; one even backed out. Anyway, you don’t ask for an autograph or shake a celebrity’s hand in the john.

This occasional company, however, did not take any of the edge out of Hoffa’s voice.

“This is where you explain yourself,” he said. He was smiling, but it was the smile of a father meeting his daughter’s date at the door an hour after curfew.

“Jim,” I said evenly, “you’re gonna have to be more specific.”

The smile disappeared and he seemed to be trying to swallow both his upper and lower lip. His fists were clenched. Not a good sign. At all.

Then he said, “This PR guy from Milwaukee, what’s his name, Elliot, Ellison, what the fuck was you doing at the 606 with him Friday night? That specific enough for you?”

It was.

Now I had the choice of softening and shaping the truth into something that made it more palatable. But then we were in a big men’s room, redolent of piss, shit, disinfectant, and urine cake, where nothing palatable got served up.

So I gave it to him fairly straight. “Tom’s an old friend of mine. He said he’d been doing some PR work for you and some friends of yours. He’s an honest businessman, and when one of your guys asked him to make a money drop … he got understandably nervous.”

“Why?” Indignant. Nostrils flaring. Fists clenched again. “Does he think we’re a bunch of fuckin’ crooks?”

That was like Polly Adler saying, “What, do you think I run a whorehouse?”

“It just wasn’t … business as usual,” I said, gesturing with an open, soothing hand. “He’s a straight citizen, Jim. He doesn’t usually go into strip clubs passing an envelope to the likes of Jack Ruby. Who, let’s face it, is a mobbed-up little piece of shit.”

Rather than make Hoffa angry, this actually settled him down. The truth, oddly, did that sometimes. I had often been in a room of his sycophants and caught the moment in Hoffa’s eyes where he got fed up with having his dick stroked.

The union boss hunched his shoulders like Jimmy Cagney in an old gangster movie-a familiar tic of his. “So, he come to you? For help.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t call me, or one of mine?”

“What for? Your guy didn’t hide the fact the envelope was full of money. Probably ten grand. Tom was asked to hand it over to somebody in a strip club a block away from Skid Fucking Row. Tom and me go way back. He thought he might need a bodyguard. Wouldn’t you think the same?”

Hoffa was squinting, considering that. “Like … should some asshole try to mug him or such shit.”

“Exactly.”

He raised his chin, looked down at me, which was tricky at his height. “You saw the transaction go down?”

“I wouldn’t call it a transaction, Jim. Tom did what he was told-he handed off the envelope to Ruby. And he left.”

He pointed at me with a blunt-tipped finger. “And your friend Tom-did you tell him later that you knew Ruby, and what his name was and so on?”

“No! Why would I? All Tom wanted was to do you a favor and not get his ass handed to him, in the process. What’s wrong with that?”

Hoffa thought about it.

“Nothing,” he admitted.

I shrugged. “It’s a coincidence that the guy picking up the envelope happened to be Ruby, who I happen to know.”

“Happen to know how?”

“We go back to the West Side. Way back. He grew up with Barney Ross and me. His real name is Jake Rubinstein.”

There was no question about Hoffa knowing Ruby. His box-seat pal Allen Dorfman’s father, Red, had taken over the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union back in ’39, after that shooting Ruby had helped cover up. Right when the Teamsters stepped in and took over.

Hoffa said, very low-key, “At the 606, did you speak to your old West Side buddy?”

Surely he knew I had.

“Yeah. Sat and talked with him a while. Nothing about the envelope he’d been handed. He didn’t indicate he knew I’d seen the handoff. Or even suspected my being at the club had anything to do with Tom.”

“What did you talk about?”

“This and that. Discussed which strippers he might want to book in his club. He has a club in Dallas, you know.”

“And that’s it?”

Should I tell him?

I told him. “Funny thing was … he mentioned Cuba.”

His eyes tightened. “Cuba?”

“Yes … you know … how certain people have been helping certain other people with certain Cuban problems.…”

Hoffa grunted something that was not exactly a laugh. “This Mongoose deal.”

I hated that he knew the name of it. But I wasn’t surprised. He’d bragged to me before about helping Uncle Sam try to take Castro out. And he’d complained that “Booby” had cut him no slack for his patriotic efforts.

He cocked his head, like a deaf guy trying to hear better. “So you just talked to Ruby a while, shot the shit, nothing else … memorable?”

“Some kid stopped and talked with us,” I said, figuring I better not leave anything out.

“This kid have a name?”

“Osborne, I think.”

Hoffa shrugged. “Don’t mean nothing to me.”

Some guy came in and entered a stall. We moved to the other side of the chamber-for privacy, not to avoid potential unpleasant odor.

Hoffa’s eyebrows went up, his expression indicating that if I hadn’t been entirely straight with him, now was the time.

“Heller, you’re saying nothing you talked to Ruby about had anything to do with your Milwaukee friend. With the … favor he done us.”

“Nothing.”

Ruby talking to me at all meant he’d suspected I’d been there to back Tom up, or Hoffa and I wouldn’t be having this conversation. But I didn’t point that out.

I went on: “Jake always did run his mouth. He was bragging to this kid that I’d been a Marine hero, that kind of bullshit. Showing off. That’s how Cuba came up. Telling this kid how I was the guy that first put things in motion.”

A john flushed. A guy came out, used the sink, left.

Hoffa was studying me. “You’re saying … this was a straight-up bodyguard job. Your friend had all that cash, got jumpy about it, and wanted some protection. That simple?”

“That simple. Jim, I don’t know why Tom gave that envelope to Ruby, and I don’t want to know. Not interested. And neither is Tom.”

“… Okay.” He did the Cagney shoulder hunch again. “Might as well piss while we’re here.”

“Might as well.”

So we stood at the metal trough and pissed …

… though I was a little surprised I could, figuring it had already been scared out of me.

The game never turned into anything special, but the Bears did win-16 to 7. That made seven wins and one loss.

Still in contention.

That evening Helen and I sat in a booth at Pizzeria Uno and shared a small tomato pie.

“How long will you be in town?” I asked her.

We were both eating slices with forks-the stuff was just too formidable to do otherwise, half the sauce on the North Side piled on the little pie, on top of just as much cheese.

“I was thinking maybe a week,” she said, with a little shrug. “If you can get me meetings at the Chez Paree and Empire Room, and something comes of it … a little shorter stay. Otherwise, I plan to make the rounds of the other spots.” She made a face. “And there’s always the strip joints.”

“Well, even so, we can’t have you staying at the Lorraine.”

“Oh, I don’t mind it, Nate, really. Lot of nice girls there.”

“Why don’t you bunk in at my place? You can take the client apartment downstairs. You’ll have your own key. That way you can come and go as you please, and spend as much time with me as both our schedules allow.”

“That’s generous. That does sound nice.”

“And taking all these cabs, you’ll go broke. The A-1 has a small fleet of half a dozen cars. You can have one for the week. There’s room for it next to my Jag in the old horse stable I use for a garage, behind my building.”

Her eyes were moist. I thought for a second there this hard-boiled dame might cry on me.

“Nathan … this is very sweet of you. I hope I can repay you in some way.…”

“I don’t bother with straight lines that obvious,” I told her.

We were having coffee when she brought Hoffa up.

“He surprised me,” she said.

“Shorter than you figured.”

“That, and he … seemed so nice. So affable. Just a regular fella, although, you know … larger than life, no matter how short he is. I noticed he didn’t drink. There was beer and booze flasks all around, but all he had was Pepsi.”

“He’s a teetotaler like you, Helen.”

She sipped her coffee, thinking. “Tell me, Nathan-is he a bad man?”

“Depends.”

“Explain.”

“I think he genuinely cares about the working stiff. But he’s also fine with lining his own pockets, and if you’re his enemy? Let’s just say some of those nice women you were sitting gabbing with, this afternoon, have husbands who have committed some of the most vicious murders Chicago has ever seen. And Chicago has seen some.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “Well, they say he’s a crook, and I don’t have anything good to say about unions myself, so I can’t say any of that surprises me.”

But she had surprised me. “You’re against unions? An old bleeding-heart FDR liberal like you?”

She waved a hand like a child bidding good-bye. “Never had a union be anything but trouble for me, on the road. The entertainment unions either side with the management, or tell me I can’t play someplace ’cause it’s blacklisted, or side with one of the little dancers I travel with on some pay dispute.”

“Sounds like showbiz has taken its toll.”

Shaking her head, the piled-up blonde curls bouncing some, she said, “No more bleeding heart for me, Heller. Strictly a free-enterprise girl these days. Hell, Kennedy was the first Democrat I voted for since Roosevelt. I like seeing his brother go after a bent union.”

I gave her a kidding grin. “If you’re turning so reactionary in your second childhood, Helen, why didn’t you vote for Tricky Dick?”

She shuddered. “Didn’t you see the debates? All that sweat and five-o’clock shadow. Nixon looked like half the fucking club owners I deal with.”

That made me laugh.

“Anyway,” she said, “Jack Kennedy is cute.”

“You make me so proud we gave you girls the vote.”

“Still a wise guy. You haven’t changed much.”

She shook her head, smiled, and began fishing in her purse for her cigarettes.

“Your life, Nate, even now, it’s still like something out of, I don’t know, Sam Spade. Last night, when you grabbed your gun and went running outside, bare-chested? I was frightened, Nate, but also … excited. Reminded me of the world’s fair days. Kind of thrilling to know a man like you.”

“Ah, well, everyone thinks so.”

A tiny laugh. “Even after all these years, you still live on that dangerous edge, don’t you?”

“Not by choice.”

A bigger laugh, as she lit up a Lucky. “Well, certainly by choice. You don’t have to hang around with people like Jimmy Hoffa.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I grinned at her. “Okay, smart girl. Those tickets last night? You think they were a gift?”

“Weren’t they?”

“No, Helen. They weren’t.”

“What were they, then?”

“A summons.”

We slept together that night, with no interruptions from any dese-dem-and-dozer wanting to kill me or offer me tickets to a sporting event, either. My world seemed peaceful, damn near idyllic with Helen back in my life (and bed), an existence not at all dangerous, and it only took me about half an hour before I got to sleep wondering what it was about Jack Ruby and that packet of cash that had made me the object of Jimmy Hoffa’s Sunday-afternoon attention.