Dinner With Hoffa
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| Hoffa |
Although she lived for more than twenty more years, in 1975 my mother was eighty years old. Nevertheless, she did not display the slightest surprise, or hesitation in answering, "Sure", when asked if she would like to have dinner with Jimmy Hoffa. One of her constant pleasures was to be doing things that other women couldn't match.
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| Jimmy Hoffa |
The Philadelphia County Medical Society's Center City branch was having a dinner, and the program chairman had the main goal in life of attracting speakers who would bring an overflow audience. Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the Teamsters Union, recently released from prison, certainly filled that description; one of the members of the branch had a patient who was a teamster official who happened to know that Jimmy would love to speak to the doctors about medical care in prisons. Not only was he willing, he paid his own expenses to fly up from Florida to give the speech. As by far the oldest lady present, my mother was not to be denied when she demanded to be seated at the head table.
disappeared, and there have been hundreds of books and articles written about his probable murder by the Mafia, the latest of which is called I Heard You Paint Houses, in which one Frank Sheeran is quoted as claiming to have been the hit man. I wouldn't know. The title, however, is reliably known to refer to all the blood which is found splattered about, following a mob rub-out.The reawakening of this topic does raise some old questions of the highest rank. Reviewing the evidence, it is possible to believe he was not guilty of precisely what Bobby Kennedy was accusing him of. At least, the prosecution failed to convince one jury of it. The FBI records do seem to indicate that J. Edgar Hoover offered him evidence of the questionable Kennedy private lives, which he refused to use. And there seems to be little doubt that he worked hard to elect Richard Nixon, or that Nixon later commuted his sentence. Generally speaking, he was on the side of opposition to Mafia influence in the Teamsters Union. But his relationship to the Kennedy family is quite another matter.
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