In October 1962, James Riddle Hoffa — president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the most powerful union in America, a man whom Robert Kennedy considered the most dangerous labor leader alive — flew into Berry Field in a sharp gray suit and checked into a block of rooms on the seventh floor of the Andrew Jackson Hotel in downtown Nashville.
He was there to stand trial for a crime committed fourteen years earlier. And before it was over, the trial itself would become the bigger crime.
The original scheme was elegant in its contempt for the law.
In 1948, a Michigan trucking company called Commercial Carriers was locked in a costly strike. Hoffa, who controlled the Teamsters in the region, offered to make it go away — for a price. The company set up a shell corporation in Nashville called the Test Fleet Corporation. Ownership was registered under the maiden names of two women: Josephine Poszywak and Alice Johnson. Josephine Poszywak was Jimmy Hoffa’s wife. Alice Johnson was the wife of Hoffa’s associate, Bert Brennan.
Commercial Carriers provided the capital, the trucks, and the bookkeeping. Test Fleet “leased” ten trucks back to the company at favorable rates. Every dollar was profit. The wives collected over $125,000 in dividends from a $4,000 investment. The company grossed over a million. In exchange, the strike ended and labor peace prevailed. It was a textbook violation of the Taft-Hartley Act, which forbids union officials from receiving payments from employers. And Nashville — chosen because it was far from Detroit and the name “Test Fleet” attracted no attention — was where they parked the paper.
Fourteen years later, Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department finally had enough evidence to prosecute. Kennedy had been pursuing Hoffa since the late 1950s, first as chief counsel of the Senate Rackets Committee and then as Attorney General. He assembled a unit inside the Justice Department that Hoffa’s people called the “Get Hoffa Squad.” The prosecutor Kennedy sent to Nashville was James F. Neal — a Tennessee native, a meticulous trial lawyer, and a man Hoffa would later call “the most vicious prosecutor who ever lived.”
Neal would go on to prosecute the Watergate cover-up trial, convicting Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and John Mitchell. But Nashville came first.
The trial began on October 22, 1962, in the U.S. Courthouse at 801 Broadway, before Judge William E. Miller. Hoffa’s defense team included several attorneys, among them a Nashville lawyer named Z.T. “Tommy” Osborn Jr.
Osborn’s name had appeared in the news earlier that year — on the winning side of Baker v. Carr, the landmark Supreme Court case that established the principle of one person, one vote. Osborn had compiled the statistical evidence that proved Tennessee’s legislative maps were rigged and had argued before the justices in Washington. It was the most important reapportionment case in American history, and Osborn was one of its architects.
Now he was sitting at the defense table next to Jimmy Hoffa. Nashville is a small town.
The trial lasted nine weeks. The government’s case was complex — financial records, corporate structures, the mechanics of how money moved from Commercial Carriers through Test Fleet to the Hoffa and Brennan households. Hoffa sat through it with the confidence of a man who had beaten charges before.
On December 4, 1962, the proceedings were interrupted when a man named Warren Swanson walked into Judge Miller’s eighth-floor courtroom and fired a pellet gun at Hoffa. The gun was not powerful enough to do serious damage. Hoffa reportedly punched Swanson in the face before U.S. marshals tackled the attacker. The trial resumed.
On December 23, the jury deadlocked — seven to five for acquittal. Judge Miller declared a mistrial. Hoffa walked out of the courthouse and back to the Andrew Jackson Hotel. He thought he’d won.
He had not.
What Hoffa didn’t know was that the seventh floor of the Andrew Jackson Hotel was compromised.
During the trial, a Teamsters official from Baton Rouge named Edward Grady Partin had insinuated himself into Hoffa’s inner circle. Partin was facing his own legal problems — kidnapping and embezzlement charges — and he had made a deal with the federal government. He reported daily to Walter Sheridan, Kennedy’s lead investigator, about what was happening in Hoffa’s suite.
What was happening was jury tampering.
According to Partin’s testimony, Hoffa had set aside $15,000 to $20,000 to buy jurors. The operation was not subtle. Ewing King, president of Nashville Teamsters Local 327, approached a Tennessee state trooper whose wife sat on the jury, offering a promotion in exchange for a favorable vote. A Teamsters associate offered $10,000 to a prospective juror named James Tippens. Another attempt targeted the son of juror Gratin Fields — $5,000 for the son, $5,000 for the father. Judge Miller had already dismissed two jurors during the trial for suspicious contacts.
Partin heard Hoffa discuss the fix from inside the suite. He once reported Hoffa gesturing to his back pocket and boasting that he had a juror “in his hip pocket.”
After the mistrial, Judge Miller ordered a grand jury investigation. In May 1963, Hoffa was indicted for jury tampering. The case was moved to Chattanooga to avoid pretrial publicity. On March 4, 1964, a jury convicted Hoffa and three co-defendants. Judge Frank Wilson sentenced him to eight years.
The conviction went to the Supreme Court. Hoffa’s attorneys argued that Partin — a government informant embedded in the defense team’s hotel — had violated the Fourth Amendment. In Hoffa v. United States (1966), the Court ruled against him. Hoffa had invited Partin into the suite voluntarily. The Constitution protects against government trespass, not misplaced trust in a friend.
Tommy Osborn — the Baker v. Carr hero — did not survive the wreckage.
In preparation for the jury tampering trial, Osborn hired a Nashville detective named Robert Vick to investigate the jury pool. Vick was a government informant. He recorded Osborn authorizing a $10,000 bribe for a prospective juror named Ralph Elliott. The tape was entered into evidence. Osborn was convicted of jury tampering in 1964 and sentenced to three and a half years in federal prison. He was disbarred.
The man who had stood before the Supreme Court and argued that every American’s vote should count equally had been caught on tape buying a juror. Both acts involved the same thing — the machinery of democratic representation — but from opposite ends. One expanded it. The other corrupted it. It is the kind of trajectory that only makes sense in a city where the courthouse and the hotel bar are three blocks apart.
Hoffa reported to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in March 1967 to begin serving his sentence. He was pardoned by President Nixon in 1971, with the condition that he not engage in union activity until 1980. On July 30, 1975, Hoffa drove to the Machus Red Fox restaurant outside Detroit to meet two men. He was never seen again.
James Neal returned to Nashville and built a law practice — Neal & Harwell — that became one of the most powerful litigation firms in the South. He defended Ford Motor Company in the Pinto criminal trial, won an acquittal for Elvis Presley’s doctor, served as counsel to Al Gore, and died in Nashville in 2010 at eighty-one.
Edward Partin, the informant who brought Hoffa down from inside the Andrew Jackson Hotel, returned to Baton Rouge and eventually went to prison himself on racketeering charges. The Teamsters never forgave him. Neither did anyone else.
The Andrew Jackson Hotel is gone — demolished in 1971. The federal courthouse on Broadway still stands. The seventh-floor suite where Hoffa ran his operation and Partin listened through the walls is now empty air above a Nashville street. The trial that happened there produced two Supreme Court cases, one presidential pardon, one unsolved disappearance, and the destruction of the lawyer who had just saved American democracy from its own gerrymandered maps.
Nashville does not do small.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain