Controlled anger came rumbling out of the witness. “Mr. Kennedy, it’s ‘shocking’ you would even suggest I could be involved with that kind of blood-taint money…and I don’t go for that, Mr. Kennedy! I don’t go for that kind of action.”

The chief counsel’s words continued their rat-a-tat-tat. “You could have avoided that kind of action many years ago by disassociating yourself from Joe Costello, could you not?”

“Whhhhhhy, Mr. Kennedy?” Barney seemed to stretch the word “why” out endlessly—and into it he put hurt and disappointment and indignation. “Why would I do that?”

Bob’s rage was barely reined in. “Every place you go—we’ve checked your telephone records—finds you calling known gangsters.”

Barney’s expression oozed brotherly love. “Mr. Kennedy, what happened in the past lives of people, like Mr. Costello, is no concern of mine. They may be nice people now.”

“You arranged for Lt. Shoulders’ son to work for the Teamsters Union in St. Louis. Lt. Shoulders who went to prison for perjury over the Greenlease money.”

“Maybe so, but his son didn’t. Sir, you don’t give anyone a chance to prove they’re nice. They may be nice people.”

“Are you a ‘nice person,’ Mr. Baker?”

“That’s for others to judge.”

Bob wore the kind of smile a snarling animal does. “I don’t want you to leave the stand leaving the impression of being just the Teamsters’ joker. You are associated with the scum of this country. And you are just like them.”

I tried not to groan. Bob had stepped over the line—he’d become a bully now, and a self-righteous one.

Barney sensed it and just grinned at the young counsel. He even summoned his own chuckle. “What can I say? I’m just a big ham at heart. I admit it. I talk big. I drop names. Just the way I am.”

After the lunch break, accompanied by high-profile defense attorney Edward Bennett Williams, James R. Hoffa took his position at the witness table. The Teamster president had a broad-shouldered, burly look that his lack of stature—five feet five—didn’t quite undermine. As usual, he wore an off-the-rack dark brown suit with highwater trousers exposing his trademark white socks, and a ready (if at times menacing) smile. The famous square face, rounded off by his chin, had a vaguely Asian cast, and his roughneck features were offset by an unlikely twinkle in the light brown eyes, his dark glossy hair brushed back, porcupine quills ready to fly at a moment’s notice.

Jimmy Hoffa’s father had been a coal miner and his mother had polished radiator caps in an auto plant. His first job had been fifteen bucks a week as a teenager unloading fruits and vegetables; by sixteen he’d organized his first wildcat strike. That had put him on the Teamster payroll. He still was.

Bob had something up his sleeve. I knew he did because an operative in my New York office had developed it. Sol Lippman, general counsel to the Retail Clerks International Association, said Hoffa had threatened to kill him for turning down a Teamsters merger. And complaining to the police or FBI about it would be useless, Hoffa said—“I have a special way with juries.”