The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [237]
Bobby’s father was adamantly opposed to Bobby involving himself in such a dubious enterprise. The primary result, as Joe saw it, would be Jack’s loss of labor support. There may have been another reason Joe became so upset, a reason that he could not tell his son. In his hand, Joe held a map of power in America far more extensive, detailed, and truthful than anything Bobby or Jack grasped. Joe saw the dark tunnels that burrowed under America. He saw where they led and how they entered the soft underbelly of American life. He knew what a dangerous enterprise it would be even to chart these tunnels, to say nothing of attempting to close them off. Joe may also have feared that Bobby’s quest would lead to his own father’s activities. He argued with Bobby as he had never done before, but Bobby gave him no ground. Joe went to Justice Douglas and asked him to plead with his son to give up this crazed mission, but nothing dissuaded Bobby. Others might have thought that Bobby was nothing but his father’s puppet, but Joe was not pulling the strings that Bobby danced to now.
Bobby put together a stellar team that included Carmine Bellino, the former head of the accounting unit at the FBI. Bellino could read a page of figures as if they were fingerprints, and he put in seven-day weeks. “Unless you are prepared to go all the way, don’t start it,” Bellino cautioned Bobby as they began. “We’re going all the way,” Bobby answered.
On his first trip to the West Coast, Bobby discovered what to him was another America. He was a conservative Democrat who had been brought up with a certain ambivalence toward left-leaning unions that pushed militantly against the owning class. In a few weeks, though, he was confronted with union leaders who struck out militantly not at management but against their own union brothers and sisters. These local leaders forged sweetheart deals and pocketed bribes and concessions. Their minions bludgeoned honest workers who stood up to them and intimidated the rank and file into silence. As Bobby interviewed source after source, the twisted trail of corruption led higher and higher until he was confronted with the stark suspicion that Beck himself was corrupt. In one instance alone, Beck may have pilfered $163,000 from the union treasurer to build the kind of palatial house in which once only the bosses had lived.
Bobby and his staff pored over documents and interviewed scores of people. It was often a tedious, frustrating business, running down one lead that turned back on itself, then following another that did the same, and always traveling, from Los Angeles to Portland and Seattle to Detroit and Chicago.
On a frigid December day five days before Christmas, Bobby and Bellino hurried back to their room at Chicago’s Palmer House to pore over subpoenaed documents that detailed the relationship between Beck and Nathan W. Sheferman, a so-called labor relations consultant. As the two men meticulously examined the documents, they realized that they now had the evidence to prove indisputably that Beck was not the “labor statesman” he purported to be, but a criminal who had betrayed the trust of the men and women who drove trucks across America and delivered bread and beer to stores. These documents had the power to put a man in prison and to begin to shut down a golden spigot of corruption that had benefited everyone from union officials to extortionists, from politicians to thugs, and from sweetly scented, refined business gentlemen to common murderers. And this was