[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 3 (Friday, January 5, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S82-S83]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
VICTOR RIESEL AND WALTER SHERIDAN--``IN DEFENSE OF HONEST LABOR''
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, the New York Times Magazine began a
tradition a year ago of devoting its year-end issue to essays on the
lives of some of the most interesting people who died during the year.
The December 31, 1994 issue of the magazine contained reflections on 51
men and women who died last year. I commend all of these essays to my
colleagues for their eloquence, grace, and insight. They make excellent
and inspiring reading.
One of the essays, by Pete Hamil, paid tribute to Victor Riesel and
Walter Sheridan for their leadership on behalf of American workers and
the integrity of the American labor movement. Walter Sheridan worked
with my brother Robert Kennedy in the Justice Department in the 1960's,
and later spent many years on the staff of the Senate Labor and Human
Resources Committee as one of the finest investigators the Senate has
ever had. I believe the essay will be of interest to all of us in
Congress who knew Walter, and I ask unanimous consent that it be
printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the essay was ordered to be printed in the
Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times Magazine, Dec. 31, 1995]
In Defense of Honest Labor
(By Pete Hamill)
They spent many years fighting the same fight; trying to
give the American worker a fair shake and keep the unions
clean. 1913-1995 Victor Riesel, in his newspaper column that
run for more than 40 years and on his radio show, fearlessly
exposed labor corruption (and paid dearly for it). 1925-1995
Walter J. Sheridan, as a government investigator with Robert
Kennedy in the Senate and in the Justice Department, helped
send Jimmy Hoffa to prison. In the end, neither Riesel nor
Sheridan was able to stem the downward slide of the labor
movement, but it can't be said that they didn't try.
When they died within days of each other in January, Victor
Riesel and Walter Sheridan seemed like figures from a lost
America. In their separate ways, they were shaped by that
brief, romantic time when millions of Americans still
believed that the labor movement would serve as the cement of
the social contract.
The theory was relatively simple. Unions--not government--
would establish hard limits on the powerful. Braided together
into a mighty national force, unions would guarantee lives of
security, decency and personal pride to ordinary citizens.
Unions would provide a sense of community. And unions would
be the ethical watch-dogs of the society, casting cold eyes
on slippery politicians and predatory businessmen. Those
ambitions were paid for with the blood of union members, from
Ludlow, Colo., to Flint, Mich., and in hundreds of other
places where a picket line was seen as a moral necessity.
By the time Riesel and Sheridan followed their separate
trails into our social history, the union movement was a
sewer. They knew it better than almost all others, for Riesel
and Sheridan were among the few Americans who carried torches
into that sewer and came back to tell us what they had seen.
Riesel was better known than Sheridan because for most of
his adult life he was a labor columnist, first at The New
York Post, where he began in 1942, and after 1948 at The New
York Daily Mirror, with syndication in some 300 newspapers.
It is one measure of how much our society has changed that
even the job description ``labor columnist'' sounds as rare
now as that of blacksmith.
Riesel came to his life's work with superb credentials. He
was born in 1913 on Manhattan's Lower East Side, that nursery
of union organizers, artists, prize-fighters and hoodlums.
His father was a union activist whose work carried the family
on the familiar journey to the more serene precincts of the
Bronx when Victor was 13. He graduated from Morris High
School just as the Great Depression was beginning and
immediately went to work. Over the next decade, he managed to
earn a bachelor's degree in the night school of the City
College of New York, while working in hat factories and lace-
makers' lofts and steel mills. He learned journalism on
college and union newspapers.
As Riesel was starting his labor column, when American
industry was gorged with wartime profits, the hoodlums were
everywhere. Lepke Buchalter and Gurrah Shapiro had corrupted
and terrorized the garment industry. The leaders of the
waterfront unions were brutal and cynical in their alliances
with the men who controlled the East Coast ports. Other
unions were run as businesses by faceless men protected from
scrutiny by the death of union democracy. Union treasuries
were looted; pension funds were eaten by the mob. Dissidents
had their heads broken or were dropped in swamps in New
Jersey. In the postwar boom, union leaders began buying
yachts. They played a lot of golf. They had become an
oligarchy, as remote from the rank and file as the men who
ran the great corporations. Riesel went after them in his
column and on his radio program and would eventually pay a
severe price.
If Riesel was formed by the Depression, Walter Sheridan's
character was shaped by World WAr II. he was born in 1925 in
Utica, N.Y. His father ran a small hotel called the Monclair
and a restaurant named Sheridan's, and though the Sheridans
were far from rich, the Depression did not force them into
soup kitchens. At the Utica Free Academy, a public high
school, Walter was senior class president and quarterback of
the football team. He joined the Navy, quickly volunteered
for the submarine service and was on board the U.S.S. Pargo
in the Sea of Japan on the day the war ended.ter the war, he
came to New York City and enrolled at Fordham on the G.I.
Bill. In 1948, while a student, he married Nancy Tuttle; they
had met in high school in Utica (and would go on to have 5
children and 14 grandchildren). After graduation in 1950,
Sheridan briefly tried law school in Albany, then decided to
enter the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he would
spend four disillusioning years. The F.B.I. was then in the
iron control of J. Edgar Hoover, whose anti-Communist
obsessions, private intelligence files and bureaucratic
genius made him as permanent, a fixture in Washington as the
average union leader was in Bayonne. I once spent an hour
with Sheridan during Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 campaign and
asked him casually why he'd left the F.B.I.
``Because Hoover was more interested in guys who were
Communists for 15 minutes in 1931,'' Sheridan said quietly,
``than he was in guys who were stealing New Jersey.''
After resigning from the F.B.I., Sheridan joined the
National Security Agency, where he refined his skills as an
investigator. These included a willingness to endure tedium,
a stoical tenacity when faced with dry holes or
disappointment and, above all, an ability to gaze at often
purposefully obscure documents and discover a story line.
Most great investigators have two other qualities: a passion
for anonymity and a belief in the righteousness of the
enterprise. Sheridan, by all accounts, was a great
investigator.
In 1957, his life was permanently changed when he was
recruited by Robert Kennedy to join the staff of the Senate
Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or
Management Field, better known as the McClellan Committee.
The chairman was Senator John McClellan, a Democrat from
Arkansas. John F. Kennedy was a member of the committee, and
Robert Kennedy was the chief counsel. Sheridan established
almost instant rapport with Bobby. They laughed when they
discovered they were born on the same day--Nov. 20, 1925.
Kennedy quickly recognized in Sheridan characteristics he
admired in others who joined his team: tenacity, courage, a
respect for detail and hard work and an absence of self-
importance.
The basic task of the committee was to dig into the mob
takeover of the unions. It quickly began to focus on the
complex, gifted and corrupt Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters,
which, with almost two million members, was the nation's
largest and richest union. The hearings had been called, in
part, because of widespread national revulsion the year
before at what had been done to Victor Riesel.
On April 5, 1956, on his late-night radio show, Riesel
attacked racketeering in Local 138 of the International Union
of Operating Engineers, based in Long Island. He singled out
William C. DeKoning Sr., recently released from prison after
doing time for extortion, and his son, William C. DeKoning
Jr., who had inherited the presidency of the local when his
father was sent to jail. Riesel had also attacked Hoffa, who
was maneuvering from his Middle Western base to take over the
national leadership of the Teamsters.
After the broadcast, Riesel went to Lindy's, the most
famous of the late-night Broadway restaurants of the era. He
stepped outside at 3 a.m., was fingered by a shadowy figure
and then a young man stepped up and hurled sulfuric acid into
Riesel's face. He was permanently blinded.
The police learned that the acid thrower was a 22-year-old
apprentice hoodlum named Abraham Telvi, who disappeared for a
while. They arrested a second-level labor hoodlum--and Hoffa
crony--named John DioGuardia (better known as Johnny Dio) and
charged him with ordering the attack. But witnesses suddenly
developed amnesia and Johnny Dio went free. When Telvi, who
had been paid $1,175 by middlemen to do the job, understood
the importance of his victim, he demanded more money. He was
murdered on July 28 on the Lower East Side, not far from
where Riesel grew up.
There is no record of Riesel and Sheridan working together,
but in Sheridan's 1972 book, ``The Fall and Rise of Jimmy
Hoffa,'' he relates a tale told to him by an honest
[[Page S83]]
teamster named Sam Baron, who was in a hotel room with Hoffa one night
in 1956:
Hoffa went into another room to take a phone call and then
came back into the room where Baron * * * and others were
gathered. According to Baron, Hoffa walked up to him and
poked his finger in his chest, saying, ``Hey, Baron, a friend
of yours got it this morning.''
``What do you mean?'' Baron asked.
``That son of a bitch Victor Riesel. He just had some acid
thrown on him. It's too bad he didn't have it thrown on the
goddamn hands he types with.''
Despite his blindness, Riesel continued writing his
syndicated column until his retirement in 1990. Sheridan, who
moved to the Justice Department when Robert Kennedy became
Attorney General, continued pursuing Jimmy Hoffa, and the
Teamsters leader finally went to prison in 1967. He served 58
months before being released by Richard Nixon. None of this
was simple. The ``Get Hoffa'' squad, commanded by Sheridan,
often seemed obsessive; even some liberals objected to its
relentlessness. But Sheridan always denied that he and
Kennedy were engaged in a vendetta. ``For Kennedy to have
done less than he did,'' he wrote in his book, ``would have
been a violation of his own public trust and a dereliction of
duty.''
By the time Sheridan wrote those words, John and Robert
Kennedy had been murdered. A few years later, on July 30,
1975, Jimmy Hoffa went to meet a guy in a restaurant outside
Detroit and was never seen again. The labor movement hasn't
vanished, of course, but by any measurement, it is greatly
diminished. Not even the most giddy union idealist offers
hope that it can become in the future what it should have
been before the hoodlums cut into its heart. We do know this:
Victor Riesel and Walter Sheridan spent years of their lives
trying to save the labor movement from the enemy within,
trying to help thousands of people who would never know their
names.
____
Pete Hamill's journalism career began in 1960 at The New
York Post, a union shop. ``Piecework,'' a collection of his
articles, is being published this month.
____________________