[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.

                          ____________________