Beck's Bad Boy

At a Honolulu press conference last week, 61-year-old, keg-shaped Dave Beck, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, turned to a sport-shirted little man who was sitting silently by and barked: "Who runs this union, Jimmy?" Grinning ingenuously, James R. Hoffa, ninth vice president of the I.B.T. and most undisciplined of Beck's bad boys (TIME, March 19), jumped to his feet and replied: "You run it, Dave. The board meeting today certainly proved that."

Superficially, Hoffa's answer seemed no more than the truth. That afternoon, at a meeting of the I.B.T. general executive board in Honolulu's Princess Kaiulani Hotel, Beck and the board had shelved Hoffa's pet project: a loan of $400,000 to the International Longshoremen's Association, which was expelled from the A.F.L. more than two years ago for flagrant corruption and racketeering. Beck also asked and got from the board virtually unlimited authority to clean out corruption in the I.B.T. itself.

If Beck had been seriously interested in cleaning up the I.B.T., one of his first targets should have been New York, where a specially created federal grand jury last week began an investigation of seven racket-linked teamster locals that Hoffa recently set up to insure the election of pro-Hoffa officers by the New York Teamsters Joint Council. (The election itself is being disputed in the courts.) Beck, however, professed a complete lack of interest in the New York situation. He insisted solemnly that "in my opinion it was an honest election." He also made it clear that the shelving of the I.L.A. loan did not mean that tough, power-hungry Jimmy Hoffa would be forced to abandon his idea of a "mutual aid pact"--committing the Teamsters and the discredited Longshoremen to joint organizational drives and joint pressure on employers.

When the Honolulu meeting was over, a reporter asked Dave Beck if the decisions taken had been designed to "put the brakes on" Jimmy Hoffa, whose organizing talents have spread his domain into 27 states. "Positively not!" boomed Beck. "Why in hell would we want to put the brakes on anybody who is doing that good a job of organizing? I wish I had 40 more like him."

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