A poignant side to the Hoffa story
Jack O’Brien graduated from Washington and Lee in 1984 with an Oxford fellowship and an acceptance from Yale Law School in hand. A few weeks later, he changed his name back to the one he had at his birth: Jack Goldsmith.
Why? In June 1975, when Jack was 12, his mother, Brenda, married her third husband, Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, a longtime Teamsters union factotum. Six weeks later, the former Teamsters president to whom O’Brien had dedicated most of his life, Jimmy Hoffa, disappeared from a suburban Detroit parking lot, never to be found.
O’Brien was fingered as the likeliest suspect. O’Brien’s mother, Sylvia Pagano, was a mob family daughter whose relationship with Detroit underboss Anthony Giacalone helped grease the ties between La Cosa Nostra and Hoffa’s union.
For 12-year-old Jack, O’Brien’s arrival in his life was the best thing that had ever happened. Chuckie “glommed on to me with love and attention that I had never received from … anyone else,” and he became “an extraordinary father to me and my brothers.” Listening to Chuckie’s tales of years past, “I thought of Jimmy Hoffa as the grandfather I’d never met,” and “I proudly changed my name to ‘Jack O’Brien.’ ”
In college, however, as he recounts in his new book, “In Hoffa’s Shadow,” Jack began reading the stories about Chuckie’s Mafia ties, and as he considered his future, “I began to worry that the association with Chuckie might jeopardize my legal career.” After he finished Yale Law School, a judicial clerkship led to an FBI security clearance interview in which Goldsmith expressed “total disdain and disgust” for his stepfather, telling two agents that “he hopes he never sees or talks to ‘Chuckie’ O’Brien again.”
A Supreme Court clerkship, two law faculty posts and a George W. Bush administration appointment followed, but when Goldsmith’s new wife witnessed his rudeness toward his mother’s partner, she reproved him. “He loves you so much, you should be kinder to him.”
Goldsmith left his Justice Department post in mid-2004 to accept a professorship at Harvard, and parenting his own young children “led me to feel terrible about what I had done to the man who had been a wonderful father to me.” That Christmas he apologized to Chuckie, who accepted his apology.
“I never believed Chuckie was involved in killing the man he so obviously revered,” Goldsmith writes, because years of listening to O’Brien had shown him how “Chuckie loved Jimmy Hoffa more than anyone.”
Yet the second father figure in Chuckie’s life, “Uncle Tony” Giacalone, had said enough to O’Brien after Hoffa’s disappearance for Chuckie to know why the mob had killed him. No longer Teamsters president after a stint in federal prison, Hoffa had been speaking recklessly about mob control of the union. “People expected me to keep him quiet. But I couldn’t,” Chuckie confessed to Goldsmith. Two days after Hoffa’s disappearance, Giacalone took O’Brien to dinner. “Life is very funny, Chuck. .... Things happen, and you don’t have control over it,” Uncle Tony told him, while warning, “Don’t talk about (expletive) you don’t know about.”
Goldsmith explains that Giacalone “was telling Chuckie that he, Uncle Tony, could not have stopped it from happening,” and two months later Giacalone reinforced his message by summoning O’Brien to a meeting with Genovese family capo Anthony Provenzano, another mobster whom Chuckie had long known. Hoffa “was going to take everybody down,” Provenzano told O’Brien.
Chuckie understood that “Provenzano had a lot to do with it,” as he told Goldsmith, but O’Brien also knew enough about the Mafia to appreciate that what Goldsmith calls “one of the most brilliantly executed murders in American history” had been authorized by the Mafia’s high command. “New York had to approve it,” he explained to Jack.
The national bestsellers lists were not available from Publishers Weekly due to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge of Crosby, Maine, is back, once again presiding over — though not always present in — 13 linked stories. Still bossy and blunt to the point of obnoxiousness, Olive has found the ideal narrator in Kimberly Farr, who captures her peremptory manner and brutal honesty to a tee. We learn that Olive is now a widow in her 70s, but as the seasons pass, she marries again, is widowed again, and is 86 years old when we leave her, as she’s going off to supper at the senior-living facility where she now lives. In the interim we are treated to revelatory episodes, some sad, some droll, including a ghastly baby shower. Strout has an extraordinary gift of emotional precision in showing loneliness, miscommunication and selfdoubt in such a stark yet compassionate way. What should be depressing is refreshing. Farr’s performance is perfectly in tune with the prevailing mood of these stories, a spirit summed up by Olive herself: “Well, that’s life. Nothing you can do about it.”