[inaudible conversations] good evening thank you for coming to politics and prose brick im a bookseller here where we host 1000 authors per year. Please go to our website where you can pick up one of the monthly event calendars throughout the store with the current listings going to the end of october. Before we get started today would like you to please silence your cell phone so not to disrupt the event when its time for q a please step up to the mic so we can hear your question as we are audio recording and cspan is recording for book tv. We will have a signing up here at this table and if you could fold up your chairs that would be a great help. So tonight i very excited to welcome Jack Goldsmith to politics and prose celebrating his newest work in half his shadow. Theres been many theories of the phase of jimmy hoffa resident of the International Brotherhood of teamsters since he disappeared in 1975 many involved Charles Chucky obrien and goldsmith stepfather he recounts how his childhood affection for obrien became more complicated as he pursued a legal career. And the perspective he gained as serving as assistant attorney general under george w. Bush he was moved to uncover the truth about obrien and hoffa and the mob and labor power and rise of the surveillance state. s book tells the moving story of being reunited with the stepfather he disown and to unravel the most persistent mystery and chuckys role. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institute head office of Legal Counsel from the george w. Bush administration to challenge the warrantless wiretapping program to justify the use against the war of terrorism. Author of terror presidency. Please join me to welcome Jack Goldsmith. [applause] thank you very much for hosting this event and for you all coming out tonight even though there is a democratic debate and a Baseball Team i am grateful that you came. My tale begins june 1975 i was 12 years old living in arkansas and my mother married her third husband his name was Charles Obrien my birth father was not terribly good my second stepfather my first stepfather was not very good i didnt have a very good father figure so he shows up on the scene i had known him about six months before they got married and i immediately glommed onto him. He was an amazing father. He showed me the love and affection i never had we did everything together i thought he was great. Twelve years old. Six months later jimmy hoffa disappeared mysteriously from a parking lot in the suburbs of detroit michigan to this day there is no direct evidence of what happened to hoffa. He vanished there are lots of theories but nobody knows what happened. He was in the parking lot and was seen in the parking lot as late as 245 the last phone call at 330 and thats it for go there are theories of how he was picked up but we dont know to this day what happened. As many people may know that jimmy hoffa in the fifties and sixties was one of the most wellknown public figures in the country leading the Teamsters Union the most powerful in the country and had the outside his personality extraordinary labor leader for the teamsters and also corrupt in many ways. He cuts ideals and the pension fund was ran out of his own pocket but he basically went to jail in 67 for a variety of things out in 71 when nixon pardoned kammer commuted his sentence he was trying to regain the presidency when he disappeared. Probably almost certainly at behest of the mob because basically hoffa was trying to win back the Teamsters Union the mob had taken over control much more than when he was president and they feared he would spill their secrets because he threatened to do so and theres pretty good evidence that there was mob organized. One week after his disappearance Chucky Obrien became a lead suspect he is also hoffas righthand man in the fifties until the year before he disappeared he met hoffa at nine years old and was by his side basically all the time from the early fifties until he went to prison and then after until he disappeared many thoughts chucky was hoffas illegitimate son they were extremely close and always together. It was an extraordinary thing when six days after his disappearance my stepfather became the lead suspect. It was a circus if you remember. Front page news every day evening news every day for weeks and i was in the middle of it as a 12 yearold kid who stepdad is the leading suspect. So during my High School Years with the formative years of my life chucky was caught up so there was a lot of circumstantial evidence including he was in the vicinity at the time he was driving a car of the sun of a direct mobster who is known to organize the hit hair up off i was found in the car and the fbi had every reason to focus. The next five years of my life was basically, one, we became like this he was an extraordinary father i revere the Teamsters Union and his Union Identity and mobsters to be close with. They were known as uncle tony to me i thought they were wonderful and i believe my stepfather when he told me the mob did not exist brick i bought the whole thing. This is at the same time i was hanging out with these folks but the hoffa stuff was out of control the government was all over him basically he was painted as the guy who did it and right now its conventional wisdom if you type in Chucky Obrien you will say thats the person who picked up hoffa. So i go to college in 1980 over the next six or seven years i start to read when i get to college i read books about the hoffa disappearance for the first time and it turns out it may be naive but it turns out the mob actually did exist my uncles tony were violent and my stepfather had a criminal past. All things that i was dimly aware or did not focus on. Also i came to worry maybe my wife would be in danger or my life would be in danger to be his son and then i use to revel in his Union Identity and his making fun of education my value started to change in college i admired him less and then i started to think about my professional career coming out of law school i started to think maybe thats not such a great thing to be an attorney if i have any ambitions to be in the government to have these very close mob ties or the stepson of the leading suspect. So to make a very long story short i cut chucky out of my life. Was a slow process over five or six years and i concluded basically by the time i finished in law school i needed to have nothing to do with him. He was bad and i was virtuous i needed to stay on that path that he had or might wrongly and a basically cut him out of my life and it was brutal. It hurt him in quite a lot of ways that i did not appreciate at the time. So it turns out it was a good idea from a professional standpoint the year i got out of law school the first thing i was asked to do was to work on a case that required me to get classified security clearance. I filled out the forms i put down my aliases i said my name is jack obrien ages 13 through 21 i didnt say, the son of the main mob disappearance but about one week one week later two or three fbi agents knock on my door i thought it was standard security clearance i later found out that this set off alarm bells in the fbi and they thought they had access to someone who was close to the hoffa disappearance and would learn something. So basically i spent a day with the fbi they grilled me i didnt expect this at all i thought i was finished to get security clearance everything i knew about the mob and chucky but to make a long story short i convince them that i separated myself from chucky and got the clearance and then thats the next 20 years of my career i kept getting the clearance through government jobs basically because i tossed him under the bus as a career perspective it was a good move for professional development. Im skipping over a lot of things because i want to get to the book fast forward 18 years later im in the Justice Department the assistant attorney general for Legal Counsel i never would have gotten there if i didnt do what i had done two chucky 20 years earlier im working in the Justice Department late one night from the wiretapping program of the Bush Administration long story short theres all sorts of problems in the program im figuring it out late one night reading Fourth Amendment cases and berger versus new york and they are two citations the hoffa version and obrien versus united states. And i was shocked. Could that be my stepfather cracks it turns out it was a case with Chucky Obrien but when i was in high school he only said how corrupt the government was to break every rule and they did it to me and then i had the Supreme Court case and i never knew about this case. It turns out it was true and he was illegally surveilled and it did vacate his conviction as basically with decades of emerging from the public in the mid sixties and he was the beneficiary of this because of him and his lawyer in the office of the mob person he was close to. This was shocking to me for many reasons because i was in a very special space with the president of the war on terrorism and then all this just came rushing back to me everything he said about the Justice Department and there i was kneedeep in the Surveillance Program with serious legal problems and chucky was lard atlarge and it still was and i was there in the 2000s. So this began a process with me that took about a year of which i went through a lot of soulsearching about my relationship with chucky and it involved a lot of things. Me realizing i judged him very harshly i exaggerated my own virtue and underappreciated his. He had never done anything wrong to me hed always been a great father to me. He was ill and i appreciated his situation with something he could not fight because and i left the government i was accused of doing things that i didnt think were fair and i didnt want to fight those charges either so i sympathize on that front. Finally my mom always told me how badly i hurt chucky when i broke with him but i didnt appreciate it until i had children and then i began to reflect on the vulnerability of what happened to me what i did two chucky all these reasons came together to lead me to ask for his forgiveness in late 2004 it happened in a very casual way watching seinfeld in the Television Room he would sit in his chair and i said i was wrong to do what i did to you i hope you forgive me. He looked at me and he was surprised. This is the first time i had seen him it was like the good old days but he was shocked he looked at me and his face was ashen and he started to tear up and said you dont have to apologize son i understand why you did what you did. That was it. That was the end of any discussion over the previous 20 years. We became very close and spent a lot of time in over the course of these conversations i started to doubt if he picked up hoffa for a bunch of reasons i didnt have any evidence but just the way he talked about it and revered hoffa. So i said to him one day about eight years ago, why dont i write a book about this cracks im sure whatever i discover what happened it has to give you a better shake and you have been given because every other one had you bringing hoffa to his death. He hesitated to have me write a book that tried to vindicate him from the charge but let me just say he was like this to hoffa it was like a father to him so he was charged with patricide and that charge that was floated in the seventies it ruined his life for a bunch of reasons it dishonored him ruined his life in the Teamsters Union and basically destroyed him. And he tried to fight back and could never fight back he never had the financial or the legal tools. I told him i would do my best he finally said okay but on one condition i will try to clear you and figure out what happened on one condition. But you have to tell me the truth. This is a major challenge because chucky i didnt have to read the hoffa memorandum as the early report that referred to chucky said he is a notorious and pathological liar. I knew this he only stated the truth about everything. Now my main witness am trying to clear so another challenge is that there was so much misinformation built up over the hoffa disappearance with the seventies theories so many claims and counterclaims that sifting through that to get to the truth was extremely difficult talking to every fbi agents that ever work the case that was a lie if i looked at thousands of pages of government going government many of which had never been discussed and chucky and i developed a rapport may be spending thousands of hours talking about the case. And it was an amazing dance ride was the interrogator sometimes he would answer me straight sometimes he would deflect but other times he told me quite a lot. Long story short i do believe i accomplished my original goal to clear him from the charge he was the person that drove hoffa to his death i hope you agree with that conclusion there are a lot of reasons with the circumstantial case against him a lot that the government did not talk about or know about to suggest he didnt or could not have done it that the evidence for me starting in the nineties they believed he was not the person this is not known in public. They had all sorts of good reasons for that and why they came to the conclusion in part because they had an alternate theory today is much different than what the government understands so it is in part about my journey of atonement to clear chucky along the way i think i succeeded but fortunately or unfortunately it turned into something more than that a narrative about the 20th century with the rise of the mob connected to hoffas rise and fall and the steps the government took to both diminish labor and its a fascinating story i do my best to tell but i also learned about Law Enforcement through the fbi. I became very close with the four original fbi agents in their early thirties originally accuse chucky of doing this. We became friends and spent 12 sessions together hours and hours to talk about the case and never stopped obsessing about it. L think anybody has ever stopped no fbi agents have stopped they still talk about it and think about it and are still involved in the mystery. But i also learned the government did not treat chucky well. Hes definitely not an angel it turns out the public narrative it didnt match up with what the government knew inside with the evidence they had against him constantly portraying him to get him to talk and pressure him into talking in the hopes he would be pressured by the mob telling them they were come after him if he didnt fess up. After the government figured out he wasnt the person who did it they never corrected the record there is a mechanism for allegations him putting it out there and for 44 years he has been accused in the public eye there is no mechanism to put that genie back in the bottle and theres no incentive in it for the government there is for them not to. Most extraordinarily the government approached chucky and actually offered to send him the exoneration letter all he had to do was come in for an interview and tell the truth and he would get this letter. He was a very old man went to the interview and spent four hours with them actually it was a hilarious interview he had everybody in stitches stitches and he told the truth and he agreed he told the truth and they promised the letter and then a few weeks later they said it was coming and then a month and then two months and then four months and the letter never came because the people at the top us attorney and head of the fbi all the people working the case for decades were convinced he didnt do it and i tell the story about that every turn. He had bad luck most of his life also its history because intersects with hoffas life in my life and the american surveillance state i spend a lot of time going through these extraordinary transcripts and its a story thats familiar of the fbi engaging of backup to say its okay a familiar story they were strictly unconvincing but there was reform in most extraordinarily that story of that round of government access surveillance tied up in many ways in three or four different ways there was a connection from what hoffa went through and what i did 50 years later. So finally i would just tell you to more and then i will stop. The book is about the mob and labor and their relationship over 20th century and those that took place Bobby Kennedy went after hoffa very aggressively, he thought he would get rid of hoffa and save the American Labor movement and save the members from this horrible person they trusted the working class hoffa much more than the millionaire. But the irony was in his super aggressive attacks on hoffa bobby painted a huge broad brush that staying all of labor really to the late fifties and sixties you can see drop in public approval so that is one historical irony is that kennedy was convinced if you got rid of hoffa from the Teamsters Union than that would get rid of the mob at exactly the opposite happened hoffa had dealings with the mob but also kept mma because he was in charge especially regard to the pension fund when he went away the very weak successor let the mob take over so actually it made much worse infiltration of the monsters union than ever before which is what they did not expect the third irony is the mob had taken over the teamsters and really it was the mobs decision to knock off hoffa in 75 that finally the government had the tools to have the resources and to discover in the course of that these amazing memos my god we have uncovered these mob connections between the mob and the teamsters as if it never existed as much worse than we realize. This is the Time Starting with a hoffa disappearance to take those resources and tools to go after the racketeering i wouldnt say wipe it out but diminish significantly so i quote the fbi in the case so otherwise would be a lot more mobsters on the street and finally the book, this is the hardest topic its about father and son and sons and daughters jimmy hoffa lost his father at seven his father died chucky lost his father when his dad took off he had trouble with the mob in kansas city i lost my father we were all little boys in search hoffa never had a figure his father figures were jimmy hoffa and his senior mob leader from detroit who they themselves are very close chucky loved and revered both men but he was a person behind in the disappearance. To make matters worse he was seen as treacherous because he is the person who killed his father killed. And finally with my relationship it is about my changing views and how he looked when i was 20 versus how i looked when i was 20 and how i look differently after being through the Justice Department and how it looked even more different talking to him as he got old and near deat death. The book is a reflection on that and the complications in our relationship and how this all brought us much closer than we had ever been before. So now im very happy to take your questions. So now im very happy to take your questions. I really enjoyed your book. Thats a good read. My question is you talk about how chucky had this idea of not talking. Do you think if he would have gotten the letter . Just to be clear he answered every single question they were asking about his involvement in the disappearance they wanted to clear him because they hoped if they cleared him he would cooperate to tell them other things that he knew so he answered all of their questions and satisfied every condition they had. He told me a lot of things they didnt ask him what he knew because theres no way he would answer that. A big part of the book chucky was half sicilian and half irish but raised with sicilian values his mother came from kansas city and schooled him on uncle tony schooled him on code of silence and that kept beating up his desire to help me to write this book and the book is about our struggle to work through his commitment to america and me figuring out what he knew and it was a struggle through the end. First of all thank you for being here. Have a quex question. How did your mom eat Chucky Obrien cracks and then second the guy who posed as a reporter said he is the one who killed hoffa hes dead now that you think thats truthful . I will comment on the first thing it is about father and sons but also forgiveness and the power of forgiveness and i didnt realize how important this was i just wrote the book but the main feedback i had gotten was thank you for writing the book because it makes me realize the issues i have in my family with my parents and the importance of forgiveness of those relationships. So people appreciated that on the question of west memphis. My mom was living in florida. But my grandmother raised in monash lived in west memphis we had to be there that summer she met chucky through chuckys mother she was a favorite in the mob circles so they got married and then moved to florida. There is a movie coming out that is based on the book on a confession of Frank Shearin who was a teamsters official or at least a serious criminal and gave a confession that is the basis of this book and the confession is. [laughter] there is more to say about it but zero evidence to support it no evidence at all to support that confession and a lot of reasons you think it is false every person i talked to in the fbi to say theres no way that now its a basis for a Motion Picture and good for me its based on the early seventies theory i havent seen the movie yet but he has him talking about hoffa and inserts himself into that so i suspect he has chucky driving him to his death and i suspect the scorsese movie will be more influential than what the fbi thinks which is unfortunate. Thank you so much i cant help but wonder how this grenade landed in the middle of your family affected the other members and your mother. Thank you. My brothers and i were very young i was 12 my brothers were eight and five it was traumatic for all of us stealing it but my mom was the most devastated. She had Mental Health problems before this event and got significantly worse as a result of the investigations and publicity charges and reporters being called before a grand jury actually shouldnt have to attend because of Mental Health. As for me it seems strange and implausible it was a wild time that the main thing i remember about those five years was happiness because of my relationship we were extremely close i had a pretty good experience in high school we did everything together im sure i have suppressed a lot i dont remember it a as a terrible time but as a stable and happy time but it was terrible for my mom. Thank you for your interesting story. How is it that chucky could get information that turned out to be truthful about government surveillance . That something you were skeptical love of one point and then realized it is true that you had inside information and he didnt spirit thats not accurate. In the late fifties when J Edgar Hoover became convinced he had to take organized crime seriously his first line of attack was to use bugs or wires surveillance to gather intelligence then it went through 1965 who was not known at the time it was secret but it all came out and the reason chucky knew about it when the government revealed the legal identity the Supreme Court basically ordered them to say what will you do . They had two confederates to the solicitor general they thought the legal basis they would stop doing these things they presented a plan to the court they pledged they would reveal every case close to legal surveillance so chuckys case was one of those so he got lucky so he learned about in the sixties as the basis for his conviction to be vacated but one of the main things i learned we live in an era of surveillance paranoia and we have every reason to be paranoid because everybody watches all the time. There was dramatic paranoia in the sixties story after story of newfangled recording devices watching us it sounds like what we talk about today and hoffa had a lot of reasons to think he was surveilled he believed he was illegally wiretapped but the short answer is chucky learned about it that but not the extent i know the extent all of the transcripts these legal recordings are available to the public now believe it or not with the 80s investigation into jfk and they collected all sorts of evidence around the government and the mob and they ended up being Public Record but chucky learned about it in the sixties. I can remember watching kennedy as a tiny person is there a more general confident comment if the teamsters are a force of good . I can talk more about the fifties and forties then i can about today. Its a story of tragedy i think. To exaggerate how powerful it was because hoffa basically extended the bargaining unit and that meant by closing down transportation routes that were crucial strategic points he could put economic leverage on anyone and this was before the government clampdown on the labor laws he had extraordinary power and was extremely successful to bring hundreds of thousands of workers out of poverty into the middle class and he was considered good for the teamsters. Ultimately however i dont think it was a serious promise but there was a promise because of his commitments he was corrupt. And in a counterfactual world if you didnt have this corruption he can have led labor in a different direction because basically his performance was basically in difference to the criminality around him and his indifference had an effect far beyond the whole Labor Movement so not to make sweeping generalities on the whole hoffa was brilliant and Effective Labor leader but he seen as negative on balance. Dave back was his predecessor back was the predecessor and had similar tactics he used similar bargaining technics techniques that hoffa perfected. Hoffa was always making side deals nourishes cash everywhere there is a lot of things i found in my research hoffa didnt have a fancy life he was spending it to enhance his power by politicians off or judges or anyone that would help him he had the teamsters power and that was true but not completely that was more conventionally corrupt to line his pockets to his benefit. Ive read a portion of your book but you said he didnt get the letter to exonerate him that the fbi does know who did it . Over the course spending a lot of time with government officials in detroit i have triangulated their theory which is based on surveillance evidence and conversations overheard is that they think they know who did it that jack picked hoffa up i will not mention the name but andy add another name of the person who actually killed him because he was bragging about it that corroborated other information this is the basis of the last dig so this person who is a very wellknown quickly rose in the ranks im not sure where i have drawn the line but i dont know the fbi evidence they had many theories over the years and they seem very confident about this theory my publisher wanted me to mention the name but i didnt because i found it very frustrating chucky wasnt a suspect based on what the fbi thought this gentleman is dead he died i shouldnt do what i didnt appreciate what others did to chucky but having conversations with people in detroit and the government that they will release this information at some point in the near future. Thank you. I love the book. I think everybody should read i it. Thank you your stepfather does indicate that tony was likely involved is it appropriate to ask how you think it connects to the new jersey mob . Chucky tried hard not to tell me things he was not supposed to but he did and one of the things he told me his dad a teachers official from the teamsters as widely suspected and the organization of the plot and did not give any details but it was corroborated and its not surprising uncle tony was involved but it seems what i learned from chucky and others it was approved by the commission as a decision that affected the whole nation. Everybody. That is the decision made their. And this is my speculation. Especially anthony jack alone he. That that hasnt been fully explored it very much looks in the calls that they made so that is the basic contours of the conspiracy. Does that answer your question . Whatever happened to the pool table . [laughter] uncle tony is chucky said the most uncontrollably violent man i met in my life. But the guy i knew was always in bathing suit in his palmdale home hanging out at the pool with barbecues to play on his gorges pool table. I was 13 or 14 then i love that pool table i asked him where he got it where i could get one. One day uncle tony called chucky and said get that god damn pool table and give it to your children. So we had in our garage in plantation which i adored throughout my High School Years. And i dont know what happened if i understood the significance at 17 i would do anything to have it now. But i dont know. I think of tony every time i play pool. Going to the conversation chucky and then to retract a lot of that. Maybe we will never know so the question is to talk through that. And then to resolve that like a lawyer. I learned a lot from chucky over hundreds of hours of conversation he was always torn the image of his mother every time he got close to something he said that he wanted to tell me things this seems bizarre but i came to admire his principles because thats all he had left. But then one day he had a heart attack i came down to boca baton and chucky was at the hospital he was in much worse shape than my mom. She would be okay and my mom said take them to lunch to calm him down. This is a point in my conversations basically i decided i would not press him anymore he told me that he would tell me. We sit down and reflexively i hit the recorder on my iphone i had no expectation of having any conversation i did it without thinking. We were talking alone we were talking about my childhood and the good old dale the good old days. Then somehow a trip to detroit the Previous Year for this interview with the government came up. I said just think that tony was involved i know you dont think that but its pretty clear they were involved in chucky said tony had a lot to do with it. And i was stunned. Stunned that he never ever had talked about it and he said in a way that was very credible but never talked about the disappearance and always gave me the stories that i never believed he looked at his first one at his soup and proceeded to tell me a bunch of things. I learned a lot in the conversation thats when i realized the moment hoffa had disappeared he was not involved but he knew about the backdrop and the teamsters relationships and the players and immediately knew what happened and why. s and all the pressure comes down on him they were worried he would break and flip so he had to be very careful about what he said and get permission every time you talk to the government. He understood the pressure he was under he told me i didnt tell them and hes glad he didnt and he doesnt know what will happen and one of the many reasons that he immediately regretted i think he did because he was distraught about my mom. I dont know why and exhausted and just downloaded. At that point i had a huge dilemma. I just learned a lot of things that go to the truth of the hoffa disappearance that is not known and credible but i cannot write this book if i dont include this information. On the other hand a couple weeks later chucky had a meltdown and said you cannot put that in the book. Not because he feared for his life but that was his honor he told me something he wasnt supposed to and made it very clear to me. I struggled with what to do i said to my publisher i can either not write the book but i cant write it without the book or wait until he passes away. That was my plan. And yet i wanted to exonerate him to show the world but i didnt want to stay in his honor in the process. So i decide not to publish the book until he passed away. He was very anxious for me to publish the book he was putting pressure on me to publish it. So i decided time is running short so i showed him the manuscript which included the things he told me not every detail but what was material and let him decide and make the tradeoff. I gave him the manuscript i need it back by friday. So i was sure he was a you can publish this book i saw him looking at the manuscript he was wincing he asked me to take some of the stupidest Little Things out of respect for hoffa or whatever but the meat he might regret was that the end of the book friday comes around. Your call for go he handed me the manuscript with a terribly sad face and said i wrote one i read every word. You wrote a great book. Congratulations on. I dont thank you read the book and i dont think he read to the end and i dont know why. What the hell does that mean . [laughter] was that too painful or didnt want the responsibility or he decided to suck up his honor to publish the book or if he decided my name is more important. But he gave me the thumbs up. I reflect in the end i cannot reproduce here but if that was the right call. The right call. And he was in tears which he doesnt often do and he basically said ive read the book three times. I really read it this time. You wrote an amazing book. I dont know how you did it. I am terribly sorry i was such a pain. That judgment for him by any made it all okay. Thank you very much. [applause] we will have a signing at the table i dont like to always shut people out at the very beginning that walking in right now is the great, great granddaughter eleanor and her husband. [applause] its special to have them but welcome everyone to the museum. I know many of you have been here before but is this everybodys first time . We are delighted to have you on this Beautiful Day in downtown connecticut. It is in fact the last museum for the community that we serve many are familiar in 2010 we were hit by a tornado because that is the kind of stuff that happens and then the year after that was hurricane irene and super storm sandy so thank you to the delegation who support the bonding appropriation because we are just about to embark on a major historic rehab of that building from