The Rise & Fall of Nashville Lawyer Tommy Osborn: Kennedy Convictions

By William L. Tabac

Author William L. Tabac describes the extraordinary legal proceeding with the twists and turns of a modern television drama and the fall of a prominent attorney.

Tommy Osborn's star was rising. The young Nashville lawyer led a band of Tennessee reformers to victory in a landmark Supreme Court case. Hailed by Chief Justice Earl Warren as the most important of his career, Baker v. Carr's "one man, one vote" mandate revolutionized how Americans chose their representatives. Osborn was hired by Jimmy Hoffa to take on Bobby Kennedy for the fourth time. Unfortunately, the young lawyer met his match in Walter Sheridan, Kennedy's top aide and brilliant spymaster.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Oct 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781439665596

William L. Tabac

William L. Tabac is a practicing lawyer and emeritus professor of law at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law of Cleveland State University. He has published articles on a wide variety of subjects in law journals and for the New York Times Sunday Magazine and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is the author of The Insanity Defense and the Mad Murderess of Shaker Heights: Examining the Trial of Mariann Colby (2018). He served as producer and host of The Law and You, an award-winning radio program, and as a legal commentator for WKYC-TV in Cleveland, Ohio.

Book preview

secrets.

INTRODUCTION

For close to a decade, a tumultuous war raged between two historic figures. Robert Francis Kennedy, attorney general of the United States, was the most powerful prosecutor in America. His opponent, James Riddle Hoffa, was the head of the country’s largest labor union. The galvanic nature of the protagonists naturally drew the public’s attention to them; the synergy generated by these two men was so powerful that they became media lightning rods. Overlooked was the fact that the war was not fought by Kennedy and Hoffa. Rather, two trusted, fervently loyal men, with a free hand to do so, determined the rules of engagement and an outcome that was both celebrated and condemned.

Walter James Sheridan and Zeno Thomas Osborn Jr. were driven by the well-documented antipathy that the primary protagonists felt for each other. It was said of Sheridan that he would have laid down his life for Bobby Kennedy, just as Osborn ultimately did for Jimmy Hoffa.

Tommy Osborn, as he was known, was a brilliant Nashville lawyer. His reverence for Hoffa developed in 1962 after he agreed to represent him in an influence peddling case that Kennedy brought in Nashville, Tennessee. Hoffa hired Osborn, in part, because of his fame—the young Nashville lawyer had just won a landmark case in the Supreme Court hailed by Chief Justice Earl Warren as the most important of his storied tenure. Under the talisman oneman, one vote, Baker v. Carr had revolutionized the way Americans chose the representatives who governed them.

Fresh from his service with the National Security Agency (NSA), the super-secret espionage agency, Walter Sheridan was recruited by Kennedy in the late ’50s, when Hoffa appeared before the Senate Rackets Committee, where Kennedy served as chief counsel. The faceoff provided the spark that ignited the war. The consensus of those who were on hand in the Senate hearing room during the encounters was that Hoffa was the victor there. Kennedy turned to another forum to bring Hoffa down, pursuing him in the courts. On three occasions, however, either a jury or a judge dismissed the charges. The fourth try, in the Nashville courtroom with Osborn representing him, came in 1962 after Kennedy was sworn in as attorney general.

Lawyers are great believers in the jury system. Disappointed as he was about his courtroom losses and not abashed about complaining to the press about them, Kennedy had bet on that system. Before the Test Fleet case, as the 1962 Tennessee case was known, he had played it straight, relying on the lawyers to break Hoffa’s hold over his union. Desperate for a win after three humiliating losses, Kennedy turned to Sheridan, a non-lawyer who, drawing on his experience with the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) before that, fashioned an edge—a finger on the scale, so to speak. He concealed a spy among the Hoffa lawyers to eavesdrop on the defense.

As a lawyer, Osborn’s first and highest duty was to his client. Because the rules of the profession require a careful balancing act, the duty is fraught with difficulty. A lawyer must represent his client zealously but within the bounds of the law and ethics. As a non-lawyer, Sheridan did not have a bar association peering down at him. The intrusion into Hoffa’s legal sanctum violated Hoffa’s right to counsel, a protection afforded by the U.S. Constitution. Had the spying not occurred, the jury might have acquitted Hoffa—there’s really no way of knowing. Yet when the Test Fleet jurors couldn’t agree and the judge declared a mistrial, it was tantamount to another victory for Hoffa because the charge would never be brought again.

The spy’s role in the Test Fleet case would only be revealed later, during a trial in Chattanooga on yet another charge. In that one, the fifth attempt to destroy the labor leader, Kennedy finally secured his win thanks to Sheridan.

By then, Tommy Osborn was no longer representing Hoffa. Through another feat engineered by Sheridan, and with another spy having been impressed into service, Osborn had been disbarred for attempting to bribe a juror in the Chattanooga case, tried by Kennedy for obstruction of justice and imprisoned.

Osborn had crossed a very bright line. Jury tampering is an assault on a basic institution of government—like, ironically, the right to vote, which Osborn helped revolutionize in Baker v. Carr. Yet as this book will demonstrate, Sheridan also undermined the jury system in fulfilling his mission of bringing down both Hoffa and Osborn.

Believing that Hoffa was thoroughly corrupt, Bobby Kennedy’s motivation was clear: Hoffa or anyone who got in the way—even the lawyers who defended him (Teamster lawyers were prostitutes in Kennedy’s view)—had to be neutralized. In Walter Sheridan Kennedy had found an ideal instrument to achieve that end. Less understood, because it was lost in the sensationalism of the events, is what drove Osborn to abandon his oath of office, jeopardize a promising career and force the ultimate sacrifice on himself.

The epic battle over Jimmy Hoffa in Tennessee was an all-out war waged by Walter Sheridan and Tommy Osborn outside the courtroom. Emotions—raging, powerful ones—not principles, ruled when Bobby Kennedy encountered Jimmy Hoffa in Tennessee. Of course, no matter how much Hoffa and Kennedy detested each other or how certain their convictions were about their enemy, the true measure of the righteousness that drove them could only await that judgment that no man could render.

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE,

EASTER MONDAY, 2009

From Cleveland, there was no direct flight to Nashville. My layover had been in Detroit, James Riddle Hoffa’s old stomping grounds. Peter had arrived nonstop from Washington in half the time. Peter has a photograph of Robert Kennedy on his law office wall.

Small coincidences, yet symbolic ones. Waged almost a half century ago in august Congressional hearing rooms and in the courts, the feud had even spilled over into a dingy basement file room at Justice, where Hoffa had grabbed Kennedy and slammed him hard against a wall. Had the lawyers not separated them, he would have strangled him.

For about a decade, two antagonists, one backed by the United States of America and the other by the most powerful labor union in the country—each with mob muscle at his command—had gone head to head. The climax came in 1964, when Kennedy jailed both Hoffa and his lawyer, Tommy Osborn, for jury tampering. It was the largest jury tampering prosecution in American history. The aftermath was as stunning as the clash: Hoffa murdered by a hit man; Kennedy murdered by a fanatic; and Osborn, a charismatic, brilliant Nashville lawyer, murdered by his own hand.

By 2009, all that was left of the fierce, protracted battle into which I had intruded myself was ashes. Bucking the trend, I was in Nashville to exhume the cases, not the fabled body. I was there because I had been obsessed with the cases, Tommy Osborn’s especially, for decades. Peter was there because he had been there from the beginning—roughly 1981, when, as a first-year law student who served as my research assistant, he had photocopied nine thousand pages of trial transcript for me.

The occasion was a hearing that a federal judge had ordered on my petition to unseal the secret grand jury testimony in the cases. The hotel was across the street from a place of memories, the Tennessean, where many years before I had holed myself up for a week in a dank basement poring over yellowing news clips about the famous Hoffa cases.

The famous Hoffa cases—that’s how one of the tamperers had described it to a potential juror. The response from the press was fantastic. Papers throughout the country and around the world ran stories on it. Who would have guessed that a hearing on the case would have generated such media excitement? Bill Poovey, of the Associated Press, had called to interview me. It’s amazing what you can find by looking at a docket sheet, he mused.

Hoffa Cases Head Back to Nashville, the headline in a Chattanooga paper had read. The petition had to be filed in Nashville, where Hoffa and Osborn were indicted, and the federal court there had control over the sealed grand jury records. Hoffa’s trial was held downstate, in Chattanooga, because of massive publicity that followed when Tommy Osborn was caught scheming on tape to fix a juror in the upcoming case.

Grand jury secrecy is a cherished concept in America, older than the nation itself, Nashville judge Todd Campbell wrote—just as other judges had when confronted with such petitions. It is also tightly guarded. (Indeed, the prosecutors involved in my petition sought, and received, permission from Judge Campbell to deal with the secret Hoffa materials.)

Yet as powerful as the principle was, the door was open. A few attempts to unseal grand jury proceedings were successful. Almost all the cases had been major ones. Historians persuaded a federal judge in New York City to unseal the testimony that was used to indict Alger Hiss, the famous alleged Soviet spy. Another New York judge unsealed most of the testimony that led to the indictments of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for passing atomic bomb secrets to the Russians.

But these cases were heard in New York—persuasive law but not controlling in the Sixth Circuit, the federal circuit that governed the Nashville courts. I was dealing with a big one too, of course. The Hoffa-Kennedy feud had been a media main event. Scores of books and articles have been published about the encounter. Hollywood even made a movie out of it. The previous summer—forty-four years after the trial—the Judicial Conference for the Sixth Circuit had held a standing room–only program on it in Nashville. Jim Neal, who prosecuted Hoffa for Bobby Kennedy, spoke. Lawyers who were convinced that Kennedy agents had wiretapped their conversations and gone the wrong way up one-way streets to spy on them also spoke. And Judge Campbell, who would hear my petition, had attended it.

Historical interest counted big to the New York courts. But since the courts in my circuit had not yet considered it, I needed more to go on than that. I also argued that it would be in the public interest to unseal the records. The administration of justice in that explosive, final showdown, I contended, should be evaluated for its fairness and integrity.

For years, arguments had raged—as recently as the Sixth Circuit Judicial Conference seminar the previous spring—about whether the Kennedy Department had used illegal wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping to indict Hoffa and Osborn. And for just as long, Department lawyers, from Neal on down, had vehemently denied it.

I did not believe that the grand jury had been exposed to illegal electronic surveillance. The Kennedy lawyers were too smart to plant a bomb that could undo the single win that Robert Kennedy wanted most. But I didn’t know, so I put the claim in the petition, arguing that continued grand jury secrecy would prevent the facts about possible illegal wiretapping from ever being known.

Baloney! Neal erupted when told of my mention of wiretapping by Poovey of the Associated Press, deliberately avoiding, no doubt, the unprintable term that immediately comes to mind. Yet the wiretapping and eavesdropping—which I had concluded did occur—was not the centerpiece of my argument. Walter Sheridan, Kennedy’s top Hoffa gun at Justice, was.

Sheridan headed up the Get-Hoffa squad—or the Posse, as it was known even at Justice. In 1972, he published a book, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, that gives his version of the encounter. As the New York Times is to world events, Sheridan’s book was to the Hoffa chase. Found in virtually every library in America, it has been relied on, and cited, by everyone who has researched it.

Sheridan’s account is full of excruciating but unsubstantiated detail. One detail, however, is not mentioned—a detail that I believed might weigh heavily on Judge Campbell’s mind. Only one witness testified against Hoffa in the grand jury room. This person was not the witness—the only witness—who testified against him at the trial. It was Sheridan. Neal had told me that when I interviewed him twenty some years ago. Sheridan had also agreed to an interview but changed his mind.

A Kennedy biographer has said that Robert Kennedy was God to Sheridan. Another has claimed that Sheridan would have laid his life down for him. Day and night, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two of them were in constant contact with each other over Hoffa. If Sheridan was the sole witness against Hoffa in the grand jury room, it was as if Robert Kennedy himself gave the evidence that would bring Hoffa down.

So, fortified with a massive buildup of the historical interest of the case, I filed my petition. Hoffa’s daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, who had just retired as a St. Louis judge, agreed to support it. Hoffa’s son never