Neff, James. Mobbed Up: Jackie Presser's High-Wire Life in the Teamsters,
the Mafia, and the FBI. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. 489 pages.
Jackie Presser (1926-1988) was the son of Teamster power broker Bill
Presser, who was convicted of labor racketeering three times. Bill and
Teamster president Frank Fitzsimmons enjoyed close relations with the Nixon
White House through Nixon's aide Charles Colson. Bill wanted his son Jackie,
something of an overweight blunderer, to follow in his footsteps as a
mobbed-up Teamster heavy. Although it took more than dad's influence,
Jackie made it by secretly informing on the Cleveland mob for the FBI. For
their part, the FBI helped Jackie avoid car bombs, a popular Cleveland-mob
art form, by giving him a little transmitter that could spray a car with
radio waves and trip any detonators. Jackie was on his way: in October,
1975, he played golf with Nixon, Fitzsimmons, Anthony Provenzano, and
Allen Dorfman and at the LaCosta Country Club.
Bill died two years before his son became president of the Teamsters
in 1983. Jackie's close ties to the Reagan White House made FBI director
William Webster nervous, but Presser's boosters in the FBI continued to
protect him, and thwarted efforts by the Labor Department to prosecute him.
Eventually the Justice Department closed in on the Teamsters by suing them
under a new racketeering law, and court-appointed management took over until
mob-free candidates could be elected to the executive board.
ISBN 0-87113-344-X
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