On a spring evening in 1961, over-the-road trucker Jim Harper was en route from Mauston, Wisconsin to his home in Minneapolis. At seventy miles an hour, with a combined load of 60,000 pounds of man, machine, and material, he approached a curve along the Great Mississippi River Road and hit the brakes. The tractor-trailer didn't slow. Harper's brakes failed. For the second time in as many weeks, his truck had been sabotaged.
In the preceding months, Harper had led an insurgency to clean up corruption in his Teamsters' Local 544. His efforts frew the attention of Jimmy Hoffa, at the time focused on securing the right to lead the national Teamsters organization out of government supervision.
So it was that an ordinary man found himself caught in an extraordinary web, as he pursued a path of personal redemption that almost killed him. That had not been his intent. At age 31, he wanted only to atone for his prior failures, including mistakes that only a few years early had taken him to society’s darkest corners and America’s most dangerous prison in Angola, Louisiana. Even after Hoffa personally told him to stop the crusade, he would not stand down. He could not. His perseverance beyond all rationality placed him in mortal danger, as his friends betrayed or deserted him, and his enemies tried to kill him.
For a time, his struggle made the front page of the Minneapolis Tribune in a city that held some of Hoffa’s most sinister secrets. He had no idea that the reporter in whom he had confided and who authored those articles remained personally loyal to Hoffa. But he did notice that the newspaper coverage took a peculiar twist before it faded altogether, along with the support of those who had initially pointed him in Hoffa’s direction.
Somehow, he survived. When he died forty years later, the artifacts of his union battle remained among his most treasured possessions, documenting the defining episode of his life. But behind what he had always thought was just an unsuccessful effort to follow Hoffa’s announced agenda of "union reform" lay a saga of courage, intrigue, and betrayal - a saga that he would never know.
He was my father, and this is his story.
