<Begin Segment 19>

TI: I'm curious; as the point person to go after Hoffa, were you ever in fear of your safety and security, or the safety and security of your family?

CS: Not really, only once. I came home to our house, we lived in northern Virginia, and we had a deck on the back from the dining room, up off the ground, and I saw a device about that big up against the wall, and I panicked. I thought it was a bomb. And I found out that my wife had installed a clothesline -- [laughs] -- and that was the clothesline implement. And that was the only time that I ever really felt that my family was in danger. From a personal standpoint, because when I was away from home, I lived in hotels, and my hotel residences were rather well-known. And for exercise, I would always walk from my office to the hotel in Chicago. My hotel was down past the El tracks, and I'd walk about ten blocks under the El tracks late at night, regardless of the hour, like eleven, twelve, one, two, or three o'clock at night. I never felt that I was in danger. I had these staff persons who worked for me who were career lawyers from the Justice Department, who wanted to have a sense of importance, and they'd claim that they had received threats. So I decided since I was in charge of the operation, that if anyone was in danger, it would be me, so I assigned myself twenty-four-hour guards from the U.S. marshal service. So they stayed in my hotel suite, they traveled with me everywhere I went for about a year. I never felt the real necessity for that. It was more, to me, sort of a tongue-in-cheek response to the claim by my under-staff people, that they were in danger. I felt that if anyone would be in danger, it would be me. But I never felt physically threatened at all, and even though Mr. Hoffa and I were on opposite sides of the fence, I was out to prosecute him, I think he had a lot of respect for me, as I had respect for him. And I do not think Mr. Hoffa would have allowed any of the people who were operating on his behalf to do anything that would harm (me). I just had that feeling. And so danger, I probably feel more in danger in Seattle today than I felt in danger when I was investigating the Teamster pension fund.

TI: That's interesting. I just have to ask this question: would you care to speculate what happened to James Hoffa?

CS: Yes. I believe the story that his body was dismembered and put in the concrete at the (Meadowlands) Racetrack in New Jersey. And this is based upon an interview with, in Playboy, with a person in the witness protection program who is supposed to have known all the details of what happened. His relation of events and names was very, very accurate. People whose names he referred to, times and dates he referred to were very, very accurate. And I compared my response to that article with a high-ranking person in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who, like me, was very familiar with Mr. Hoffa's background and investigation, who shared my belief that that was an accurate story. And so I am myself personally of the opinion that that is true, but I would never publicly say that it is true, nor would I be confident to testify that it is true. It is simply my internalized response to something that I read, applying it against my background, and my background consists of a lot of things in the back of my mind. I kept no written records, and my style of investigation was, "keep no records," because if you do, they're subject to production, and I fortunately have a fairly good retentive memory, and so all the details that I needed to recall, I could recall.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.