Jimmy Hoffa means of leveraging union strength at one company, to then move to organize workers, and finally to win contract demands at other companies. This process, which took several years starting in the early 1930s, eventually brought the Teamsters to a position of being one of the most powerful unions in the United States. Trucking unions in that era were heavily influenced by, and in many cases controlled by elements of, organized crime. For Hoffa to unify and expand trucking unions, he had to make accommodations and arrangements with many gangsters, beginning in the Detroit area. Organized crime influence on the
Jimmy Hoffa rest of his life. Hoffa left school at age 14 and began working full-time manual labor jobs to help support his family. Hoffa married Josephine Poszywak, an 18-year-old Detroit laundry worker of Polish heritage, at Bowling Green, Ohio on September 24, 1936; the couple had met during a non-unionized laundry workers' strike action six months earlier. The couple had two children: a daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, and a son, James P. Hoffa. The Hoffas paid $6,800 in 1939 for a modest home in northwest Detroit. The family later owned a simple summer lakefront cottage in Orion Township, Michigan, north of