Labor Union Leader. His father was a coal miner who died when he was young. His mother went to work to support Jimmy and his siblings, they moved to Detroit. In seventh grade, Jimmy dropped out of school to go to work to help his family. He eventually went to work on a loading dock for a grocery store chain in Detroit. There he orchestrated his first labor strike, helping his co workers get a better contract. He used a newly arrived shipment of strawberries as a bargaining chip. The workers refused to unload the strawberries until they had a new deal. Jimmy was an important regional figure with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) union by his mid twenties. By 1952, he had risen to national vice president of the IBT and served as the union's General President between 1958 and 1971. He secured the first national agreement for teamsters' rates in 1964, and played a major role in the growth and development of the union which eventually became the largest union (by membership) in the United States with over 1.5 million members at its peak, during his terms as its leader. He was a civil rights supporter and expressed this in many statements. Jimmy became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, and this connection continued until his disappearance in 1975. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, and fraud in 1964. Jimmy was imprisoned in 1967 and sentenced to 13 years, after exhausting the appeal process. In mid 1971 he resigned as president of the union, an action that was part of a pardon agreement with President Richard Nixon, to facilitate his release later that year. Nixon blocked Jimmy from union activities until 1972 when Jimmy attempted to overturn this order and to regain support. During his career, Jimmy had made more than his fair share of enemies. It is believed that one of his foes may have had a hand in his disappearance in 1975. On July 30 of that year, Jimmy left his Detroit area home for a meeting with a local crime figure and a mob connected union leader from New Jersey at a restaurant in Bloomfield Township. The get together was supposed to be about settling a feud, but Jimmy was the only one who showed up. What happened to the former union boss after that remains a mystery. His car was found in the restaurant's parking lot, but there were no clues to Jimmy's whereabouts. He was declared legally dead in 1982. He was 62 years old at the time of his disappearance.