Top 100 Charles Brandt Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it.”

— Charles Brandt

52. “Mary liked to arrange picnics with the kids, and we’d take them to the Willow Grove Amusement Park. I wasn’t always running. When they were smaller I used to take them out. I was very close to Peggy, but she doesn’t talk to me any more, not since Jimmy disappeared. The.”

— Charles Brandt

53. “Before a battle or a landing, you get a little nervous tension. Once the shooting starts it goes away. You don’t have time to think. You just do what you have to do. After the battle it sinks in. We took the Germans by.”

— Charles Brandt

54. “Nunz and Sammy were good people. I never cared for Pro himself. He’d kill you for nothing. One time he had a guy kissed for getting more votes than him.”

— Charles Brandt

55. “The “means” was his second philosophy and can be summed up by a remark he made to Bobby Kennedy at a private party in which they found themselves together: “I do to others what they do to me, only worse.” Simply put, Jimmy Hoffa believed that the “ends” of improving the lot of working Americans, with his union leading the way, justified whatever “means” were used to accomplish it.”

— Charles Brandt

56. “We finally drove the Germans back and we entered the Alsace-Lorraine region, which is part French and part German.”

— Charles Brandt

57. “Bill handed me an envelope. I handed it back to him. I told him, “I’ll do a friend a favor.” Russell had taught me well. Don’t cheapen yourself. “If you do a friend a favor,” Russell had said, “then sometimes he does you a favor.” Bill.”

— Charles Brandt

58. “Future presidential candidates Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts were members of the committee. The committee’s chief counsel and principal interrogator was the future president’s younger brother and the nation’s future attorney general, Bobby Kennedy. As a result of his aggressive work on the committee, Bobby Kennedy was to become Jimmy Hoffa’s mortal enemy. Johnny.”

— Charles Brandt

59. “The deportation proceedings and appeals would last for fifteen years, but they were always hanging over Russell’s head. In the end when he lost his last appeal and had packed his bags and had his tickets, I recommended a lawyer to him who went through the Italian government, spread a little lira, and got it so the Italian government refused to take Russell, and that was that. America had to keep him.”

— Charles Brandt

60. “Whispers was one of these short Italian guys in his early thirties that you’d see all around South Philly, just trying to get by with one hustle or another. This is not the same Whispers they blew up when they bombed his car around the same time. This is the other Whispers. I didn’t know the one they blew up; I just heard about it. I.”

— Charles Brandt

61. “In those days they wanted their money today. Now they want their money yesterday. Half of them today are doing drugs themselves, and it makes them impulsive. It distorts their thinking. More than half of them. Some of the bosses, too. I.”

— Charles Brandt

62. “But back then we had to amuse ourselves, and fighting seemed to be all we had. Looking back, it was good for us. You got a lot out of your system. And you learned a lot. And then when our country needed soldiers we were in shape. We already had a mental toughness. I graduated from the eighth grade.”

— Charles Brandt

63. “Can you start tomorrow in Detroit?” “Sure.” “Come to Local 299 and report to Bill Isabel and Sam Portwine. They’re in charge of public relations for the International.” We.”

— Charles Brandt

64. “At one point Hoffa told Bobby Kennedy regarding the tapes, “To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember.” There.”

— Charles Brandt

65. “There were only two things that mattered in his life: the union and his family. Believe it or not, as strong as he was for the union, his wife and his daughter and his son came first to him.”

— Charles Brandt

66. “I often said that when they put me in jail in 1981 it was not the FBI’s intent, but they saved my life. They only have seven days in a week, and by the time I went to jail I was drinking eight.”

— Charles Brandt

67. “I don’t care how tough you are or how tough you think you are, if they want you you’re theirs. It’s usually your best friend that walks up to you talking about a football bet and you’re gone. Like Giancana got it frying eggs and sausages in olive oil with an old friend he trusted. This.”

— Charles Brandt

68. “On the other hand, in his book, The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy wrote about his experiences and observations as chief counsel for the McClellan Committee hearings on organized crime and labor unions, saying: “We saw and questioned some of the nation’s most notorious gangsters and racketeers. But there was no group that better fits the prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than Jimmy Hoffa and some of his chief lieutenants in and out of the union.” Twentieth.”

— Charles Brandt

69. “It was different in the sixties when I married my second wife, Irene, and I had my fourth daughter, Connie. By then I was with Hoffa and the Teamsters, and I had steady money coming in and I was older and home more. I wasn’t out maneuvering. I was already in position. Sometime.”

— Charles Brandt

70. “I asked him about work, and he sent me to a guy and the guy asked me if I thought I could handle loading hindquarters. Three days a week I was going to the gym and hitting the heavy bag, the speed bag, lifting weights, and playing handball. Plus I was teaching dancing, so I picked up a hindquarter like it was a pork chop, and I got the job. The.”

— Charles Brandt

71. “No doubt I was getting a reputation for being efficient, but also for being somebody you could trust.”

— Charles Brandt

72. “It was a problem that needed squaring away and I squared it away for them. By now it seemed like it was something I was doing all my life. If you count my father sending me out to beat up other boys so he could win beer bets, maybe it was. Evidently.”

— Charles Brandt

73. “The meeting had been called to settle down the potential problems that could have erupted in the wake of the October 1957 shooting of godfather Albert Anastasia in a barber’s chair with a hot towel over his face in New York’s Park-Sheraton Hotel. The.”

— Charles Brandt

74. “After the war, it just seemed natural to take what you could take wherever you could take it. There was only so much blood you could sell for $10 a pint. I.”

— Charles Brandt

75. “Yet during a twenty-year period there wasn’t an American alive who wouldn’t have recognized Jimmy Hoffa immediately, the way Tony Soprano is recognized today. The vast majority of Americans would have known him by the sound of his voice alone. From 1955 until 1965 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as Elvis. From 1965 until 1975 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as the Beatles. Jimmy.”

— Charles Brandt

76. “Many a morning I found myself waking up in America and being surprised to find myself in a bed. I had been having nightmares all night long, and I didn’t know where I was. It would take me awhile to adjust, because I couldn’t believe I was in a bed. What was I doing in a bed? After the war I never slept more than three or four hours a night. In.”

— Charles Brandt

77. “One cold night in December 1941 I won a dance contest jitterbugging to “Tuxedo Junction” at the Denver Dance Hall. The next thing I knew I was on a troop train at four in the morning heading for the West Coast to defend California. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I just turned twenty-one and I was 6′2″. Four years later when the war ended I got my discharge one day before I turned twenty-five; I was 6′ 4″. I had grown two inches.”

— Charles Brandt

78. “I told him about the macaroni hanging out on the line like laundry to dry on Sunday in Catania. Sometimes he’d invite me to eat with him and we’d talk a little Italian.”

— Charles Brandt

79. “Jimmy looked at me and said, “I think you should stay in Chicago for a while.” And what a town that turned out to be. If you can’t make money in Chicago you can’t make money anywhere. They leave the bodies right on the sidewalk. If your dog was with you, your dog goes, too. They.”

— Charles Brandt

80. “And on the other side of the ledger, unions like the Teamsters often employed their own muscle, their own reigns of terror, including bombings, arsons, beatings, and murders. The warfare and violence were not just between labor and management. It was often between rival unions vying for the same membership. Sadly, it was often violence directed at rank-and-file union members who urged democratic reform of their unions. The.”

— Charles Brandt

81. “As a consequence there was no admissible evidence with which to bury Jimmy Hoffa, and the perjury indictment was dismissed.”

— Charles Brandt

82. “When asked by Bobby Kennedy where he’d gotten $20,000 in cash to invest in a business venture, Hoffa replied, “From individuals.”

— Charles Brandt

83. “In Alsace-Lorraine I saw Pope stick his leg out from behind a tree to get a million-dollar wound so he’d be sent home; only a heavy round came in and took his leg off. He survived and went home with one leg missing. Another.”

— Charles Brandt

84. “Eliciting information from Frank Sheeran about his combat experiences was the most difficult part of the interview process. It was two years before he could accept the fact that his combat experience was even worth discussing. And then it became painstaking and stressful for both a respectful questioner and his reluctant subject, with many stops and starts. To.”

— Charles Brandt

85. “Brennan. Brennan was president of his own Detroit Teamsters local and had an arrest record for violence that included four incidents of bombing company trucks and buildings. Brennan referred to Jimmy as his “brains.” Hoffa.”

— Charles Brandt

86. “As Hoffa put it, “Nobody can describe the sit-down strikes, the riots, the fights that took place in the state of Michigan, particularly here in Detroit, unless they were a part of it.” And on another occasion he said, “My scalp was laid open sufficiently wide to require stitches no less than six times during the first year I was business agent of Local 299. I was beaten up by cops or strikebreakers at least two dozen times that year.” And.”

— Charles Brandt

87. “Ten days after Hoffa took the oath of office in 1957, the AFL-CIO kicked out the Teamsters, saying that they could get back in only if they got rid of “this corrupt control” of the union by Jimmy Hoffa and his racketeer union officials. On.”

— Charles Brandt

88. “Whispers told me to meet him at the Melrose Diner. So I went around there. You wouldn’t expect to see any people from downtown at the Melrose Diner. It’s more for the crowd grabbing a bite to eat before they go to a Phillies game. You get a nice piece of apple pie there with hot vanilla syrup on it. Whispers sat down and asked me if I could use ten grand. I told him to keep talking.”

— Charles Brandt

89. “Wednesday night was the night that you went out with your wives, that way nobody was seen out with his cumare, his mistress, whatever you want to call it. Everybody knew not to be out with their cumare on Wednesday night. It was like an unwritten rule.”

— Charles Brandt

90. “Riesel had been crusading against the criminal element in labor unions. The night of the radio broadcast, Riesel stepped out of the famous Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway near Times Square and was approached on the sidewalk by a goon who threw a cup of acid in his face. Riesel was blinded by the acid’s effect on his eyes. It soon became obvious that the attack had been ordered by Hoffa ally and labor racketeer John Dioguardi, aka Johnny Dio.”

— Charles Brandt

91. “My father, Tom Sheeran, would borrow a big old clumsy car with a running board.”

— Charles Brandt

92. “I already had my sights set on becoming an International organizer some day. That’s a position at the very top. You worked out of the national office. You traveled all over the country in that position, wherever they needed you. You could do a lot of favors that were legitimate and still help yourself. If that thing hadn’t happened to Jimmy at the end, I would have been an International organizer. In.”

— Charles Brandt

93. “I was starting to get groggy from drinking all day, selling my blood, and getting whacked on the back of the head. I wasn’t looking too good to the girl in the third row, either. Between.”

— Charles Brandt

94. “By coincidence I ran into my kid brother, Tom, on the dock in Le Havre, France, in October 1945.”

— Charles Brandt

95. “I worked at Budd Manufacturing where they made auto body parts. It was a slave pit, a real butcher shop. They had no decent safety standards. Every so often somebody would lose a hand or a finger. People today forget how much good the unions did in getting decent working conditions. I didn’t feel like donating an arm to Budd so that’s another place I quit, but that job made an impression on me when I got into union work later. In.”

— Charles Brandt

96. “A couple of years after they both got out they had a sit-down at a Teamsters Convention in Miami to try to square the beef. Only Tony Pro threatened to rip Jimmy’s guts out with his bare hands and kill his grandchildren. At the time, Jimmy told me he was going to ask Russell for permission for me to take care of the little guy.”

— Charles Brandt

97. “People in those days didn’t display affection like they do today. I’m still learning how to be affectionate to my grandchildren. I don’t ever remember getting a kiss from my mother. I never even saw her kiss my kid brother, or my kid sister, Margaret. Not that anyone meant to play favorites, but Tom was my father’s favorite and Peggy was my mother’s. I guess I was so big, and being the oldest, they expected me to be more grown up than the two younger ones.”

— Charles Brandt

98. “When he got work my father worked as a steel worker, high up on tall buildings, walking on beams like those Mohawk Indians. It was dangerous work. People were always falling to their death. He worked on the building of the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia and on the few high-rise buildings they could afford to build in the Depression.”

— Charles Brandt

99. “They supplied me the piece and they had one guy right there to take it from me after the thing and get in one car with it and drive away. His only job was to break the piece down and destroy it.”

— Charles Brandt

100. “They say the average number of days of actual combat for a veteran is around eighty. By the time the war was over the Army told me I had 411 combat days, which entitled me to $20 extra.”

— Charles Brandt