In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth

You may remember Jack Goldsmith from the Bush-Cheney years (he stood up to Cheney to stop the Stellarwind surveillance program and now is a Harvard law professor), but his life has been shadowed by a more notorious piece of American history: when he was twelve, his beloved stepfather, Chuckie O'Brien, became one of the leading suspects in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, for whom he had been a right-hand man so intimately close he had inspired the Tom Hagen character in The Godfather. With Chuckie's reticent assistance, Goldsmith investigates the crime, but his book, written with tenderness but also a lawyer's stolid fact-sorting, is a far broader, and more interesting, portrait of the rise and fall of union power and a hapless, doomed life spent at the intersection of a charismatic labor leader and the implacable Mob.