"I made two disastrous mistakes in my life," says Jimmy Hoffa in the opening pages of this book. "The first was coming to grips with Robert F. Kennedy to the point where we became involved in a blood feud.... My second mistake was naming Frank Fitzsimmons as my successor."

Hoffa's third mistake was the meeting he went to on July 30, 1975, when he disappeared.

Before that happened, Jimmy Hoffa told in person, on tape, and by phone to Oscar Fraley, a writer he trusted, his own story: what went right, what went wrong, and why, with no holds barred. He names names. He tells who did what to whom, who got what and why, as he sees it.

Listen to Hoffa: "Hell, I'm not saying I'm an angel, but when it came to dirty tricks I couldn't hold a candle to the Irish Mafia." Hoffa got his start as a labor organizer when the goons all worked for the employers. He fought fire with fire.

The reader will learn about Hoffa's personal life, but he will learn even more about how Hoffa saw the largest and most powerful labor union in the country; what he thought about organized crime and organized frame-ups; and of what they did to him in prison. The stories recounted in this book make the mind reel and the blood boil.

If history seems most alive when we hear it in the words of the central participants, this book is history with a difference: it says as much about tomorrow as yesterday, by pointing a finger at where and how the bodies are buried, in Detroit, Washington, and wherever power and billions of dollars work fist in glove.