EDITORIAL:

...The Hoffa case touches every Teamster who shares in the pension funds that have cemented the marriage between the union and the mob through loans to mob-controlled country clubs, resorts and casinos, and every rival worker or employer intimidated by Teamster thugs...

...the new popular crime of the '70s...

...Kidnapping has become the make-it-big-quick gamble, as if all life were a night in Las Vegas...

...This world invaded by the world of two middle-class immigrant Irishmen from Brooklyn, men who had reportedly planned the caper for two years-one who liked to watch "Jeopardy" on TV with the boys at the firehouse...

...the other, cheerful "like a Leprechaun," who neither smoked nor drank, and whose parish priest heard of his arrest in time to include him in the Prayers of the Faithful at the 11 o'clock mass...

...Ironically, the disappearance and kidnapping have coincided with the new literary and cinema vogue for fictional private eyes and gang lords, as if, with the damaged reputations of the police and FBI, these amoral, pragmatic rationalists and entrepreneurs were to replace the cowboy, doctor and banker as folk heroes...

...When they write about the Bronfman case, however, it will be about the convergence of two worlds: the first world of a multi-million dollar whiskey executive with two failed marriages and a third interrupted by an abduction...

...Popular literature has told this story several times-the American dream gone sour, the original idealism of the labor movement corrupted by greed, power, devouring itself, "successful" men who bedeck their Miami hideaways with the trappings of gentility and communicate with one another by blowing up each other's automobiles...

...Editorials THE MISSING MEN The mysteries of the two very different missing men, 62-year-old James R. Hoffa and 21-year-old Samuel Bronfman II, that have captured public attention during the past several weeks, have combined elements of potential personal tragedy and summer media entertainment...

...And all they wanted was a million dollars each to spend.to spend...

...an obsession with privacy and a Fifth Avenue penthouse and well-hidden Westchester estate to protect it...

...But, aside from challenging editors to come up with headlines like "Say Hoffa Was Set to Squeal" and "Family Gets Tapes from Sam," and catalogues of similar disappearances and crimes-Patricia Hearst, J. Paul Getty III, John J. Teich, Barbara Jane Mackle, Joe Bonanno and Judge Crater- these cases dramatize the increasing criminalization of American life and raise other questions, perhaps best answered by novelists and filmmakers, about a society where "success," violence and the craving for quick money seem more than ever locked in a lovers' menage a trois...

...If Hoffa is dead-perhaps murdered by rival forces within his own union who feared his return to power, or by gangsters settling an old score or guaranteeing his silence- it will be an end consistent with the violent life pattern he set thirty years ago, which brought him "success" and political power, including premature release from prison by President Nixon...

...an unpretentious son who usually wore blue-jeans, T-shirt and sneakers, who dined with his father and lived with his mother...

...The Bronfman case, which has' been solved with the help of some luck, touches every family of even moderate wealth vulnerable to...