(FORTUNE Magazine) – Many of the Teamsters who packed the lobby restaurant at the Sheraton National in Arlington, Va., for Jim Hoffa's victory party were drunk--on cold Budweisers, mainly, but also on nostalgia. The deejay was all over the misty map of long ago, spinning "My Way" and "Born in the U.S.A." and "American Pie." Everybody wanted a picture taken at the podium, flanked by poster-sized photographs of the martyred father (scowling in black and white) and the triumphant son (grinning in color). When the candidate finally arrived and the crowd broke into a deafening drumbeat chant--Hawww-fuh! Hawww-fuh! Hawww-fuh!--the effect was almost complete, the past almost present. "We're gonna be Teamsters again," shouted Chicago Local 743's Karen Tummillo, above the din. "Real Teamsters!"

Whether you find that prospect thrilling or chilling is irrelevant; the idea is absurd. For one thing, real Teamsters wouldn't be drinking Budweiser just now. Not when 8,000 bitter Teamsters from all over the country have been without a new contract at Anheuser-Busch since last March. Nor would they book a victory party at the Sheraton National, it being a non-union hotel. Somewhere, James R. Hoffa--who disappeared in 1975, presumably murdered by the mob--is fuming.

James P. Hoffa, an undistinguished labor lawyer from Detroit whose main attribute appears to be his name, inherits a deeply troubled union, adrift since shortly after the 1996 election, when a fundraising scandal engulfed the victor, Ron Carey; a union, moreover, that is down more than half a million members from its peak; that can't say boo without raising eyebrows on the feds' Independent Review Board (the IRB has kept close tabs on the Teamsters since 1989 and isn't going away); that has nothing to do anymore with half the nation's truck freight; that is beaten down, broke, and dispirited from years of what Hoffa calls "civil war."

During the '90s, Carey and the IRB expelled hundreds of shady Teamster officials and placed more than 60 corrupt locals in receivership. That accounts for the highly visible element within the Hoffa camp that's itching for revenge and believes that with Hoffa's win, its day has come. Others, like John Murphy, head of Boston's Local 122 and a newly elected VP on the Hoffa slate, are preaching reconciliation. "Jim Hoffa is the only guy who can pull this union back together again," Murphy says. To accept that, however, requires more faith than reason. What Hoffa calls his "mandate" was won with a mere 196,000 votes in a union with 1.4 million members. He got 55% of the tally but only 14% of the electorate. Three out of four Teamsters didn't even bother to vote.

A few days after the party, on a cloudy December morning, a blue limousine carrying the president-elect and his entourage pulled up outside Teamster headquarters in Washington, D.C.--the famous Marble Palace. Earlier, at breakfast, Hoffa had spoken excitedly about visiting "my father's office" for the first time and "taking up the reins of power." So there he was, bounding up the wide steps, stopping to shake hands with three bemused secretaries on cigarette break. And joining Hoffa for this powerfully symbolic event? Tom Pazzi, the veteran political operative who is Hoffa's new chief of staff; David Lyle, a press aide; and Richard Leebove, a longtime Hoffa PR consultant with ties to Lyndon LaRouche, who was barred by the government from helping Hoffa during the 1998 election because of illegal campaign contributions in 1996. An intriguing lineup, absolutely. But not a real Teamster in the bunch.

--David Whitford