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44 Years Ago Today; Jimmy Hoffa vanishes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hoffa
Hoffa, circa 1965
James Riddle Hoffa (born February 14, 1913; disappeared July 30, 1975, later declared dead July 30, 1982) was an American labor union leader who served as the President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) union from 1957 until 1971. He vanished in late July 1975, at age 62.
From an early age, Hoffa was a union activist and became an important regional figure with the IBT by his mid-20s. By 1952 he was national vice-president of the IBT, and was its general president between 1957 and 1971. He secured the first national agreement for teamsters' rates in 1964 with the National Master Freight Agreement. He played a major role in the growth and development of the union, which eventually became the largest (by membership) in the United States with over 2.3 million members at its peak, during his terms as its leader.
Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, and this connection continued until his disappearance in 1975. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery and fraud in 1964, in two separate trials. He was imprisoned in 1967 and sentenced to 13 years. In mid-1971, he resigned as president of the union as part of a pardon agreement with President Richard Nixon; and he was released later that year, although barred from union activities until 1980. Hoffa, hoping to regain support and to return to IBT leadership, unsuccessfully attempted to overturn this order.
Hoffa vanished in late July 1975 and was never found. He was declared legally dead in 1982.
<snip>
Disappearance
Hoffa disappeared on Wednesday, July 30, 1975, from the parking lot of Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit. He had told others he was going there to meet with two Mafia leaders: Anthony Giacalone and Anthony Provenzano. Provenzano was also a Teamster leader in New Jersey and had earlier been close to Hoffa. Provenzano was a national vice-president with IBT from 1961, Hoffa's second term as Teamsters' president. Anthony Provenzano, once a friend of Hoffa but now an enemy, threatened to kidnap and hurt Hoffa's granddaughter. Hoffa called Provenzano "crazy". In 1973 and 1974, Hoffa talked to him to ask for help in supporting him for his return to power. Provenzano refused to listen and threatened Hoffa by saying he would pull out his guts and kidnap his granddaughters. Hoffa could not afford to take these threats lightly: at least two of Provenzano's political opponents were believed to have been murdered. Others who had spoken out against him had been physically assaulted.
The threats from the mafia that they would get rid of Hoffa were taken very seriously; Hoffa's son is quoted as saying "Dad was pushing so hard to get back in office, I was increasingly afraid that the mob would do something about it." There had been three visits in a short time frame to Hoffa's home at Lake Orion and one trip to the Guardian Building law offices by Anthony Giacalone, an alleged kingpin in the Detroit Mafia, and his younger brother, Vito. Friendly with Provenzano and believed to be related to him, their avowed purpose in coming was to set up a "peace meeting" between Provenzano and Hoffa. Hoffa's son viewed the "peace meeting" overture as only a pretext. He was convinced that Giacalone was "setting Dad up" for a hit. Even Hoffa himself was becoming increasingly uneasy each time that the Giacalones arrived. The meeting would take place at the Machus Red Fox, a suburban Detroit restaurant. The Machus Red Fox was known to Hoffa; the restaurant had hosted the wedding reception of his son, James. Hoffa wrote the date in his office calendar, "TG — 2 P.M. — Red Fox".
On July 30, Hoffa left home in his green Pontiac Grand Ville at 1:15 p.m. Before heading to the restaurant, he stopped in Pontiac to talk to his close friend Louis Linteau, a former president of Teamsters Local 614 in Pontiac, who at the time ran Airport Service Lines, a limousine service. Linteau and Hoffa used to be enemies but had since mended their differences and by the time Hoffa left prison, Linteau became his unofficial appointment secretary. It was well known in both underworld and labor union circles that Linteau acted as a buffer for Hoffa and that if anyone needed a face-to-face meeting with him they needed to contact Linteau first. The dinner meeting between Hoffa and the Giacalone brothers on July 26 where they informed him of the July 30 sit-down was arranged by Linteau. Hoffa stopped by his office to check in before he went to the Machus Red Fox. Linteau was out to lunch when Hoffa stopped by so Hoffa left a message for him before departing.
At 2:15 p.m., an annoyed Hoffa called his wife from a pay phone on a post in front of Damman Hardware, directly behind the Red Fox, and complained, "Where the hell is Tony Giacalone? I'm being stood up." His wife told him that she hadn't heard from anyone. He told her he would be home at 4 p.m. Several eyewitnesses saw Hoffa standing by his car and pacing the restaurant's parking lot. Two men saw Hoffa emerge from the Red Fox after a long lunch and recognized him; they stopped to chat with him briefly and to shake his hand. At 3:27 p.m., Hoffa called Linteau complaining that Giacalone was late. Hoffa said, "That dirty son of a bitch Tony Jocks set this meeting up, and he's an hour and a half late." Linteau told him to calm down, and to stop by his office on the way home. Hoffa said that he would and hung up.
At 7 a.m. the next day, Hoffa's wife called her son and daughter by telephone, saying that their father had not come home. On her way to the house, Hoffa's daughter claimed to have had a vision of her father, who she was already sure was dead. He was slumped over, wearing a dark-colored short-sleeved polo shirt. At 7:20 am, Linteau went to the Machus Red Fox, and found Hoffa's unlocked car in the parking lot, but there was no sign of Hoffa or any indication of what had happened to him. He called the police, who later arrived at the scene. State police were brought in and the FBI was alerted. At suppertime, Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa, filed a missing persons report.
Years of extensive investigation, involving numerous law enforcement agencies including the FBI, came to no definite conclusion. Giacalone and Provenzano, who denied having scheduled a meeting with Hoffa, were found not to have been near the restaurant that afternoon. Hoffa was declared legally dead on July 30, 1982. The case continues to be the subject of rumor and speculation.
Hoffa's wife, Josephine, died on September 12, 1980. According to her children, she died of the grief caused by the 1975 disappearance of her husband, because her health had declined steadily since then. She is entombed in Michigan.
Claims and developments
In 1989, Kenneth Walton, the head of the FBI's Detroit office, told The Detroit News that he knew what had happened to Hoffa. "I'm comfortable I know who did it, but it's never going to be prosecuted because ... we would have to divulge informants, confidential sources."
In 2001, the FBI matched DNA from Hoffa's hair—taken from a brush—with a strand of hair found in a 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham driven by longtime friend Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien on July 30, 1975. Police and Hoffa's family had long believed O'Brien played a role in Hoffa's disappearance. O'Brien, however, had previously denied ever being involved in Hoffa's disappearance or that Hoffa had ever been a passenger in his car.
In a first-season episode of the Discovery Channel show MythBusters, titled "The Hunt for Hoffa," the locations in Giants Stadium where Hoffa was rumored to be buried were scanned with a ground penetrating radar to see if any disturbances were present that would indicate a human body had been buried there. They found no trace of any human remains. No human remains were found when Giants Stadium was demolished in 2010.
In the book, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and the Closing of the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (2004), author Charles Brandt claims that Frank Sheeran, a professional killer for the mob and longtime friend of Hoffa's, confessed to assassinating him. According to Brandt, O'Brien drove Sheeran, Hoffa, and fellow mobster Sal Briguglio to a house in Detroit. He claimed that while O'Brien and Briguglio drove off, Sheeran and Hoffa went into the house, where Sheeran claims that he shot Hoffa twice behind the right ear. Sheeran says that he was told that Hoffa was cremated after the murder. Sheeran also confessed to reporters that he murdered Hoffa. Blood found in the Detroit house where Sheeran claimed the murder happened was determined not to be Hoffa's.
On June 16, 2006, the Detroit Free Press published in its entirety the so-called "Hoffex Memo," a 56-page report the FBI prepared for a January 1976 briefing on the case at FBI Headquarters in Washington. Although not claiming conclusively to establish the specifics of his disappearance, the memo records a belief that Hoffa was murdered at the behest of organized crime figures who regarded his efforts to regain power within the Teamsters as a threat to their control of the union's pension fund. The FBI has called the report the definitive account of what agents believe happened to Hoffa.
In the book The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, Richard Kuklinski claimed to know the fate of Hoffa: his body was placed in a 50-gallon drum and set on fire for "a half hour or so," then the drum was welded shut and buried in a junkyard. Later, according to Kuklinski, an accomplice started to talk to federal authorities and there was fear that he would use the information to try to get out of trouble. The drum was dug up, placed in the trunk of a car, and compacted to a 4 × 2 foot rectangular cuboid. It was sold, along with hundreds of compacted cars, as scrap metal and was shipped off to Japan to be used in making new cars.
In 2012, Roseville, Michigan, police took samples from the ground under a suburban Detroit driveway after a person reported witnessing the burial of a body around the time of Hoffa's 1975 disappearance. Tests by Michigan State University anthropologists found no signs of human remains. In January 2013, reputed gangster Tony Zerilli implied that Hoffa was originally buried in a shallow grave, with the plan that his remains would later be moved to a second location. Zerilli contends that these plans were abandoned, and Hoffa's remains lay in a field in northern Oakland County, not far from the restaurant where he was last seen. Zerilli denied any responsibility for or association with Hoffa's disappearance. On June 17, 2013, the Zerilli information led to a property in Oakland Township in northern Oakland County owned by Detroit mob boss Jack Tocco. After three days, the FBI called off the dig. No human remains were found, and the case remains open.
Thomas Andretta and his brother Stephen, who reportedly died of cancer in 2000, were named by the FBI as suspects. Both were New Jersey Teamsters and reputed Genovese crime family mob associates. The FBI called Thomas Andretta a "trusted associate of Anthony Provenzano; reported to be involved in the disappearance of Hoffa."
Andretta, who died on January 25, 2019, served federal prison time for racketeering. He repeatedly refused to comment on the case.
In a April 2019 interview, with DJ Vlad, Michael Franzese said he was aware of the location of Hoffa's body, as well as the shooter. Franzese said Hoffa was 100% killed in a mafia related hit, and that the order came down from the commission in New York. When questioned about the location and the shooter all Franzese would disclose was, "I can tell you the body is very wet" and "The shooter is still alive today, but currently in prison."
</snip>
Hoffa, circa 1965
James Riddle Hoffa (born February 14, 1913; disappeared July 30, 1975, later declared dead July 30, 1982) was an American labor union leader who served as the President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) union from 1957 until 1971. He vanished in late July 1975, at age 62.
From an early age, Hoffa was a union activist and became an important regional figure with the IBT by his mid-20s. By 1952 he was national vice-president of the IBT, and was its general president between 1957 and 1971. He secured the first national agreement for teamsters' rates in 1964 with the National Master Freight Agreement. He played a major role in the growth and development of the union, which eventually became the largest (by membership) in the United States with over 2.3 million members at its peak, during his terms as its leader.
Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, and this connection continued until his disappearance in 1975. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery and fraud in 1964, in two separate trials. He was imprisoned in 1967 and sentenced to 13 years. In mid-1971, he resigned as president of the union as part of a pardon agreement with President Richard Nixon; and he was released later that year, although barred from union activities until 1980. Hoffa, hoping to regain support and to return to IBT leadership, unsuccessfully attempted to overturn this order.
Hoffa vanished in late July 1975 and was never found. He was declared legally dead in 1982.
<snip>
Disappearance
Hoffa disappeared on Wednesday, July 30, 1975, from the parking lot of Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit. He had told others he was going there to meet with two Mafia leaders: Anthony Giacalone and Anthony Provenzano. Provenzano was also a Teamster leader in New Jersey and had earlier been close to Hoffa. Provenzano was a national vice-president with IBT from 1961, Hoffa's second term as Teamsters' president. Anthony Provenzano, once a friend of Hoffa but now an enemy, threatened to kidnap and hurt Hoffa's granddaughter. Hoffa called Provenzano "crazy". In 1973 and 1974, Hoffa talked to him to ask for help in supporting him for his return to power. Provenzano refused to listen and threatened Hoffa by saying he would pull out his guts and kidnap his granddaughters. Hoffa could not afford to take these threats lightly: at least two of Provenzano's political opponents were believed to have been murdered. Others who had spoken out against him had been physically assaulted.
The threats from the mafia that they would get rid of Hoffa were taken very seriously; Hoffa's son is quoted as saying "Dad was pushing so hard to get back in office, I was increasingly afraid that the mob would do something about it." There had been three visits in a short time frame to Hoffa's home at Lake Orion and one trip to the Guardian Building law offices by Anthony Giacalone, an alleged kingpin in the Detroit Mafia, and his younger brother, Vito. Friendly with Provenzano and believed to be related to him, their avowed purpose in coming was to set up a "peace meeting" between Provenzano and Hoffa. Hoffa's son viewed the "peace meeting" overture as only a pretext. He was convinced that Giacalone was "setting Dad up" for a hit. Even Hoffa himself was becoming increasingly uneasy each time that the Giacalones arrived. The meeting would take place at the Machus Red Fox, a suburban Detroit restaurant. The Machus Red Fox was known to Hoffa; the restaurant had hosted the wedding reception of his son, James. Hoffa wrote the date in his office calendar, "TG — 2 P.M. — Red Fox".
On July 30, Hoffa left home in his green Pontiac Grand Ville at 1:15 p.m. Before heading to the restaurant, he stopped in Pontiac to talk to his close friend Louis Linteau, a former president of Teamsters Local 614 in Pontiac, who at the time ran Airport Service Lines, a limousine service. Linteau and Hoffa used to be enemies but had since mended their differences and by the time Hoffa left prison, Linteau became his unofficial appointment secretary. It was well known in both underworld and labor union circles that Linteau acted as a buffer for Hoffa and that if anyone needed a face-to-face meeting with him they needed to contact Linteau first. The dinner meeting between Hoffa and the Giacalone brothers on July 26 where they informed him of the July 30 sit-down was arranged by Linteau. Hoffa stopped by his office to check in before he went to the Machus Red Fox. Linteau was out to lunch when Hoffa stopped by so Hoffa left a message for him before departing.
At 2:15 p.m., an annoyed Hoffa called his wife from a pay phone on a post in front of Damman Hardware, directly behind the Red Fox, and complained, "Where the hell is Tony Giacalone? I'm being stood up." His wife told him that she hadn't heard from anyone. He told her he would be home at 4 p.m. Several eyewitnesses saw Hoffa standing by his car and pacing the restaurant's parking lot. Two men saw Hoffa emerge from the Red Fox after a long lunch and recognized him; they stopped to chat with him briefly and to shake his hand. At 3:27 p.m., Hoffa called Linteau complaining that Giacalone was late. Hoffa said, "That dirty son of a bitch Tony Jocks set this meeting up, and he's an hour and a half late." Linteau told him to calm down, and to stop by his office on the way home. Hoffa said that he would and hung up.
At 7 a.m. the next day, Hoffa's wife called her son and daughter by telephone, saying that their father had not come home. On her way to the house, Hoffa's daughter claimed to have had a vision of her father, who she was already sure was dead. He was slumped over, wearing a dark-colored short-sleeved polo shirt. At 7:20 am, Linteau went to the Machus Red Fox, and found Hoffa's unlocked car in the parking lot, but there was no sign of Hoffa or any indication of what had happened to him. He called the police, who later arrived at the scene. State police were brought in and the FBI was alerted. At suppertime, Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa, filed a missing persons report.
Years of extensive investigation, involving numerous law enforcement agencies including the FBI, came to no definite conclusion. Giacalone and Provenzano, who denied having scheduled a meeting with Hoffa, were found not to have been near the restaurant that afternoon. Hoffa was declared legally dead on July 30, 1982. The case continues to be the subject of rumor and speculation.
Hoffa's wife, Josephine, died on September 12, 1980. According to her children, she died of the grief caused by the 1975 disappearance of her husband, because her health had declined steadily since then. She is entombed in Michigan.
Claims and developments
In 1989, Kenneth Walton, the head of the FBI's Detroit office, told The Detroit News that he knew what had happened to Hoffa. "I'm comfortable I know who did it, but it's never going to be prosecuted because ... we would have to divulge informants, confidential sources."
In 2001, the FBI matched DNA from Hoffa's hair—taken from a brush—with a strand of hair found in a 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham driven by longtime friend Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien on July 30, 1975. Police and Hoffa's family had long believed O'Brien played a role in Hoffa's disappearance. O'Brien, however, had previously denied ever being involved in Hoffa's disappearance or that Hoffa had ever been a passenger in his car.
In a first-season episode of the Discovery Channel show MythBusters, titled "The Hunt for Hoffa," the locations in Giants Stadium where Hoffa was rumored to be buried were scanned with a ground penetrating radar to see if any disturbances were present that would indicate a human body had been buried there. They found no trace of any human remains. No human remains were found when Giants Stadium was demolished in 2010.
In the book, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and the Closing of the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (2004), author Charles Brandt claims that Frank Sheeran, a professional killer for the mob and longtime friend of Hoffa's, confessed to assassinating him. According to Brandt, O'Brien drove Sheeran, Hoffa, and fellow mobster Sal Briguglio to a house in Detroit. He claimed that while O'Brien and Briguglio drove off, Sheeran and Hoffa went into the house, where Sheeran claims that he shot Hoffa twice behind the right ear. Sheeran says that he was told that Hoffa was cremated after the murder. Sheeran also confessed to reporters that he murdered Hoffa. Blood found in the Detroit house where Sheeran claimed the murder happened was determined not to be Hoffa's.
On June 16, 2006, the Detroit Free Press published in its entirety the so-called "Hoffex Memo," a 56-page report the FBI prepared for a January 1976 briefing on the case at FBI Headquarters in Washington. Although not claiming conclusively to establish the specifics of his disappearance, the memo records a belief that Hoffa was murdered at the behest of organized crime figures who regarded his efforts to regain power within the Teamsters as a threat to their control of the union's pension fund. The FBI has called the report the definitive account of what agents believe happened to Hoffa.
In the book The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, Richard Kuklinski claimed to know the fate of Hoffa: his body was placed in a 50-gallon drum and set on fire for "a half hour or so," then the drum was welded shut and buried in a junkyard. Later, according to Kuklinski, an accomplice started to talk to federal authorities and there was fear that he would use the information to try to get out of trouble. The drum was dug up, placed in the trunk of a car, and compacted to a 4 × 2 foot rectangular cuboid. It was sold, along with hundreds of compacted cars, as scrap metal and was shipped off to Japan to be used in making new cars.
In 2012, Roseville, Michigan, police took samples from the ground under a suburban Detroit driveway after a person reported witnessing the burial of a body around the time of Hoffa's 1975 disappearance. Tests by Michigan State University anthropologists found no signs of human remains. In January 2013, reputed gangster Tony Zerilli implied that Hoffa was originally buried in a shallow grave, with the plan that his remains would later be moved to a second location. Zerilli contends that these plans were abandoned, and Hoffa's remains lay in a field in northern Oakland County, not far from the restaurant where he was last seen. Zerilli denied any responsibility for or association with Hoffa's disappearance. On June 17, 2013, the Zerilli information led to a property in Oakland Township in northern Oakland County owned by Detroit mob boss Jack Tocco. After three days, the FBI called off the dig. No human remains were found, and the case remains open.
Thomas Andretta and his brother Stephen, who reportedly died of cancer in 2000, were named by the FBI as suspects. Both were New Jersey Teamsters and reputed Genovese crime family mob associates. The FBI called Thomas Andretta a "trusted associate of Anthony Provenzano; reported to be involved in the disappearance of Hoffa."
Andretta, who died on January 25, 2019, served federal prison time for racketeering. He repeatedly refused to comment on the case.
In a April 2019 interview, with DJ Vlad, Michael Franzese said he was aware of the location of Hoffa's body, as well as the shooter. Franzese said Hoffa was 100% killed in a mafia related hit, and that the order came down from the commission in New York. When questioned about the location and the shooter all Franzese would disclose was, "I can tell you the body is very wet" and "The shooter is still alive today, but currently in prison."
</snip>
4 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Before it's too late to find out from those still living. Someone knows.
Tony's "Machus Red Fox restaurant" was Holstens, in the Sopranos.
"Don't Stop..." 