Jimmy Hoffa
James Riddle Hoffa was an American labor union leader who served as the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1957 until 1971.
From an early age, Hoffa was a union activist, and he became an important regional figure with the IBT by his mid-twenties. By 1952, he was the 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 the 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, a connection that continued until his disappearance in 1975. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and mail and wire 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 commutation agreement with US President Richard Nixon and was released later that year, but Hoffa was barred from union activities until 1980. Hoping to regain support and to return to IBT leadership, he unsuccessfully tried to overturn the order.
Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975. He is believed to have been murdered by the Mafia and was declared legally dead in 1982. Hoffa's legacy continues to stir debate.
Early life and family
Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913, to John and Viola Hoffa. His father, who was of German descent from what is now referred to as the Pennsylvania Dutch, died in 1920 from lung disease when Hoffa was seven years old. His mother was of Irish ancestry. The family moved to Detroit in 1924, where Hoffa was raised and lived the rest of his life. Hoffa left school at age 14 and began working full-time manual labor jobs to help support his family.Hoffa married Josephine Poszywak, an 18-year-old Detroit laundry worker of Polish heritage, in Bowling Green, Ohio, on September 24, 1936. The couple had met six months earlier during a nonunionized laundry workers' strike action. They had two children: a daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, and a son, James P. Hoffa. The Hoffas paid $6,800 in 1939 for a modest home in northwestern Detroit. The family later owned a simple summer lakefront cottage in Orion Township, Michigan, north of Detroit.
Early union activity
Hoffa began union organizational work at the grassroots level through his job as a teenager with a grocery chain, which paid substandard wages and offered poor working conditions with minimal job security. The workers were displeased with that situation and tried to organize a union to better their lot. Although Hoffa was young, his courage and approachability in that role impressed fellow workers, and he rose to a leadership position. By 1932, after refusing to work for an abusive shift foreman, Hoffa left the grocery chain, partly because of his union activities. He was then invited to become an organizer with Local 299 of the Teamsters in Detroit.Growth of Teamsters
The Teamsters, founded in 1903, had 75,000 members in 1933. As a result of Hoffa's work with other union leaders to consolidate local union trucker groups into regional sections and then into a national body, which Hoffa ultimately completed over two decades, membership grew to 170,000 members by 1936, and three years later, there were 420,000. The number grew steadily during World War II and in the postwar boom to top a million members by 1951.The Teamsters organized truck drivers and warehousemen throughout the Midwest and then nationwide. Hoffa played a major role in the union's skillful use of "quickie strikes," secondary boycotts, and other means of leveraging union strength at one company, then to move to organize workers, and finally to win contract demands at other companies. That process, which took several years starting in the early 1930s, eventually brought the Teamsters to a position of being one of the most powerful unions in the United States.
Trucking unions in that era were heavily influenced by and in many cases controlled by elements of organized crime. For Hoffa to unify and expand trucking unions, he had to make accommodations and arrangements with many gangsters, beginning in the Detroit area. Organized crime influence on the IBT would expand as the union itself grew.
Rise to power
Hoffa worked to defend the Teamsters from raids by other unions, including the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and he extended the Teamsters' influence in the Midwest from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. Although he never actually worked as a truck driver, he became president of Local 299 in December 1946. He then rose to lead the combined group of Detroit-area locals shortly afterwards and later advanced to become head of the Michigan Teamsters groups. Meanwhile, Hoffa obtained a deferment from military service in World War II by successfully making a case for his union leadership skills being of more value to the nation by keeping freight running smoothly to assist the war effort.At the 1952 IBT convention in Los Angeles, Hoffa was selected as national vice-president by incoming president Dave Beck, the successor to Daniel J. Tobin, who had been president since 1907. Hoffa had quelled an internal revolt against Tobin by securing Central States' regional support for Beck at the convention. In exchange, Beck made Hoffa a vice-president.
The IBT moved its headquarters from Indianapolis to Washington, DC, taking over a large office building in the capital in 1955. IBT staff was also meanwhile enlarged, with many lawyers hired to assist with contract negotiations. Following his 1952 election as vice-president, Hoffa began spending more of his time away from Detroit, either in Washington or traveling around the country for his expanded responsibilities. Hoffa's personal lawyer was Bill Bufalino.
Teamsters presidency
Hoffa took over the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, at the convention in Miami Beach, Florida. His predecessor, Beck, had appeared before the John L. McClellan-led US Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor or Management Field in March 1957 and took the Fifth Amendment 140 times in response to questions. Beck was under indictment when the IBT convention took place and was convicted and imprisoned in a trial for fraud held in Seattle.Teamsters expelled from AFL-CIO
The 1957 AFL–CIO convention, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, voted nearly five to one to expel the IBT. Vice-President Walter Reuther led the fight to oust the IBT for charges of Hoffa's corrupt leadership. President George Meany gave an emotional speech, advocating the removal of the IBT and stating that he could agree to further affiliation of the Teamsters only if they would dismiss Hoffa as their president. Meany demanded a response from Hoffa, who replied through the press, "We'll see." At the time, IBT was bringing in over $750,000 annually to the AFL-CIO.National Master Freight Agreement
Following his re-election as president in 1961, Hoffa worked to expand the union. In 1964, he succeeded in bringing virtually all over-the-road truck drivers in North America under a single National Master Freight Agreement, which may have been his biggest achievement in a lifetime of union activity. Hoffa then tried to bring the airline workers and other transport employees into the union, with limited success. He was then facing immense personal strain as he was under investigation, on trial, launching appeals of convictions, or imprisoned for virtually all of the 1960s.Hoffa was re-elected without opposition to a third five-year term as president of the IBT, despite having been convicted of jury tampering and mail fraud in court verdicts that were stayed pending review on appeal. Delegates in Miami Beach also elected Frank Fitzsimmons as first vice-president, who would become president "if Hoffa has to serve a jail term."
Criminal charges
Hoffa had first faced major criminal investigations in 1957, as a result of the McClellan Committee. On March 14, 1957, Hoffa was arrested for allegedly trying to bribe an aide to the Select Committee. Hoffa denied the charges, but the arrest triggered additional investigations and more arrests and indictments over the following weeks. However, when John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, he appointed his younger brother Robert as Attorney General. Robert Kennedy had been frustrated in earlier attempts to convict Hoffa, while working as counsel to the McClellan subcommittee. As Attorney General from 1961, Kennedy pursued a strong attack on organized crime and he carried on with a so-called "Get Hoffa" squad of prosecutors and investigators.Prison sentences
In May 1963, Hoffa was indicted for jury tampering in Tennessee, charged with the attempted bribery of a grand juror during his 1962 conspiracy trial in Nashville. Hoffa was convicted on March 4, 1964, and subsequently sentenced to eight years in prison and a $10,000 fine. While on bail during his appeal, Hoffa was convicted in a second trial held in Chicago, on July 26, 1964, on one count of conspiracy and three counts of mail and wire fraud for improper use of the Teamsters' pension fund, and sentenced to five years in prison.Hoffa spent the next three years unsuccessfully appealing his 1964 convictions. Appeals filed by his chief counsel, St. Louis defense attorney Morris Shenker, reached the U.S. Supreme Court. He began serving his aggregate prison sentence of 13 years on March 7, 1967, at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
Appoints Fitzsimmons as caretaker president
When Hoffa entered prison, Frank Fitzsimmons was named acting president of the union, and Hoffa planned to run the union from prison through Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons was a Hoffa loyalist, fellow Detroit resident, and a longtime member of Teamsters Local 299, who owed his own high position in large part to Hoffa's influence. Despite this, Fitzsimmons soon distanced himself from Hoffa's influence and control after 1967, to Hoffa's displeasure. Fitzsimmons also decentralized power somewhat within the IBT's administration structure, forgoing much of the control Hoffa took advantage of as union president. While still in prison, Hoffa resigned as Teamsters president on June 19, 1971, and Fitzsimmons was elected Teamsters president on July 9, 1971.After prison
On December 23, 1971, less than five years into his 13-year sentence, Hoffa was released from prison when US President Richard Nixon commuted it to time served. As a result of Hoffa's previous resignation, he was awarded a $1.75 million lump sumtermination benefit by the Teamsters Retirement and Family Protection Plan. That type of pension settlement had never occurred with the Teamsters. The IBT then endorsed Nixon, a Republican, in his presidential re-election bid in 1972. In prior elections, the union had normally supported Democratic nominees but had endorsed Nixon in 1960.
Hoffa regained his freedom, but the commutation from Nixon did not allow Hoffa to "engage in the direct or indirect management of any labor organization" until March 6, 1980. Hoffa contended that he had never agreed to that condition. Hoffa accused senior Nixon administration figures, including Attorney General John N. Mitchell and White House Special Counsel Charles Colson, of depriving him of his rights by imposing that condition. It was suspected that the condition had been imposed upon Hoffa because of requests from the Teamsters' leadership, but that was denied by Fitzsimmons. By 1973, Hoffa was planning to seize the presidency of the Teamsters again.
Hoffa sued to invalidate the restriction so that he could reassert his power over the Teamsters. John Dean, former White House counsel to Nixon, was among those called upon for depositions in 1974 court proceedings. Dean, who had become famous as a government witness in prosecutions arising from the Watergate scandal by mid-1973, had drafted the clause in 1971 at Nixon's request. Hoffa ultimately lost his court battle since the court ruled that Nixon had acted within his powers by imposing the restriction, as it had been based on Hoffa's misconduct while he was serving as a Teamsters official.
Hoffa faced immense resistance to his re-establishment of power from many corners and had lost much of his earlier support even in the Detroit area. As a result, he intended to begin his comeback at the local level with Local 299 in Detroit, where he retained some influence. In 1975, Hoffa was working on an autobiography, , which was published a few months after his disappearance. He had earlier published a book titled The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa.
Disappearance
Prelude
Hoffa's plans to regain the leadership of the union were met with opposition from several members of the Mafia, including some who were connected to his disappearance in 1975. According to Dan Moldea, Hoffa had retaliated against his Mafia opponents by co-operating with investigations against them.One of them was Anthony Provenzano, who had been a Teamsters local leader in New Jersey and a national vice-president of the union during Hoffa's second term as its president. Provenzano had once been a friend of Hoffa's but became an enemy after a reported feud when both were in federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s. In 1973 and 1974, Hoffa asked him for his support to regain his former position, but Provenzano refused and threatened Hoffa by reportedly saying he would pull out his guts and kidnap his grandchildren. Provenzano was a caporegime in the New York City Genovese crime family. At least two of Provenzano's union opponents had been murdered, and others who had spoken out against him had been assaulted.
Other Mafia figures who became involved were Anthony Giacalone, an alleged kingpin in the Detroit Mafia, and his younger brother, Vito. The FBI believes that they were positioning themselves as "mediators" between Hoffa and Provenzano. The brothers had made three visits to Hoffa's home at Lake Orion and one to the Guardian Building law offices. Their avowed purpose in meeting Hoffa was to set up a "peace meeting" between Provenzano and Hoffa. Hoffa's son, James, said, "Dad was pushing so hard to get back in office, I was increasingly afraid that the mob would do something about it." James was convinced that the "peace meeting" was a pretext to Giacalone's "setting Dad up" for a hit since Hoffa had been increasingly uneasy each time the Giacalone brothers arrived.
Events of July 30
Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975 after he had gone out to the meeting with Provenzano and Giacalone. The meeting was due to take place at 2:00 p.m. at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, a Detroit suburb. The place was known to Hoffa, as it had been the site of the wedding reception of his son James. Hoffa wrote Giacalone's initials and the time and location of the meeting in his office calendar: "TG—2 p.m.—Red Fox."Hoffa left home in his green Pontiac Grand Ville at 1:15 p.m. Before heading to the restaurant, he stopped in Pontiac at the office of his close friend Louis Linteau, a former president of Teamsters Local 614 who now ran a limousine service. Linteau and Hoffa had been enemies early in their careers but eventually became friends. When Hoffa left prison, Linteau had also become Hoffa's unofficial appointment secretary and arranged a dinner meeting between Hoffa and the Giacalone brothers on July 26 in which they had informed him of the July 30 meeting. Linteau was out to lunch when Hoffa stopped by and so Hoffa talked to some of the staff present and left a message for Linteau before he left for the Machus Red Fox.
Between 2:15 and 2:30 p.m., an annoyed Hoffa called his wife from a payphone on a post in front of Damman Hardware, directly behind the Machus Red Fox, and complained that Giacalone had not shown up and that he had been stood up. His wife told him she had not heard from anyone. He told her he would be home at 4:00 p.m. to grill steaks for dinner. Several witnesses saw Hoffa standing by his car and pacing the restaurant's parking lot. Two men saw Hoffa, recognized him, and stopped to chat with him briefly and to shake his hand. Hoffa also made a call to Linteau in which he again complained that the men were late. Linteau gave the time as 3:30 p.m., but the FBI suspected that it was earlier, based on the timing of other phone calls from Linteau's office from around that time. The FBI estimates that Hoffa left the location without a struggle around 2:45–2:50 p.m. One witness reported seeing Hoffa in the back of a maroon "Lincoln or Mercury" car with three other people.
Investigation
At 7 a.m. the next day, Hoffa's wife called her son and daughter to say that their father had not come home. On her way home, Hoffa's daughter claimed to have had a vision of her father, who, she was already sure, was dead. He was slumped over and wore a dark-colored, short-sleeved polo shirt. It has mystified her ever since that although the she could not have possibly known that prior to her arrival at Lake Orion, the clothing in her vision was exactly what Hoffa was wearing when he disappeared. At 7:20 a.m., 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. The Michigan State Police were brought in, and the FBI was alerted. At 6 p.m., Hoffa's son, James, filed a missing person report. The Hoffa family offered a $200,000 reward for any information about the disappearance.The primary piece of physical evidence obtained in the investigation was a maroon 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham, which belonged to Anthony Giacalone's son Joseph. The car had been borrowed earlier that day by Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien to deliver fish. O'Brien was Hoffa's foster son although relations between them had soured in the years preceding Hoffa's disappearance. Investigators and Hoffa's family suspected that O'Brien had a role in Hoffa's disappearance. Keith Corbett, a former US Prosecuting Attorney, has since suggested that O'Brien would have been considered too unreliable to be entrusted with such a high-profile murder. On August 21, police dogs identified Hoffa's scent in the car.
Giacalone and Provenzano, who denied having scheduled a meeting with Hoffa, were found not to have been near the restaurant that afternoon. Provenzano told investigators that he was playing cards with Stephen Andretta, Thomas Andretta's brother, in Union City, New Jersey, the day that Hoffa disappeared. Despite extensive surveillance and bugging, investigators found that the Mafia members who they thought were involved were generally unwilling to talk about Hoffa's disappearance, even in private. On December 4, 1975, a federal investigator in Detroit said in court, presided by James Paul Churchill, that a witness had identified three New Jersey men as having participated "in the abduction and murder of James R. Hoffa." The three men were close associates of Provenzano, namely, Salvatore Briguglio, Salvatore's brother Gabriel Briguglio, and Thomas Andretta.
After years of investigation, involving numerous law enforcement agencies including the FBI, officials have not reached a definitive conclusion as to Hoffa's fate and who was involved. Hoffa's wife, Josephine, died on September 12, 1980 and is interred at White Chapel Memorial Cemetery in Troy, Michigan. On December 9, 1982, Hoffa was declared legally dead as of July 30, 1982, by Oakland County, Michigan Probate Judge Norman R. Barnard.
In 1989, Kenneth Walton, the agent-in-charge 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 Joseph Giacalone's car, but it is possible that Hoffa had traveled in the car on a different day.
On June 16, 2006, the Detroit Free Press published the entire "Hoffex Memo," a 56-page report prepared by the FBI for a January 1976 briefing on the case at the 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 in the Teamsters as a threat to their control of the union's pension fund. As of 2019, digs are still periodically conducted in the Detroit area in search of Hoffa's body, but a common theory among experts is that the body was cremated.
Claims and developments
In his book, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and the Closing of the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, the author Charles Brandt claims that Frank Sheeran, an alleged professional killer for the mob and a longtime friend of Hoffa, confessed to assassinating him. According to Brandt, O'Brien drove Sheeran, Hoffa, and the fellow mobster Sal Briguglio to a house in Detroit. Brandt claimed that while O'Brien and Briguglio drove off, Sheeran and Hoffa went into the house, where Sheeran claimed to have shot Hoffa twice in the back of the head and that he was told Hoffa was cremated after the murder. Further, Sheeran also admitted later to reporters that he murdered Hoffa, but blood stains found in the Detroit house in which Sheeran claimed the murder had happened were determined not to match Hoffa's DNA. According to Sheeran, in the first conversation that he had with Hoffa was over the phone, Hoffa started by saying, "I heard you paint houses." The mob code meaning was" I heard you kill people," the "paint" being the blood that splatters when bullets are fired into a body. The truthfulness of the book, including Sheeran's supposed confessions to killing Hoffa, has been disputed by "The Lies of the Irishman," an article in Slate by Bill Tonelli, and "Jimmy Hoffa and 'The Irishman': A True Crime Story?" by Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith, which appeared in The New York Review of Books.In Philip Carlo's book The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, Richard Kuklinski claimed to know the fate of Hoffa: the body was placed in a 50-gallon drum and set on fire for "a half hour or so," and the drum was then welded shut and buried in a junkyard. Later, according to Kuklinski, an accomplice started to talk to federal authorities. Because of fear that he would use the information to try to get out of trouble, the perpetrators had the drum dug up and placed in the trunk of a car, which was then compacted and shipped, along with hundreds of others, to Japan as scrap metal. The former FBI agent Robert Garrity called Kuklinski's admission to killing Hoffa "a hoax," said that Kuklinski had never been a suspect in Hoffa's disappearance, and added, "I've never heard of him." The Mafia writer and journalist Jerry Capeci also dismissed Kuklinski's claims of kiling Hoffa as "mostly demented ramblings."
Hoffa's body was rumored to be buried in Giants Stadium. In an episode of the Discovery Channel show MythBusters, "The Hunt for Hoffa," the locations in the stadium in which Hoffa was rumored to be buried were scanned with a ground penetrating radar. That was intended to reveal if any disturbances indicated a human body had been buried there, but no trace of any human remains was found. In addition, no human remains were found when Giants Stadium was demolished in 2010.
In 2012, Roseville, Michigan, police took samples from the ground under a suburban Detroit driveway after a person reported having witnessed the burial of a body there around the time of Hoffa's 1975 disappearance. Tests by Michigan State University anthropologists found no evidence of human remains.
In January 2013, the reputed gangster Tony Zerilli implied that Hoffa was originally buried in a shallow grave, with a plan to move his remains later to a second location. Zerilli said that the plans were abandoned and that Hoffa's remains lay in a field in northern Oakland County, Michigan, not far from the restaurant in which he had been last seen. Zerilli denied any responsibility for or association with Hoffa's disappearance. On June 17, 2013, investigating the Zerilli information, the FBI was led to a property in Oakland Township, in northern Oakland County, which was 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.
James Buccellato, a professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University, suggested in 2017 that Hoffa was likely murdered one mile away from the restaurant at the house of Carlo Licata, the son of the mobster Nick Licata. The Mafia then owned several waste incinerators and a crematorium in the Detroit area, and Buccellato suggested that Hoffa's body was taken to one of those places. Buccellato was doubtful that the body had been transported a long distance: "It's just not practical."
Thomas Andretta, who died in 2019, 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."
In an April 2019 interview with DJ Vlad, the former Colombo crime family capo Michael Franzese stated that he was certain Hoffa's disappearance to be mob related, that he was aware of the location of Hoffa's body and his shooter, and had tapes that reveal details of his disappearance. Franzese said, "I can tell you that it's wet, that's for sure," and "Upon good information, again, I think I know who the real shooter was; still alive today, in prison."