Conspiracy Theories: Jimmy Hoffa

James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa (born February 14, 1913 – disappeared July 30, 1975, declared legally dead in 1982) was an American trade unionist.

Hoffa served as the General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1958–1971, despite being incarcerated during the latter four years of his tenure. Hoffa, who had been convicted of jury tampering and attempted bribery in 1964, was imprisoned in 1967 after exhausting the appeal process. However, he did not officially resign the Teamsters' presidency until 1971. This was part of a pardon agreement with U.S. president Richard Nixon, in order to facilitate Hoffa's release from prison. Hoffa was last seen in 1975 outside a suburban Detroit restaurant called the Machus Red Fox.

Early life

Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14, 1913. His paternal ancestors were "Pennsylvania Dutch" and Irish-American. Hoffa's father, John Cleveland Hoffa, a coal driller, died of lung disease in 1920. After his father's death, the family moved to Detroit, where Hoffa was raised and lived for most of the rest of his life.

The Hoffa family later had a summer property in Lake Orion, Michigan, a northern Detroit suburb.

Hoffa began union organizational work through his employment as a teenager with a grocery chain, which paid substandard wages and offered poor working conditions. The workers were displeased with this situation, and tried to organize a union to better their lot. Although Hoffa was young, his bravery and approachability in this role impressed fellow workers, and he rose to a leadership position. A while later, after being dismissed from the grocery chain, in part because of his union activities, Hoffa became involved with Local 299 of the Teamsters, in Detroit.

Leads Union activities

The Teamsters organized truckers and firefighters first throughout the Midwest, and then nationwide across the United States. The union skillfully used "quickie strikes", secondary boycotts, and other means of leveraging union strength at one company, then moved to organize workers, and then win contract demands at other companies. This process, which took several years from the early 1930s, eventually brought the Teamsters to a position of being one of the most powerful unions in the United States. Hoffa played a major role in the growth of the Teamsters union.

Becomes Teamsters President

Hoffa took over the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, when his predecessor, Dave Beck, was convicted on bribery charges and imprisoned. Hoffa worked to expand the union, and, in 1964, succeeded in bringing virtually all over-the-road truck drivers in North America under a single national master-freight agreement. Hoffa then tried to bring the airline workers and other transport employees into the union.

Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa, is the Teamsters' current leader. His daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, currently serves as an associate circuit court judge in St. Louis, Missouri.

Conviction

In 1964, Hoffa was convicted in Chattanooga, Tennessee of attempted bribery of a grand juror, and was sentenced to 15 years. He spent the next three years appealing his conviction, without success; he began serving his sentence in 1967. Just before he entered prison, Hoffa appointed Frank Fitzsimmons as acting Teamsters president; Fitzsimmons was a Hoffa loyalist and fellow Detroit resident, who owed his own high position in large part to Hoffa's influence. On December 23, 1971, however, Hoffa was released from the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania prison, when President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to time served, on the condition he not participate in union activities for ten years. Hoffa, while glad to regain his freedom, had not sought the non-participation conditions, and was unhappy with this situation.

Disappearance

Hoffa was planning to sue to invalidate that non-participation restriction, in order to reassert his power over the Teamsters when he disappeared at, or sometime after, 2:45 pm on July 30, 1975 from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Oakland County, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. He had been due to meet two Mafia leaders, Anthony Giacolone from Detroit and Anthony Provenzano from Union City, New Jersey and New York City. Provenzano was also a union leader with the Teamsters in New Jersey, who had earlier been quite close to Hoffa.

Investigations into his disappearance

DNA evidence examined in 2001 placed Hoffa in the car of long-time Teamster associate Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien (who has been described as Hoffa's "foster son"), despite O'Brien's claims that Hoffa had never been in the car. Police interviews later that year failed to produce any indictments.

Donald Frankos

In 1993, authors William Hoffman and Lake Headley released the book Contract Killer: The Explosive Story of the Mafia's Most Notorious Hitman, written with the cooperation of former mobster Donald Frankos, who was also known as "Tony the Greek." Among other crimes, Frankos confessed during the course of the book that, while serving a lengthy prison term for the murder of Lucchese crime family associate Richard Bilello, he had participated in a number of mob murders outside of prison via the use of phony furloughs provided by corrupt prison officials.

Frankos claimed that, during one of those furloughs, he took part in the murder of Hoffa, as part of a hit team consisting of himself, Irish mobster John Sullivan, and James Coonan, the notorious boss of the Westies. According to Frankos, Hoffa was lured by his close friend Chuckie O'Brien to a house owned by Detroit mobster Anthony Giacolone. Once there, Hoffa was shot and killed by Coonan and Frankos using suppressed .22 pistols, then dismembered by Coonan, Sullivan, and Frankos. The body was then left in a meat locker in the basement of the house for a lengthy period of time, while debate raged as to how to dispose of it. It was later picked up by a fourth hitman, Joseph "Mad Dog" Sullivan (no relation to John Sullivan), who sealed the body in an oil drum and buried it underneath Giants Stadium.

Frank Sheeran

In July 2003, convicted killer Richard Powell told authorities that a briefcase containing a syringe used to subdue Hoffa was buried at a house in Hampton Township, Michigan. The FBI searched the backyard of a home formerly frequented by Frank Sheeran, who was a World War II veteran, Mafia hit man, truck driver, Teamsters official, and close friend of Hoffa's. Nothing significant was found.

In 2004, Charles Brandt, a former prosecutor and chief deputy attorney general of Delaware, published the book I Heard You Paint Houses. The title is based on a euphemistic exchange apparently used by hitmen and their would-be employers ("I heard you paint houses." "Yes, and I do my own carpentry, too"). House painting alludes to the incidental-to-homicide emplacement of blood spatter on walls; "doing my own carpentry," to the task of disposing of the body. Brandt recounted a series of confessions by Sheeran regarding Hoffa's murder, and claimed that Sheeran had begun contacting him because he wished to assuage feelings of guilt. Over the course of several years, he spoke many times by phone to Brandt (which Brandt recorded) during which he acknowledged his role as Hoffa's killer, acting on orders from the Mafia. He claimed to have used his friendship with Hoffa to lure him to a bogus meeting in Bloomfield Hills and drive him to a house in northwestern Detroit, where he shot him twice before fleeing and leaving Hoffa's body behind. An updated version of Brandt's book claims that Hoffa's body was cremated within an hour of Sheeran's departure.

In 2004, authorities in Detroit extracted floorboards from the northwest Detroit home where Sheeran said he had shot Hoffa. However, by February 2005, the Bloomfield Township Police said the FBI Crime Lab reported that, while there had been male, human blood on the floorboards, the blood did not match Hoffa's. It was later revealed that the DNA had been destroyed when the wrong kind of Luminol was used to find the blood remnants.

Richard Kuklinski

In Philip Carlo's book The Ice Man, written about (and with the cooperation of) convicted contract killer Richard Kuklinski, Kuklinski claimed that he played a large part in the disappearance of Hoffa. He said that he and three other men met Hoffa for lunch at the Machus Red Fox and, when Hoffa got into their van, Kuklinski knocked him out and then put a knife in his head. Kuklinski then took the body back to New Jersey, where it was burned and then buried in a 50 gallon gasoline drum. This drum was eventually put in the trunk of a car, which was then crushed into a block measuring 4' by 2'. This block and many others were then sold to Japanese auto manufacturers as scrap to melt down and make new cars out of.

Events since 2006

On May 17, 2006, acting on a tip, the FBI searched a farm in Milford Township, Michigan, for Hoffa's remains. Nothing was found.

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, D.C. The FBI has called the report the definitive account of what agents believe happened to Hoffa.

In November 2006 KLAS-TV Channel 8 Las Vegas interviewed author Charles Brandt about Hoffa's murder and disappearance. Brandt claims that Hoffa's body was taken from the murder scene and possibly driven two minutes away to the Grand Lawn Cemetery where he was cremated.

Film and television

Portrayed by Robert Blake in the 1983 TV-film Blood Feud, Trey Wilson in the 1985 television miniseries Robert Kennedy & His Times, and by Jack Nicholson in the 1992 film Hoffa. In the 1978 film F.I.S.T., Sylvester Stallone portrays Johnny Kovak, a character based on Hoffa.