JIMMY HOFFA

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James Riddle Hoffa  was born on February   14^th , 1913 and he  disappeared on July 30^th, 1975 and was  later declared dead July 30, 1982.However, he was murdered years before that date. He was an American labor union leader who served as the President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) union.

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.

On December 23^rd , 1971, less than five years into his 13-year sentence, Hoffa was released from prison when President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to time served. Following his release, Hoffa was awarded a Teamsters' pension of $1.7 million, delivered in a one-time lump sum payment. This type of pension settlement had not occurred before with the Teamsters,

The IBT then endorsed President Nixon, a Republican, in his presidential re-election bid in 1972; in prior elections, the union had supported Democratic nominees but had also endorsed Nixon in 1960.

While he was glad to regain his freedom, Hoffa was very disappointed with the condition imposed on his release by President Nixon, which prevented Hoffa from engaging in union activities until March 1980. He 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 this condition; Mitchell and Colson both denied this. It was probably imposed upon Hoffa as the result of requests from the Teamsters' leadership  although Fitzsimmons also denied this.

Hoffa sued to invalidate the non-participation restriction in order to reassert his power over the Teamsters. John Dean, former White House counsel to President 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 non-participation 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 was based on Hoffa's misconduct while 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 his autobiography titled Hoffa: The Real Story, which was published a few months after his disappearance. He had earlier published a book titled The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa (1970)

Hoffa's plans to regain the leadership of the union were met with opposition from some members of the Mafia, including some who would be connected to his 1975 disappearance. One of them was Anthony Provenzano, who had previously been a Teamster 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 but had since become his enemy. sHoffa had 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 east two of Provenzano's political opponents were believed to have been murdered on hos orders. Others who had spoken out against him had been physically assaulted. According to Dan Moldea, Hoffa had retaliated against his Mafia opponents by cooperating with investigations against them. That was a really stupid thing to do.

Other Mafia figures who became involved were Anthony Giacalone, an alleged kingpin in the Detroit Mafia, and his younger brother, Vito. In a short space of time, 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. According to Hoffa's son, "Dad was pushing so hard to get back in office, I was increasingly afraid that the mob would do something about it." Hoffa's son viewed the "peace meeting" overture as a pretext, and was convinced that Giacalone was "setting Dad up" for a hit. Hoffa himself was becoming increasingly uneasy each time that the Giacalone brothers arrived to talk with him.

Hoffa disappeared on July 30^th , 1975 after going out to a meeting with Anthony Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone. The meeting was arranged to take place at 2 p.m. at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit. The restaurant was known to Hoffa since  it had been the site for 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 at the office of his close friend Louis Linteau, a former president of Teamsters Local 614 in Pontiac who now ran a limousine service. Linteau and Hoffa had been enemies early in their respective careers, but had since settled their differences. By the time Hoffa left prison, Linteau had also become Hoffa's unofficial appointment secretary (he had arranged the dinner meeting between Hoffa and the Giacalone brothers on July 26^th, where they had informed him of the July 30 sit-down). Linteau was out to lunch when Hoffa stopped by, so he talked to some of the staff present and left a message for Linteau before departing for the Machus Red Fox Restaruant.

At 2:15 p.m., an annoyed Hoffa called his wife from a payphone 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 had not 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. This was Hoffa's last known communication with anyone.

\I saw a movie about Hoffa ad the movie ended when two men arrived at the restaraut and one of them went into the restaurant and the second one walked to the car that Hoffa was sitting in the back seat.

I thought  that Hoffa was going to be shot right then and there but in fact he wasn’t killed then, The last scene was the car being driven into a large transport truck and being driven away.  Thatwas not what happened.

For years, I had no idea when and where he was killed or by whom. Now I know.

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 he was dead. In her vision, her father  wasslumped 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.

After years of extensive 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. 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 continued 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 fear and grief caused by the 1975 disappearance of her husband. Her health had declined steadily after that. She died and is entombed in Michigan.

In his 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, and that he was told that Hoffa was cremated after the murder. Further, Sheeran also admitted later to reporters that he murdered Hoff and yet, blood stains found in the Detroit house where Sheeran claimed the murder happened were determined not to match Hoffa's blood.

On June 16^th, 2006, the Detroit Free Press published in its entirety the so-called "Hoffex Memo," a 56-page report prepared by the FBI 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.

In Philip Carlo's book The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer (2006), 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. Because of fear that he would use the information to try to get out of trouble, the perpetrators had the drum dug up, placed in the trunk of a car, and compacted to a 4 × 2 foot syeel rectangular cuboid. It was sold, along with hundreds of compacted cars, as scrap metal. This material was later shipped to Japan to be used in making new cars.

In a first-season episode of the  TV  Discovery   Channel    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. This was intended to reveal if any disturbances indicated a human body had been buried there. They found no trace of any human remains. 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.^[54] Tests by Michigan State University anthropologists found no evidence of human remains.

In January 2013, reputed gangster Tony Zerilli implied that Hoffa was originally buried in a shallow grave, with the plan to move his remains later to a second location. Zerilli contends that these plans were abandoned. He said that Hoffa's remains lay in a field in northern Oakland County, Michigan, 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, investigation of the Zerilli information led the FBI 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 stll 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 mobster Nick Licata. He further suggested that Hoffa's body was taken to a crematorium in Detroit that was owned at the time by the Mafia. He was doubtful that the body was transported a long distance, saying "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."^[60] Andretta served federal prison time for racketeering. He repeatedly refused to comment on the case.

In an 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 definitely 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, Franzese said, "I can tell you the body is very wet," and "The shooter is still alive today, but currently in prison.”  Very wet?  Was it dumped in a lake, a river or the ocean?