Ever since Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa mysteriously disappeared in 1975, everyone from the FBI
to Martin Scorsese has been speculating about what happened to him: What was done to him?
Who did it?
Where, if anywhere, is the body?
Here's what's come out about Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance.
The story of Jimmy Hoffa's friend and confidant Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran playing a part
in Hoffa's disappearance is arguably the most high-profile Hoffa theory currently out there,
thanks to Martin Scorsese's 2019 movie The Irishman, where Robert De Niro stars as Sheeran
and Al Pacino plays Hoffa.
The movie is based on the book I Heard You Paint Houses, which tells the story of the
cold-blooded Sheeran befriending and eventually murdering Hoffa.
The book, which claims to be based on Sheeran's deathbed confessions, also claims that he
acted as a muscle for Hoffa, and even killed people at the behest of the union leader.
Unfortunately, the story may be an utter fabrication: many of the Irishman's contemporaries think
the whole thing is complete baloney.
In fact, no one who knew the man seems to think that this supposed stone-cold killer
of up to 30 was ever truly suspected of killing a single person.
“Maybe you should get some bodies around you…”
“Oh please, I’m not gonna go that route.
Don’t do this to me, Frank!”
So what are the facts?
Let's start back at the beginning.
Jimmy Hoffa disappeared on the afternoon of July 30, 1975.
At around 2 p.m. on that day, he was waiting in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant.
He was supposed to meet mafia bigshots Anthony Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone, but apparently
neither turned up.
Hoffa called his wife at 2:15 p.m., saying that he was "stood up" and that he'd be home
by 4 p.m.
Of course, that never happened, and this was the last time anyone heard from Hoffa ... at
least, anyone who is willing to admit it.
On the morning of July 31, Hoffa's Pontiac Grand Ville was still in the parking lot.
The car was unlocked and contained zero clues about its owner’s location.
One missing person's report later, a mystery for the ages was set to begin.
“Who’s that with her?”
“You don’t know who that is?”
“No.”
“Jimmy Hoffa.”
A public figure and a strange crime are an alluring combination, and Jimmy Hoffa's sudden
disappearance was no exception.
However, the state was desperate to keep the FBI out of the investigation because it would
freak out their mafia informants.
This, combined with the reward that eventually reached over $200,000, led to some pretty
strange tips and lines of investigations, such as several officers digging up a field
for three days only to find one dead dog.
There were several crank callers, one claiming he'd kidnapped Hoffa for just $500 in ransom,
and another claiming that a, quote, "monster man" knocked Hoffa off with a baseball bat
and hauled his body to a swamp in Florida.
Hoffa's family, meanwhile, enlisted a hypnotist to interview employees of the Machus Red Fox
restaurant.
The end of the investigation was just as weird.
The FBI kept raiding seedy locations, and even finding the occasional unrelated body,
but all routes seemed to lead to dead ends.
As such, the first five years of the investigation were a wild ride, and by 1980, a whopping
70 witnesses had faced a federal grand jury.
None were indicted.
Every crime mystery needs a primary suspect, and in this case, that role went to Chuckie
O'Brien.
O'Brien was a longtime acquaintance and aide of the labor leader, but they fell out in
late 1974.
When Hoffa disappeared in the summer of 1975, O'Brien said he had nothing to do with the
case.
Still, a bunch of circumstantial evidence linked him to the case, and police dogs even
discovered Hoffa's scent in a car that had been loaned to O'Brien.
This made him the primary suspect well into the 1990s, when the investigators finally
started opening up to other options.
O'Brien's stepson is law professor Jack Goldsmith, who has his own ideas about his stepdad.
Goldsmith says that O'Brien was indeed near the scene of disappearance, and that he was
driving the car Hoffa's scent was found in, but he was merely delivering fish and probably
had no part in the actual disappearance.
However, Goldsmith admits that O'Brien, who lost his reputation and career because of
his supposed involvement, did in fact know at least something about the case, and the
reason he stayed quiet and took the blame was his unwillingness to become a "rat."
One of the most notorious suspects is Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, a New Jersey mob boss
with ties to the Genovese family.
Reportedly, Hoffa had beef with Provenzano and his fateful meeting was supposed to be
a parlayHowever, Tony Pro no-showed, and was seen in New Jersey around the time of Hoffa's
disappearance in Detroit, giving him a rock-solid alibi.
Another Tony often linked to the death was Anthony Giacalone, who was one of the public
"faces" of the Detroit mob under Joe Zerilli, and who some experts believe conspired to
silence the Teamster.
Giacalone was also supposed to be at the Provenzano-Hoffa meeting.
As "luck" would have it, Giacalone also happened to have an airtight alibi, as he was hanging
out in front of witnesses at the Southfield Athletic Club.
Oddly, some experts have pointed out that his brother and fellow mafioso Vito Giacalone
seemed to fly under the radar.
Interestingly enough, the Mercury Marquis Brougham car where the dogs caught Hoffa's
scent - the one supposedly driven by Chuckie O'Brien - actually belonged to Anthony Giacalone's
son.
Hmm.
One of the more colorful figures around the Jimmy Hoffa case was Donald "Tony the Greek"
Frankos, an alleged freelance hitman who was already on the national radar for his role
as a witness in the trial of John Gotti.
In 1989, Tony the Greek told Playboy magazine that he knew Hoffa's final fate, and that
he told the FBI about it as early as 1986.
According to Mr.-the-Greek, Hoffa's killer was alleged Irish Mafia bigshot Jimmy Coonan,
and the deed was done in a mob house near Mount Clemens, Michigan.
After the union leader was shot, his body was then dismembered and buried beneath the
Giants Stadium of the day - in the concrete underneath the artificial turf near Section
107.
This particular theory is obviously intriguing, but doesn't seem to have gained much traction
among the officials, who have called it "possible but ... improbable."
Mythbusters arrived at the same conclusion when they looked for Hoffa's remains around
the stadium, and ultimately deemed the myth busted.
In 2011, a book called The Weasel: A Double Life in the Mob added another intriguing location
to the list of potential places housing Jimmy Hoffa's mortal remains.
The book's authors - a low-level mobster-turned-informant named Marvin Elkind and mafia expert Adrian
Humphries - claim they have knowledge that Hoffa never left Detroit.
In fact, he's buried in the foundations of the General Motors headquarters at the city's
Renaissance Center.
Elkind says he found out about the location of Hoffa's body, in 1985 during a Teamsters
event in Detroit.
As his group was passing the construction site, mafia boss Anthony Giacalone nodded
at the foundations and said: "Say good morning to Jimmy Hoffa, boys."
Whether you choose to believe this story or not, it's worth noting that Giacalone was
reportedly one of the guys Hoffa was supposed to meet before his disappearance.
Was he just using his reputation to wind up the Teamsters?
Or did he casually admit to Hoffa's murder?
The world may never know for sure, especially as Giacalone passed away in 2001.
One of the strangest and most notorious people to throw their hat in the "I killed Jimmy
Hoffa" ring is Richard "Iceman" Kuklinski, who got his own movie in 2012.
The notorious mafia hitman was sentenced to prison for five murders in 1998, and died
there in 2006.
The imposing, 6'5" Kuklinski claimed to have killed his first man when he was only 14,
and that he "practiced" new methods of mayhem by killing homeless people.
His cold-blooded nickname came from his ruthlessness and a case where he froze a body to throw
investigators off about the time of death.
Kuklinski claims that he was among the group of gangsters who shanghaied Hoffa away.
He said he knocked the union leader unconscious and stabbed his head with a hunting knife.
Then, he drove to New Jersey with Hoffa's body in the trunk of a car that was crushed
and sold as scrap metal.
However, the Iceman has claimed to have been a part of multiple high-profile mafia crimes,
and boasts an utterly unproven death tally of over 100 murders.
As such, some experts think his Hoffa story is pure fantasy.
In 2012, the investigators received a tip about a man who was in cahoots with Anthony
Giacalone.
According to the tipster, this former mobster had installed a brand new concrete driveway
on his property in Roseville, Michigan, in 1975, around the same time Hoffa disappeared.
The tipster also said that there was a body buried beneath.
While Police Chief James Berlin thought that the tip was credible and the person had indeed
witnessed a "burial," he also noted that any body was unlikely to be Hoffa's.
The driveway was nevertheless excavated and the authorities indeed found a, quote, "anomaly"
roughly two feet beneath the surface.
However, it wasn't Jimmy Hoffa.
The year 2013 saw yet another search for Jimmy Hoffa's remains.
The newest location was a field near Oakland Township on the outskirts of Detroit.
The FBI, the local sheriff's office, and local police descended upon the field thanks to
a tip from Anthony Zerilli, an elderly mobster.
Zerilli's tale of Hoffa's demise was even more terrifying than most stories of the union
leader's passing.
According to him, Hoffa was taken to the field, hit with a shovel, and buried alive under
a concrete slab.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, for Hoffa’s final moments), the tip turned out
to be yet another dead end, and the search ended with the discovery of precisely zero
missing Teamster leaders.
Isn't it strange that the FBI has investigated the disappearance of a high-profile union
leader for decades without cracking the case?
There are people who think that the Feds actually know who made Jimmy Hoffa "vanish," but the
agency is just too embarrassed to admit it.
According to prime suspect Chuckie O'Brien's stepson, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith,
the FBI focused on O'Brien because he was a long-time acquaintance of Hoffa who had
recently fallen out with him, and happened to be near the Machus Red Fox restaurant on
the morning of the day Hoffa disappeared.
The professor admits this was a perfectly valid reason to include O'Brien on the list
of suspects, but claims that the Feds leaned on him so hard and for so long that they were
eventually unable to admit they were in the wrong.
He says that multiple federal agents know perfectly well who actually killed Hoffa,
but have kept quiet.
According to Goldsmith,
"They just didn't want to take the political heat, admitting they had basically accused
the wrong person - or let linger the accusations against Chuckie for 40 years."
However, while Goldsmith claims he knows the identity of the real killer - a particular
low-level mobster who has already passed away - he has chosen to keep the perpetrator's
identity a secret.
One of the more recent developments in the Jimmy Hoffa case came in 2018, when Fox News
correspondent Eric Shawn wrote an opinion piece where he called the FBI to release their
files on Hoffa, believing this would solve the disappearance, quote, "by the stroke of
a pen".
He quoted a former U.S. Attorney General and an ex-federal prosecutor who both agree that
transparency would be the best way to go.
In an interesting twist, Shawn says that he actually has some revealing information that
indicates the Agency may well be sitting on something.
The Fox News man says that he actually found traces of human blood from a house near the
Machus Red Fox restaurant in 2004 while investigating the Frank Sheeran theory, following a lead
he says that the Irishman himself gave him.
As you can probably guess, the blood didn't exactly crack the case.
The FBI says the blood was definitely human but not Hoffa's, while Shawn claims the DNA
testing was largely inconclusive.
Regardless of what the truth is, here, it certainly appears that someone met a grisly
fate at a house suspiciously close to Hoffa's place of disappearance.
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