Jimmy Hoffa

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Jimmy Hoffa

Born:	February 14, 1913 Brazil, Indiana, USA
Died:	Unknown (disappeared July 30, 1975); Body never found.
Occupation:	Trade union leader

James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa (February 14, 1913, disappeared July 30, 1975, date of death unknown) was an American labor leader. As the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hoffa wielded considerable influence. He is also well-known in popular culture for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his unexplained disappearance and presumed death.

[edit] Early life

Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana, the son of a poor coal miner. His father died when he was young and Hoffa could not stay in school. Hoffa moved to Lake Orion, Michigan to work in a warehouse. He developed a reputation as a tough street fighter who always stood up for his fellow workers against management. Because of this, Hoffa was fired from his warehouse job but later hired as an organizer for Local 299 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). He and other IBT organizers fought with management in their organizing efforts in the Detroit, Michigan, area.

Hoffa used organized crime connections to shake down an association of small grocery stores. This led to his first criminal conviction, for which he paid a fine. After he rose to a leadership position in Local 299, Hoffa continued to work with organized crime in Detroit, using the threat of labor trouble to induce business to use a mobster controlled clothier (Friedman and Schwarz, 1988).

He was a natural leader who was upset at the mistreatment of workers. In 1933, age 20, he helped organize his first strike of "swampers", the workers who loaded and unloaded strawberries and other produce on and off delivery trucks.

[edit] Union activities

The Teamsters union organized truckers, first throughout the Midwest and then nationwide. It skillfully used quickie strikes, secondary boycotts and other means of leveraging union strength at one company to organize workers and win contract demands at others. The union also used less lawful means to bring some employers into line.

Hoffa took over the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, when his predecessor, Dave Beck, was convicted on bribery charges and imprisoned. Hoffa worked tirelessly to expand the union and in 1964 succeeded in bringing virtually all North American over-the-road truck drivers under a single national master freight agreement. Hoffa then pushed to try to bring the airlines and other transport employees into the union. This was of great concern to the United States bourgeoisie as a strike involving all transport systems would be devastating for the national economy.

For all the benefits that Hoffa and some Teamsters delivered for over-the-road drivers, other Teamsters locals did little more than sign sweetheart deals that made union officers rich and left workers poor. In industries such as garment delivery, organized crime took over locals, and then used their power to strike, bringing the entire industry either under the Mafia's control or at least vulnerable to blackmail.

Hoffa had a working relationship with these racketeers, some of whom had played an important part in his election as general president of the Teamsters. Several Teamster chapter presidents were convicted for mob-related crimes but often would continue serving as union leaders, such as Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano in New Jersey. Cleveland Corn-Sugar War survivor Moe Dalitz and Allen Dorfman bankrolled many mob casinos, hotels and other construction projects from the Teamsters pension fund.

President John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson both put pressure on Hoffa through John's brother Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General, attempting to investigate his activities and disrupt his ever-growing union. The Kennedys in particular were sure that Hoffa had pocketed a great deal of union money. Having expelled the Teamsters in the 1950s, the AFL-CIO also disliked Hoffa and aided the Democrats in their investigations.

Ultimately, Hoffa was not nearly as beholden to the Mob as to his successor and longtime crony Frank Fitzsimmons, who would have been jailed if he had not died from cancer. While Hoffa was a brilliant tactician who knew how to play one employer off against another and who used the union's power to rationalize the industry by driving out weaker employers, "Fitz" was content to gather the other benefits of high office. The deregulation of the trucking industry pushed by Edward Kennedy and others during Fitzsimmons' tenure eventually destroyed much of what Hoffa had won for his members under the National Master Freight Agreement by making it much harder to maintain the standards Hoffa had achieved.

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.

[edit] Conviction and disappearance

In 1964, Hoffa was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror and jailed for 15 years. On December 23, 1971,[1], however, he was released when President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to time served on the condition he not participate in union activities for 10 years. Hoffa was planning to sue to invalidate that restriction in order to reassert his power over the Teamsters when he disappeared at about 2:30 pm on July 30, 1975, from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. He had been due to meet two Mafia leaders, Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone from Detroit and Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano from Union City, New Jersey and New York City.

His fate is a mystery that continues to this day. Among the theories are:

• Hoffa's assassination was allegedly ordered at Brutico's, an Italian restaurant in Old Forge, PA.

• Former Mafioso Bill Bonanno claimed in his book, Bound by Honor, that Hoffa was shot and put in the trunk of a car that was then run through a car compactor.

• Convicted mob hitman Donald Frankos, alias "Tony the Greek," has claimed that, while on furlough from prison (where he was incarcerated for a previous murder), he committed numerous hits, including that of Hoffa. Frankos claims that Hoffa was murdered in a house belonging to Detroit mobster Anthony Giacolone by a team consisting of Frankos and Westies gangster Jimmy Coonan, and that the body was subsequently buried in the foundations of Giants Stadium by another hitman, Joe "Mad Dog" Sullivan.

• Mob hitman Richard Kuklinski also claimed in one of his televised interviews that Hoffa was now a "car bumper". He claims that Hoffa was stabbed in the back of the head and placed in a steel barrel. The barrel was buried, but dug up due to the possibility of its discovery by police. According to Kuklinski, the barrel — with Hoffa's body still in it — was compacted and melted down, to become part of a shipment of recycled steel sold to a Japanese car manufacturer.

• Hoffa's body was buried in concrete in or near the Straits of Mackinac bridge.

• Hoffa's body was buried in what is now Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, New Jersey. (several sites in the stadium were tested for an episode of Mythbusters.)

None of these theories have been proven and his body has never been found. Hoffa was declared legally dead and a death certificate issued on 30 July, 1982, seven years after his disappearance. Rumors of sightings have persisted for years.

[edit] Investigations

DNA evidence examined in 2001 placed Hoffa in the car of longtime Teamster associate Charles O'Brien, despite O'Brien's claims Hoffa had never been in his car. Police interviews later that year failed to produce any indictments.

In July 2003, after the 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, another backyard was examined and excavated. Again, nothing was found [2] [3].

[edit] Frank Sheeran

In 2003, the FBI searched the backyard of a home in Hampton Township, Michigan formerly frequented by Frank Sheeran, Second World War veteran, Mafia hitman, truck driver, Teamsters official and close friend of Hoffa. 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 splatter of blood on walls, and "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.

[edit] Events since February 14, 2006

On February 14, 2006, Lynda Milito, wife of Gambino crime family member Louie Milito, claimed that her husband had told her during an argument in 1988 that he had killed Hoffa and dumped his body near Staten Island's Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City.

FBI Agents digging for Hoffa's remains in a open field — which is part of a farmhouse in Milford Township, Michigan on May 17, 2006. As reported by ABC station WXYZ-TV in Detroit.

In April 2006, news reports surfaced that hitman Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski had confessed to author Philip Carlo that he was part of a group of five men who had kidnapped and murdered Hoffa. The claim's credibility is questionable, as Kuklinski has become somewhat notorious for repeatedly claiming to have killed people — including Roy DeMeo — that concrete evidence has proved he could not have killed. The story forms part of the book The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, which was released on July 1, 2006.

On May 17, 2006, acting on a tip, the FBI began digging for Hoffa's remains outside of a barn on what is now the Hidden Dreams Farm (satellite photo) in Milford Township, Michigan where they surveyed the land and began to dig up parts of the 85-acre parcel, according to federal officials. More than 40 agents sectioned off a piece of the property where they believed Hoffa's bones might be. Federal agents would not say who tipped them off, but said they received information on a group of people who met on the land 30 years ago. The FBI has made contact with Hoffa's daughter, but no other information has been released. [4] It is not known if the FBI has found anything, although images taken from a helicopter appeared to show agents digging something out of the ground. The investigation team included forensic experts from the bureau's Washington laboratory and anthropologists, archaeologists, engineers and architects.

On May 18, 2006, the Detroit Free Press reported that the Hoffa search was prompted by information supplied by Donovan Wells, 75, a prisoner at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, KY. The newspaper said Wells, who was jailed for 10 years in January 2004 for using his Detroit-area trucking company and drivers to ship large quantities of marijuana from Texas to Detroit from 1998-2001, was trying to parlay his knowledge about Hoffa's disappearance to get out of prison early. On May 20, 2006, the Free Press, quoting anonymous sources, said one of Wells's lawyers had threatened to go to the media during the previous year unless the US Attorney's Office acted on Wells's information and followed through on a pledge to seek his release from prison. The next day, the newspaper quoted Wells's lawyer from a 1976 criminal case, James Elsman of Birmingham, who said the FBI in 1976 had ignored Wells's offer to tell them where Hoffa was buried. The lawyer said the FBI ignored him again on May 18, after he learned that the FBI was digging in Milford Township and called the bureau to offer the information. Outraged, Elsman said he then offered the information to the Bloomfield Township Police Department. On May 22, an FBI agent and township police detective visited Elsman's office, but Elsman declined to offer much information, saying he first wanted them to provide him with a signed release from Wells. Elsman also offered to visit the horse farm to help agents pinpoint where to dig. The FBI didn't take him up on his offer.

On May 24, 2006, the FBI removed a large barn on the farm to look under it for Hoffa.

On May 30, 2006 the FBI ended the search for Hoffa's body without any remains found at the Hidden Dreams Farm.

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 report, which the FBI has called the definitive account of what agents believe happened to Hoffa, can be found online.

In November of 2006 KLAS-TV Channel 8 Las Vegas interviewed author Charles Brandt about the latest news regarding 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. ^[1]

[edit] Hoffa in popular culture

[edit] Films

• The 1978 movie F.I.S.T., starring Sylvester Stallone as warehouse worker Johnny Kovak rising through the ranks of the fictional Teamster-like "Federation of Interstate Truckers", is loosely based on Hoffa's life.
• In the 1980 film Nine to Five, a woman named Violet is talking of tying a concrete block to her boss's corpse and pitching him off the end of the pier. Her co-worker says, "You're crazy, Violet! They always find it!". Violet replies by saying "Crazy am I? They never found Jimmy Hoffa!".
• In the 1986 film Armed and Dangerous, Frank Dooley (John Candy) and Norman Kane (Eugene Levy) go to work for a corrupt labor union. Upon realizing this, Dooley remarks of the union leaders to Kane, "I bet you any one these guys could tell you where Jimmy Hoffa's body is buried."
• In the 1990 film Ghost there is a scene where Patrick Swayze makes a comment to one of the other characters: "They are gonna bury you right next to Jimmy Hoffa!"
• In the 1991 movie, Nothing But Trouble, a small town's two police officers and reeve surreptitiously capture and execute out-of-towners for misdemeanors. During an escape attempt, the protagonists discover a room with hundreds of drivers licenses posted on the walls, Jimmy Hoffa's among them.
• The 1991 movie Point Break has a one-liner in which a grizzled veteran asks his too-eager partner, while processing a car at a crime scene, "Are you through, Mr Wizard? Let me know if you find Jimmy Hoffa under the seat while you're at it!"
• In 1992, the semi-factual motion picture Hoffa was released, starring Jack Nicholson in the title role and Danny DeVito (also the film's director) as Hoffa's fictional right-hand man.
• Ace Ventura: Pet Detective from 1994, contains a scene where Ace seeks help from a computer geek. The computer geek is sending erroneous coordinates to some Norwegian whalers and states "...they'll find Jimmy Hoffa before they find any humpback whales!".
• Naked Gun 33 1/3 1994, contains a scene where Frank Drebin is searching for an address in a file cabinet. One of the files is labeled location of Jimmy Hoffa's body.
• In Nutty Professor, released in 1996, professor Klump and his date go to a standup comedy show. Here they meet an insult comedian who, after seeing the obese professor claims "...they finally found where they hid Jimmy Hoffa" while referring to the professor's back side.
• In the 1997 film Titanic, before the drawing of Rose is found on the Kyldysh, and Brock Lovett is talking to some guy, possibly his boss, about the location of Cal Hockley's safe, his friend says, "Jimmy Hoffa's briefcase?"
• In the 2003 movie Bruce Almighty, a police dog uncovers the body of Jimmy Hoffa along with his birth certificate and dental records, buried near a police training area in Buffalo, NY.

[edit] Television

• The 1983 TV mini-series Blood Feud dramatized the conflict between Hoffa (portrayed by Robert Blake) and Robert F. Kennedy (portrayed by Cotter Smith). (This conflict in real life reached levels of almost childish absurdity. Hoffa and Kennedy once ran into one another at a function both were attending, whereupon they engaged in an arm-wrestling contest. Hoffa claimed to have won.)
• During a witch hunt for a White House leak in the The West Wing episode Bad Moon Rising, Donna Moss leads C.J. Cregg to believe she is the source of the leak until she admits, jokingly, that "I'm a madwoman, CJ; and it doesn't stop with the leak... Call the authorities. Send them to my parents' house in Madison... They'll find the Lindbergh baby in the basement... Also some post-its reminding me where I put Jimmy Hoffa... I framed Roger Rabbit!".
• The Simpsons parodied the myth that Hoffa was buried in a football stadium in the episode Last Exit to Springfield. Mr. Burns and Smithers comment on the strange disappearance of the power plant union president. Just then, in a brief cut-away scene, a football player is seen running to catch a ball, but he suddenly trips over a mound of dirt in the shape of a body.
• Children's sitcom The Adventures of Pete & Pete included a scene where Little Pete tunneled beneath his lawn and discovered Hoffa's wallet stuffed with money (which he quickly appropriated).
• A doctor operating on Tony Soprano in Episode 4 of Season 6 of The Sopranos feigned shock during the surgery, saying, "Oh my God... I just found Jimmy Hoffa."
• The TV series MythBusters featured an episode where ground penetrating radar was used to search for Jimmy Hoffa's body at the Giants stadium.
• On the show I Love the 80's, one of the scenes shows the opening of Al Capone's Secret Vault. Hal Sparks jokes they were going to find Jimmy Hoffa in an oil drum.
• In episode #143 "I Coulda Been a Defendant" (1997) of the popular TV series Due South, Lt. Harding Welsh tells Stanley Kowalski, the second Ray Vecchio, to let a good samaritan go who had been taken in for questioning and, when Ray Vecchio insists on ID-ing the guy, replies: "All right, if he's Jimmy Hoffa, keep him. Anybody else, set him free."
• In a special about Robert F. Kennedy on the Discovery Channel, a reporter claims he interviewed a mobster who claimed Hoffa's body was crushed, and then put into a smelter.
• In episode 3x08 of Veronica Mars, "Lord of the Pis", Veronica interrogates a flakey sorority girl who gets frustrated with the line of questioning and comments, "God, what's with all the questions? What's next? You want to know where I buried Jimmy Hoffman?" Presumably meaning Jimmy Hoffa.
• A 2006 episode of CSI: NY (2x20 "Run Silent, Run Deep") referenced the myth that Hoffa was buried in the Meadowlands. The circumstances of the killing were not similar to Hoffa's, apart from the body being discovered in the northwest end zone of Giants Stadium. The Meadowlands scenes were shot at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
• An episode of the 80's sitcom The Golden Girls had Sophia Petrillo, who throughout the shows run was constantly hinting that her family had Mob connections, accidentally let slip that she knew what had happened to Hoffa.
• In episode 6 of Tilt (2005), a guy answers to the question what happened to Billy Landry who previously owned a casino but later supposedly disappeared: "Then? Landry is the new Jimmy Hoffa!"
• In the 4th episode of the animated series Rocko's Modern Life (1993), when Rocko has to go the the DMV to get his car back, he is forced to wait in the longest of many lines. The sign above an empty line says, "Jimmy Hoffa".

[edit] Music

• The hip-hop group Oddjobs mention Hoffa, rapping in Time Flies on their album Drums that "I even threw Jimmy Hoffa in the Minnehaha creek for sayin' Oddjobs was weak."
• In his verse during the Notorious B.I.G.'s song Last Day, Jadakiss raps "...Lox and Poppa, turning niggaz into Jim Hoffa...".
• In the song Buzz, Royce Da 5'9" raps: "Silent, you're better off finding Hoffa. I've lost my mind. Sick man brought my nine".
• The Hip-Hop Artist Jay-Z mentions Hoffa on His album "The Black Album" on the song "Allure" where he says: " I'm like a Russian mobster, drinking distilled Vodka; until i'm under the field with Hoffa; it's real"
• Aimee Mann has a song Jimmy Hoffa Jokes.
• In Lords of the Underground's song "Chief Rocka" there is a line stating "If you got beef then you can live with Jimmy Hoffa".
• Snoop Dogg in the song "Bring it on" raps: "Old 'Blue Eyes,' Dogg Sinatra Make a nigga disappear like Jimmy Hoffa".
• The rock band Clutch in the song "Pulaski Skyway" Neil Fallon sings: "Jimmy Hoffa in the Meadowlands, weighing down that union, man./So grab his ankles, stevedores,/Oh man, how those Jets do roar."
• The band Sloppy Meateaters has a song named "Run Mary Run" In which the lead singer says "Three days, 'till my first Christmas. What's my present? My poppa pulled a Jimmy Hoffa."
• Andre Nickatina raps about Hoffa in his rap song "All Star Chuck Taylors" saying "I disappear like Jimmy Hoffa."
• Company Flow's El-P raps :"I'll do the simple shit, strike harder than Hoffa" in "Vital Nerve".
• A capella duo Paul and Storm wrote a song entitled "other places Jimmy Hoffa isn't"

[edit] Books

• Walter Sheridan's book The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa is noted as an account of Hoffa's trials in Tennessee. It is usually considered to be biased, however, as Sheridan was a lawyer working for Robert Kennedy.
• Two other books are The Hoffa Wars by investigative reporter Dan Moldea, which details Hoffa's rise to power (see below); and Contract Killer by William Hoffman and Lake Headley, which attempts to examine Hoffa's murder in great detail.
• Jimmy Hoffa is also a supporting character in the James Ellroy novel American Tabloid, where it is suggested that Jimmy enjoyed boating trips wherein he and friends would chum the waters, shoot sharks with Thompson submachine guns and/or beat sharks to death with nail studded baseball bats. He also appears as a character in Ellroy's follow-up novel The Cold Six Thousand.

[edit] Other

• In the massive online role playing game MafiaLife, Jimmy Hoffa's body can be found while doing 'favors' on one of the 'Accumulations' pages.
• In the computer game, World of Warcraft, a character fishing in the sewers of the Undercity has a chance of picking up an "Old Teamster's Skull", with the description of "Looks like someone didn't like this guy.", making reference to Jimmy Hoffa.
• Hoffa is something of a recurring gag in the comic strip Piranha Club by Bud Grace. In one storyline, the lead character, Ernie, finds the frozen corpse of Jimmy Hoffa when he is stranded in Tibet. In another, an Amazon tribe kidnaps Sid's pet piranha, and replaces him with Jimmy Hoffa's shrunken head. Ernie and Arnold also finds Jimmy Hoffa frozen inside a glacier while scaling Mount Bayonne.
• In the game Grand Theft Auto: III, the mission "Dead Skunk in The Trunk" is rumored to be based on Hoffa's death / disposal.
• In the game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a dead character is laying out of a bridge pillar, an allusion to Jimmy Hoffa's death.
• In another video game, Destroy All Humans!, a rather humorous mention of Hoffa can be heard if a player scans a Union worker's mind.
• Also, in the Microsoft game Close Combat III: Eastern Front, the player can right click on the terrain to receive relative information. In one of the Stalingrad "Red October" factory maps, there are many gasoline drums, one of which is listed as containing "Hoffa's Body".
• Also in the N64 game Gex 64: Enter The Gecko, sometimes in the Toonland level (Second one), Gex will say "Phone call for Mr. Hoffa."
• In Jim Bakker's heyday, it was popularly joked if one scraped off his wife Tammy Faye's makeup, one would find Jimmy Hoffa.
• Buffalo Sabres play-by-play announcer Rick Jeanneret alluded to the mystery of Hoffa's disappearance following Dave Hannan's game-winning goal in the fourth overtime of Game 6 of the 1994 Eastern Conference Quarterfinals (the longest game in Sabres history) against the New Jersey Devils, which sent the series to a Game Seven in New Jersey: His excited call: "This series is going back to where Jimmy Hoffa is! Back to the Meadowlands in New Jersey!" is one of his most notable.

[edit] See also

• List of people who have disappeared
• Teamsters Union
• Death in absentia
• the Mafia in America
• Hoffa (1992 film loosely based on Hoffa's life)

[edit] Bibliography

• Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran and the inside story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the last ride of Jimmy Hoffa, Steerforth Press, Hanover (NH, USA) 2004 (ISBN 1-58642-077-1).
• Dan E. Moldea, The Hoffa Wars, Charter Books, New York: 1978 (ISBN 0-441-34010-5).

[edit] Reference

1. ^ George Knapp (2006-11-16). The Hoffa Files: The Missing Body of Jimmy Hoffa. KLAS TV, Las Vegas. Retrieved on 2006-12-12.

[edit] External links

• Satellite view of the Hidden Dreams Farm.

• Latest Hoffa information Regarding the disposal of Hoffa's body. 12-04-06