James Riddle Hoffa, one of America’s best-known labor leaders, vanished without a trace in 1975. The son of a coal miner, he had built the International Brotherhood of Teamsters into the largest, richest, and most politically powerful union in the United States. He had also famously made an enemy of Robert F. Kennedy in 1959 when he was called before the Senate sub-committee investigating organized crime, known as the McClellan Rackets Committee, for which Kennedy was the general counsel. Since Hoffa’s union’s pension fund had financed the building of much of the casino economy of Las Vegas, Kennedy relentlessly questioned Hoffa about the union leadership’s involvement with mobsters. Hoffa answered by mocking Kennedy. The enmity between Hoffa and Kennedy intensified in 1961 when his older brother John F. Kennedy became president, and appointed him attorney general. One of Robert Kennedy’s first acts was to create a “Get Hoffa” task force at the Justice Department. He ordered no-holds-barred surveillance and wiretaps on Hoffa and minute scrutiny of all his past activities. As a result, Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering and fraud, and, in 1967, sent to prison. Even after his conviction and jailing, Hoffa was reelected president of the Teamsters. Finally, in 1971, his sentence was commuted by President Richard M. Nixon after Hoffa agreed to officially resign the Teamster presidency. The FBI remained involved in the case, investigating Hoffa’s behind-the-scenes influence to maintain control over the Teamsters, and Hoffa remained under surveillance until his death.
| DATE | VICTIM | LAST SEEN | |
| SEPTEMBER 29, 1913 | Rudolf Diesel inventor | Aboard the Dresden, English Channel, December 26, 1913 | |
| AFTER DECEMBER 26, 1913 |
Ambrose Bierce writer | Chihuahua, Mexico | |
| AUGUST 6, 1930 | Joseph Force Crater Judge | Billy Haas Chophouse, New York | |
| MARCH 26, 1967 | Jim Thompson Silk magnate | Church service at Cameron Highlands, Malaysia | |
| DECEMBER 17, 1967 | Harold Holt Prime Minister of Australia | Cheviot Beach, Australia | |
| NOVEMBER 8, 1974 | Richard John Bingham 7th Earl of Lucan | In car in Sussex, England | |
| JUNE 22, 1983 | Emanuela Orlandi daughter of Vatican Bank executive | Boarding bus to Vatican City, Italy | |
| JULY 31, 1975 | James Hoffa labor leader | Red Fox Restaurant, Bloomfield, Michigan | |
| MARCH 31, 1985 | Vladimir Alexandrov Soviet scientist | Nuclear Winter Conference, Madrid, Spain | |
| AUGUST 13, 2003 | David Sneddon American hiker | Shangri-la, China | |
| MARCH 8, 2007 | Robert Levinson private investigator and former FBI agent | Kish Island, Iran | |
| MARCH 22, 2011 | Rebecca Coriam Disney employee | Lounge of the ship Disney Wonder, off coast of Mexico |
On July 30, 1975, Hoffa went to a limousine-service office in Pontiac, Michigan, where he had told a friend he was meeting with Tony Giacalone, reputedly an organized crime figure in Detroit, and Tony Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamster official. His calendar had the notation “TG—2 p.m.—Red Fox,” which apparently referred to his meeting with Tony Giacalone at the Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Hoffa arrived at the Red Fox shortly before 2:00 p.m., but no one met him, according to witnesses. At 2:15 p.m., Hoffa telephoned his wife from a call box and said “I wonder where the hell Tony is.” He said he was still waiting. He never returned home. When police investigators, called by his wife, went to the restaurant, they found Hoffa’s car but not Hoffa. The subsequent investigation found no signs of a struggle, no weapon, and no witnesses to his departure. Both Tony Giacalone and Tony Provenzano, when questioned, categorically denied that they had had any plan to meet Hoffa. They both also had alibis: Giacalone had spent the afternoon in a steam room at the Southfield Athletic Club on the outskirts of Detroit; Provenzano had been at a local Teamsters meeting in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The FBI launched one of the largest investigations in its history to find out what had happened to Jimmy Hoffa. It lasted longer than a quarter of a century and is summed up in 1,879 pages of FBI files recently released on a CD-ROM. At one point, they checked out every meat-packing plant in the Detroit area looking for frozen body parts, but found none from Hoffa. After a source on the TV show A Current Affair claimed to be a Mafia hitman who witnessed Hoffa’s killing, the FBI spent months investigating and polygraphing him before determining that his story was a fabrication. On various tips, the FBI excavated graves, construction sites, and garbage dumps without ever finding Hoffa’s body—or proof that he was dead. As late as September 28, 2012, the FBI tested soil in a driveway in a suburb of Detroit for DNA traces of Hoffa but found none. No one has ever been charged with Hoffa’s murder.
The consensus theory in law-enforcement circles is that Hoffa was murdered at the behest of Mafia leaders out of concern that he would regain control of the Teamsters. A fifty-six-page report prepared by the FBI in January 1976 states that it is probable that Hoffa was murdered by organized crime figures to prevent him from regaining control over the union’s pension fund. A second theory is that Tony Provenzano had him killed as part of an internal power struggle for control of the Teamsters. Proponents of this theory point out that Hoffa had become a problem for Provenzano, and that there was a history of other enemies of Provenzano disappearing. Three years earlier, a man allegedly involved in counterfeiting money with Provenzano had disappeared. So did Tony Castellito, the treasurer of Provenzano’s local union chapter. Finally, there is the theory that Hoffa was killed by his own adopted son, Charles O’Brien. Through DNA analysis in the 1990s, investigators found a hair that matched Hoffa’s DNA in a Mercury that had been driven by O’Brien. Witnesses told the FBI that O’Brien had strongly opposed Hoffa’s plan to run in the Teamsters election in 1975. But O’Brien had an alibi: at the time of Hoffa’s disappearance witnesses saw him cutting a forty-pound frozen salmon into steaks at the home of a Teamsters official.
My assessment is that the absence of evidence is itself a clue to who abducted Hoffa. The disappearance was so professionally accomplished that a twenty-five-year investigation failed to turn up a body, signs of a struggle, witnesses, or any forensic evidence (DNA evidence could not have been foreseen in 1975), and the obvious suspects also had convenient alibis. This organization indicates that Hoffa’s elimination was a well-planned operation carried out by criminals who were experienced in murder and who also had the influence among Hoffa’s associates to assure that he would go to a prearranged meeting. This persuades me that the FBI was correct in attributing his disappearance to organized crime.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to solve a murder if the corpse vanishes and does not resurface. This is especially true if there are no witnesses. There is no body and no crime scene.