It’s Been Forty Years, And We Still Don’t Know Where Jimmy Hoffa Is [Video]
Forty years ago today, former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa went to lunch at the Macchus Red Fox Restaurant near Detroit. He hasn't been seen or heard from since, and his body has never been found.
We've all heard rumors about what happened to Jimmy, but nothing's ever been confirmed.
He told his wife in a phone call shortly before his disappearance that a meeting with some people associated with the Detroit Mafia had not gone off as scheduled, and that was the last he was heard from.
Rumors about what happened to Jimmy have floated around Michigan for years, the most popular I can remember from my teenage years was that he was buried in the concrete supports of the I-696 freeway near the Motor City. Other rumors have existed over the years, including the he was buried in the end zone of the old Giants Stadium in Rutherford, New Jersey (as former New York Giants punter Sean Landeta once joked, "It gives a whole new meaning to kicking into the coffin corner") , or beneath a barn on farmland in Milford (an area that extensively searched in 2013 in an attempt to find the body).
The only thing we know fro certain is that a strand of his hair was found in his friend (and mob associate) Chuckie O'Brien's car. O'Brien has never commented on the finding, and has remained mum about it ever since.
The list of mob-involved enemies that Hoffa had was lengthy, and the two he was to have met that day, Tony (Pro) Provenzano of the New Jersey Mafia and Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone from the Detroit Mafia, both had iron clad alibis. But that doesn't mean they didn't have him killed.
According to the web site PrarieGhosts.com, admitted mob hit man, Ralph Picardo, said in his memoirs that Hoffa’s body was put in a 55-gallon steel drum and carted away in a truck. Picardo said he didn’t know where it was taken but one theory had it that the drum was buried on the grounds of Brother Moscato’s garbage dump, a toxic waste site in Jersey City, New Jersey.
The best guess of Detroit law makers always revolved around a mob hit orchestrated by Salvatore Briguglio.
Federal investigators speculate that two or three coconspirators may have witnessed Briguglio shoot and kill Hoffa. Two of them have been identified as Gabriel Briguglio, Sal’s brother; and Thomas Andretta, another Local 560 business agent. A fourth possible conspirator was Stephen Andretta, Thomas’s brother, who allegedly served as Provenzano’s alibi back in New Jersey.
Briguglio was murdered in 1978.
It was this idea that inspired Danny DeVito, as he imagined it in the ending to bio-pic Hoffa, which starred Jack Nicholson.
Here's how they depicted Hoffa's demise.