The Mafia has been hell on Union leaders who wouldn’t do the right thing. The most famous example of this is Jimmy Hoffa, who was erased from the face of the earth on July 30–31, 1975. He had been the most powerful and corrupt union leader on Earth, King of the Teamsters, and Teamsters were King!
Hoffa was a Detroit kid, hit adulthood just as the stock market crashed and the nation plunged into the Great Depression.
Hoffa was a natural organizer of men. As a teenager, he led a rebellion by workers at a grocery store warehouse where conditions were cruel.
The Teamsters Local 299 hired Hoffa as an organizer in 1932. Hoffa, of course, became a Teamster for life, rising steadily in the ranks in a very public way. He worked his way into America’s heart when he stood up to Bobby Kennedy on live TV during a Senate committee hearing on corrupt unions.
Under Hoffa’s leadership, the Teamsters became the most powerful union in America. Trouble came when the Mafia came for their skim, Hoffa balked. Mob guys moved in, got themselves elected as union officers. Hoffa waved his fist—but not for long.
His disappearance became instantly legendary. Within hours of his last sighting, front-page headlines rocked every daily newspaper in the country: JIMMY HOFFA MISSING. And he remains American culture’s favorite missing person, edging out Judge Crater and D. B. Cooper.
Hoffa was last seen wearing a dark blue sports shirt, dark blue trousers, and sunglasses, standing outside the Machus Red Fox restaurant on Telegraph Road near Maple in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, a northern suburb of Detroit.
Interestingly, no one inside the Machus Red Fox remembered seeing Hoffa on that Wednesday. Management confirmed that he had no reservation at the restaurant at any time that day.
All eyewitnesses who saw him saw him outside. He stood up close to the side of the restaurant and looked as if he were waiting for someone. That was ten a.m. on Wednesday, July 30. At 2:30 p.m. Hoffa called home and said the person he’d expected to meet had not showed up.
And yet he was picked up. And then he was gone.
At six p.m. on Thursday, with Hoffa off the board for more than a day, his family reported him missing. Police found Hoffa’s 1974 Pontiac Grand Ville hardtop in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox. It was empty and unlocked, no signs of a struggle. It stood to reason, though, that Hoffa left his car in the parking lot and got into another car as a passenger, so there may have been duress.
The disappearance wasn’t a total shock. There’d been foreshadowing.
Teamsters Local 299 had endured a series of violent events, a plague of troubles, in the month before Hoffa’s disappearance. The Mob was going to have its way.
Michigan governor William Milliken told a gaggle of pressmen that it was his understanding that Hoffa had intended to meet Detroit Mafia kingpin Anthony Giacalone at the time he was last seen. Who actually picked him up was anyone’s guess.
No one saw Hoffa getting into a car.
*
Since the day Hoffa vanished, there has been a relentless search for his remains, with regular, almost constant rumors as to where they are. The most famous was that Hoffa had been shot to death with a silenced .22 pistol in Michigan, disassembled with a power saw and a meat cleaver, frozen, and mixed into the foundation under the end zone at Giants Stadium closest to section 107 in the Meadowlands, New Jersey.
Nope. I can tell you for a fact that’s not what happened, and that’s not where he is.
Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran claimed that he killed Jimmy Hoffa, shot him twice in the back of the head, cremated his body in an incinerator in the Detroit suburbs.
Nope.
Authorities dug here, dug there, but I can tell you right now, they are never going to find him.
And here’s why: What apparently no one at the restaurant saw was that Hoffa was picked up in a burgundy-colored Buick, not a Mercury Marquis as has been reported. The hit was done in a very imaginative way. They had it set up on a freeway. A moving truck, with the back open, rear ramp dropped so it was just off the ground, moved into position so it was driving in front of the Buick.
Behind the Buick a tow truck moved into place. It was not a regular tow truck, but a sizable truck with a hook on the back.
In one fluid motion, the rear truck pushed the Buick right into the back of the front truck, the ramp was drawn in, and the rear of the front truck slammed shut.
So now, Hoffa, and apparently a driver who wasn’t informed of the plan in its entirety, were trapped in the front truck, which had a device attached that ran from the exhaust pipe to the interior, so that as it drove the rear compartment filled with deadly carbon monoxide. The men in the burgundy-colored Buick were asphyxiated.
It took time, but they had time, as that moving truck drove seven hundred miles, traveling south of Lake Erie, a route that was longer but eliminated the crossing of the Canadian border.
Unobserved, Hoffa’s stiff was moved all the way through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—and finally across the Bayonne Bridge, over the Kill Van Kull, and onto Staten Island.
The truck drove into a chop shop where I knew the guys, a large “body and fender” place.
The Buick was removed from the back of the rigged moving truck, which immediately left and began its return drive to Michigan. The Buick and its contents were crushed into a two-by-four-by-four cube, using a process so hot that any tissue containing DNA was burned away.
The guys who ran the shop were big along the waterfront: ex-pugilist Alex “The Ox” DeBrizzi—aka Al Britton, his boxing name—who was for a time treasurer for the International Longshoremen Association (ILA). He used to keep the ILA treasury in a jar at home.
DeBrizzi was a soldier for his crime family for three administrations: Mangano, Anastasia, and finally Gambino. His big rackets were extortion, gambling, and a side hustle in drugs.
The other guy was Michael D’Alessio, another Gambino guy who’d been running gambling and other rackets on Staten Island for generations. I knew D’Alessio because my friend Tommy Bilotti, who I’d known since we were kids in Little Italy, ran errands for him when he was a kid.
The Staten Island boys didn’t dispose of the cube. They decided to auction it off, and sure enough every well-to-do hood in America wanted to own the “remains” of Jimmy Hoffa, which became American folklore within hours of Hoffa being snatched.
A friend of mine bought the cube. I can’t tell you who he is, because he’s still alive and I don’t want to be found dead. Let’s just say he lives in Florida. He bought the cube and mounted a four-foot-by-six-foot piece of glass on top, to make it into a coffee table, which he keeps in his basement, the smoking room. It looks like an art piece. It’s very interesting.
Sometimes, if you’re visiting him, he’ll say something like, “Let’s go downstairs and have a cigar with Jimmy Hoffa.”
***
