A lifetime ago — 50 years— James P. Hoffa, attorney for his father’s old Detroit Teamsters Local 299, was vacationing at his summer home outside Traverse City with his wife, Virginia, and their two young sons. Gerald Ford was president. The Tigers were in last place; Bruce Springsteen was about to release his breakthrough album, Born to Run; and Frank Fitzsimmons was president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
On July 31, 1975, the phone next to his bed rang. It was 6 a.m. Life would never be the same.
It was his mother, Josephine, who told him his father, James Riddle Hoffa, hadn’t come home the previous night. She was crying, recalls Hoffa, 84, during a phone interview from his Michigan home with Hour Detroit.
“I thought the worst,” he says — and with good reason. His father, though just 5-foot-5, was a larger-than-life figure with the build of a boxer and a fighter’s share of enemies. He served as Teamsters national president from 1957 to 1971 and refused to relinquish control of the union, even after beginning a 13-year sentence in 1967 at the Lewisburg federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania for jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and wire fraud related to the union’s pension fund.
In December 1971, President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence with the caveat that he refrain from union activity until 1980. But by 1975, Hoffa, 62, was challenging Nixon’s restriction and had vowed to regain the presidency — and to rid the union of mob influence and its access to pension funds for business loans.
As part of his effort to regain control, he was supposed to meet with Detroit mobster Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone and New Jersey Teamster and mobster Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano for lunch on Wednesday, July 30, 1975, at Machus Red Fox on busy Telegraph Road in Bloomfield Township to clear a path for his return. According to an FBI report, they were to discuss “a disagreement over who would control the union.”
The two mobsters, who were related by marriage, stood up Hoffa. In fact, at the time of the lunch, Tony Giacalone was reportedly walking around the Southfield Athletic Club asking people every half hour what time it was, according to a former federal prosecutor.
Sometime that afternoon, James Riddle Hoffa vanished forever — leaving behind his green 1974 Pontiac Grand Ville, which sat overnight in the restaurant parking lot, and a mystery. The question of what happened in or near the parking lot on that day in July has fascinated professional and amateur sleuths ever since. The location of Hoffa’s still-undiscovered remains became a cultural punch line. No surprise that half a century later, Hoffa’s unquiet spirit still haunts the place where he began his rise to power.
“As the 50th anniversary of Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance approaches, the FBI Detroit Field Office remains steadfast in its commitment to pursuing all credible leads,” said Cheyvoryea Gibson, special agent in charge of the FBI Detroit Field Office, in a statement to Hour Detroit. “The case remains an active investigation, and we continue to encourage anyone with information to submit a tip at tips.fbi.gov or call 1-800-CALL-FBI [225-5324].”
The disappearance and presumed murder of Hoffa remains an FBI cold case — a subject of speculation and global intrigue. It has been the basis for countless articles, books, and films. Jack Nicholson portrayed the union boss in the 1992 film Hoffa; Al Pacino did the same in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman in 2019.
Perhaps the irony of his middle name — Riddle — is not lost in his storyline.
“When this happened, I felt that the case would be solved in 1975, 1976,” says James P. Hoffa, who followed in his father’s footsteps, serving as president of the Teamsters from 1998 to 2022. “Now that it’s gone this long, each year I think it diminishes our opportunity to find out what happened.
“My theory is that the Detroit mob was involved in his murder,” he says. “It was part of a plot that he not come back in the labor movement because they were able to control Frank Fitzsimmons and they didn’t want my father coming back to reform the union and make it what it should be.”
Former and current federal law enforcement officials insist they essentially know what happened — and, mostly, who was involved. But no one was ever charged, and most, if not all, of the key suspects are now dead. The debate continues as to where the body was disposed of and whether certain figures — like the late Chuckie O’Brien, Hoffa’s onetime right-hand man and self-described foster son — had a hand in the death.
After 50 years, the FBI has not given up on the case, which Keith Corbett, the former head of the Organized Crime Strike Force for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit, says “has always been an embarrassment to the FBI because they never solved it in the sense of being able to say definitively what happened.”
Paul Abbate, a former head of the FBI’s Detroit office who went on to become the deputy director of the agency until his retirement in January, doesn’t see it as an embarrassment. Ditto for other former agents involved in the case interviewed by Hour Detroit. However, Abbate doesn’t downplay the importance of the case.
“I looked at it as a priority because it’s such a high-profile matter,” he says. “It was unresolved, and the bureau prides itself on bringing resolution to cases — even if it’s years or decades later. We never give up on any case, certainly involving a loss of life.”
Born in Brazil, Indiana, on Valentine’s Day in 1913, James Riddle Hoffa got involved in organized labor during the Depression and rose through the ranks. He became president of Local 299 in Detroit and, in 1957, president of the national union — securing the first nationwide agreement for its members under the National Master Freight Agreement. While he was a hero to many members, the Justice Department was concerned about his cozy relationship with organized crime, which couldn’t obtain traditional bank loans and turned to the union pension fund to bankroll business ventures including Las Vegas casinos.
After serving nearly five years of his 13-year sentence for charges related to the pension fund, in late 1971 he returned home to his wife of 35 years, Josephine. He vowed to retake the presidency and cleanse the union of organized crime’s influence.
The Search Begins…
On July 31, 1975, after getting the phone call from his mother, Hoffa’s son wasted no time, chartering a plane to the Oakland-Pontiac Airport. His wife and children drove home later. “I right away got home and contacted the police, contacted the FBI, filed reports.” He also went to the restaurant parking lot that day to check the trunk of his father’s car — to make sure he wasn’t in it.
From his parents’ summer home, a lakefront cottage on 3 acres in Lake Orion, he frantically called Teamsters officials and whoever else might have a clue as to his father’s whereabouts.
“Whether they knew or not, they basically just blew it off, saying, ‘I don’t know anything about it.’”
One of the people he called was Frank Ragano, his dad’s Florida attorney. On March 3, 1975 — just months before the disappearance — Ragano attended a meeting in Miami with Hoffa to discuss financing a film about Hoffa’s life, according to an FBI report, which noted that Hoffa insisted on having final say on the script.
“He was not helpful,” Hoffa’s son says of Ragano.
Over the decades, tips both plausible and ridiculous have come in from around the country, suggesting Hoffa was buried beneath Giants Stadium in New Jersey, under the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, on farmland in Oakland County. Some of these tips led the FBI to conduct fruitless digs — the most recent in 2022 adjacent to a former landfill in Jersey City, New Jersey. The total cost to taxpayers for the searches is difficult to calculate, but in 2006 alone, the FBI estimated it spent more than $200,000 to excavate Hidden Dreams Farm in Milford Township, 30 miles northwest of Detroit. That property had been owned by Hoffa associate Rolland McMaster.
In 2013 — nearly 40 years after the disappearance — the FBI deployed about 40 employees for three days to a dig in Oakland Township on property previously owned by mobster Jack Tocco. That tip came from 85-year-old ex-mobster Anthony “Tony Z” Zerilli, the highest-ranking Mafia figure to come forward in the probe. Zerilli was in prison at the time of Hoffa’s disappearance, but his father led the Detroit Mafia then. Zerilli himself was a former underboss, and authorities believed he knew enough key players to be credible. He claimed Hoffa was struck with a shovel and buried alive in a shallow grave inside a barn on the property.
Nothing turned up in the barn.
“Certainly we’re disappointed,” said Robert Foley, head of the Detroit FBI at the time.
The FBI has also chased many false leads.
In one case, the FBI attempted to verify the claims of an inmate serving a life sentence for the murder of a woman he had kidnapped. He claimed to know details of the Hoffa murder.
But an FBI file reviewed by Hour Detroit stated that the Detroit office considered him “to be a con artist and manipulator” who had done a “masterful job of researching the known public information concerning the FBI’s official position and theories on the Hoffa case.”
The report went on to note that “on January 30, 1996,” the inmate was “unable to provide a specific location for Hoffa’s body. Detroit considers … [the] information to be false and without credibility.”
The Suspects
Former federal officials and investigative reporters have differing opinions. Some believe the plot involved only the Detroit mob, including brothers Vito “Billy Jack” Giacalone and Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone. Others, like John Anthony — a former FBI agent who served as legal adviser and media coordinator for the Detroit FBI office at the time — believe it was a collaboration between the Detroit and New Jersey mobs. The thought is that Tony Provenzano, a member of the Genovese crime family from New Jersey and former president of Teamsters Local 560 in Union City, New Jersey, didn’t want Hoffa disrupting the mob’s lucrative ties to the union.
About four year’s after Hoffa’s disappearance, Anthony says, the Detroit FBI office sent two agents to visit Provenzano at the Lompoc federal penitentiary in California, where he was serving time for racketeering. Anthony explains that the Drug Enforcement Administration had a criminal case against a member of Provenzano’s family and the FBI was hoping to negotiate a deal in exchange for information about Hoffa.
But during the meeting, Anthony recalls, Provenzano simply told the agents, “He’s dead,” and refused to elaborate. Provenzano died at 71 of a heart attack at a hospital near the prison in December 1988.
Local investigative reporter and author Scott Burnstein, founder of a national website called The Gangster Report, who has organized-crime sources around the country, says he’s not convinced that the New Jersey mob was actually involved in Hoffa’s disappearance.
He believes that while it may have required a consensus from Mafia dons around the country that Hoffa had to go, it was the Detroit mob that did the job, from start to finish, since Hoffa was considered a Detroit asset.
“I’ve heard from multiple people that New Jersey people really didn’t participate,” he says. “But I’m open to the possibility that someone from New Jersey was in the car” that took Hoffa away. “But definitely Billy Giacalone was in the passenger seat and Detroit mobster Anthony ‘Tony Pal’ Palazzolo was in the driver’s seat.”
He believes they drove Hoffa to a house five minutes away down Telegraph Road, where Palazzolo killed him. From there, he says, the body was quickly disposed of — possibly at the Central Sanitation Services incinerator in Hamtramck, which was run by organized-crime figures.
“I believe they probably just shot him in the head, but I’ve also heard from pretty reliable sources that they strangled him,” Burnstein says.
Eric Straus, who worked for the now-defunct Organized Crime Strike Force and is still a federal prosecutor in Detroit, believes it was a Detroit mob job.
“I’ve always thought that the New Jersey angle was absurd and it was really kind of a red herring that no one should have chased. The Detroit Cosa Nostra was an extremely capable crime family. It didn’t need the New Jersey guys coming to Detroit.”
Washington, D.C., investigative reporter Dan Moldea, who published the book The Hoffa Wars in 1978, immediately came to Detroit after Hoffa vanished and started freelancing for NBC News. He later worked on the story for the Detroit Free Press. To this day, he has never given up on cracking the mystery.
He’s convinced that the New Jersey mob had a heavy hand in the disappearance. He says he was told that Tony Provenzano, who didn’t want Hoffa returning to power, had put a contract out on Hoffa and that some of his top lieutenants were involved in the killing.
“I actually believe that Tony Provenzano was present for the murder,” Moldea says, adding that he was told by an FBI informant that Provenzano was at Carl’s Chop House on Grand River in Detroit the night before the disappearance, telling someone, “It’s going to be a great day tomorrow.”
From his reporting, Moldea says, he believes the body was loaded into a 55-gallon drum and shipped by truck and buried adjacent to a former 87-acre landfill in Jersey City, New Jersey — the former PJP Landfill, also known as “Brother Moscato’s Dump.” It was operated by mobster Phil Moscato and Paul Cappola Sr.
Moldea says it was Cappola who, before he died in 2008, told his son Frank that Phil Moscato directed him to bury Hoffa’s body after it arrived. Moldea says that on Sept. 29, 2019, Frank Cappola showed him a small patch of land in which he said the body was buried. In a sworn statement in 2019 to Moldea, Frank Cappola said his father was directed to bury the body at the landfill, but because he believed it was under law enforcement surveillance, he buried it in an adjacent spot.
“My father saw but never handled Hoffa’s dead body,” Cappola said in his statement. He died in 2020.
Moldea says he kept pushing the FBI to dig at the site, and eventually, agents did so in 2022 but came up empty. He insists “the FBI dug in the wrong spot, not the one place we gave them,” and hasn’t given up on persuading agents to return.
But others, like Straus and Burnstein, are skeptical that the body was ever shipped out of Michigan.
“What criminal group would transport this radioactive body through 30 to 40 police jurisdictions to be buried in an unknown place? It defies logic,” Straus says. “The body had to be disposed of quickly. It had to happen in Michigan. The New Jersey theory just doesn’t make any sense.”
James P. Hoffa agrees, saying, “We really don’t believe he was ever transported from Detroit to New Jersey.”
Mention the 2019 Martin Scorsese film The Irishman, and you’re bound to get a strong reaction from Moldea. The movie, which starred Al Pacino as Hoffa and Robert De Niro as gangster and Teamster official Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, is based on the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt. In the book, Sheeran, who was also known as a hit man for the Pennsylvania mob, claims to have killed Hoffa at a home in Detroit. Sheeran died in 2003, a year before the book was published.
Moldea recounts in 2014, five years before the film was released, inviting De Niro to speak at his twice-yearly gathering of authors at the Old Europe, a German restaurant in northwest Washington, D.C. De Niro had bought the movie rights to the Sheeran book.
Later in the evening, after the actor spoke to the nearly 90 authors in attendance, Moldea says he sat down with the actor and told him the Sheeran account was pure fiction.
“I said, ‘You know, you’re the greatest actor who’s ever lived, but you don’t know shit about the Hoffa case.’ He was not thrilled. I was hoping to get along with him, but he was just declaring that Sheeran had the right story.”
Another unanswered question is whether Chuckie O’Brien, a Teamster who was Hoffa’s former right-hand man and identified himself as his foster son, was involved. The FBI initially suspected he may have driven Hoffa away after the aborted lunch date. He was never charged. O’Brien, who was on the outs with Hoffa at the time, gave conflict-
ing accounts of his whereabouts. The FBI in 1976 referred to him as a pathological liar.
“I always thought Chuckie O’Brien was involved in some way or another,” James P. Hoffa says. “He certainly knew what was happening.” He says he confronted O’Brien at the Lake Orion house after his father vanished. “I wanted to know where he was the day of the disappearance. I wanted to know what happened, and he left the house in a hurry. That
was the last time I spoke to him.”
People like Straus; some FBI investigators; Burnstein; and O’Brien’s stepson, Jack Goldsmith — a former Justice Department official and current law professor at Harvard University — believe he had no involvement and was intentionally kept out of the loop. Straus says O’Brien had had a falling-out with Hoffa and the mob simply wouldn’t have trusted someone like O’Brien to play a role and keep his mouth shut.
In fact, Goldsmith wrote a book, In Hoffa’s Shadow, laying out a convincing case, including a timeline of that day, as to why his step-father had no role in the death. Still, despite all his efforts, Goldsmith was unable to convince the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit to write a letter clearing O’Brien’s name before O’Brien died in 2020 at age 86.
Former FBI agent Anthony says that even if no one has been charged in the Hoffa murder, the massive probe put a big dent into crime: “As a result of the FBI’s investigative efforts, there were over 1,000 mob guys who were indicted and convicted. The investigation put a lot of heat on organized crime.”
James P. Hoffa says the 50th anniversary is a time to celebrate the good his father did for American workers.
Still, he hasn’t totally given up on the case.
“We are ever vigilant to what goes on,” Hoffa says about himself and his sister, Barbara Ann Crancer, a retired Missouri judge and attorney. “We read all the articles. We do have periodic contact with the FBI. I don’t want to say any more than that.”
Allan Lengel is the editor for Deadline Detroit. He previously worked as a reporter for The Washington Post and The Detroit News and taught journalism at the University of Maryland.
This story originally appeared in the July 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
**Correction: A previous version of this story misstated that Paul Abbate resigned from the FBI in January — he retired, and the story was updated on July 8 to reflect that.
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