Jimmy Hoffa
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- See also: James R. Hoffa's son and current Teamster union president James P. Hoffa
James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa (born 14 February, 1913, disappeared 30 July, 1975) was a noted American labor leader who is also well-known in popular culture for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his still-unexplained disappearance and presumed death.
Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana and was the son of a poor coal miner. His father died when he was young and Hoffa could not stay in school. Hoffa moved to Detroit to work in a warehouse. He was a natural leader who was upset at the mistreatment of workers, and in 1933, at the age of twenty, he helped organize his first strike of "swampers", the workers who loaded and unloaded strawberries and other produce on and off delivery trucks.
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Union activities
Hoffa rapidly advanced through the ranks of the Teamsters union, which organized truckers throughout the Midwest and then nationwide through skillful use of 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, creating the image of Teamsters as thugs that remains today. It is said that he built the Teamsters with "two balls and a billy club," and that "he wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty."
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, greatly worrying the United States government and business which saw how devastating a strike of all transportation systems could be 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, then used their power to strike to bring an entire industry either under the Mafia's control or at least vulnerable to blackmail.
Hoffa had a working relation with these racketeers, some of whom had played an important part in getting him elected General President of the Teamsters. Several Teamster chapter presidents were convicted for mob related crimes, and often would continue serving as union leaders, including Antonio 'Tony Pro' Provenzano, in New Jersey. Moe Dalitz and Allen Dorfman bankrolled many mob casinos, hotels, and other construction projects from the Teamsters pension fund.
Another group Hoffa allegedly had close ties to was the Republican Party. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both put pressure on Hoffa, attempting to investigate his activities and disrupt his ever-growing union. The Kennedys especially were sure that Hoffa had pocketed a great deal of union money. The AFL-CIO also disliked Hoffa, having expelled the Teamsters in the 1950s, and aided the Democrats against him.
In the end, Hoffa was not nearly as beholden to the mob as his successor and longtime crony Frank Fitzsimmons, who avoided imprisonment because of death due to 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 play golf (he always won when playing other Teamster officials) and take in other benefits of high office. The deregulation of the trucking industry pushed by Edward Kennedy and others in the late 1970s 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 high standards that Hoffa had achieved.
Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa currently leads the Teamsters. His daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, currently serves as an Associate Circuit Court Judge in St. Louis, Missouri.
Conviction and disappearance
In 1967 he was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In 1971, 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 on 30 July 1975 from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at about 2:30 p.m. He was to meet with two Mafia leaders, Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone of Detroit and Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano of Union City, New Jersey.
His fate is a mystery that continues to this day and there are many guesses as to what happened to him. Among these are that Hoffa was dumped from a boat into Lake St. Clair, Lake Huron, or Lake Erie, is buried in northern Michigan, in the yard of either his house in Bloomfield, or another Detroit area house, under the New Jersey Turnpike, in an abandoned shaft of a coal mine near Pittston, Pennsylvania, somewhere in Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, New York, under the end zone at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, in an unmarked grave on deserted West Sister Island in Lake Erie, or at the PJP Landfill in Jersey City underneath the Pulaski Skyway. Other hypotheses are that Hoffa's corpse was actually put in a cement-making machine and turned into cement, dissolved in an acid tank used to rechrome car bumpers, rendered into fat at a rendering plant, put in a car-crusher at a wrecking yard, or put into a smelter and melted in a local Detroit plant. Conspiracy theorists have even floated the hypothesis that Jimmy Hoffa is buried in singer Elvis Presley's grave, and that the singer faked his death. No theory has been proven and his body has never been found, and on 30 July 1982 he was declared legally dead, and a death certificate was formally issued.
Investigations
Recently, the Discovery Channel show MythBusters arranged to have the locations in Giants Stadium where Hoffa was rumored to be buried scanned with a ground penetrating radar to see if any disturbances were present that would indicate a human body had been buried there. No trace of any human remains was found. Additionally, a FBI search in 2003 at a backyard of a home in Munger Township, Michigan turned up no results. The home is a former place where Frank Sheeran used to frequent.
In 2001, DNA evidence placed Hoffa in the car of longtime Teamster associate Charles O'Brien, who claimed Hoffa was never in his car. However, new police interviews that year failed to produce any indictments.
The backyard of a house in Hampton Township, Michigan was excavated, mainly under a swimming pool, in July of 2003. A convicted killer, Richard Powell, told authorities that a briefcase, containing a syringe used to subdue Hoffa, was buried in the backyard of the house. Nothing was found, but whenever someone finds any bones in southeastern Michigan, he or she might think that the bones are the remains of Hoffa. [1][2]
In 2004, Charles Brandt, a former prosecutor and Chief Deputy Attorney General of Delaware, published a book, I Heard You Paint Houses, in which he recounts a series of confessions by Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran, who claimed to have killed Hoffa. Sheeran, a World War II veteran, Mafia hitman, truck driver, Teamsters official, and close friend of Hoffa's, began contacting Brandt with the intention of assuaging his guilt over his murderous past. Over the course of several years, Sheeran and Brandt had numerous phone calls (recorded by Brandt) during which Sheeran confirmed his role as Hoffa's killer. According to Sheeran, he had been ordered by the Mafia to murder Hoffa in 1975. Claiming to have used his friendship and influence with the former Teamsters leader, he lured him to a bogus mob meeting in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. They then drove to a House in Northwest Detroit where Sheeran shot Hoffa twice and fled, leaving the body behind. To "paint houses" is a euphemistic term for murder, alluding to the splatter of blood on the walls.
On February 14, 2006, Lynda Milito, wife of Louie Milito of the Gambino crime family, announced that her husband killed Jimmy Hoffa and dumped his body near New York's Verrazano Narrows Bridge. She claimed that her husband told her this during an argument in 1988.
In April of 2006 news reports surfaced that famed hitman Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski had confessed to author Philip Carlo that he was part of a group of five men who kidnapped and murdered Hoffa. The details provided by Kuklinski will be part of a book coming out in July 2006 entitled “The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer.” [3]
In modern culture
A semifactual motion picture of Hoffa's life entitled Hoffa was released in 1992 starring Jack Nicholson in the title role and Danny DeVito—also the film's director—as his fictional right-hand man.
In 1983, the television mini-series Blood Feud dramatized the conflict between Hoffa (portrayed by Robert Blake) and Bobby Kennedy (portrayed by Cotter Smith).
The 1978 movie F.I.S.T. was based loosely on the life of Hoffa. It starred Sylvester Stallone as a young Cleveland, Ohio warehouse worker, Johnny Kovak, who rises through the ranks of the fictional Teamster-like "Federation of Interstate Truckers."
The book The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa by Walter Sheridan is a noted guide to the trials in Tennessee of Hoffa, although biased as Mr. Sheridan was one of RFK's lawyers. Another notable work is the 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, by investigative reporter Dan Moldea, detailing Hoffa's rise to power. The book Contract Killer by William Hoffman and Lake Headley goes into great detail about Hoffa's murder.
Because of the notorious circumstances of Hoffa's disappearance, many films and television series (including The Simpsons, Nothing But Trouble, and Bruce Almighty) have used Jimmy Hoffa's body (or the discovery thereof) to humorous effect. Children's sitcom The Adventures Of Pete & Pete, however, had Little Pete tunnelling beneath his lawn and discovering Hoffa's wallet (at which point he exclaimed "Hoffa!", stole a large amount of money from it and tossed it away.)
In the episode "Bad Moon Rising", of The West Wing, during a witch hunt for a White House leak, C.J. Cregg questioned Donna who led her to believe she was the leak, until she admitted "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!" C.J. caught on that she was joking.
The Hip-Hop group Oddjobs, who originally hail from the Twin Cities, make a mention of Hoffa, rapping that "I even threw Jimmy Hoffa in the Minnehaha creek for sayin' Oddjobs was weak" in the song Time Flies on the album Drums.