Jimmy Hoffa Where are You?

I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. Jimmy Hoffa

That's what unions do. They can get money, they can get support, they can get manpower. James R. Hoffa

This is just the beginning of a new era for America's workers. James R. Hoffa

We must have more union members in this country to fight the political and business forces that are undermining workers in this country. The AFL-CIO has chosen the opposite approach by planning to throw even more money at politicians. James R. Hoffa

We vote - if the public votes 50 percent, we vote 70 percent. So we have a bigger impact with our numbers, and the organization and the manpower we can bring to a race. James R. Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa was born on February 14, 1913. This past February was his 97th birthday. He disappeared in 1975 at age 62. That’s the age that several people think of retiring, but not Jimmy Hoffa. The mystery surrounds the day he disappeared July 30, 1975. Working backwards, in September 2001, news reports claimed that DNA tests by the FBI tied Hoffa to a car driven by his associate Charles O'Brien the day Hoffa disappeared. It’s 2010 and no news yet. Hoffa’s body was never found, and in July 30, 1982 he was declared legally dead.

When Hoffa failed to return home on July 30, 1975, his wife called police to declare him missing. He told his wife he’d be back around 4 PM. From the conversation Hoffa had with his wife, he expected to have a friendly lunch with his chum Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone, a Detroit mafia leader, who died in 2001 of kidney failure at age 82, and Anthony Provenzano from Union City, New Jersey and New York City, chief of a Teamsters local in New Jersey who died several years ago after being convicted in another murder case among others. Anthony Giacalone was married to Provenzano's cousin. Hoffa knew Provenzano from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, penitentiary where he served time for mail fraud and both were inmates. Hoffa was released early from a prison by President Richard Nixon on condition that he not seeks high union office.

By all accounts and alibis, the two men never showed. Hoffa called his wife at 2:30 PM from the restaurant parking lot, asking if Tony Jack called, but he had not. Hoffa next called his close friend Louis Linteau, owner of an airport limousine service. "Where the hell's Giacalone?" he snarled. "He stood me up, Hoffa was quoted." No idea what Linteau said. By this time it was approximately 2:45 PM, the last time anyone admits to seeing Hoffa.

According to accounts, Hoffa was dressed in blue pants and a blue pullover shirt. Hoffa left his two-story, cottage-style summer home on Big Square Lake, 40 miles north of Detroit, at 1:15 PM. His car, a colossal, green, two-door 1974 Pontiac, was stilled parked at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit. Apparently, he parked his car at the north end of the Red Fox lot, where he waited for his lunch date. According to the Red Fox's manager, Hoffa never entered the restaurant on July 30. Question did he really drive his car and was he alone? There were accounts that Jimmy Hoffa never drove. What’s true?

This was the era before cell phones, so Hoffa made his calls from a pay phone near a hardware store. According to reports, soon after Hoffa had called home, a maroon 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham pulled out of the restaurant parking lot and nearly hit a delivery truck. The truck driver pulled up next to the car and stated he instantaneously recognized Jimmy Hoffa sitting in the backseat behind the car's driver. The truck driver also become aware of a long object covered with a gray blanket on the seat between Hoffa and another passenger. The truck driver thought it was a shotgun or a rifle. He didn't get a good look at anyone else in the car. There were at least two people besides Hoffa, but no mention of a passenger in the front seat next to the driver. The 2001 DNA evidence is noteworthy because it in fact puts Hoffa in a car that police had suspected -- but couldn't prove -- was used in Hoffa's disappearance.

Detectives were able to trace the maroon Mercury to its owner, Joe Giacalone, the son of gangster Anthony Giacalone. Joe Giacalone asserted that he had lent the car to a friend that day, a teamster named Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien. O’Brien was very close to the Hoffa family and actually lived with the Hoffas in the past. The car was found and O'Brien's fingerprints were found on a soda bottle and a piece of paper recovered from the car. Detectives felt that Jimmy Hoffa would have felt relaxed enough with O'Brien, whom he thought of as a foster son, to get into the Mercury. It was reported in 2001 by CNN that a FBI official in Washington new DNA technology matched a hair from Hoffa with one found in a car driven by a one-time longtime friend Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien on the day the labor leader was last seen. The DNA story was reported in Detroit News. In 2001 O’Brien was reported to be living in Memphis, Tennessee.

Why that restaurant? Hoffa was no outsider to the Red Fox. He enjoyed its food and atmosphere so much that the restaurant hosted the wedding reception for his son, James Hoffa Jr., at the time a Teamsters lawyer. The 270-seat Machus Red Fox catered to a wealthy clientele, serving pompous surf-and-turf dishes–baked Boston scrod, rack of lamb a la Leopold, veal scaloppine a la Française. The restaurant is located next door to a shopping center on busy Telegraph Rd. The Red Fox, open since December 1965, functioned as the mother ship in the expanding empire of restaurateur/baker Harris O. Machus. Nearby to the Red Fox was a Machus-owned pastry shop. At the time, in another place in the Detroit metro area he owned: 160 by Machus, Machus Adams Square, Mr. Mac's Stable, the Paddock, Machus Sly Fox and two bakeries. When the property management company that owns the real estate under the Red Fox refused to renew the restaurant's lease, it collapsed in February 1996, replaced by an outpost of a flourishing Italian chain.

His name was James Riddle Hoffa, and he was born February 14, 1913 in Brazil, Indiana on St. Valentine's Day. It’s unspecified what date he died but he disappeared July 30, 1975 that’s his legal date of death. Hoffa’s body never been found, but there are lots of ideas where in the world Jimmy Hoffa may be.

Here are some theories:
Mixed in concrete and now part of the Giant's Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Giants Stadium opened on October 10, 1976. Construction began in 1972; the stadium was demolished between February 4 – August 10, 2010. Hoffa’s body was not discovered/found.

Dumped into the Au Sable River in Michigan in 30 feet of water, between two dams. The Au Sable has a drainage basin of 1,932 square miles and an average flow of 1,100 ft at its mouth. The river drops 650 feet from its source at the junction of Kolka and Bradford Creeks. Body would have flowed down stream. The area is popular for fishing. Someone would have discovered it.

Buried under the helicopter pad at the Sheraton Savannah Resort Hotel At 71 years of age in 1998 the hotel on Wilmington Island played host to its first visitors since it closed June 26, 1994. The hotel was once owned by the Teamsters. The urban legend that's been going around for years is that Jimmy Hoffa is buried under the helicopter pad. Alas the problem is the helicopter pad was built six years after Hoffa disappeared.

The remaining theories are not verified:

• Stuffed into a 50 gallon oil drum, and taken on a Gateway Transportation truck to the Gulf of Mexico.
• Ground up into little pieces and dumped into a Florida swamp.
• Disposed of in the Central Waste Management trash incinerator owned by Peter Vitale and Raffael Quasarano. Quasarano in Hamtramck, East Detroit, which was destroyed by fire in 1978.
• Buried at the bottom of a swimming pool behind a mansion in Bloomfield Hills near Turtle Lake.
• Buried in a field in Waterford Township.
• Buried under a public works garage in Cadillac, Michigan
• Run through a mob operated fat-rendering plant that was subsequently burned down.
• Crushed in a steel compactor for junk cars at Central Sanitation Services, a company owned by Raffaele
• Ironically, part of the site now occupied by the Wayne County Jail.
• Dumped into a 100 acre gravel pit, owned by his brother William, near Highland. Infra-red photos were taken of the site from a military plane. How gross to be buried on land owned by your brother?