DETROIT –David knows that two days from now, his email will be bombarded with Google Alert notices as his last name is mentioned in media reports across the county. “It happens on July 30 every year,” he said with a smile, shaking his head.
None of the stories will be about him; though a successful attorney, he isn’t in the news and doesn’t seek media attention. No, the fuss will be all about his grandfather, who disappeared on that date in 1975, when David was barely more than a toddler.
For if you guessed David’s last name might be Hoffa, you are right. He is the grandson of Jimmy Hoffa, the figure at the heart of probably the most enduring mystery and biggest unsolved case in American history. On July 30, 1975, Hoffa, the former head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, drove to a restaurant on Telegraph Road in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Township.
A scrawled note he left indicated he thought he was going to meet with two well-known Mafia figures to try to get them to support his attempt to reclaim the union presidency, which he had been forced to give up in 1971, four years after he went to prison for fraud and attempted jury tampering.
Witnesses reported they had seen Hoffa waiting impatiently in the parking lot, and he called his wife to tell her he had apparently been stood up and was about to come home. Then he vanished.
His car was found, unlocked, in the parking lot the next morning. Nobody ever heard a word from him again; nor did one of the most intense investigations in the history of the FBI uncover a smoking gun, a killer, or a body. The two mob figures he thought he was going to meet, Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano and Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone, had airtight alibis.
That was almost half a century ago. Investigators long ago concluded that Hoffa was murdered by crime figures who did not want him to regain control of the nation’s largest and most powerful union, not because he was corrupt, but because he wasn’t their stooge.
The organized crime bosses preferred dealing with Frank Fitzsimmons, the caretaker president Hoffa had installed when he went to prison, and who the mob found far more pliable. Eventually, the government took control of the union, which underwent some dark and humiliating years before Hoffa’s son, a talented lawyer named James P. Hoffa managed to win the presidency in 1998.
The younger Hoffa (who is not a junior, though he is mistakenly often referred to that way) managed to clean up the union, restore its finances, keep the criminals away and end government supervision.
Yet few people know that — or even know much about the elder Hoffa, except that he mysteriously disappeared and supposedly had something to do with crime. “They ask me if he was friends with Al Capone” said David Hoffa. “They think he was around in the 1920s.”
Some even speculate that he might still be alive and in hiding somewhere, which would be extremely unlikely, given that the elder Hoffa would now be 109. But the public is still fascinated, and there is constant speculation about what happened to his body.
Every year, authorities get a tip that Hoffa is buried somewhere, and with great fanfare and the news cameras present, they dig up some field or parking lot, finding nothing.
The late Vince Piersante, who was in charge of investigating organized crime for the Michigan Attorney General’s office in 1975, told me that there was no body. “It was taken to a rendering plant in Wayne they (organized crime) controlled, and disposed of that day,” he said. “Taking it somewhere would have made no sense.”
That made sense to me — but we may soon learn more about the case. The elder Hoffa’s son, who recently retired as general president of the Teamsters’ union, is writing a book tentatively titled Hoffa Is My Name. While the book is primarily about his own remarkable career, he told me he plans to deal openly and honestly with his father, what happened to him, and why. The men were very close.
What he also wants remembered is that the elder Hoffa was also largely responsible for negotiating the Master Freight Agreement and other deals that took hundreds of thousands of truck drivers from poverty to the middle class. “If Jimmy Hoffa told me to lie down in the street in front of traffic, I’d do it, because of all he did for us,” Roy Squires, an elderly truck driver told me years ago. He wasn’t alone.
Yet regardless of what Jim Hoffa reveals, as long as there is no body, fascination with the case is likely to continue. Piersante told me it was once reported that Hoffa was buried in a field, and earth movers, bulldozers and the press converged on the site.
“Well, I determined that there wasn’t anything to it, and I told Frank Kelley, the (Michigan) attorney general to forget it. “Vince, I believe you,” Kelley said. “But Vince, see all those cameras? See the TV news helicopters up there? Vince, dig a hole.”
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
