What Really Happened to Jimmy Hoffa

And why do we still care?

TROY, MI – The old landline rang shrilly at six in the morning in his wife’s family cabin in Traverse City, where the young lawyer, his wife Ginger, and their two little boys were fast asleep.

He grabbed the receiver and shook himself awake. It was his mother, and she was crying almost hysterically. “Your father didn’t come home last night,” he said. Jim Hoffa was suddenly fully awake.

“I immediately thought he was dead,” he told me.

That was exactly half a century ago this month. James Riddle Hoffa, one of the most famous and controversial labor leaders in American history, was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a drinker, a gambler or a carouser. But he had plenty of enemies.

He had vanished the afternoon before, after leaving for a meeting and telling his wife Josephine he’d be back at their Lake Orion home and throw some steaks on the barbecue.

He was never heard from again; his body never found.

What did follow was one of the most intense investigations in American history, and probably our biggest murder mystery, at least in popular mythology. Most people think the “Mafia” or some organized crime figures killed Hoffa, even if they don’t know why.

But there’s an endless fascination with what happened to Hoffa’s body. Was it buried under the Giants’ old football stadium in New Jersey? Sunk into the ocean in a cement-filled drum?

Buried under a barn? Nearly every year some law enforcement agency gets a tip they deem credible enough to check out, and they dig a hole at taxpayer expense. But they never find anything.

They are almost certain to keep digging. But I don’t believe they ever will find anything, and neither does Jim Hoffa, now retired after leading the International Brotherhood of Teamsters for 23 years, nearly twice as long as his father had, and likely saving the union.

They won’t find him because the body was most likely completely destroyed before his family even knew he was missing. “I believe he was cremated or incinerated,” his only son told me in 2022.

“Something like that. They had the ability (the mob) had the ability to do that; they had an incinerator in Hamtramck, they had rendering companies. My theory is that they lured him into a house. He walks in, thinks he’s going to meet somebody, and …”

He was murdered. Murdered to stop him fighting to regain control of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Many years ago, the late Vince Piersante, leader of a task force fighting organized crime in the Michigan attorney general’s office, told me the reason the mobsters wanted him dead was simple: They preferred Frank Fitzsimmons, who Hoffa had installed in charge of the union when he went to federal prison for various offenses in 1967.

Hoffa sometimes cooperated with the mob but sometimes said no, while Fitzsimmons was a pliant stooge for organized crime.

Hoffa was given early release from prison in 1971, under an agreement that he could not take part in union activities until 1980, but he immediately began fighting to have that overturned.

His son worried about that, and who Jimmy Hoffa was talking with. He tried to talk his father out of trying to get back in power. “I said, you’ve got money, you’ve got the grandkids, don’t do it.”

But he couldn’t help himself. “He was so driven to get back.” July 30, 1975 not only ended Jimmy Hoffa’s life, it radically transformed that of his son. Before the disappearance, Jim Hoffa said he had no thought of following him into union leadership.

But then, the world changed. The younger Hoffa staged a long and ultimately successful fight to regain control of the union. But once he did in 1998, he cleaned out the remaining corruption.

“We got the government and the mob out of the union, hopefully forever,” he said. Because of past scandals, the union was still under federal supervision when the younger Hoffa was finally elected president for a partial term in 1998.

That soon ended, and he went on to be reelected four times, retiring at last when he was 80. Today, he’s resigned to reporters calling him up every year on the anniversary.

He’s willing to talk about that. He knows his father made mistakes, but his biggest regret is that few people today know anything about the good Jimmy Hoffa achieved.

“He brought millions of people into the middle class,” through accomplishments like the legendary Master Freight Agreement, he said. “What my father accomplished in life and for our members is far more important than where his body ended up.”

Hard to disagree. But popular culture thinks otherwise.

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