40 years later, Jimmy Hoffa mystery endures

DETROIT — On this day 40 years ago, former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa called his wife, Josephine, from a pay phone in Bloomfield Township to say he had been stood up at an afternoon meeting with two mobsters.

And then he vanished.

Hoffa was never seen in public again, and his disappearance has become one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century, earning a place in popular culture through references in movies, music, books, even video games. As recently as 2013, a credible tip was enough to prompt an FBI dig. But as the Hoffa mystery officially enters middle age, the hopes of ever charging anyone with the crime have faded.

“They’re all dead,” said Hoffa’s daughter, Barbara Crancer, a retired judge in St. Louis. “Most of the people that were suspects are gone. I guess it won’t be solved. It would be a comfort to find his body, but I don’t think we will.”

Crancer said she doesn’t plan to mark the anniversary because she thinks of her father every day.

“It’s a sad time for us,” she said. “If you ever have anyone in your family who is taken away from you by force, you know what a gap it leaves in your heart. You miss them so much.”

Most investigators also are convinced no one will ever be charged with Hoffa’s death.

“Almost everybody who is involved has gone to meet their maker,” said Keith Corbett, a longtime prosecutor who spent 25 years with the Organized Crime Strike Force of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit. “The list of people who have reliable information is really short. You could probably count them on one hand with a couple fingers left over. I think it’s extremely unlikely that there will be any new developments in the case.”

The closest investigators ever came to recovering a corpse was a single strand of hair, three inches long, found in a car that may have driven Hoffa to his death. DNA testing, which didn’t exist until 10 years after he disappeared, eventually confirmed it was Hoffa’s.

But the Mafia members and their associates suspected of arranging the hit on Hoffa have mostly died, some violently, others as old men in their beds. Detroit’s current U.S. attorney, Barbara McQuade, declined to comment on the case, other than to say: “The case is inactive, but not closed.”

So what really happened that Wednesday afternoon in 1975?

Everyone has a theory.

The main one presented to a grand jury was that the Mafia killed Hoffa to prevent him from disclosing mob infiltration of the Teamsters, including its tapping into the union’s pension fund to finance its rackets.

Hoffa had resigned the Teamsters presidency after going to prison on charges of jury tampering, conspiracy and fraud. In 1965, a federal jury in Chattanooga, Tenn., convicted Hoffa of conspiring to accept illegal payments from a trucking company and later of trying to funnel a $10,000 bribe to the son of one of the jurors.

But after President Nixon commuted his sentence, Hoffa was out of prison and angling to return to power.

By that time, the mob had formed a relationship with Hoffa’s successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, and didn’t want Hoffa’s return to jeopardize it.

Federal investigators spelled out much of the theory in a January 1976 summary known as the Hoffex Memo. The list of suspects reads like a script from a mob movie, complete with nicknames:

■ Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone, a Detroit Mafia captain with whom Hoffa was scheduled to meet the day he disappeared.

■ Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone, Anthony’s brother and also a Mafia captain.

■ Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, a New Jersey mobster and Teamster official with whom Hoffa thought he was meeting.

■ Salvatore (Sally Bugs) Briguglio, a Provenzano henchman suspected by investigators of being the trigger man in Hoffa”s killing.

■ Gabriel Briguglio, Salvatore’s brother.

Hoffa’s family told investigators that Hoffa had scheduled a 2 p.m. meeting July 30, 1975, with Anthony Giacalone and Provenzano at the Machus Red Fox restaurant on Telegraph Road just south of Maple Road in Bloomfield Township, in a building that now houses Andiamo Italia West.

“The only thing we know for certain are the notes that he left of who he was meeting, when he was meeting them,” Crancer said. “He left it in writing. He left the time and the initials of the people. Then if he went and kept that meeting, which I’m sure he did, then those had to be the people responsible. That’s the only thing I can say. They made the appointment.”

READ THE HOFFEX MEMO:

Giacalone was said to be arranging a reconciliation meeting between Hoffa and Provenzano. The two became friends while serving time together in a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania in the 1960s, but later fell out and came to loathe one another.

But the meeting at the Machus never happened, and investigators doubt if even Hoffa thought it would take place there. The upscale restaurant required a coat and tie at the time, and Hoffa wore a casual shirt and slacks that afternoon.

Giacalone, whom investigators describe as a grim-faced recluse, was at the Southfield Athletic Club, glad-handing acquaintances and even strangers. Corbett said investigators interpreted the moves as an effort to establish an iron-clad alibi at precisely the time of the hit on Hoffa.

Provenzano wasn’t even in Michigan on the day Hoffa went missing. Investigators later confirmed that he spent the afternoon playing cards with his brother, Salvatore (Sammy Pro) Provenzano, at a union hall in New Jersey.

Hoffa’s wife told investigators that her husband called her about 2:15 p.m. saying no one showed for the meeting.

Hoffa’s fame made his face well known, and five witnesses later told federal investigators they recognized him in the parking lot of the Red Fox that afternoon, appearing as if he were waiting for someone.

Other witnesses said Hoffa was seen leaving in a burgundy-colored Mercury Marquis with three other men, including a driver who appeared to be Charles (Chuckie) O’Brien, a Hoffa protégé who was considered to be a stepson to Hoffa.

A police crime dog found traces of Hoffa’s scent in the rear passenger seat, and investigators recovered a single strand of hair in it. Years later, DNA testing would match the hair to Hoffa.

No body was ever found despite countless searches.

Corbett theorizes that Hoffa was killed near the restaurant and the body was run through a cardboard shredding machine at Central Sanitation Services, a mob-owned garbage disposal service in Hamtramck that was destroyed in an arson fire about six months after Hoffa’s disappearance.

A second theory places Hoffa’s death at a Milford Township horse farm owned by Rolland McMaster, a Teamsters enforcer. Dan Moldea, author of the The Hoffa Wars, has spent decades chronicling Hoffa and the Teamsters, including an interview with Salvatore Briguglio shortly before he was murdered.

“The best evidence ... is that Hoffa was driven to McMaster’s farm where he was murdered by Sally Bugs Briguglio,” Moldea wrote for a piece at ganglandnews.com, a website that chronicles the Mafia.

Hoffa’s body was “then stuffed into a 55-gallon drum, and shipped via a Gateway Transportation truck to his final resting place,” at a mob-owned landfill on the Hackensack River in New Jersey, Moldea wrote. Gateway was a trucking company whose president served as a trustee of the Teamster pension fund.

O’Brien is still alive but could not be reached for comment. Both Giacalones are dead, as is Anthony Provenzano.

Salvatore Briguglio was shot dead outside a restaurant in New York’s Little Italy neighborhood in March 1978. The whereabouts of his brother, Gabriel, are not known.

A parade of witnesses to the grand jury in Detroit in the months after Hoffa disappeared failed to produce enough evidence for an indictment. Over the years, investigators weighed thousands of tips, most of them bad, but some worth looking into.

Kirt Bowden joined the Bloomfield Township Police Department as a rookie officer in 1977 and retired as chief 36 years later.

Bowden said most of investigation was done by the feds, but at different times he’d review the file, and in May 2004 when a plausible tip came in that Hoffa was killed at a home in northwest Detroit, Bowden accompanied investigators to the scene, which turned out to be yet another dead end.

“You don’t pass up a Hoffa tip,” Bowden said.

Contributing: David Ashenfelter, retired Detroit Free Press staff writer.