The Killer Book of Cold Cases (17 page)

Hoffa was, by all odds, a tough child in a man’s body. In another incident, he beat mobster Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano in a fistfight at an airport. Tony responded by promising to tear Hoffa’s heart out and kill his grandchildren. Considering Tony’s reputation, the threat wasn’t terribly far-fetched.

The problem was Hoffa’s ambition. When he was found guilty and sent to jail, he automatically became subject to a stipulation of the federal Landrum-Griffin Act that prohibited convicted union leaders from running for office in the union for five years after their release from prison. But that didn’t matter to Jimmy.

Word got out that he was going to wait the necessary five years and then run again for president of the international union. And there was no doubt that he would have had a chance of winning. The workers loved Jimmy. Indeed, on the last birthday he spent in Lewisburg, he received thousands of cards and a plane flew over the prison with a banner streaming behind it wishing him happy birthday.

But someone didn’t love Jimmy: the Mafia. The reason was that after Jimmy went to prison, he was replaced as Teamster leader by someone the Mob liked better: Frank Fitzsimmons, who had nowhere near the drive and ballsiness of Hoffa. When the Mafia spoke, Fitzsimmons listened. That wasn’t always true with Jimmy, who was much more bullheaded.

The specter of Jimmy coming back to run the Teamsters was not something the Mob could endure. Having the union yield to their wishes translated into greater profits, but Jimmy did things his way, not their way. Jimmy Hoffa had to go away permanently. And the Mob can achieve that in only a certain number of ways.

On July 30, 1975, a meeting was set up—probably by a trusted friend—for Jimmy at the Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. Jimmy was due to meet with Mafia hotshots Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone and Tony Provenzano, the latter not one of Hoffa’s friends, as pointed out earlier.

On the day he disappeared, Hoffa seemed to be uncharacteristically nervous, according to his wife and a good friend who operated a limousine service and had stopped in to see Jimmy. He went to the restaurant dressed casually in a dark blue, short-sleeved shirt with black pants and white Gucci loafers. A stickler for punctuality, he arrived at the restaurant right on time for the 2 p.m. meeting.

But Giacalone and Provenzano were not there. Hoffa waited in the front of the restaurant until 2:15 before going to a public phone booth to call his wife and tell her that he had apparently been stood up.

Nobody knows exactly what happed after that, but Hoffa was spotted after he called his wife. A truck driver making deliveries in the area nearly had a collision with a car, a 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham, as it pulled out of the restaurant parking lot. The driver said that he spotted a gray blanket wrapped around what appeared to be a rifle between what was clearly Jimmy Hoffa and another passenger.

Police investigators discovered something ominous the next day. Hoffa’s 1974 Green Pontiac Grand Ville was discovered in the restaurant parking lot. The car was unlocked. Figuratively holding their breaths, investigators opened the trunk but found nothing.

They then searched for the Mercury Marquis and found that it belonged to Joe Giacalone, the son of Anthony Giacalone, one of the people who were supposed to meet with Hoffa. When investigators dusted the interior of the car, they discovered numerous fingerprints. On some paper and a 7UP bottle, they found prints belonging to Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, who had lived with Hoffa for awhile and who the labor leader considered a foster son.

The set-up looked like an age-old Mafia gambit: get someone to lure the victim—in this case, Hoffa—who would trust that person enough to get into the car. The FBI checked the whereabouts of their prime suspects. Anthony Giacalone said that he had spent the day at the Southfield Athletic Club, which was verified by other people at the club. The police also checked out Tony Pro. He claimed to have been playing cards with friends in New Jersey, and they supported his alibi. Both of the men denied knowing anything about a meeting with Hoffa.

Perhaps the key player in the Hoffa disappearance was Chuckie O’Brien, who also said he hadn’t seen Hoffa on July 30. He gave the FBI a detailed alibi about bringing a large salmon to the home of a Teamster official and having to help the man’s wife cut it into steaks, and then later being at the Southfield Athletic Club with Tony Giacalone at the same time that Hoffa was waiting to meet with him and Tony Pro.

O’Brien also said that blood from the fish had gotten onto the car seat, so he had taken the vehicle to a car wash to clean it. No one at the athletic club or at the car wash could corroborate his story.

Investigators theorized that Hoffa had gotten into the car and then been driven to his execution, probably in a house nearby. More than a quarter century after he disappeared, in March 2001, that was proven. Tracking dogs were brought in from Pennsylvania and given a pair of Hoffa’s socks and his moccasins to sniff. Amazingly, they soon found Hoffa’s scent in the back of O’Brien’s car. Investigators also found a hair in the back of the car and, using DNA methods, eventually matched it to hair in Hoffa’s hairbrush. But they did not have enough evidence to pursue an indictment.

Then an informant named Ralph Picardo, who was serving a conviction for murder, came forward saying he knew exactly what had happened to Jimmy Hoffa. Picardo had been a business agent for Teamsters Local 4H and had driven Tony Pro around. Picardo said that Hoffa did indeed have an appointment for a sit-down with archenemy Provenzano, arranged at the suggestion of Tony Giacalone.

Once Hoffa was at the restaurant, Chuckie O’Brien showed up and drove him to a house close to the restaurant where Chuckie said he was staying with friends. He told Hoffa that the meeting would be held there. (If Picardo is to be believed, the story of the rifle covered by a gray blanket is not true.) But instead of Tony Pro being at the house, there was a team of killers: a Teamster agent named Thomas Andretta and two brothers, Sal Briguglio and his brother Gabriel, as well as Frank Sheeran, a Teamster official from a local in Delaware.

Sheeran had close ties with Mob boss Russell Bufalino. Picardo said Bufalino ordered the hit, though no reason why was offered. Picardo said Bufalino traveled from his home base of Pittston, Pennsylvania, on July 30 and may have been in the house to make sure “the piece of work” he ordered was done correctly and Hoffa was gone for good.

Someone once said that the last thing you want to do is piss off the government, and that certainly happened in this case. The federal government was unable to charge anyone with the crime because FBI investigators couldn’t find a body, and they were unable to penetrate the alibis given for that day by the people involved—not even that of Chuckie O’Brien, whose alibis resembled “Swiss cheese,” as one government official said. But as O.J. Simpson learned the hard way, if the government doesn’t get you one way, they’ll get you another, including just harassing you and making sure you spend a lot of money on lawyers.

For example, Tony Pro had the government watching his local all the time, and in 1978, he was prosecuted and found guilty of having murdered Anthony Castellito in 1961. That was despite the fact that Castellito’s body was given its final send-off in a tree shredder. Provenzano went to prison for the last time in 1980 for racketeering and eight years later got what prisoners call “backgate parole”—he died there at age 71.

Tony Giacalone was tried and convicted of tax evasion and spent ten years in prison. He was going to be tried for racketeering acts, but he died before the charges found their way into a court of law.

Chuckie O’Brien went to Florida to work for Frank Fitzsimmons and spent some time in jail for minor offenses like accepting a car as a gift while a union official and lying on a loan application.

The Mob caught up with Sal Briguglio, who was affiliated with Tony Pro. Briguglio was gunned down in New York’s Little Italy, his offense allegedly being talking to prosecutors about the Castellito murder.

The mystery of what happened to Jimmy Hoffa on July 30, 1975, has been solved—he was murdered. But the location of his body is another question, and perhaps the one most people are interested in learning. One thing is known: the Mob can be quite creative about getting rid of a body.

Consider, for example, a stone-cold killer named Jimmy “The Gent” Burke who reportedly killed more than one hundred people. One day, Burke was standing on a patio slab in Queens beneath which the body of a man named Gerry had been buried. Burke tapped the slab with his shoe and said: “So how you doing, Gerry?”

According to informant Ralph Picardo, the convict who fingered the conspirators, Hoffa’s body was put in a 55-gallon steel drum and carted away in a Gateway Transportation truck. Picardo said he didn’t know where it was taken.

Jimmy Hoffa was declared legally dead in 1982, but his case remains open. Like a perpetual flame, a special agent at the FBI’s Detroit field office is constantly assigned to it. The investigation has generated over 16,000 pages of documents gathered from interviews, wiretaps, and surveillance, but despite the government’s best efforts to get to the bottom of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, what the Mob did with the body remains a question mark and names of the people who killed him remain a mystery.

On October 23, 1983, 61-year-old Jane Alexander was at her friend Nancy Martell’s house, helping to prepare dinner for a crowd of folks who were coming over to watch the San Francisco 49ers game. A phone call came for Jane from her friend Hugh Fine who said, “Cousin Irma Clark in San Francisco called. She’s very upset. She says she called Aunt Gert’s house about eight-thirty last night and got no answer. She thinks something awful has happened.”

Jane was extremely upset. Aunt Gert was like a surrogate mother to her, having helped raise Jane after her parents divorced. At eighty-eight, Gert lived by herself in San Jose, seventy miles from Jane’s home in Marin County, and was still active and self-sufficient. And her life ran like clockwork. She should have been home at 8:30 p.m.

Jane called Cousin Irma and received extremely upsetting news. Irma had called Gert’s house. At first, she thought she had called a wrong number because she didn’t recognize the voice of the person who answered. When she called back, she found she was talking to a police officer who wouldn’t give any information about why he was there or what had happened.

A little crazed, Jane called Gert’s house and got a cop who identified himself as a San Jose police officer. Jane demanded to know what had happened, and a moment later, a man who identified himself as the San Jose coroner, Nat Gossett, got on the phone. The conversation went like this: