Monday, July 30, 2012

The Disappearance Of Jimmy Hoffa

July 30, 1975:
Jimmy Hoffa disappears from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at about 2:30 p.m. He is never seen or heard from again, and will be declared legally dead on this date in 1982.
Hoffa disappeared at, or sometime after, 2:45 pm on July 30, 1975, from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, an affluent suburb of Detroit. According to what he had told others, he believed he was to meet there with two Mafia leaders—Anthony Giacalone and Anthony Provenzano. Provenzano was also a union leader with the Teamsters in New Jersey, and had earlier been quite close to Hoffa. Provenzano was a national vice-president with IBT from 1961, Hoffa's second term as Teamsters' president.
When Hoffa did not return home that evening, his wife reported him missing. Police found Hoffa's car at the restaurant but no sign of Hoffa himself or any indication of what happened to him. Extensive investigations into the disappearance began immediately, and continued over the next several years by several law enforcement groups, including the FBI. However, the investigations did not conclusively determine Hoffa's fate. For their part, Giacalone and Provenzano were found not to have been near the restaurant that afternoon, and each denied they had scheduled a meeting with Hoffa.
Hoffa was declared legally dead in 1982, on the seventh anniversary of his disappearance, when he would have been aged 69.Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa, is the Teamsters' current leader, serving since 1999 in that position. His daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, retired as an Associate Circuit Judge in St. Louis County, Missouri in March 2008, but in March 2009, Judge Crancer agreed to serve as an Assistant Attorney General to the Attorney General for the State of Missouri, Chris Koster, as Chief Counsel of the Division of Civil Disability and Workers Rights, and retired again in March 2011. The television show MythBusters featured an episode involving the possible burial of Hoffa at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Ground-penetrating radar revealed no disturbances beneath the playing field. Giants Stadium has since been demolished.
In 2001, the FBI matched DNA from Hoffa's hair—taken from a brush—with a strand of hair found in a 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham driven by longtime friend Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien on July 30, 1975. Police and Hoffa's family had long believed O'Brien played a role in Hoffa's disappearance.[22] O'Brien, however, had previously denied ever being involved in Hoffa's disappearance or that Hoffa had ever taken a ride in his 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham.
On June 16, 2006, the Detroit Free Press published in its entirety the so-called "Hoffex Memo", a 56-page report the FBI prepared for a January 1976 briefing on the case at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Although not claiming to conclusively establish the specifics of his disappearance, the memo indicates that law enforcement's belief is that Hoffa was murdered at the behest of organized crime figures who deemed his efforts to regain power within the Teamsters to be a threat to their control of the union's pension fund. The FBI has called the report the definitive account of what agents believe happened to Hoffa.
In November, 2011, in a book by Adrian Humphreys titled The Weasel: a Double Life in the Mob, the former driver of Jimmy Hoffa and a mob associate Marvin "The Weasel" Elkind (also referred to by government handlers as "the Cigar") stated that Hoffa is buried in the foundations of the Renaissance Center in Detroit, Michigan (photo on right banner of blog).
Everybody loves a mystery, and this is one of the more famous ones.  I've got to say that while the Giants Stadium story is a good one, logistically, the Renaissance Center story makes more sense.  It seems pretty risky to ship a live or dead man a third of the way across the country just to stick him in a hole full of concrete when there's one you can use 25 miles away.

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