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The rise, fall, and mysterious disappearance of legendary Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa. Authors and associates speculate on what may have happened.
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00:00This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.
00:07The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations,
00:13but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries we will examine.
00:17In 1967, Jimmy Hoffa began serving a 13-year prison sentence.
00:24It was the beginning of the end for the man who was called America's most powerful labor leader.
00:32Hoffa was pardoned four years later, but his troubles were far from over.
00:38On July 30th, 1975, he left home and disappeared without a trace.
00:47Was Jimmy Hoffa kidnapped or murdered? If so, why and by whom?
00:54Did he flee to a distant country? Why did Jimmy Hoffa disappear?
01:00Be firm, but return to work and wait for the government of the United States to be able to make the decision.
01:14Don't take the law in your own hands or you're going to hurt me. Don't do it, please.
01:21As president of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa commanded a workforce larger than the United States Army.
01:32Hoffa was a leader gifted with great charisma, one of America's working-class heroes.
01:39One day in 1975, Hoffa went to a meeting at a suburban Detroit restaurant.
01:46He has not been seen since.
01:49My father, James R. Hoffa, has been missing for some 32 hours.
01:55He left for an appointment at Max's Red Fox restaurant at approximately 1.30 p.m. Wednesday, July 30, 1975.
02:04He called home at approximately 2.15 p.m.
02:07We have not heard from him since.
02:12Acting on anonymous tips, local authorities searched the Detroit suburbs for a body.
02:18The
02:25Jimmy Hoffa is still missing. He was a powerful man, president of the world's largest labor union.
02:32But powerful men make enemies. Who might have wanted Hoffa out of the way and why?
02:38Is it conceivable that he was kidnapped for ransom or that he deliberately dropped out of sight?
02:43The answer to the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance might be found by tracing his spectacular rise to power.
02:50Violence was commonplace in the working world Jimmy Hoffa entered during the late 1920s.
03:02Police and strike breakers battled fiercely with union workers as the labor movement gained momentum.
03:11In his teens, Hoffa joined a small Detroit local in the Teamsters union of truckers and warehousemen.
03:23As a fearless young organizer, he helped engineer dozens of strikes to improve working conditions.
03:30Truckers began hauling more and more of the nation's freight as our highway system expanded.
03:35The Teamsters grew into a powerful union.
03:47Hoffa moved quickly up the union executive ladder.
03:50By the age of 33, he headed Local 299 in Detroit.
03:56Eleven years later, in 1957, Hoffa ran for international president of the Teamsters.
04:03He gained support in locals all over the country by brilliant politicking.
04:11When the delegates were polled, Hoffa triumphed by a 3 to 1 margin.
04:16Pete Camerata is co-chairman of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
04:23Well, when Hoffa spoke to the rank and file, he was always able to reach them.
04:29And even though Jimmy Hoffa was a little man, he had a certain amount of charisma about him.
04:34When you shook hands with Jimmy Hoffa, even though Hoffa was a little fella, 5'5", or something like that,
04:39you thought you were shaking hands with somebody much bigger.
04:42Hoffa was willing to get right down in the street with the brothers and win what they had to win.
04:48And that's what people loved him for.
04:53In 1967, the Master Freight Agreement gave Hoffa more power than any union leader before him.
05:01Now, truckers nationwide would be bound by the same contract.
05:04To many businessmen and politicians, this was a frightening prospect.
05:11What scared them is the fact that Jimmy Hoffa could say to 400,000 Teamsters or 450,000 Teamsters at the time to park the trucks and they'd park them.
05:21If Teamster truckers carried most of America's food, fuel and clothing for the marketplace, is it possible that Jimmy Hoffa had too much power?
05:34Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Clark Mullenhoff.
05:37Jimmy Hoffa had more uncontrolled power than any other person in the United States, including the President.
05:44He was not accountable to anyone.
05:48He controlled employers, he controlled politicians through his gifts of union funds and cash, or through his use of anti-labor charges against the political figures.
06:05He controlled everything that moved on a truck.
06:13Hoffa never used his power to shut down the nation's commerce.
06:17Publicly, he played the part of a labor statesman.
06:20We're asking for language dealing with safety of equipment.
06:25We're asking for wage increases.
06:28People who knew Hoffa said that privately, he was a hot-tempered and ruthless man.
06:33Well, from the first time I met Jimmy Hoffa throughout his whole life, he was a totally confident, cocky, banter-rooster type of individual.
06:48He could be most ingratiating and pleasant, even boyish.
06:52Pays to have friends.
06:53But he could turn around and snap his fingers and become a tyrant if he were crossed in any respect.
06:59To the rank and file, Hoffa was a powerful boss who won good contracts.
07:06Enemies, however, claimed he made deals with employers outside Detroit, allowing them to pay his Teamsters a substandard wage.
07:15Hoffa centralized Teamster power and took control of the huge central state's pension fund.
07:22He lent millions to build gambling casinos.
07:28An estimated $170 million of Teamster pension funds went into Las Vegas.
07:35There are also charges that Hoffa had ties to organized crime.
07:39From at least the mid-1940s, Jimmy Hoffa was dealing with organized crime figures in all parts of the country.
07:47He was using them to enforce his dictates on local labor leaders who were honest.
07:55He was also using them as a network for his own advancement and his own power.
08:03He put them in power in various unions from one end of the country to the other.
08:09The best answer in regards to hoodlums and what have you is the fact that every strike we have with employers who really want to fight, they revert to hiring hoodlums.
08:19And unless we know who our enemy is, unless we're in a position to do something about it, you'll lose your strike.
08:26But who controlled whom?
08:28What was the real relationship between Hoffa and men like New Jersey's Tony Provenzano?
08:34You've got people in Detroit, at least 15, who have police records.
08:38You've got Joey Glimco in Chicago.
08:41I say you're not tough enough to get rid of these people then.
08:44Well, I don't propose to be tough.
08:46You haven't moved against any of them.
08:47I don't propose to act tough.
08:49I will follow the Constitution of the International Union.
08:53I don't frighten too easily.
08:55I don't intend to have the impression left that's been stated publicly that I'm controlled by gangsters.
09:03I am not controlled by them.
09:05Mr. Hoffa, I'm certainly...
09:06From 1957 to 1963, Attorney Robert Kennedy and his brother, Senator John Kennedy, feuded bitterly with Hoffa as the McClellan Committee probed labor crimes.
09:18When John Kennedy was elected president in 1960, he appointed his younger brother attorney general.
09:26Bobby declared all-out war on organized crime.
09:29Hoffa was indicted for extortion, perjury, wiretapping, jury tampering, and pension fund embezzlement.
09:39Somehow, he managed to avoid conviction.
09:42Hoffa's bag of tricks included efforts to buy off sheriffs, prosecutors, congressmen, senators, governors, and he tried to influence cabinet officers, and he at least compromised them.
09:59He even tried to buy me off, and he came out just out of the blue sky and said,
10:05Every man has his price, Clark. What's yours?
10:08After seven years of prosecution, Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering through the testimony of a disgruntled teamster.
10:16Later, he was found guilty of embezzlement.
10:23In 1967, Hoffa surrendered to authorities to serve his term.
10:29The fateful series of events that would lead to Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance had begun.
10:37In Search Of will continue in a moment, here on the History Channel.
10:45In 1967, ex-teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa headed for Lewisburg Penitentiary to serve his term.
10:52He may have regretted the involvement with gangsters that had led to his downfall.
10:58But Hoffa's knowledge of the underworld would become an even greater burden in prison.
11:03For nearly four years, Jimmy Hoffa brooded in his cell as his power slipped away.
11:13Meanwhile, Hoffa's trusted aide, Frank Fitzsimmons, began his takeover of the Teamsters Union.
11:20I wish to announce that I am a candidate for the General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
11:28And will run for that office at the International Union Convention, which begins July the 5th in Miami Beach, Florida.
11:37Eligible for parole in two years, Hoffa resigned his union office so that Fitzsimmons could run.
11:43It was a decision he would later regret.
11:47Once elected, Fitzsimmons solidified his position by making friends in the White House.
11:53He personally appealed to Richard Nixon to pardon Jimmy Hoffa.
12:00Hello, honey.
12:02How are you?
12:03How are you?
12:05No, I believe it.
12:07Unknown to Hoffa, Nixon added conditions to his pardon, banning him from union activity.
12:13Hoffa would say later that had he known about the restrictions, he would have refused to sign the pardon papers.
12:20In semi-retirement, Jimmy Hoffa found himself trapped in another kind of prison.
12:27To Hoffa, freedom, even life itself, meant a return to union power.
12:33Hoffa retained his amazing popularity.
12:39Observers thought that if Jimmy's lawyers were able to reverse the Nixon restrictions, Hoffa could win back the Teamster presidency from Fitzsimmons.
12:51But Jimmy never got the chance.
12:54July 30th, 1975.
12:59Jimmy Hoffa headed for a rendezvous with two Teamster officials, Anthony Giacalone and Tony Provenzano, a former ally with whom Hoffa had had a fist fight in prison.
13:10At 2 p.m., Hoffa arrived at the Maccas Red Fox restaurant.
13:15After waiting half an hour, he entered the restaurant and telephoned his wife to check whether Giacalone had called.
13:23Josephine Hoffa has not seen her husband since.
13:27Police search the area for clues or a body.
13:41But Industrial Detroit provides countless places to dispose of a corpse.
13:47There has been nothing, no calls or notes.
13:50As a police official, what do you think happened?
13:52There's too much to speculate on.
13:54I believe it was just too early, perhaps the next 24, 48 hours.
13:59Could someone have snatched Hoffa from the restaurant in broad daylight?
14:04Charlie Schatz was an old friend.
14:06Jim would have never walked into a trap.
14:10It's been tried before.
14:13This has been somebody that's been very close to Jim that he trusted.
14:23Hoffa's foster son, Chucky O'Brien, was questioned.
14:28Police found blood in the car O'Brien was driving.
14:31But tests proved it was that of a fish.
14:34Hoffa's family waited in vain, hoping desperately to hear from his kidnappers.
14:40No ransom message ever arrived.
14:45But what about the men Hoffa was supposed to meet?
14:49Mr. Provenzano hasn't been in this town for the last 15 years.
14:52Tony Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone had airtight alibis for the time of Hoffa's disappearance.
14:59Both denied arranging any meeting with Jimmy.
15:03Ironically, in 1978, Provenzano went to prison for the murder of another Teamster official.
15:10Four of Provenzano's associates were also summoned to a grand jury hearing.
15:15Sal and Gabriel Brigulio, and Thomas and Steven Andretta.
15:20Each refused to talk.
15:22In 1978, Sal was murdered gangland style on a New York street.
15:28The government still has no case for the murder of Jimmy Hoffa.
15:34But the testimony of a mafia hitman turned government informant
15:37is considered by the FBI to be a plausible description of the kidnapping drama.
15:42Investigative reporter Dan Molday has been researching the Hoffa case for five years.
15:48In the first act, Hoffa drives from his home, arrives at the restaurant expecting to meet two underworld figures.
15:57He's picked up by one, perhaps two close associates, driven to a private residence four minutes away from the restaurant,
16:06where he is ambushed and killed.
16:10His body is then stuffed into a 55-gallon drum and taken to a location where it is placed in a compactor for junk cars.
16:19It is crushed and it is smelted.
16:25Hoffa's body will never be found.
16:31If Hoffa's disappearance was a mafia hit, what was the motive?
16:35FBI investigators believe Hoffa was killed to protect lucrative mob deals.
16:42Joe Irwin knew Hoffa for three decades.
16:46Well, they had to get Jimmy Hoffa out of the way because probably within a month he would have been free of his parole deal
16:53and he would have went back into the union and he would have taken over without a doubt from Fitzsimmons and crew
17:00and he would have eliminated every damn one of them.
17:02The motive for Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance goes beyond his mere ambition to regain the general presidency of the Teamsters Union,
17:12which he was institutionally closed out from anyway.
17:14Hoffa was becoming increasingly unpredictable and was becoming dangerous for the mob to allow to continue operating.
17:24Dan Molde believes an angry Hoffa had begun to squeal about connections between the mafia and the CIA in Cuba.
17:34Cuba had long been a stronghold of organized crime and gambling.
17:38When the Cuban revolution broke out, the mob sold arms to both sides.
17:46After Castro came to power, he began throwing gangsters out of Cuba.
17:51There is strong evidence that mobsters and the CIA were plotting to kill Castro
17:57and that Jimmy Hoffa was the original liaison between them.
18:01The evidence is also clear that in 1975 during the Churchill Committee's investigation of the Castro assassination,
18:07plots that Hoffa was indeed giving information to the Church Committee about his knowledge and perhaps even his participation in these plots.
18:19Sam Giancana, who was planning to speak before the Church Committee, was murdered exactly one month before Hoffa disappeared.
18:27And I believe these two murders are connected.
18:29Only weeks before his disappearance, Hoffa had completed a book in which he made bitter charges against Frank Fitzsimmons.
18:42He implicated mobsters by name and specifically mentioned the end of his friendship with Tony Provenzano.
18:48This book may have been Hoffa's death warrant.
18:55Conceivably, he knew enough secrets to send dozens of mobsters to jail or the electric chair.
19:02Did Hoffa know the secret behind the crime of the century?
19:05On November 23rd, 1963, John Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas.
19:14The alleged killer was Lee Harvey Oswald, whose Cuban connections were documented by the Warren Commission.
19:21Oswald's murderer, Jack Ruby, had well-known ties to mobsters.
19:26According to Dan Molday, FBI records indicated that Ruby phoned Hoffa aides repeatedly during November 1963.
19:36You might tend to incriminate them. You're a complete indifference to it.
19:40Hoffa hated the Kennedys for mercilessly hounding him during the McClellan hearings.
19:45But did he know more than the rest of us about the President's murder?
19:49Dan Molday.
19:50In September of 1962, Sanos Tropicani in a Florida underworld figure was speaking with a FBI informant.
19:58During the conversation, which included Hoffa's personal approval of a $1.5 million Teamster pension fund loan for Tropicani's associates,
20:06Tropicani went into a rage over Kennedy's pursuit of Hoffa and indicated to the FBI informant that Kennedy was going to be hit.
20:15During my investigation, the FBI informant indicated that Tropicani also added that Tropicani had, quote, made it clear that it was Hoffa who was making the arrangements for the President's assassination.
20:30Jimmy Hoffa's connection with Kennedy's murder is tenuous.
20:34More certain is that Jimmy was involved with organized crime.
20:38Was he murdered by mob enemies as the government believes?
20:43Could he have fled to avoid assassination?
20:46Or is he still being held incommunicado?
20:49For society, the moral is clear.
20:54When underworld power is linked to mighty institutions and charismatic leaders, no one is safe.
21:01Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance was the final twist in a long and turbulent career.
21:08Gifted with unique talent and charisma, Hoffa could have been one of our country's great leaders.
21:15He began on the loading docks and earned his status as a working class hero.
21:19But like so many leaders, Hoffa was corrupted by his tremendous power.
21:25He was unable to see the folly of his alliance with the underworld until it was too late.
21:32Coming up next, agents investigating the murder of radio DJ Alan Berg uncover a white supremacist conspiracy on FBI The Untold Stories.
21:50Then, history's crimes and trials chronicles the hunt for serial murderers in the case of the Zodiac Killer and the Green River case.
22:02The End
22:11The End
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