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Jimmy Hoffa

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James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa (born February 14, 1913, disappeared July 30, 1975), was an American labor leader. As the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hoffa wielded considerable influence. After he was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror, he served nearly a decade in prison. He is also well-known in popular culture for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his unexplained disappearance and presumed death. His son James P. Hoffa is the current president of the Teamsters.

Early life

Born in Brazil, Indiana, on Feb. 14, 1913, his paternal ancestors were Pennsylvania Germans ("Pennsylvania Dutch") who migrated to Indiana in the mid-1800s. His maternal ancestors were Irish-American. James grew up fast when his coal-driller father, John Cleveland Hoffa, died from lung disease in 1920. His mother, Viola "Ola" Riddle, took in laundry to keep the family together, and the children also helped with afterschool jobs. Hoffa later described his mother lovingly as a frontier type woman "who believed that Duty and Discipline were spelled with capital D's."

In 1922, the Hoffas moved to Clinton, Indiana, for a two year stay, then to Detroit to an apartment on Merritt Street on the city's brawling, working-class west side. Tagged by the neighbor kids as a hillbilly, Hoffa won respect and acceptance with his fists. After school Jimmy worked as a delivery boy and finally dropped out of school in the 9th grade just as the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression brought massive layoffs and business failures.

A friend, Walter Murphy, told him to get into the food business. "No matter what happens, people have to eat," he said. Jimmy got a job at the Kroger Grocery and Baking Company, whose warehouses were located just a few blocks from his home. Lying to the foreman about his age, Hoffa began his job of unloading produce from railroad cars for 32 cents an hour. The pay, two-thirds of it scrip redeemable for food at Kroger's, was good considering the growing unemployment and food lines. The downside to the new job was that warehouse workers were required to report at 4:30 p.m. for a 12-hour shift, but they only got paid for the time that they actually unloaded produce. The rest of the shift, they would sit around idle and unpaid, waiting to be called but unable to leave the premises. The men also endured a foreman from hell, "the kind of guy," Hoffa later said who causes unions. Called the "Little Bastard" by all the workers, he abused his powers, threatening and firing workers for no reason. Hoffa and his coworkers, including Bobby Holmes, who would also rise in the Teamster hierarchy with Hoffa, bided their time. The harsh reality that one third of American workers remained jobless made them cautious in their organizing efforts. Finally one night in the spring of 1931, after two workers were fired for going to a food cart for their midnight dinner, the men acted. Hoffa called for a work stoppage just as trucks loaded with Florida strawberries pulled into the warehouse. Faced with the need to get the perishable cargo into refrigerators quickly, Kroger management agreed to meet with the new leaders the following morning as long as the workers resumed their duties.

After several days of negotiating Hoffa and his aides had a union contract. It included a raise of 13 cents an hour, the guarantee of at least a half a day's pay per day, a modest insurance plan and, of course, recognition of the union. The new leaders soon applied for and received a charter as Federal Local 19341 of the American Federation of Labor. Hoffa was fired the following year after a fight with a plant foreman who goaded the hot-tempered union leaders into throwing a crate of vegetables on the floor and spraying the boss with assorted vegetable juices. Jimmy claimed in later years that he quit before he could be fired and walked away.

Hoffa next landed a job as a full time union organizer for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He took the Kroger union with him into the IBT where its membership was absorbed into Local 299. He and other IBT organizers fought with management in their organizing efforts in the Detroit, Michigan, area.

Hoffa used organized crime connections to shake down (see extortion or protection racket) an association of small grocery stores. This led to his first criminal conviction, for which he paid a fine. After he rose to a leadership position in Local 299, Hoffa continued to work with organized crime in Detroit using the threat of labor trouble to induce business to use a mobster controlled clothier (Friedman and Schwarz, 1988).

Union activities

The Teamsters union organized truckers & firefighters, first throughout the Midwest and then nationwide. It skillfully used quickie strikes, secondary boycotts and other means of leveraging union strength at one company to organize workers and win contract demands at others.

Hoffa took over the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, when his predecessor, Dave Beck, was convicted on bribery charges and imprisoned. Hoffa worked to expand the union and in 1964 succeeded in bringing virtually all North American over-the-road truck drivers under a single national master freight agreement. Hoffa then pushed to try to bring the airlines and other transport employees into the union.

President John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson both put pressure on Hoffa through John's brother Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General, attempting to investigate his activities and disrupt his ever-growing union. The Kennedys in particular were sure that Hoffa had pocketed a great deal of union money. Having expelled the Teamsters in the 1950s, the AFL-CIO also disliked Hoffa and aided the Democrats in their investigations.

Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa, is the Teamsters' current leader; his daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, currently serves as an associate circuit court judge in St. Louis, Missouri.

Conviction and disappearance

In 1964, Hoffa was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror and jailed for 15 years. On December 23, 1971, however, he was released when President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to time served on the condition he not participate in union activities for 10 years. Hoffa was planning to sue to invalidate that restriction in order to reassert his power over the Teamsters when he 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, Oakland County, Michigan , a suburb of Detroit. He had been due to meet two Mafia leaders, Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone from Detroit and Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano from Union City, New Jersey and New York City.

Investigations

DNA evidence examined in 2001 placed Hoffa in the car of longtime Teamster associate Charles O'Brien, despite O'Brien's claims Hoffa had never been in the car. Police interviews later that year failed to produce any indictments.

In July 2003, after the convicted killer Richard Powell told authorities that a briefcase containing a syringe used to subdue Hoffa was buried at a house in Hampton Township, Michigan, another backyard was examined and excavated. Again, nothing was found.

Frank Sheeran

In 2003, the FBI searched the backyard of a home in Hampton Township, Michigan formerly frequented by Frank Sheeran, Second World War veteran, Mafia hitman, truck driver, Teamsters official and close friend of Hoffa. Nothing significant was found.

In 2004, Charles Brandt, a former prosecutor and Chief Deputy Attorney General of Delaware, published the book I Heard You Paint Houses. The title is based on a euphemistic exchange apparently used by hitmen and their would-be employers. "I heard you paint houses." "Yes, and I do my own carpentry, too." House painting alludes to the splatter of blood on walls, and "doing my own carpentry" to the task of disposing of the body. Brandt recounted a series of confessions by Sheeran regarding Hoffa's murder, and claimed that Sheeran had begun contacting him because he wished to assuage feelings of guilt. Over the course of several years, he spoke many times by phone to Brandt (which Brandt recorded) during which he acknowledged his role as Hoffa's killer, acting on orders from mob boss Russell Bufalino. He claimed to have used his friendship with Hoffa to lure him to a bogus meeting in Bloomfield Hills and drive him to a house in northwestern Detroit, where he shot him twice before fleeing and leaving Hoffa's body behind. An updated version of Brandt's book claims that Hoffa's body was cremated within an hour of Sheeran's departure.

Events since February 14, 2006

On February 14, 2006, Lynda Milito, wife of Gambino crime family member Louie Milito, claimed that her husband had told her during an argument in 1988 that he had killed Hoffa and dumped his body near Staten Island's Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City.

In April 2006, news reports surfaced that hitman Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski had confessed to author Philip Carlo that he was part of a group of five men who had kidnapped and murdered Hoffa. The claim's credibility is questionable, as Kuklinski has become somewhat notorious for repeatedly claiming to have killed people — including Roy DeMeo — that concrete evidence has proved he could not have killed. The story forms part of the book The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, which was released on July 1, 2006.

On May 17, 2006, acting on a tip, the FBI began digging for Hoffa's remains outside of a barn on what is now the Hidden Dreams Farm (satellite photo) in Milford Township, Michigan where they surveyed the land and began to dig up parts of the 85-acre parcel, according to federal officials. More than 40 agents sectioned off a piece of the property where they believed Hoffa's bones might be. Federal agents would not say who tipped them off, but said they received information on a group of people who had met on the land 30 years before. The FBI has made contact with Hoffa's daughter, but no other information has been released. It is not known if the FBI has found anything, although images taken from a helicopter appeared to show agents digging something out of the ground. The investigation team included forensic experts from the bureau's Washington laboratory and anthropologists, archaeologists, engineers and architects.

On May 18, 2006, the Detroit Free Press reported that the Hoffa search was prompted by information supplied by Donovan Wells, 75, a prisoner at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, KY. The newspaper said Wells, who was jailed for 10 years in January 2004 for using his Detroit-area trucking company and drivers to ship large quantities of marijuana from Texas to Detroit from 1998-2001, was trying to parlay his knowledge about Hoffa's disappearance to get out of prison early. On May 20, 2006, the Free Press, quoting anonymous sources, said one of Wells's lawyers had threatened to go to the media during the previous year unless the US Attorney's Office acted on Wells's information and followed through on a pledge to seek his release from prison. The next day, the newspaper quoted Wells's lawyer from a 1976 criminal case, James Elsman of Birmingham, who said the FBI in 1976 had ignored Wells's offer to tell them where Hoffa was buried. The lawyer said the FBI ignored him again on May 18, after he learned that the FBI was digging in Milford Township and called the bureau to offer the information. Outraged, Elsman said he then offered the information to the Bloomfield Township Police Department. On May 22, an FBI agent and township police detective visited Elsman's office, but Elsman declined to offer much information, saying he first wanted them to provide him with a signed release from Wells. Elsman also offered to visit the horse farm to help agents pinpoint where to dig. The FBI didn't take him up on his offer.

On May 24, 2006, the FBI removed a large barn on the farm to look under it for Hoffa.

On May 30, 2006 the FBI ended the search for Hoffa's body without any remains found at the Hidden Dreams Farm.

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. The report, which the FBI has called the definitive account of what agents believe happened to Hoffa, can be found online.

In November of 2006 KLAS-TV Channel 8 Las Vegas interviewed author Charles Brandt about the latest news regarding Hoffa's murder and disappearance. Brandt claims that Hoffa's body was taken from the murder scene and possibly driven two minutes away to the Grand Lawn Cemetery where he was cremated.

On December 9th 2007 the E! Channel debuted the 20 Most Shocking Unsolved Crimes. The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa was number four. The house at Beaverland and Curtis streets where Frank Sheeran allegedly killed Hoffa was highlighted along with its proximity to the Grand Lawn Cemetery in Detroit.

Hoffa in popular culture

Films

  • The 1978 movie F.I.S.T., starring Sylvester Stallone as warehouse worker Johnny Kovak rising through the ranks of the fictional Teamster-like "Federation of Interstate Truckers", is loosely based on Hoffa's life.
  • In 1992, the semi-factual motion picture Hoffa was released, starring Jack Nicholson in the title role and Danny DeVito (also the film's director) as Hoffa's fictional right-hand man.
  • Many films have included sarcastic lines or jokes about the location of Hoffa's body.

    • In the 2003 Jim Carrey comedy Bruce Almighty, Hoffa's body is found by a police dog at a local park in Buffalo, NY.
    • In the 1980 comedy Nine to Five, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton, after stealing a body, presumed to be their boss Mr. Hart, from the hospital, all three girls are riding in a car and Tomlin's character, Violet, is talking about putting the body's feet in concrete blocks and pitching it off a pier which prompted Parton's character, Doralee, to say "Are you crazy? They'll find it, they always find it!" to which Violet replies "Oh-ho crazy am I? They never found Jimmy Hoffa!"
    • In the 1991 Chevy Chase movie Nothing But Trouble, Chase and Demi Moore's characters find a newspaper clipping on a wall in the Valkenheiser's mansion saying "Jimmy Hoffa Still Missing", along with his drivers licence, suggesting Hoffa's disappearance was merely due to him crossing paths with the film's antagonists.
    • In the 1994 film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, a hacker who interfers with whalers' navigational system says "they'll find Jimmy Hoffa before they find any whales."
    • In the 1990 film Ghost Sam tells Carl, "They're gonna bury you right next to Jimmy Hoffa."
    • In the 1994 comedy Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, Frank Drebin rummages through a file cabinet with a section titled "Location of Jimmy Hoffa's Body"
    • In the 1987 film Innerspace, the film's villain is said to have Hoffa's wristwatch in his desk drawer.

Television

  • The 1983 TV mini-series Blood Feud dramatized the conflict between Hoffa (portrayed by Robert Blake) and Robert F. Kennedy (portrayed by Cotter Smith). (This conflict in real life reached levels of almost childish absurdity. Hoffa and Kennedy once ran into one another at a function both were attending, whereupon they engaged in an arm-wrestling contest. Hoffa claimed to have won.)
  • In a special about Robert F. Kennedy on the Discovery Channel, a reporter claims he interviewed a mobster who claimed Hoffa's body was crushed, and then put into a smelter.
  • In Season 1, Episode 13 of MythBusters, "Buried in Concrete", Adam and Jamie use a ground penetrating radar device to search several rumored burial locations within Giants Stadium. They find no readings consistent with a cavity left by a body that had rotted away.
  • In the Season 4 episode 6 of The 4400, "The Marked", a 4400 makes a low budget movie about the disappearance of Hoffa.
  • In Season 6 part 1 of HBO's The Sopranos, while a team of doctors are operating on Mobster Tony Soprano, a doctor says "Oh my God!" another says "What is it?" and the doctor claims jokingly "I think I found Jimmy Hoffa!"
  • In his comedy special Playin' With Your Head, George Carlin mentions Hoffa during a bit about how he believes the concept of "missing persons" defies the laws of physics; Carlin comments "Jimmy Hoffa isn't missing. He's in an oil drum in New Jersey!"
  • In the series premiere of The Larry Sanders Show, Garry Shandling quips that he "found Jimmy Hoffa" while advertising for "The Garden Weasel", a fictional gardening tool.
  • In an episode of , after a tip off from a mobster, a body of is found buried under Giants Stadium. One of the Jersey CSI jokes that he thought Hoffa being buried in the stadium was a myth. It later turned out to be someone who crossed the Tanglewood Boys.
  • In episode 116 of MADtv we see "Casino Man," a combined parody of the films Casino and Encino Man where, instead of digging up a caveman, two teenagers dig up Jimmy Hoffa who promptly shouts, "Next time you bury someone, make sure he's dead!"
  • In a Frasier episode, "A Words to the Wiseguy", Martin is found asleep after attempting to stay up all night to catch a newspaper thief. Frasier makes a sarcastic comment about how Martin worked as "watchman for Jimmy Hoffa".
  • In an episode of 'Dexter' Sgt. Doakes says "We have less information about you, than Jimmy Hoffa!" about Dexter.
  • In The Simpsons episode Maximum Homerdrive when the truck drivers hear about Homer blabbing about the autodrive system one says "We'll have to teach our friend some discresion" and the other says "Just like we did to Jimmy Hoffa" the other replies "Hey shut up!" In the episode Last Exit to Springfield, Smithers mentions the Power Plant Union's representative hasn't been seen "since he promised to clean up the Union"; the scene cuts to a football player tripping up over a body buried in the field which is meant to be Hoffa.
  • In Rocko's Modern Life episode "Skid Marks", there is a dedicated line for Jimmy Hoffa at the Department of Motor Vehicles reception.
  • In the Blood Sisters episode "Going Somewhere Fast", when the gang accidently go to a graveyard, one of the tombstones read "Here lies Jimmy Hoffa, still fucking lost".

Music

  • Aimee Mann has a song entitled "Jimmy Hoffa Jokes"
  • A capella duo Paul and Storm wrote a song entitled "Other places Jimmy Hoffa Isn't"
  • New Zealand Post-Rock band Jakob has a song entitled "Jimmy Hoffa" on their album
  • Rapper Young Dro has a song called "Cartoon" in which he says "All you niggas pop or play will lay where Jimmy Hoffa lay"
  • Rapper Andre Nickatina has as song called "All Star Chuck Taylors" where he says, "You be like Nicky man no fair, real propa, I disappear like Jimmy Hoffa."
  • On one of Gucci Mane's songs he say " messing with us be missing like Jimmy Hoffa"
  • In Jon McLaughlin's song "Amelia's Missing" he mentions Hoffa along with other missing people "I can't find Crazy Horse, can't find Hoffa/And Amelia's missing somewhere out at sea."
  • Double G(gangsta and gentlemen)(D-BLOCK) Rapper [Styles P.] has a song entitled "Alone in the Streets" in which he says "I think I should've been an author or sumthin, disappeared like Hoffa or sumthin, came back when they offered me sumthin."
  • In The Young Buck Song Guns Go Bang Ft. M.O.P He Says @ 0:37 "An unsolved mystery if done proper,partner look at jimmy hoffa they aint find his ass or who shot him"
  • In the Jay-Z song Allure from The Black Album he says, "I'm like a Russian mobster, drinkin distilled vodka/'Til I'm under the field with Hoffa, it's real"
  • In the Notorious B.I.G. song Last Day from the Life After Death, Disc 1, (D-BLOCK) Rapper (Jadakiss) says "Either you ridin' or you dyin' cause we swingin' iron, Lox and poppa, turning niggas' into Jim Hoffa"
  • In Episode 1-10 of Gilmore Girls, Luke asks Lorelai who she's going to find now and says, "How about Jimmy Hoffa? That’ll keep you busy for a while."

Books

  • Walter Sheridan's book The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa is noted as an account of Hoffa's trials in Tennessee. It is usually considered to be biased, however, as Sheridan was a lawyer working for Robert Kennedy.
  • Two other books are The Hoffa Wars by investigative reporter Dan Moldea, which details Hoffa's rise to power (see below); and Contract Killer by William Hoffman and Lake Headley, which attempts to examine Hoffa's murder in great detail.
  • Jimmy Hoffa is also a supporting character in the James Ellroy novel American Tabloid, where it is suggested that Jimmy enjoyed boating trips wherein he and friends would chum the waters, shoot sharks with Thompson submachine guns and/or beat sharks to death with nail studded baseball bats. He also appears as a character in Ellroy's follow-up novel The Cold Six Thousand.
  • The novel, Pictures At Eleven, tells the story of Al Strohmeier, a manic, offbeat, and fantastically average midwestern computer salesman who stumbles onto the plot behind and becomes the one and only witness to Hoffa's mysterious disappearance in 1975 (Lithium).
  • Jim Clay's book Hoffa! Ten Angels Swearing. An Authorized Biography published in 1965 by Beaverdam Books in Virginia as a paperback original defends Hoffa's position in his own words.
  • In the book The Dilbert Future by Scott Adams, in Chapter Three, "Technology Predictions", when explaining how ISDN works (or doesn't), Adams says: "You have a better chance of finding Jimmy Hoffa in your documentation than you have of finding the information you need to order an ISDN line." (page 42, Boxtree paperback edition).
  • In an early Bloom County strip, Milo Bloom grills a senator over the phone about Hoffa's whereabouts, deliberately twisting the senator's words; ie. Senator:I don't know where Hoffa is! Milo:(scribbling on notepad) I don't remember where I buried Hoffa, says Bedfellow...

Other media

  • Hoffa is something of a recurring gag in the comic strip Piranha Club by Bud Grace. In one storyline, the lead character, Ernie, finds the frozen corpse of Jimmy Hoffa when he is stranded in Tibet. In another, an Amazon tribe kidnaps Sid's pet piranha, and replaces him with Jimmy Hoffa's shrunken head. Ernie and Arnold also finds Jimmy Hoffa frozen inside a glacier while scaling Mount Bayonne.
  • In 2006, low-cost airline Spirit Airlines released a "Hunt for Hoffa" advertising campaign with the tagline "Help us find Hoffa with our Hunt for Hoffa game and enjoy fares from just $39 each way." The point of the game was to dig for Hoffa's body by clicking grids on the airline's website, and "winners" were taken to another webpage, saying "You found Hoffa!," thanking them for assisting the National Spirit Sale Center find the politician's body. Within hours after the promotion debuted, the company received many complaints, and the promotion was taken down immediately and changed to another promotion, simply titled "Happy Sale." This promotion was later listed as #8 on CNN Money's 101 Dumbest Moments in Business.
  • In Joan Rivers' stand-up comedy act "What Becomes a (Semi) Legend Most", Joan laments her upcoming visit to the gynecologist since he tends to make remarks which imply that she is not having frequent sex: "I better get the Endust", "THERE'S Jimmy Hoffa!!!", etc.
  • Released January 11 2008, Hoffa appears as a baby in "Sam and Max" Season 2, Episode 2. He was apparently addicted to the waters of the fountain of youth, which exist on the Moai islands.
  • In the Video Game "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City", there is a Jimmy Hoffa "Easter Egg". When a player takes a sea-plane and forces it under the bridge on the northwest corner of the city, a glitch will occur that allows you to see inside the bridge. Having noticed this glitch, RockStar-the creators of the game, decided to work with this, and placed Jimmy Hoffa's body inside the bridge to follow the myth that he was thrown in a cement mixer and built into a city structure.

Notes and references

Bibliography

  • Arthur A. Sloane, Hoffa, MIT Press, 1992.
  • Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran and the inside story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the last ride of Jimmy Hoffa, Steerforth Press, Hanover (NH, USA) 2004 (ISBN 1-58642-077-1).
  • Dan E. Moldea, The Hoffa Wars, Charter Books, New York: 1978 (ISBN 0-441-34010-5).

See also

External links



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