The real story of the Teamsters boss told through exclusive interviews, news footage, and photographs.
Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance and probable murder is one of the great crimes of the century. Despite a massive Federal investigation spanning 4 decades and hundreds of suspects, only the general contours of the crime are known. In the American mythology Hoffa is both hero and villain; a self-made man who ran the nation's largest union and was so beloved by the rank and file Teamsters he represented that they supported him as union president while he was under indictment and even in prison.
Hoffa also moved in the
highest circles of organized crime. Among his closest friends and
business partners were members of the national Mafia commission, men he
was forced to align with during the violent and chaotic early days of
union building when corporations deployed armed goons and police to
attack workers in the street, and unions battled each other to control
the workforce.
Hoffa's chief nemesis
was US attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, and the two men developed a
deep hatred for each other. In the long aftermath of President F. John
Kennedy's assassination Jimmy Hoffa's name swirled in the aether of
conspiracy theories, and his close Mafia associates Carlos Marcello and
Santos Trafficante are at the center of the most plausible theories
about Kennedy's death.
The two men Hoffa
thought he was going to meet on the day of his disappearance have the
most ironclad alibis of any suspects in the case. All the FBI's other
leads came from informants and unreliable witnesses. In the years after
the case the FBI has dug up farms, investigated waste dumps, and
debriefed numerous Mafia turncoats that purported to have information on
Hoffa's death, but they all turned out to be ephemeral. The only
physical evidence is a single piece of Hoffa's hair found in Mafia
enforcer Tony Giacalone's son's car.
Frank Sheeran, a
Teamster ally and Mafia enforcer, made the claim that he personally
killed Hoffa in a house in Detroit and his story became a national best
seller. But the veracity of Sheeran's story is undermined by his
previous attempts to get a book deal centered around the claim that
Richard Nixon had Hoffa killed, and his use of a forged document
purportedly signed by Hoffa that validated his story.
"Killing Jimmy Hoffa"
covers the life and times of Hoffa and explore all the theories about
his disappearance. In analyzing the suspects we will take a tour of
America's 20th criminal landscape and see how the Hoffa hit was the
final act in the nearly 50 year reign of La Cosa Nostra as a shadow
government that wielded chilling power and control over America.
Finally, we will unveil a
previously unknown, and the most likely, account of the events of July
30th, 1975, the day James Riddle Hoffa vanished.
Jimmy Hoffa was a
Shakespearean character. One of the last of the self-made American men
to rise out of the working class, he was born fighting. To seize and
maintain the power he so obviously craved Hoffa had to embrace the
corruption of the world he inhabited. Corrupt businesses, corrupt
politicians, and the very essence of corruption: La Cosa Nostra. He was a
Caesar surrounded by many Brutus'. He lived to see his great nemesis,
the golden boy Robert F. Kennedy, die before him, but also lost his
greatest possession-the Teamsters union itself. In the ultimate insult,
whoever killed him got away with it; Hoffa's soul forever un-avenged.
Why do we still think
about him? It must be that he reminds us of something about America, he
reminds us that it wasn't always so easy, that it wasn't always so slick
and clean. We know that he is dead, but the important question is: Who
Killed Jimmy Hoffa?
The cast of characters
in the saga of Jimmy Hoffa is quite a menagerie. His peers were the most
powerful men in America, on both sides of the law. The Kennedy
brothers, Mafia strongmen like Detroit's Giacalone brothers and the
murderous Carmine Galante, hard-nosed union men, CIA spies, and the
captains of American industry. Hoffa was at the center of such a complex
web of relationships, plots, and conspiracies that eventually he could
no longer manage them and found himself taking a ride that he would
never return from.
At the height of his
fame, his face was more recognizable than a movie star, he was more
loved than Mickey Mantle. Just as the Kennedy's were the Golden Boys of
the aspiring classes, of the college students , James Hoffa was the
Golden Boy of the all those Americans who worked for a living, even if
he was just as flawed as Jack and Bobby.
The Hoffa hit was the last great flexing of Mafia power on a national
scale. While the government didn't charge anybody, all the prime
suspects received significant prison sentences soon after, unlike in the
assassination of JFK, where they got away fairly cleanly. Starting in
the late 80's many of the top Mafia chiefs were sent to prison for
lengthy terms, and their ability to pull off crimes right in the public
eye diminished. What we saw was an end to a period of extreme corruption
in the American economic, political, and social systems that began
during Prohibition. The era of assassinations, Watergate, etc. Corrupt
politicians, corrupt police, corrupt leaders. Hoffa was a man of his
times. Hoffa's disappearance was the capstone of 15 years of psychic
trauma and shocking events that started with JFK's assassination and
continued through the murders of MLK , RFK, and Watergate.
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