In 1967, Hoffa was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In 1971, however, he was released when Republican President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to time served on the condition he not participate in union activities for ten years. Hoffa was planning to sue to invalidate that restriction in order to reassert his power over the Teamsters when he disappeared at around 2:30pm on July 30, 1975 from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, 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.
His fate is a mystery that continues to this day and there are many guesses as to what became of him. Among these are that Hoffa was killed and:
- Dumped from a boat into Lake St. Clair, Lake Huron or Lake Erie;
- Buried:
- in Michigan, either in the yard of his house in Bloomfield or another house in the Detroit area
- under the New Jersey Turnpike;
- beneath the turf (possibly in one of the end zones) at Giants Stadium in New Jersey;
- in an abandoned coal mine shaft near Pittston, Pennsylvania;
- somewhere in Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, New York;
- in an unmarked grave on the deserted West Sister Island in Lake Erie;
- in the PJP Landfill in Jersey City underneath the Pulaski Skyway.
- put into a wood chipper with the remaining parts fed to hogs.
Former Mafioso Bill Bonanno claimed in his book, "Bound by Honor," that Hoffa was shot and placed in the trunk of a car that was then run through a car compactor. Mob hitman Richard Kuklinski also claimed in one of his televised interviews that Hoffa was now a car bumper.
Other hypotheses are that Hoffa's corpse was:
- mixed with concrete and used in construction;
- dissolved in an acid tank used to rechrome car bumpers;
- rendered into fat at a rendering plant;
- put into a local Detroit smelter and melted.
Conspiracy theorists have even floated the hypothesis that it is Hoffa, not Elvis Presley, in Elvis Presley's grave. No theory has been proven and his body has never been found. Hoffa was declared legally dead and a death certificate issued on 30 July 1982, seven years after his disappearance. Rumors of sightings persisted for years.
Investigations and claims
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 his 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 Munger Township, Michigan formerly frequented by Frank Sheeran, World War II 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 ("painting houses" is a euphemism for murder, alluding to the splatter of blood on walls, and "doing my own carpentry" is a euphemism for the disposal of the body) in which he recounts a series of confessions by Sheeran regarding Hoffa's murder. Brandt claimed that Sheeran had begun contacting him because he wished to assuage feelings of guilt. Over the course of several years, he spoke numerous times by phone to Brandt (which Brandt recorded) during which he acknowledged his role as Hoffa's killer, acting on orders from the Mafia. 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 taken to a nearby funeral home and cremated within an hour of Sheeran's departure.
i did this too
Did what?