by Tom Philbin
One of the abiding mysteries of our time is what happened to one of the most powerful union bosses ever in America, the storied Jimmy Hoffa. The mystery started when Hoffa was released from Lewisburg Federal Prison in Pennsylvania in 1971, pardoned by President Richard Nixon before Christmas. Hoffa was serving a prison term that had started in 1964 for corrupt activities, including jury tampering and mail and wire fraud.
Dangerous Ambition
Hoffa had single-handedly taken the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to the heights by gaining great wages and benefits for its members, but he also was lying down in carnal embrace with the Mafia. He was first accused of that by Attorney General Robert Kennedy who had a personal feud with Hoffa. Perhaps that stemmed from a reported incident at a dinner party. Supposedly, Hoffa challenged Kennedy to arm wrestle, which he accepted, and the next day Hoffa was crowing about how he had beaten Kennedy.
Jimmy Hoffa
Hoffa was, by all odds, a tough child in a man’s body. In another incident, he beat mobster Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano in a fistfight at an airport. Tony responded by promising to tear Hoffa’s heart out and kill his grandchildren. Considering Tony’s reputation, the threat wasn’t terribly far-fetched.
The problem was Hoffa’s ambition. When he was found guilty and sent to jail, he automatically became subject to a stipulation of the federal Landrum-Griffin Act that prohibited convicted union leaders from running for office in the union for five years after their release from prison. But that didn’t matter to Jimmy.
Word got out that he was going to wait the necessary five years and then run again for president of the international union. And there was no doubt that he would have had a chance of winning. The workers loved Jimmy. Indeed, on the last birthday he spent in Lewisburg, he received thousands of cards and a plane flew over the prison with a banner streaming behind it wishing him happy birthday.
But someone didn’t love Jimmy: the Mafia. The reason was that after Jimmy went to prison, he was replaced as Teamster leader by someone the Mob liked better: Frank Fitzsimmons, who had nowhere near the drive and ballsiness of Hoffa. When the Mafia spoke, Fitzsimmons listened. That wasn’t always true with Jimmy, who was much more bullheaded.
The specter of Jimmy coming back to run the Teamsters was not something the Mob could endure. Having the union yield to their wishes translated into greater profits, but Jimmy did things his way, not their way. Jimmy Hoffa had to go away permanently. And the Mob can achieve that in only a certain number of ways.
On July 30, 1975, a meeting was set up—probably by a trusted friend—for Jimmy at the Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. Jimmy was due to meet with Mafia hotshots Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone and Tony Provenzano, the latter not one of Hoffa’s friends, as pointed out earlier.
On the day he disappeared, Hoffa seemed to be uncharacteristically nervous, according to his wife and a good friend who operated a limousine service and had stopped in to see Jimmy. He went to the restaurant dressed casually in a dark blue, short-sleeved shirt with black pants and white Gucci loafers. A stickler for punctuality, he arrived at the restaurant right on time for the 2 p.m. meeting.
But Giacalone and Provenzano were not there. Hoffa waited in the front of the restaurant until 2:15 before going to a public phone booth to call his wife and tell her that he had apparently been stood up.
Nobody knows exactly what happed after that, but Hoffa was spotted after he called his wife. A truck driver making deliveries in the area nearly had a collision with a car, a 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham, as it pulled out of the restaurant parking lot. The driver said that he spotted a gray blanket wrapped around what appeared to be a rifle between what was clearly Jimmy Hoffa and another passenger.
Police investigators discovered something ominous the next day. Hoffa’s 1974 Green Pontiac Grand Ville was discovered in the restaurant parking lot. The car was unlocked. Figuratively holding their breaths, investigators opened the trunk but found nothing.
They then searched for the Mercury Marquis and found that it belonged to Joe Giacalone, the son of Anthony Giacalone, one of the people who were supposed to meet with Hoffa. When investigators dusted the interior of the car, they discovered numerous fingerprints. On some paper and a 7UP bottle, they found prints belonging to Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, who had lived with Hoffa for awhile and who the labor leader considered a foster son.
Mafia Gambit
The set-up looked like an age-old Mafia gambit: get someone to lure the victim—in this case, Hoffa—who would trust that person enough to get into the car. The FBI checked the whereabouts of their prime suspects. Anthony Giacalone said that he had spent the day at the Southfield Athletic Club, which was verified by other people at the club. The police also checked out Tony Pro. He claimed to have been playing cards with friends in New Jersey, and they supported his alibi. Both of the men denied knowing anything about a meeting with Hoffa.
Perhaps the key player in the Hoffa disappearance was Chuckie O’Brien, who also said he hadn’t seen Hoffa on July 30. He gave the FBI a detailed alibi about bringing a large salmon to the home of a Teamster official and having to help the man’s wife cut it into steaks, and then later being at the Southfield Athletic Club with Tony Giacalone at the same time that Hoffa was waiting to meet with him and Tony Pro.
O’Brien also said that blood from the fish had gotten onto the car seat, so he had taken the vehicle to a car wash to clean it. No one at the athletic club or at the car wash could corroborate his story.
Investigators theorized that Hoffa had gotten into the car and then been driven to his execution, probably in a house nearby. More than a quarter century after he disappeared, in March 2001, that was proven. Tracking dogs were brought in from Pennsylvania and given a pair of Hoffa’s socks and his moccasins to sniff. Amazingly, they soon found Hoffa’s scent in the back of O’Brien’s car. Investigators also found a hair in the back of the car and, using DNA methods, eventually matched it to hair in Hoffa’s hairbrush. But they did not have enough evidence to pursue an indictment.
Then an informant named Ralph Picardo, who was serving a conviction for murder, came forward saying he knew exactly what had happened to Jimmy Hoffa. Picardo had been a business agent for Teamsters Local 4H and had driven Tony Pro around. Picardo said that Hoffa did indeed have an appointment for a sit-down with archenemy Provenzano, arranged at the suggestion of Tony Giacalone.
Once Hoffa was at the restaurant, Chuckie O’Brien showed up and drove him to a house close to the restaurant where Chuckie said he was staying with friends. He told Hoffa that the meeting would be held there. (If Picardo is to be believed, the story of the rifle covered by a gray blanket is not true.) But instead of Tony Pro being at the house, there was a team of killers: a Teamster agent named Thomas Andretta and two brothers, Sal Briguglio and his brother Gabriel, as well as Frank Sheeran, a Teamster official from a local in Delaware.
Sheeran had close ties with Mob boss Russell Bufalino. Picardo said Bufalino ordered the hit, though no reason why was offered. Picardo said Bufalino traveled from his home base of Pittston, Pennsylvania, on July 30 and may have been in the house to make sure “the piece of work” he ordered was done correctly and Hoffa was gone for good.
Swiss-Cheese Alibi
Someone once said that the last thing you want to do is piss off the government, and that certainly happened in this case. The federal government was unable to charge anyone with the crime because FBI investigators couldn’t find a body, and they were unable to penetrate the alibis given for that day by the people involved—not even that of Chuckie O’Brien, whose alibis resembled “Swiss cheese,” as one government official said. But as O.J. Simpson learned the hard way, if the government doesn’t get you one way, they’ll get you another, including just harassing you and making sure you spend a lot of money on lawyers.
For example, Tony Pro had the government watching his local all the time, and in 1978, he was prosecuted and found guilty
of having murdered Anthony Castellito in 1961. That was despite the fact that Castellito’s body was given its final send-off in a tree shredder. Provenzano went to prison for the last time in 1980 for racketeering and eight years later got what prisoners call “backgate parole”—he died there at age 71.
Tony Giacalone was tried and convicted of tax evasion and spent ten years in prison. He was going to be tried for racketeering acts, but he died before the charges found their way into a court of law.
Chuckie O’Brien went to Florida to work for Frank Fitzsimmons and spent some time in jail for minor offenses like accepting a car as a gift while a union official and lying on a loan application.
The Mob caught up with Sal Briguglio, who was affiliated with Tony Pro. Briguglio was gunned down in New York’s Little Italy, his offense allegedly being talking to prosecutors about the Castellito murder.
The mystery of what happened to Jimmy Hoffa on July 30, 1975, has been solved—he was murdered. But the location of his body is another question, and perhaps the one most people are interested in learning. One thing is known: the Mob can be quite creative about getting rid of a body.
Consider, for example, a stone-cold killer named Jimmy “The Gent” Burke who reportedly killed more than one hundred people. One day, Burke was standing on a patio slab in Queens beneath which the body of a man named Gerry had been buried. Burke tapped the slab with his shoe and said: “So how you doing, Gerry?”
So Where Is Jimmy?
A variety of theories exist regarding what happened to Jimmy Hoffa:
He was disposed of in Brother Muscat’s garbage dump in Jersey City.
In what would be a nasty, ironic act, Hoffa was buried in a 100-acre gravel pit owned by his brother Bill.
He was buried in a field in Waterford Township, Michigan.
Hoffa’s body was taken to New Jersey where it was mixed into the concrete used to construct the New York Giants’ football stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
He was encased in the foundation of a public-works garage in Cadillac, Michigan.
He was buried at the bottom of a swimming pool behind a mansion in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
He was ground up and dumped in a Florida swamp.
He was crushed in an automobile compactor at Central Sanitation Services in Hamtramck, Michigan.
He was weighted down and dumped in Michigan’s Au Sable River.
His body was disintegrated at a fat-rendering plant.
He was buried under the helipad at the Sheraton Savannah Resort Hotel, which at the time of his disappearance was owned by the Teamsters.
According to informant Ralph Picardo, the convict who fingered the conspirators, Hoffa’s body was put in a 55-gallon steel drum and carted away in a Gateway Transportation truck. Picardo said he didn’t know where it was taken.
Jimmy Hoffa was declared legally dead in 1982, but his case remains open. Like a perpetual flame, a special agent at the FBI’s Detroit field office is constantly assigned to it. The investigation has generated over 16,000 pages of documents gathered from interviews, wiretaps, and surveillance, but despite the government’s best efforts to get to the bottom of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, what the Mob did with the body remains a question mark and names of the people who killed him remain a mystery.
On October 23, 1983, 61-year-old Jane Alexander was at her friend Nancy Martell’s house, helping to prepare dinner for a crowd of folks who were coming over to watch the San Francisco 49ers game. A phone call came for Jane from her friend Hugh Fine who said, “Cousin Irma Clark in San Francisco called. She’s very upset. She says she called Aunt Gert’s house about eight-thirty last night and got no answer. She thinks something awful has happened.”
Jane was extremely upset. Aunt Gert was like a surrogate mother to her, having helped raise Jane after her parents divorced. At eighty-eight, Gert lived by herself in San Jose, seventy miles from Jane’s home in Marin County, and was still active and self-sufficient. And her life ran like clockwork. She should have been home at 8:30 p.m.
Jane called Cousin Irma and received extremely upsetting news. Irma had called Gert’s house. At first, she thought she had called a wrong number because she didn’t recognize the voice of the person who answered. When she called back, she found she was talking to a police officer who wouldn’t give any information about why he was there or what had happened.
A little crazed, Jane called Gert’s house and got a cop who identified himself as a San Jose police officer. Jane demanded to know what had happened, and a moment later, a man who identified himself as the San Jose coroner, Nat Gossett, got on the phone. The conversation went like this:
“Mrs. Alexander, are you the niece of Gertrude McCabe?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry to tell you that your Aunt Gertrude has been the victim of a homicide.”
“Homicide? Was she shot?”
The coroner could not release any information.
Jane suggested to folks at the football party that she should call Cousin Irma and tell her what had happened to Gert. However, her boyfriend, 55-year-old Tom O’Donnell, whom she lived with, suggested that they drive to San Francisco. Jane agreed, and with heavy hearts, they headed out.
Upon investigation, Gertrude McCabe was found to have been bludgeoned, strangled with a bike chain, and stabbed numerous times superficially. The area where she was found was soaked with blood.
Detectives found a number of revealing details at the crime scene that indicated Gert might have known the murderer. The front door was locked, which might mean that Gert had let the killer in and then locked the door behind him—or her. Cops also noted that the heavy rear door was closed but not locked, and there was no sign of forced entry.
The overall scene, with drawers pulled and the contents scattered around, gave the appearance of a bogus burglary. Classically, burglars are “lazy,” said one cop. They simply open drawers, and pick and choose what they want. They don’t want to have to bend down and pick something up they’ve tossed. But the “burglar” had left behind jewelry of some value.
Ultimately, the cops theorized that Gert was interrupted from her reading between three and four o’clock and was bludgeoned in the back of the head by the person she let in the door.
The question was who? And why?
Jane and her boyfriend Tom O’Donnell decided to go to Gert’s house at 165 Arroyo Way. The body had been removed, but a huge, brownish stain remained on the rug in the den where Gert’s body had been found. Cops told Jane that they didn’t believe the murder was a burglary gone bad. All Jane could think was why? There was nothing special about Gert or the house she lived in. Why would someone kill her?
Bizarrely, detectives allowed Jane and Tom O’Donnell to stay at the house that night in a room that was obviously not part of the crime scene. The cops also allowed Jane to go through some of Gert’s papers. Among other things, Jane found two passbooks, each for $20,000, one in her name and the other in Cousin Irma’s name. She also found out that Cousin Irma had been named executor of Gert’s will, which didn’t please Jane. She and Irma were not on the best of terms.
In the days following Gert’s murder, cops talked to a wide variety of people, as they always do, and began to fill in the blanks about her life.
The Victim’s Life
They focused on the fact that, at her age, she didn’t do all the chores around the house, though she certainly was active. Detectives theorized that she knew her killer and that he might be a handyman. Among the handymen they investigated was Virgil Jackson.
Jackson wasn’t at the complex where he lived, but investigators interviewed neighbors and found out that he was fifty-three, his wife twenty-seven, and they had recently moved to California from Poughkeepsie, New York. Some neighbors thought that Virgil was on the lam from bad-check charges. They also said that they had overheard fights between Virgil and his wife, Sheryl, and Sheryl’s daughter had said that he had slapped her mother in the face hard enough t
o knock out a tooth.
The detectives were able to contact Sheryl, who told a story that cast suspicion on the couple. Gert had hired the Jacksons to fix a door and change some lightbulbs so they knew her. The complex manager had told police that when Sheryl found out that Gert had been murdered, she wanted to leave the complex immediately, as if escaping from Virgil.
Sheryl told the cops that she got home from work about 2:30 a.m. following the day Gert was killed. When she told Virgil then about Gert’s murder, he said he had already heard and his reaction was terrifyingly cold.
The cops’ antennas went up. The announcement of Gert’s murder had not been made until six or seven hours later on Sunday morning. Sheryl also told the investigators that she was afraid Virgil would hurt her if he knew she had been talking to the cops. But when investigators eventually questioned Virgil, he had a rock-solid alibi. The only thing that connected him to Gert’s murder was his wife’s emotionally charged suspicions.
Jane Alexander
Jane Alexander was forceful and outspoken, definitely not the kind of person to remain passive during the murder investigation of someone she loved. Gradually, she started to become obsessed with the case, and her health was affected.
Her boyfriend, Tom O’Donnell, tried to convince her to step back from the murder, but he wasn’t successful. Jane did allow Tom to take over handling the money Aunt Gert had left her, as well as other financial affairs. Eventually Jane’s obsession started to infect Tom, and Jane finally realized this. She suggested that they take a trip out of the area.
Tom suggested that they pick up the money Aunt Gert had left, rather than letting it be a distraction, so they got it and Jane gave it to Tom to deposit.