The Missing Person Case Of Teamster Jimmy Hoffa
Robert W. Kelley/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesJimmy Hoffa’s missing person case is the only one on this list that implicates the American Mafia.
As the former head of the powerful and corrupt Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa was a household name long before he vanished in 1975. His social standing also arguably made his the most famous mysterious disappearance in America. There are plenty of theories of what happened.
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman famously chronicled the most convincing theory — that Hoffa ran afoul of the mob and was consequently murdered.
Hoffa was hired by the Teamsters as an organizer in 1932, where his resourceful ambition led him to thrive — and to form shadowy relationships.
He leveraged his associations with organized crime figures into political capital that made the Teamsters the most powerful union in the country. But the mob and the Teamsters naturally developed mutually exclusive interests in the 1970s.
It was July 30, 1975, when Jimmy Hoffa vanished completely. He was last seen in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, after meeting with numerous mobsters involved in the growing dispute between the Teamsters and the mob.
Arranged as a discussion, the meeting was likely just a set-up to have the powerful labor leader eliminated. While Hoffa was officially declared dead in 1982, his case remains an open investigation to this day — his body has never been found.
Other theories suggest Hoffa was killed by New York Mafia hitman John Sullivan, who dismembered Hoffa with a meat cleaver and saw and stored his body parts in a freezer. Sullivan allegedly dumped Hoffa’s remains into the concrete foundations of the Giants Stadium, then under construction in New Jersey,
Ultimately, the narrative detailed in The Irishman about its titular figure, Frank Sheeran, seems the most convincing. Claiming that his friend didn’t suffer, Sheeran confessed before dying that he murdered Hoffa at the behest of Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino, perhaps also in league with fellow mob boss Angelo Bruno.
Nonetheless, the unsolved disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa continues to spawn new conspiracy theories to this day.
