What Happened to Jimmy Hoffa?

Hoffa on the cover of Time magazine in 1959.

On the night of July 30, 1975, a family in a Detroit suburb waited anxiously for its father to return home. He had left the house earlier that day to meet someone around lunchtime. At 2:30, he had called to tell his wife that the person he was meeting had not shown up. Since then, nobody had heard from him, even though he had promised to be back by four. Not until the next morning did his brother finally call the police to report a missing person.

Soon the report would reach television screens and the front pages of newspapers across the nation. This was no ordinary missing person; it was James R. Hoffa, the former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and perhaps the most famous labor leader in American history. Ever since he disappeared that July afternoon, wild tales have circulated, speculating on his fate. The FBI has still not closed the case file on his disappearance. Thirty-one years later, the secret of Hoffa’s whereabouts remains as mysterious as ever.

At the time he vanished, Jimmy Hoffa was a nationally famous figure and a household name. His long career in labor organizing had begun when, still a teenager, he took part in a strike at the loading dock of a Detroit grocery store. Rising through the ranks of the Michigan-based Teamsters Local 299, he became the president of the national union in 1957. Dave Beck, the president before him, had gone to prison for tax fraud, and the already powerful Hoffa stepped into the void.

On Hoffa’s watch, the Teamsters expanded dramatically in both membership and influence. By the mid-1970s, after the end of his long presidency, the union’s rolls had grown to include more than two million Americans. In the year before his disappearance, under the leadership of his successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, the Teamsters spent $8.5 million on national organizing, not including expenditures by over 800 local branches. It had long been a serious union, but only during the age of Jimmy Hoffa had the Teamsters truly become a force to reckon with.

Yet his career had a dark side to it as well. He didn’t rise to a position of national prominence simply by being a talented organizer. He worked with people in organized crime, and he borrowed some of their tactics. He made questionable business deals with mob figures, some of them involving investing union pension funds in casinos and other risky enterprises. He gave kickbacks to potential allies within his union and in the Mafia, and he used thugs to intimidate and coerce local chapters.

In 1957 he was a natural choice to succeed Dave Beck because he was already beloved by many Teamsters. He had won their affection with his hard-edged performance before a U.S. Senate committee investigating racketeering and corrupt labor practices. The committee, led by Arkansas Senator John McClellan, had turned a penetrating gaze on the activities of Hoffa and his cohort, and its final report, while not leading to criminal charges against Hoffa, blasted him. “Hoffa runs a hoodlum’s empire,” it declared, continuing in caustic imitation of the Gettysburg Address, “the members of which are steeped in iniquity and dedicated to the proposition that no thug need starve if there is a Teamster payroll handy.”

Hoffa won not only fans but also powerful enemies with his combative performance before the McClellan Committee. One of its members was Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, and the chief counsel for the committee was Kennedy’s younger brother Robert. A few years later as president of the Teamsters, Hoffa would have President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy as two of his chief antagonists. In his opening statement during his first, most famous debate with Richard Nixon, John Kennedy told his listeners: “I’m not satisfied when I see men like Jimmy Hoffa, in charge of the largest union in the United States, still free.”

Throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Robert Kennedy doggedly pursued legal action against Hoffa. The Justice Department eventually made its case and sent the union leader to jail for fraud and jury tampering. But he served less than five years of his thirteen-year sentence, unexpectedly winning a pardon in 1971 from President Richard M. Nixon.

Hoffa’s pardon came with a ban on participating in union activities until 1980. It became clear very soon after his release, however, that he had no intention of complying. It was then—after going to war with the Kennedys and losing—that he went up against the enemies who very likely ended his life. Not content to sit on the sidelines of current events, or to take up a secondary role in the life of the Teamsters, he returned to Detroit to begin rebuilding his power base where he had started, in Local 299. There he came into conflict with associates of the new Teamsters president, his former underling Frank Fitzsimmons.

In anticipation of a battle between Hoffa and Fitzsimmons, as Hoffa tried to reclaim the Teamsters presidency, the struggle for control of Local 299 escalated to the point of actual violence. Hoffa’s friend Dave Johnson, the head of 299, found his 45-foot boat torched in an unexplained fire. Fitzsimmons’s son, the vice president of the local, had his car dynamited.

It was in the midst of this turmoil that Hoffa vanished. It is still unclear who exactly was responsible for his disappearance, but a number of convincing explanations have been suggested. One is that allies of Fitzsimmons, either on his instructions or on their own initiative, disposed of Hoffa in order to end his challenge to the new president. Another is that he finally ran afoul of one of his contacts in the mob, possibly the Detroit boss Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone, who may have been the man he was supposed to meet at lunchtime. A third possible explanation, suggested in the summer of 1975, is that he emulated the Mafia leader Joseph Bonanno, who had faked his own kidnapping in 1964 to avoid testifying before a federal grand jury. Given the duration of Hoffa’s disappearance, though, and the reluctance with which he would have abandoned his family, this last explanation has largely been discounted.

His whereabouts have never been discovered, and suggestions for his final location have ranged from a Detroit-area junkyard to the inside of the concrete structure of Giants Stadium, in New Jersey. Just two months ago, in May 2006, the FBI received a tip that led them to search a Michigan horse farm for traces of his body. Nothing turned up. That tip, however, will surely not be the last. Until someone finds Jimmy Hoffa, one thing is certain: The search will go on.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com.