December 27, 2019 • 53 mins
In his day, American labor union leader James "Jimmy" Riddle Hoffa was one of the most well-known figures in the US. On July 30th, 1975, Hoffa disappeared. He has not been seen, living or dead, since that day. In the decades following his death numerous investigators have tried (and failed) to figure out what exactly happened to this infamous American icon. So what actually happened to Jimmy Hoffa? Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome
(00:24):
back to the show. My name is Matt, my name
they call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission controlled dec and most importantly,
you are you. You are here and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know. From the offset,
it is important for us to collectively establish that this
episode is not an advertisement for the Irishman. The newest
(00:49):
Scorsese film that just dropped on Netflix, Uh, to no
small amount of acclaim and a little bit of controversy.
Al Pacino plays one of the I don't know, maybe
secondary is a good word, a secondary character in the
film Uh. He plays a character named Jimmy Hoffa, which
(01:10):
is based on the real life Jimmy Hoffa. Now, Nol,
you and I had talked about this film a little
bit off air when we saw it, and and Paul
you watched it, so you brought it up to us
without spoiling the film for anyone. It's based on a book, right,
by this guy named Charles Brant. It's called I Heard
You Paint Houses. I Heard You Paint Houses, which is
(01:32):
a fantastic title. This book purports to be nonfiction, includes
interviews and alleged confessions made to the author, Charles Brandt,
by a former mafia hitman named Frank she Wrin like
Edge she Wren Uh and yes and this uh. This
film inspired our own super producer, Paul deck And to say, Hey, guys,
(01:57):
have we ever delved into the story of jim Me Halfa?
And I don't know. I I assumed that we had.
We had. Not that changes today. So here are the facts. Yeah,
let's talk about Jimmy Haffa. Who is this guy? Well,
he was born James Riddle. You know, he went by
Jimmy Halfa. And he was born on Valentine's Day, that's
(02:19):
February fourteenth, nineteen thirteen, in a place called Brazil, Indiana.
I did not know there was a Brazil Indiana. It's
kind of cool. I've never heard of that place either. Um,
assuming the the climate is a bit different in that Brazil. Um,
he he was aware of let's say, the American labor force,
(02:40):
the American laborer, the person who was using their hands
to create something, generally for somebody else. His father was
a coal miner and he passed away when Halfa was
very very young. Jimmy was young, and his mom had
end up joining the workforce to support her family, which
which was a fairly common occurrence as you know, um,
(03:03):
the heads of households would die off, whether it was
through war conflict or a workforce accident or something like that. Um.
He had three siblings of four children, including Jimmy, and
eventually they moved to a place called Detroit, Michigan, which
at the time was a hotbed of industry and growing.
(03:24):
You know, this is uh, this is still before the
enormous boom of the American auto industry, but still it's
very much an industrious place. It's a great place to
get a job. And we don't know how much formal
education Jimmy Hoffa was able to achieve. Uh, you know,
you'll hear's. Historians say they don't know whether he reached
(03:46):
high school, much less graduated, but we know that eventually,
while he was in school, he had to drop out.
He had to help support his family, so he worked
on the loading dock for a chain of grocery stores
there in Detroit. Wait, and while working there, imagine how
young this guy is. While working there, he organizes his
very first labor strike and it all hinges on shipments
(04:10):
of strawberries. Yeah, and he actually was pretty demonstrating some
pretty serious streets smart to this point already because he
used a recent shipment of strawberries as leverage to help
get his coworkers better deal, better contracts um for their labor.
They refused to unload the strawberries until they had secured better,
(04:32):
better pay and in the thirties, well, I just have
to say right there with the strawberries, like, that's a
smart thing because strawberries go bad pretty quickly, and if
you don't unload the strawberries, he's like he was coming
up the works for everybody basically by doing that. And
the it's interesting how it's set a timer, like very
clear timer on when you're gonna lose all your money
(04:54):
on these strawberries, and you're also losing money because that
truck is now stuck there. It was just really smart.
Have worked with canps, Honestly, it wouldn't because this CANPS,
I don't know. Yeah, hard to say if that was
just like a serendipitous thing, or if he very much
you know, was being calculated about that. But it was
absolutely a smart move and he got what he wanted.
(05:15):
Then in the nineteen thirties, um Hafa officially joined the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which is what he went on
to become the president of at least the union's Detroit chapter. UM.
So he kind of laid the groundwork for a career
UH in labor um and and it would seem it came.
He came by honestly based on his you know, trajectory
(05:37):
and his upbringing at that point. Yeah, and we should
also stop too for anyone who doesn't know. Doubtless, doubtlessly
we have several Teamsters in the audience today, but a
lot of people in this country and abroad don't really
know what a teamster is. The teamster, the old word
atomo logically is like someone who drives a team of horses.
(05:58):
Right now, ac cordy to their website teamster dot org.
The Teamsters are America's largest, most diverse union. UH. They
started in nineteen o three is the merger of two
team driver associations t E A M. By the way,
not teen in case, my annunciation is off, and today
(06:19):
you will you may be most familiar with them as
truck drivers, right, because we've replaced to a great degree,
we've replaced animal labor with mechanical labor. So at this
time he is uh, he is. As you said, Noel
joined up with the Teamsters. He starts as the president
(06:40):
of the Detroit chapter. For many less ambitious people, that
would be the version of making it. You know what
I mean, I'm king of the town. And the thing
is that halfa is not a guy satisfied with being
a big fish in a small town. Make no mistake,
he is a shark. He expands you in membership. He
(07:01):
quickly garners a reputation for getting better contract agreements by
any means necessary. Cough cough, corruption, cough cough, mafia cough cough,
uh cough. Right, But he started out honest, right, That's
the very important thing. By nineteen fifty two, he's vice
president of the entire union, so not just Detroit, but
(07:24):
the entire international brotherhood of Teamsters, and just five years
after that, nineteen fifty seven, he is the president of
the entire organization. It's one of these things where, especially
in the way he's portrayed in film like, I haven't
been a long time since I've seen that Jack Nicholson
uh film that believed any de Vito directed, It's called Hafa.
But at least in The Irishman, you do get the
(07:46):
sense that he felt as though he were still representing
the common man and doing something positive, even though he
was clearly um heading up what was not a strictly
legal enterprise. He he seemed like he maybe could convinced
himself that it was all for the greater good. It
was all for getting his fellow brothers a better deal,
(08:07):
like with the strawberries. But in order to do that,
you know, we're swimming with sharks here. We gotta play
nice with the sharks, a bigger, bigger shark exactly, because
it's all about us versus them mentality, and in this case,
us did include some pretty um nefarious characters. Halfa was
to be the subject of numerous criminal investigations and and
(08:29):
it was a shadow that kind of relentlessly followed him
throughout his career, and this is portrayed really really well
in the in the s Carsese film. Um wasn't entirely
surprising his direct predecessor, Dave Beck, had also been investigated
and he was ultimately tried and convicted of corrupt practices
within the union. Dave Beck, which was convicted, which gave
(08:51):
half of the opportunity to ascend to this position, yet
half a persevered Nineteen sixty four was a big year
for him in a number of ways, not all of
them fantastic. His big win was that he got nearly
all of the truck drivers in the entire continent of
North America under a single contract. Uncle Sam have been
(09:17):
keeping an eye on Jimmy, and they thought there was
something rotten in the teamster's something fishy about his rise
to fame and his success. Now at this point, he
is very, very similar to a well known politician, or
maybe even to some degree of celebrity. Right, the FBI
(09:37):
and then U S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy are
watching Haffa very closely. They are convinced that a lot
of his union success is less a result of being
a shrewd negotiator and more a result of a close
collaboration with organized crime also known as the mob or
(09:58):
the mafia. Right, so what else happened in nineteen sixty Well,
halfa himself was found guilty of a couple of things,
bribery for one, also jury tampering. Jury tampering the good
old j T when when something goes wrong and somebody
knows it, you gotta tamper a little bit. Yeah, right,
(10:20):
like and and that can be really that could be
really terrible or just going like here's a hundred dollars,
don't don't talk about me, or it could yeah, or
it could be something to the level of you know,
memories a funny thing, Mr Smith, you know what I mean.
Like sometimes you think you remember, so you look back
and you realize you don't remember it too good. After all,
(10:41):
you know, it could have been anybody there. But you
know one thing, one thing you never forget is your
children smile. And it's wonderful will be able to see
that every day instead of just looking back and and
remembering it and wishing you could say hello to him.
Oh boy, oh boy, that was really good. That's just
the science of memory. I was gonna say, just like
(11:03):
casually mentioning his or her daughter's birthday, but like that's
like that was on that was on the was on
the money. Well, that's cinematic I'm sure it was much
more subtle, yes, but but that stuff that that's when
he he was found guilty of both of those things
in connection with a previous trial that he had that
he had gone through in nineteen two years prior. Yeah,
(11:23):
he was on trial for conspiracy, which I love you
that people could be convicted of conspiracy. And then he
was found guilty in sixty four for charges related to,
as you said, Matt conspiracy. So that was one bad
thing that happened to him that year. Yeah, he's also
convicted of misusing funds from the union's pension plan. And
(11:45):
that's a big note in the in the film that
Scorsese did, and also a note I believe in the
book I Heard You Paint Houses, because the union's pension
fund was an enormous amount of money and he pretty
much had direct control over it, so he could make
the money dance to the tunes he chose, and a
(12:06):
lot of those tunes were mafia backed projects, like in
Las Vegas, for example, um paying for wings to be
constructed on you know, casinos, and as we know, a
lot of that money came directly from the mob to
start you know, Las Vegas. In the first place. So
there were those relationships, uh that were ongoing and directly
(12:27):
tied to dipping into that money, which would then be
invested and get a return. It's not like he was
stealing money from the pensioners people who would do that money.
But it was still playing fast and loose with the rules.
You know, you're telling me that organized crime organizations launder
money through things like labor unions. It's true, map money laundry,
(12:51):
but it's got a great return. I'm just gonna say,
if everything goes well, there's a great return for that stuff. Uh. Yeah,
money laundering was it was a big part of it. Also,
at what point do this Maybe a story for a
different day, but at what point do campaign donations become
um illegal? Right? At what point would be interfering with
(13:12):
the democratic process? Well, I mean, all you gotta do
is make him unlimited and then you're good to go
that I should fix all those problems. Right, Well, I
think it's safe for for the five of us. Uh,
Paul Noel met myself and you listening to agree that
Jimmy Hoffa probably did not deal with these philosophical quandaries
in the same way. It's just cost of doing business.
(13:36):
So after three years fighting these charges that his lawyer
and and you know again as depicted in the in
ther Citi film, it was a union lawyer, UM who
was also very aware of what was going on, made
the argument that this was all trumped up. Um. He
had exhausted his appeals finally and he got thirteen years
in prison in the nineteen sixty seven he was incarcerated
(13:58):
in the Louisbourg Federal Prison in Pennsylvania. UH. And then
came along UH a like minded individual who has sent
it to the presidency, a little guy by the name
of Richard Nixon who commuted half a sentence in seventy one,
essentially giving him a part in a presidential pardon with
a year and a half of probation. However, this came
(14:20):
with a string attached. Nixon band half of from holding
any union leadership position at least until nineteen So bit
of a slap on the wrists. It's a weird one too,
because it's a string with a time limit. He's not
saying stay out of the game, your dirty rat. He's saying,
just sit on the bench until the eighties. Let's let
(14:41):
the heat die down a little bit. Well, and it's
so it's so odd to me that Nixon the president,
came through and said, you know what, it's okay, is
it odd? You're good? You're good man, You're gonna be okay.
It's only been a couple of years. You got thirteen,
You'll be all right. Well half a donated heavily. Oh,
I know it's campaigned, but just too to be able
(15:04):
to get a president to do that, no matter how
much money you're donating to them, because in the end,
it's you know, the public appearance of something like that.
But here's the deal. Jimmy Hoffa and a lot of
labor union leaders out there are like hugely beloved no
matter what they're doing, no matter what they've been convicted of.
(15:25):
Will you know, over the course of time and history,
will be beloved because there is this this perception, at
least from the outside. And and you know, like we said,
Jimmy Hoffa thought that he was doing the right thing,
or at least appeared to believe he was doing the
right least at the beginning. The ideology outweighed the ego
that exactly that ideology it ripples out through the public
(15:46):
of people who are assisted in that way. And this
is a one to one and some might accuse me
of being hyperbolic here, but it's almost the way you
hear about, uh, the way folks in my dan treated
Pablo Escobar, you know, very clearly bad guy, doing at things,
hurting people, probably directly hurting individuals in that community. But
there's this perception that he's the best chance they've got,
(16:08):
or he's actually looking out for the little people, you know,
and he cares in some way, and they call him
sant Pablo and all that stuff, even though completely transparent
that this guy is is no good. Well, in Haffa,
wasn't some mob boss, no exactly, but I don't want
to draw one similar exactly, but there's intentions to look
out for the the labor class, of the working class.
(16:33):
We can imagine, you know, I think that is a
good comparison. We can imagine supporters of Escobar and supporters
of Haffa, not that they're the same in the same
line of business, but we can imagine the supporters saying, hey,
this guy is the reason that we have a paycheck.
This is the reason that my family can live comfortably
or better than they would have otherwise. So we have
(16:55):
to remember also that with his enormous power, Jimmy Hoffa
could move the vote. He could sway hundreds of thousands
of people to vote for or against a given candidate.
And for the next few years, half A wages something
very like a war. He's fighting that ban on leadership
(17:15):
in court. He doesn't want to wait till and he's
also working behind the scenes, with mixed success, to reconsolidate
his power base within the Union. And then, of course,
as even a casual student of history will recall, things
don't work out the way half A planned. Or did they.
(17:36):
We're going to rejoin him on July after a word
from our sponsor, and we're back. J Halfa is in
a state of what the streets called deep beef. He
(17:58):
has numerous enemies, he hasn't made a ton of friends,
and he's alienated many of the friends he had. But
he wants to make peace, and he realizes he might
have to eat some crow, he might have to swallow
his pride, he might have to make some inroads with
people he swore he would never work with again. So
he leaves his home in Detroit and he meets the
(18:19):
two Tony's Anthony Tony Jack and Uh Anthony Tony Prow.
Tony Jack is a figure in the Detroit crime scene.
Tony pro is a mob affiliated union leader who's based
in New Jersey. So they're supposed to meet at this
restaurant in Bloomfield Township. Is that the Marcus red Fox?
(18:43):
I believe so, yeah, that they're gonna they're gonna squash
the beef. They're gonna settle their feud. At least that's
what Haffa thinks. So shows up, what we believe, at least,
his car shows up, and he appears to be the
only one there. You know, he's there. He's gonna meet
two people, but half was the only guy there, and
he's wondering what's going on. Assume we assume, because really
(19:08):
we have no idea. We have no evidence at least
that is um, that is concrete as to what occurred
after he showed up at that restaurant, or at least
when his car showed up, because his car was there.
But he was never seen again by anyone except for
(19:30):
the people responsible for what happened to him, or himself
responsible for whatever happened to him. It's a mystery. It's
one of the most longstanding mysteries that has existed in
this country, and um, yeah, one of America's most prominent, divisive,
important public figures had simply Kay's are associated. He disappeared
(19:52):
and we're almost a half a century into the post
halfa era? So what happened to Jimmy Hoffa? Here's where
it gets crazy. The answer really depends on who who
you ask. There's no shortage of theories that have popped
up over the intervening decades, and the most popular suspects
(20:13):
being the mob of course. But in some cases this
surprised me. US federal agencies. Interesting, right, did you guys
hear about that one? That's a weird one for sure.
I mean it makes sense considering that he was such
a persona on grata like for you know, Kennedy and
the U. S. Government. I mean, they were after him,
(20:33):
and he more or less shook the rap and then
was able to kind of get back into the game.
Well we'll get into it a little bit further, but
there's also the idea that a federal agency was involved,
but not in disappearing him by killing him or anything,
but by putting him into a protection of some sort. Right, Yeah,
(20:54):
so at this point in the if we take the
high level look at it, at this point in the
world of conspiracy and speculation, the fate of Jimmy Hoffa's
kind of entered urban legend status, which means that the
theories start to obey some of the troops we would
associate with folk tales or oral tradition. The general consensus
(21:18):
now is that the mob conspired to kill Haffa because
they wanted to stop him from becoming the King of
the Teamsters again. And that's because while he was locked up,
even though he wasn't locked up for the full thirteen
year sentence, while he was locked up, his former vice
president got pretty cozy with the mob, even more so
than Haffa was, and he was much more willing to
(21:40):
play some games. When Jimmy Hoffa got out, uh the
wise guys, the mafios knew that he would try to
rain them in a little bit and they wouldn't be
able to play all the reindeer games that they had
become so accustomed to. Make no mistake, they were probably
make ging more money under that vice president. What was
(22:03):
his name meant that was Frank fitz Simmons, Frank Edward I.
Believe Frankie Fitz. Yeah, so they were making they're probably
making more money under Frankie Fitz. Who on earth would
say no to UH to continuing to enhance their profits.
They weren't keen to mess with that relationship. So the
idea then is that the mob killed him or disappeared him,
(22:27):
and we see a lot of common troops. Just like
in other forms of folklore, there are tons of variations
on this theory. It's kind of like a kind of
like a bar joke or something, you know, where it's
like X walks into a bar. They followed the same,
just a mob hit and then some sort of industrial
process to destroy or hide Haffa's body. There are a
(22:49):
ton of examples, Yes, there are, indeed. Um One of
them is that Haffa was killed, placed in the trunk
of a car, then the car was crushed in a
mob affiliated scrapyard. Um. That would be a pretty clever
way to go about it, wouldn't that leave a lot
of physical evidence? Though, Like I don't know, you gotta
will get a wonder with it, like seep out the
cubed car, like the remains or anything like that. I
(23:12):
wonder what that would look like, Yeah, I imagine, so
it would have to definitely be a tightly controlled scrap yards.
Scrap yards can be really big. But this was also
in the days before DNA testings. True, it wouldn't fly today. No,
certainly not as much, specially if it was a known
kind of mob tied facility or whatever. Another one is
that he was hit in the head with a shovel
(23:34):
and buried alive. Where are these coming from? Cheeze dramatic?
I like it, but that one doesn't make the most sense.
Do you have any providence for the for the for
the origin of a one. Yeah, that one comes to
us from the great rumor mill. That doesn't That one
doesn't have a lot of sand to it. A lot
(23:54):
of a lot of these examples that we find came
out later after because of course this happened before DNA.
It also happened before internet, right, So a lot of
these come about from statements by former mafia associated individuals,
usually when they are attempting to seem as though they
(24:16):
have leverage so that they can get some juice with
the FEDS, maybe get a better deal up to an
including relocation and immunity makes sense, and that also makes
sense for some of the ones to follow, uh, which
seemed to be kind of variations on a theme. Right.
Halfa was murdered and his remains replaced in an oil
drum um Halfa and one container or another was thrown
(24:37):
into the Great Lakes, or was abducted by the FEDS
and thrown from an airplane. It's a waterproof planned full proof.
That's uh. I just think about that. When has when
has anybody said, you know, the best way to get
rid of this prominent figure is to take them on
an airplane and then, in full view of anyone who
(24:59):
happens to be, you know, looking up, let's throw them
from the plane. It doesn't that one, okay, So that
one comes from the FED. One specifically comes from a
guy named Joseph Franco. I have no idea whether he's
related to the actor. He was an old one time
associate of Haffa's, and Franco said that he kept the
story to himself for years because he wanted to use
(25:22):
the info as leverage in negotiating an immunity deal if
he were caught for other unrelated crimes. Spoiler alert, It
did not work out for Franco. No, it did not.
There's one that Paul is a particular fan of as well,
The idea that, uh, halfa became this sort of grizzly
(25:42):
hidden landmark for a sports team. Oh yeah. The idea
is that half was dispatched, shot baby whatever it was.
Then he was his limbs were taken apart, he was dismembered,
then frozen, and then get this guess, buried inside the
cement foundation of Giants Stadium. Now, this was then located
(26:04):
in Rutherford, New Jersey and East Rutherford, New Jersey. So
what's interesting about this, just to interject, is that there's
a nice mythic tie in here because in some ancient
civilizations and cultures thought when you were building a place
of great import, you were required to make a blood
(26:27):
sacrifice of some sort. This and cats in there right
right now. This doesn't work with that kind of left
hand path stuff because the idea is that he wasn't
killed on the site. If you really want the magic
to hit, it's got to happen, you know, live and
direct on the place where you plan to lay the stones. Yeah. Yeah,
I can't remember the movie that I just watched that
(26:51):
talked all about that, but it had uh the actor
who plays the Queen of Dragons. Uh. She was in
it and it was like a haunting horror movie on Netflix. Anyway,
I'll check it out. It's out there. They they mentioned
they mentioned burying a cat like oh and alive cat
in the in the walls jerks. Yeah. Gross. Well anyway,
(27:14):
in this case, it was in Giants stadium. Uh. And
this is pretty crazy because it originates from an interview
that a guy named Donald Francos gave in ninety nine
to Playboy magazine, which I want to say, at the
time was doing great journalism. Actually still Playboys Soldiers on.
(27:35):
I'm not as familiar. I'm not as familiar with modern
Playboy nowadays. I mean, there's the old joke that you
just read it for the articles, but apparently, like for
a while, it was absolutely a place where a lot
of short stories writers broke their work and kind of
went on to great things. My favorite Shell Silver Steam
poem was published in Playboy, and I stole a copy
(27:56):
as a kid so I could read the poem. Isn't
that weird? That is quite It's good. It's about the devil.
It's a whole thing. The one that was kind of filthy, Yes,
remember that one. That's a good one. What's the what's
the name of that? Oh, gosh, the devil and Billy Markham,
that's the one. Yeah. Um. And in that article in Playboy,
(28:18):
Um he claimed that Haffa was killed by a New
York Irish mafia boss by the name of Jimmy Coonan
and buried um at the home field of the New
York Giants in New York Jets football teams, so ac
Cordy to Franco's after Conan shot halfa with a silence
twenty two caliber pistol in a house in Mount Clemens, Michigan,
he in New York mafia hitman John Sullivan bagged up
(28:42):
the body parts and stored them in a freezer for months.
See that's weird because you would think you would want
to get rid of the body as soon as you can,
because every time anybody else who knows about the freezer,
even if they don't know there's a body in it,
could be uh an knew of exposure. But okay, so
they've gotten in this freezer for months. Apparently nobody opens
(29:06):
the freezer in this part of town. What do they
do after those months have passed? Well, you find a
stadium that is under construction, a giant concrete monstrosity, and
you find a place where concrete is being poured and
you place it surreptitiously underneath there. Right, that's the whole idea.
So so for real, though, Giant Stadium was under construction
(29:30):
and it was going to open up the next year,
or it was planned to at least, the bags were
then mixed into the concrete foundation in what became a
certain section. So if you go, if you went to
Giant Stadium and you looked at section one oh seven
down there deep, that's where Jimmy Hoffa late at least
according to this theory. And this section was located near
the end zone of the stadium's football field. There's one
(29:52):
one of the end zones. Yeah, there's one problem with this,
which is that there is no evidence other than these
claims by people speaking years after the fact. In fact,
the FBI, while they had initially entertained most descriptions or
allegations of the fate of Jimmy Hoffa, and they you know,
days and months following his disappearance, Uh, they really cooled
(30:15):
on this theory. And when the stadium was demolished in
the FBI did not even bother to show up and
search the site because they put him there. I'm just kidding,
that's that's not true. I'm joking, you know. I just
I don't think people really get thrown from planes as
often as fiction would have us believe. Well, that's the
(30:35):
that's the other part of the stories. He was thrown
from a plane and he went right through, straight through
that concrete and just like embedded inside there. And then
oh and the FBI went good enough, he was wet,
the concrete was still wet, and he just went, uh,
so let's get back to she writ she Wren is
the source of the claims that are made in the
book I Heard You Paint Houses? Uh and the Irishman.
(30:59):
The film is based in the book I Heard You
Paint Houses, she Wren says that he had betrayed Jimmy Hoffa,
and he says multiple times that Jimmy Hoffa was a
friend of his right and he said he pulled the
trigger because it was inevitable that someone was gonna kill
halfa and so he thought he felt honor bound that
(31:21):
it should be him, and he thought, also, you know,
at least I'll make it quick he'll die instantly. So
here's what he said happened. He said that he brought
halfa to a house in northwestern Detroit, and he stood
behind Jimmy Hoffa, and while Jimmy hoff was distracted, she
Wren shot him twice in the back of the head
the double tap, and then he said they cremated Haffa's
(31:42):
remains and a traction senerator in the suburbs of Detroit.
She Wren actually gave the address of the house, and
we'll get to this. Uh, we gave the address of
the house where the murders supposedly took place. Investigators treated seriously.
They searched this for evidence of the killing, and they
(32:02):
found traces of blood in the house, but later testing
revealed that this blood did not belong to Haffa, so
someone probably died. Maybe she Wrin was just misbearemembering this, however,
was just one of several searches conducted. Will get to
a few of those after a word from our sponsor,
(32:29):
and we're back. Now let's get into some of the
official attempts to find Jimmy, offer to recover his body,
or even to locate him if he was still alive.
Um so let's get let's jump to nineteen nine to
the FBI and Kenneth Walton, he's the agent in charge
of the FBI's Detroit office, and he was speaking with
(32:49):
the Detroit News UH in nine and he was talking
about how he knew what had happened to Halfa, And
we have a quote from him here, I'm comfortable, I
know who did it, but it's never going to be
prosecuted because we would have to divulge informants confidential sources.
Informants confidential sources. Yeah. Well, now let's just say I
(33:14):
can imagine in a case like this, with somebody like
Jimmy Hoffa that has so many connections to probably multiple
organized criminal organizations. Um that if you did, let's say,
charge somebody that you knew or you were aware of
who did it. But if by doing that, it's going
to compromise like two or three major let's say vice
(33:38):
investigations or you know, uh, investigations of conspiracy, like that
would be a hard that would be a difficult choice
to make, at least just to find the killer or
to apprehend the killer of another known criminal or associated criminal.
So like, why would why would you give up on
(33:58):
this other thing that is viable right now, just to
just to close that case. I don't know, yeah, because
if and I don't want to put words into the
mouths of the law enforcement here, but I think it's
a fantastic point, because if you think that someone is
already inherently corrupting kind of a dirt bag for one
reason or another, then do you feel the same moral
(34:22):
obligation to pursue a case, especially if it means pursuing
that case may uh preclude your ability to lock up
other living criminals who are out there still doing things
that you find morally or you know, legally, um terrible.
That's a really good point, man, I don't I mean
(34:44):
it would it would make sense that that Walton at
least believe, like truly believed he knew. Yeah, And I
would say also, I would say also to as as
anyone in the enforcement community listening to the show today,
including our n s A interns, even knows full well, uh,
(35:04):
I imagine that the vast majority of professionals working in
those fields would say, well, it doesn't matter whether I
like someone who is a victim of a crime. It's
my job, it's my career. Correct. But it is a
cold hard fact that somebody somewhere would have to make
the decision to, you know, if if there was and
(35:25):
this is the big if here, if there was a
conflict in that way that we're speaking of here, somebody
would have to make the decision to either continue uh
searching for Hafa and going down those leads, or saying, okay,
we gotta leave this alone. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's true,
it's true. The search continues. In two thousand and one, Uh,
(35:46):
you know, we had mentioned earlier the lack of DNA
evidence for testing. Now forensic DNA is a thing, forensic
DNA investigation. Rather, in two thousand one, these hair strands
found in the nineteen seventy five Mercury Marquis linked Haffa
to a vehicle that authorities believed was used in this disappearance.
(36:09):
This vehicle, this Mercury, was owned by a friend of
Haffa's named Charles Chucky O'Brien, and they were actually they
were actually friends. Police and uh survivors. Members of Haffa's
family had always believed that O'Brien played some sort of
role in the disappearance, but O'Brien for decades had denied
(36:33):
being involved in any shape, form or fashion. He said,
In fact, Halfa had never even been a passenger in
his car. Now, just a tip here for all the
ne'er do wells in the crowd today. If you want
a stone wall, that's a pretty that's a pretty good
way to do it, you know what I mean. That's
like just under the level of playing so dumb that
you say I own a car. Yeah, okay, we found
(36:57):
these hairs of Jimmy Hoffas in your car here. He's
never even been in there. I don't want a car.
What's hair? Guys, this is a lot for me to
take in. Gosh. But uh but this lead this search
also peter doubt because you see authorities linked Haffa or
(37:20):
is Us some strands of his hair to the car,
but they were not able to determine when Halfa would
have been in the car. This also could mean that
since he and Chucky hang out a lot, that maybe
the hair just got on some of Chucky's clothing or something.
And I think we maybe bury the lead here a
little bit. Chucky was uh more than just a friend.
He was half A's adopted son. And the way it's
(37:42):
portraying the movie. I was a little confused about it too,
because there's a scene where somebody pulls a gun on
Halfa during one of his trials or like, you know,
one of his corruption trials, and Chucky kicks the crap
out of the guy, and Haffa makes a big scene
about saying, as my boy, you know, like I raised
him or whatever. You run from a knife, your charge
a gun, You charge a gun exactly, um point being
(38:06):
it wasn't his blood sign, it wasn't his uh biological sign,
but essentially was someone he had taken under his wing
and referred to more or less as his adopted So
so my question is surely he if they were as
close as as as the record indicates, he would have
been in that car before. He's never been in my car.
What is a car? I have a car. I don't understand,
(38:26):
Charles w Chucky O'Brien. So there were more searches. They've continued.
We mentioned that two thousand and twelve search based on
the testimony of she Won or the statements of she Wren.
Investigators did search that residents based on a tip two
thousand twelve. They didn't they didn't find anything, and they
(38:47):
found some blood, but it wasn't office. I think every
time I hear the name Shearon, she Ra, Oh you know, yeah,
that wasn't me. I never understood what wasn't she woman
because there was this internal consistent he man, Yeah, and
then she Ra. Why couldn't it be he Ra? That'd
(39:10):
be cool. Actually, I was more of a ThunderCats guy.
I was the superior Muscley mutant show in my opinion.
Oh wow, we're doing the low fi dub step. That
was kind of the Hank Hill versus I was gonna.
I thought it's gonna be so much more intense than that.
(39:30):
I was kind of bracing myself, and because we were
we were reacting to your brace. It was we held
back because you were clearly I think we both thought
that you were. You were just letting the moment build
and you were going to scream it. Oh yeah, it
was great. We'll fix it in post No, I don't
need it, so it was great. Yeah, unrelated. Rewatched the
(39:53):
live action he man, I liked it. You know who
plays Skeletor uh not Dolph Loren uh Frank, No, Yeah,
that's it. And he he's the only person who hasn't
disowned the film because his kids liked it. He played
a very strange skeletor. Also, you know, some toy lines
(40:13):
just don't have the narrative heft to hold a feature.
You know, they even had man at arms in there. Anyway,
what else was Franklin go in? Oh yeah, he's in
a bunch of stuff, but he was not in the
Halfa investigation. Probably to wrap this one up. In uh June,
(40:36):
the FBI gets another tip and they search of field
in Oakland Township, Michigan. That's about twenty miles away from
where Halfa was last scene. There was a guy involved
in crime named Tony Zarelli. Not the stereotype, but this
is there's a Tony heavy tail and Zarelli gave the
(40:56):
gave the authorities info about where he said Halfa was buried.
He also described how Halfa died. He said, Oh yeah,
he's the he's the person who said that Halfa was
hit on the head with a shovel and buried alive.
But he said this in an e book that he
was selling for profit. Uh And nothing came of it.
(41:16):
So either the authorities were bad at digging or Zarelli
was miss from remembering. But at this point, no one
no one has verified any remains. The closest they've come
would be those strands of hair with Halfa's DNA. But
this also leads us to controversies. The Irishman is based on,
(41:38):
as we said, a single book. Both Scorsese and de Niro,
who plays she Wren, described the character she Wren in
the film as a fictional persona based on or loosely
inspired by the real guy. And furthermore, not all Halfa
experts agree with she Wren's story. A couple of them
(41:58):
think it's total millar. Oh. Yeah. The author, Dan Moldea,
he wrote the book The Halfa Wars and he's been
researching the disappearance of this gentleman for God for years.
So he was speaking with Robert de Niro and he
basically was trying to ward off de Niro, saying that he,
(42:19):
you know, he's got all these doubts about sheering story,
and he's telling DeNiro that sheer and Brandt were I for,
let's say, essentially running a con job on DeNiro saying
this is you should not be doing this, so like
why would you make this movie? Um? But again like
(42:40):
this is pretty this is a pretty interesting story. Even
if it's not true, I would say it's it's pretty
good storytelling and and it makes me want to watch it.
Are we in spoiler territory here for the film? I
feel like we've kind of danced around it, right, Uh
we can, Yeah, we could go ahead. Let's do the
spoiler countdown because it is a new film. Three you
(43:00):
and one there's I was. I didn't, I didn't haven't
done my homework. Is that much Before watching this I
knew it was based on a book. I did not
realize that it was meant to be unequivocally like this
guy killed Jimmy Hoffa, And when the moment in the
film where that happens, I wasn't expecting it. And then
I immediately googled Irish men fiction, you know, And I
(43:25):
think that's sort of the consensus is that it's a
little more fiction or at least, you know, conflation of
fact and fiction and is pure uh nonfiction storytelling, because
it again is based on one book, one man's account,
a deathbed confession. Essentially, you know, this guy did not
live much longer past this interview, and that's that's got
(43:46):
dramatized in the film as well, the fact that he's
delivering this story to the perspective camera, which is you know,
supposed to be the journalist of you know, which is
you are the stand in for that kind of as
a viewer. Excellent film. But when I saw that, I
was like, WHOA, Okay, I guess we're this is sort
of a hybrid thing I'm seeing here, like Once upon
a Time in Hollywood for example. Um, but if you
(44:09):
are to believe the book, then this this is how
it happened. I do want to bring something up my
my father in law talked with me about this pretty extensively.
His he is also a Tony and he told me that,
without getting into too much detail, if this kind of
thing was going to go down with somebody like Jimmy Hoffa,
(44:31):
the only way you could pull it off is to
get one of his closest associates or friends to do
it himself. Because so it would make sense for Sharon's
character to actually be the one who's able to get
close enough to do it. Because we haven't really talked
about this exactly, but I mean they're basically brothers in
the film. And there's another character the has the Buffaloni
(44:55):
crime family you know, it was Russell's played by Joe Pesci,
wonderful performance. Um. The three of them are kind of inseparable.
They're they're almost like a family. But Jimmy in particular
gets a really close relationship with his daughter and that's
the whole thing. Um. But yeah, he has trusts him
like a like a blood brother. Well, one of the
(45:15):
other reasons, I mean, think of the logistics. If you're
trying to pull off a job like this, you have
somebody who not only has a protective close circle, but
they also have a established schedule, calendar. People know where
and when they're supposed to be at the majority of times.
It's not like if you're just doing you know, uh,
(45:39):
if you're just landing in a strange town and finding
someone under a bridge that no one will miss for
a few weeks, Like this is an established thing where
you have you know, you have at most probably a
few hours to get out of town, right, So it's
it definitely I think your father in law is on
(45:59):
the money. Yeah, and it's kind of scary, but yes,
let's let's continue. So Dan Muldeya has his own theory.
He believes half as disappearance was in his mind, a
New Jersey operation. He said he's interviewed all the suspected
killers in his decades long search for the truth of
the matter, and he he thinks that it's most likely
(46:21):
that it was a production of New Jersey operators. Paul
Mission Control Decade raised a great point off air earlier
when we were talking, and he said, one thing that
he found, um, one thing that he found compelling was
that the story she runs account felt kind of understated,
like the way Nol depicted it. This this death is
(46:46):
you know, there's not a lot of gravitas build up.
It feels abrupt and brutal. If that is, and the
last one was the last one, promise, If that is
Jimmy Hoffa killed himself. We didn't talk about this. We're
not gonna talk too much about it because there's not
a ton of evidence to lean on here. But what
if he committed pseudo side, which, as we all know,
(47:09):
is the fancy pants cravat wearing word for faking one's death. Uh,
it is very very difficult to do successfully if you
want to make any money. Um, it is not impossible
to do if you want to just disappear and live
by your wits or if you have access to someone
who makes some very accurate idea of some sort. Right.
(47:30):
Could he have gone uh with the federal witness Protection program?
Could he have gone with your with the uh? Could
he have gone with the institution that is sometimes called
witless protection UH? And and if so, what happened to him? Well,
we know that Jimmy Hoffa died for legal purposes on July.
(47:55):
He was declared legally dead as we record today's episode.
His disappearance and his likely death have yet to be confirmed.
Let's do a little math. If he were alive in
nineteen as we record this, he would be a hundred
and six years old. That means even if somehow he
actually went off the grid, you know, changed his name
to Himmy Jaffa or whatever and lived in a small
(48:18):
town in Saskatchewan or something, he probably already passed away.
But that hasn't stopped the investigation. As a matter of fact,
this is this is one of the things we can
leave you with. The film and the book that we've
mentioned today may have inspired US investigators to get back
(48:39):
on the case. So this was December. This is right
now as we're recording this. As the Irishman has come out. Uh.
There's an interview with U S attorney Matthew Schneider, and
this guy was asked by you know, a reporter by
someone there, what do you you know? What do you
think about the Irishman? What are your thoughts? Well, his
statement was, uh, certainly intriguing. I will talk about this,
(49:03):
but not now. I have a lot of thoughts about it.
It's unresolved. I have my own theories. There will be
more to come on this. Yeah, I mean, you know,
I didn't mean to dismiss this whole thing as being
like some sort of fantasy. Obviously there's information in this
film and in this book that is meaningful. Um, but
(49:25):
you can draw your inclusions. But anybody like this is
actually really close to the story. Surely there's gonna be
some stuff that there's a ring of truth to, or
that he knows unequivocally is true. And I'd be interested
to hear uh this perspective. I think that it's the
people that are still alive that I think that can
really shed some light on which parts of this are real,
and that's yet to be determined. And this is also
uh TikTok situation because many of the people who would
(49:50):
have been in their prime and directly involved have passed on.
That's just how, you know, That's just how the body crumbles, right,
And yeah, it makes me. It makes me wonder if
a deathbed confession has already occurred. It just kind of
went unnoticed because the family and the surrounding people were
(50:11):
just like, okay, whatever, whatever, Grandpa, you're crazy or or
even um, Grandpa, what are you think? Mmmmmmm no, no, no,
no, no no no. We don't talk about their grandpa. Grandpa.
It's supposed to be America. You know the rules. Get
the pillow. I'm just you know, that was dark. I apologize.
We're gonna take it. Hey, Grandpa, We're gonna take a
(50:33):
quick trip over to the Giants Stadium. It's gonna be fine, Grandpa,
just come with us. The best view is from outside
the player. This is terrible, that field of dreams, right,
So we at this point past the torch to you,
fellow listeners, what do you think has this been solved
unofficially the way that the former region in charge of
(50:55):
the investigation believes it has. Will The answer to Jimmy
Hoffa's disappear Urrance UH is widely suspected death ever come
to light, why or why not? We want to hear
from you. You can find us on Facebook. You can
find us on Instagram. You can find us on Twitter.
Special shout out to our Facebook community page. Here's where
(51:16):
it gets crazy. We can't wait to swing by there
and see what you think about Jimmy Hoffa. Also, Hey,
you know, we're just gonna shoot our shot. If you
have information about the disappearance of hafa Um, send it,
send it to us. We won't wrat you out, we promise. Yeah,
ed cheering if you know what you're you know, relatives
(51:37):
did like let us know. Yeah, that guy's got a
Shrek tattoo. I did not know that he has a couple. Actually,
I think it's a Donkey and the Shrek. He's really
into Shrek? Is he the one who did I'm in
love with your body? Is that about Jimmy Hoffa? That's good,
that's good, Ben. I would prefer to believe it. But
the line I believe is now his bedsheets smell like you. Yeah, Jimmy.
(52:01):
I'm gonna look up the lyrics for this after we wrapped.
In the meantime, Hey, what do you do if you
hate the social meats, but you still want to tell
us what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. You give us a call.
You call one eight three three s T d W
y t K. Just give us a call. You'll hear
Ben's voice. There will be a beep and then just
(52:21):
say I'm in love with the obody and I will
be like, whoa, it was about the Jimmy Hoffa episode,
and then leave your message. We'll get it um. If
you don't want to do any of that stuff, but
you still want to contact us, you have an idea
for an episode, you want to tell us anything at all,
you can send us a good old fashioned email. We
are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff I Don't
(53:00):
want you to know, as a production of i heeart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome
(00:24):
back to the show. My name is Matt, my name
they call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission controlled dec and most importantly,
you are you. You are here and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know. From the offset,
it is important for us to collectively establish that this
episode is not an advertisement for the Irishman. The newest
(00:49):
Scorsese film that just dropped on Netflix, Uh, to no
small amount of acclaim and a little bit of controversy.
Al Pacino plays one of the I don't know, maybe
secondary is a good word, a secondary character in the
film Uh. He plays a character named Jimmy Hoffa, which
(01:10):
is based on the real life Jimmy Hoffa. Now, Nol,
you and I had talked about this film a little
bit off air when we saw it, and and Paul
you watched it, so you brought it up to us
without spoiling the film for anyone. It's based on a book, right,
by this guy named Charles Brant. It's called I Heard
You Paint Houses. I Heard You Paint Houses, which is
(01:32):
a fantastic title. This book purports to be nonfiction, includes
interviews and alleged confessions made to the author, Charles Brandt,
by a former mafia hitman named Frank she Wrin like
Edge she Wren Uh and yes and this uh. This
film inspired our own super producer, Paul deck And to say, Hey, guys,
(01:57):
have we ever delved into the story of jim Me Halfa?
And I don't know. I I assumed that we had.
We had. Not that changes today. So here are the facts. Yeah,
let's talk about Jimmy Haffa. Who is this guy? Well,
he was born James Riddle. You know, he went by
Jimmy Halfa. And he was born on Valentine's Day, that's
(02:19):
February fourteenth, nineteen thirteen, in a place called Brazil, Indiana.
I did not know there was a Brazil Indiana. It's
kind of cool. I've never heard of that place either. Um,
assuming the the climate is a bit different in that Brazil. Um,
he he was aware of let's say, the American labor force,
(02:40):
the American laborer, the person who was using their hands
to create something, generally for somebody else. His father was
a coal miner and he passed away when Halfa was
very very young. Jimmy was young, and his mom had
end up joining the workforce to support her family, which
which was a fairly common occurrence as you know, um,
(03:03):
the heads of households would die off, whether it was
through war conflict or a workforce accident or something like that. Um.
He had three siblings of four children, including Jimmy, and
eventually they moved to a place called Detroit, Michigan, which
at the time was a hotbed of industry and growing.
(03:24):
You know, this is uh, this is still before the
enormous boom of the American auto industry, but still it's
very much an industrious place. It's a great place to
get a job. And we don't know how much formal
education Jimmy Hoffa was able to achieve. Uh, you know,
you'll hear's. Historians say they don't know whether he reached
(03:46):
high school, much less graduated, but we know that eventually,
while he was in school, he had to drop out.
He had to help support his family, so he worked
on the loading dock for a chain of grocery stores
there in Detroit. Wait, and while working there, imagine how
young this guy is. While working there, he organizes his
very first labor strike and it all hinges on shipments
(04:10):
of strawberries. Yeah, and he actually was pretty demonstrating some
pretty serious streets smart to this point already because he
used a recent shipment of strawberries as leverage to help
get his coworkers better deal, better contracts um for their labor.
They refused to unload the strawberries until they had secured better,
(04:32):
better pay and in the thirties, well, I just have
to say right there with the strawberries, like, that's a
smart thing because strawberries go bad pretty quickly, and if
you don't unload the strawberries, he's like he was coming
up the works for everybody basically by doing that. And
the it's interesting how it's set a timer, like very
clear timer on when you're gonna lose all your money
(04:54):
on these strawberries, and you're also losing money because that
truck is now stuck there. It was just really smart.
Have worked with canps, Honestly, it wouldn't because this CANPS,
I don't know. Yeah, hard to say if that was
just like a serendipitous thing, or if he very much
you know, was being calculated about that. But it was
absolutely a smart move and he got what he wanted.
(05:15):
Then in the nineteen thirties, um Hafa officially joined the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which is what he went on
to become the president of at least the union's Detroit chapter. UM.
So he kind of laid the groundwork for a career
UH in labor um and and it would seem it came.
He came by honestly based on his you know, trajectory
(05:37):
and his upbringing at that point. Yeah, and we should
also stop too for anyone who doesn't know. Doubtless, doubtlessly
we have several Teamsters in the audience today, but a
lot of people in this country and abroad don't really
know what a teamster is. The teamster, the old word
atomo logically is like someone who drives a team of horses.
(05:58):
Right now, ac cordy to their website teamster dot org.
The Teamsters are America's largest, most diverse union. UH. They
started in nineteen o three is the merger of two
team driver associations t E A M. By the way,
not teen in case, my annunciation is off, and today
(06:19):
you will you may be most familiar with them as
truck drivers, right, because we've replaced to a great degree,
we've replaced animal labor with mechanical labor. So at this
time he is uh, he is. As you said, Noel
joined up with the Teamsters. He starts as the president
(06:40):
of the Detroit chapter. For many less ambitious people, that
would be the version of making it. You know what
I mean, I'm king of the town. And the thing
is that halfa is not a guy satisfied with being
a big fish in a small town. Make no mistake,
he is a shark. He expands you in membership. He
(07:01):
quickly garners a reputation for getting better contract agreements by
any means necessary. Cough cough, corruption, cough cough, mafia cough cough,
uh cough. Right, But he started out honest, right, That's
the very important thing. By nineteen fifty two, he's vice
president of the entire union, so not just Detroit, but
(07:24):
the entire international brotherhood of Teamsters, and just five years
after that, nineteen fifty seven, he is the president of
the entire organization. It's one of these things where, especially
in the way he's portrayed in film like, I haven't
been a long time since I've seen that Jack Nicholson
uh film that believed any de Vito directed, It's called Hafa.
But at least in The Irishman, you do get the
(07:46):
sense that he felt as though he were still representing
the common man and doing something positive, even though he
was clearly um heading up what was not a strictly
legal enterprise. He he seemed like he maybe could convinced
himself that it was all for the greater good. It
was all for getting his fellow brothers a better deal,
(08:07):
like with the strawberries. But in order to do that,
you know, we're swimming with sharks here. We gotta play
nice with the sharks, a bigger, bigger shark exactly, because
it's all about us versus them mentality, and in this case,
us did include some pretty um nefarious characters. Halfa was
to be the subject of numerous criminal investigations and and
(08:29):
it was a shadow that kind of relentlessly followed him
throughout his career, and this is portrayed really really well
in the in the s Carsese film. Um wasn't entirely
surprising his direct predecessor, Dave Beck, had also been investigated
and he was ultimately tried and convicted of corrupt practices
within the union. Dave Beck, which was convicted, which gave
(08:51):
half of the opportunity to ascend to this position, yet
half a persevered Nineteen sixty four was a big year
for him in a number of ways, not all of
them fantastic. His big win was that he got nearly
all of the truck drivers in the entire continent of
North America under a single contract. Uncle Sam have been
(09:17):
keeping an eye on Jimmy, and they thought there was
something rotten in the teamster's something fishy about his rise
to fame and his success. Now at this point, he
is very, very similar to a well known politician, or
maybe even to some degree of celebrity. Right, the FBI
(09:37):
and then U S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy are
watching Haffa very closely. They are convinced that a lot
of his union success is less a result of being
a shrewd negotiator and more a result of a close
collaboration with organized crime also known as the mob or
(09:58):
the mafia. Right, so what else happened in nineteen sixty Well,
halfa himself was found guilty of a couple of things,
bribery for one, also jury tampering. Jury tampering the good
old j T when when something goes wrong and somebody
knows it, you gotta tamper a little bit. Yeah, right,
(10:20):
like and and that can be really that could be
really terrible or just going like here's a hundred dollars,
don't don't talk about me, or it could yeah, or
it could be something to the level of you know,
memories a funny thing, Mr Smith, you know what I mean.
Like sometimes you think you remember, so you look back
and you realize you don't remember it too good. After all,
(10:41):
you know, it could have been anybody there. But you
know one thing, one thing you never forget is your
children smile. And it's wonderful will be able to see
that every day instead of just looking back and and
remembering it and wishing you could say hello to him.
Oh boy, oh boy, that was really good. That's just
the science of memory. I was gonna say, just like
(11:03):
casually mentioning his or her daughter's birthday, but like that's
like that was on that was on the was on
the money. Well, that's cinematic I'm sure it was much
more subtle, yes, but but that stuff that that's when
he he was found guilty of both of those things
in connection with a previous trial that he had that
he had gone through in nineteen two years prior. Yeah,
(11:23):
he was on trial for conspiracy, which I love you
that people could be convicted of conspiracy. And then he
was found guilty in sixty four for charges related to,
as you said, Matt conspiracy. So that was one bad
thing that happened to him that year. Yeah, he's also
convicted of misusing funds from the union's pension plan. And
(11:45):
that's a big note in the in the film that
Scorsese did, and also a note I believe in the
book I Heard You Paint Houses, because the union's pension
fund was an enormous amount of money and he pretty
much had direct control over it, so he could make
the money dance to the tunes he chose, and a
(12:06):
lot of those tunes were mafia backed projects, like in
Las Vegas, for example, um paying for wings to be
constructed on you know, casinos, and as we know, a
lot of that money came directly from the mob to
start you know, Las Vegas. In the first place. So
there were those relationships, uh that were ongoing and directly
(12:27):
tied to dipping into that money, which would then be
invested and get a return. It's not like he was
stealing money from the pensioners people who would do that money.
But it was still playing fast and loose with the rules.
You know, you're telling me that organized crime organizations launder
money through things like labor unions. It's true, map money laundry,
(12:51):
but it's got a great return. I'm just gonna say,
if everything goes well, there's a great return for that stuff. Uh. Yeah,
money laundering was it was a big part of it. Also,
at what point do this Maybe a story for a
different day, but at what point do campaign donations become
um illegal? Right? At what point would be interfering with
(13:12):
the democratic process? Well, I mean, all you gotta do
is make him unlimited and then you're good to go
that I should fix all those problems. Right, Well, I
think it's safe for for the five of us. Uh,
Paul Noel met myself and you listening to agree that
Jimmy Hoffa probably did not deal with these philosophical quandaries
in the same way. It's just cost of doing business.
(13:36):
So after three years fighting these charges that his lawyer
and and you know again as depicted in the in
ther Citi film, it was a union lawyer, UM who
was also very aware of what was going on, made
the argument that this was all trumped up. Um. He
had exhausted his appeals finally and he got thirteen years
in prison in the nineteen sixty seven he was incarcerated
(13:58):
in the Louisbourg Federal Prison in Pennsylvania. UH. And then
came along UH a like minded individual who has sent
it to the presidency, a little guy by the name
of Richard Nixon who commuted half a sentence in seventy one,
essentially giving him a part in a presidential pardon with
a year and a half of probation. However, this came
(14:20):
with a string attached. Nixon band half of from holding
any union leadership position at least until nineteen So bit
of a slap on the wrists. It's a weird one too,
because it's a string with a time limit. He's not
saying stay out of the game, your dirty rat. He's saying,
just sit on the bench until the eighties. Let's let
(14:41):
the heat die down a little bit. Well, and it's
so it's so odd to me that Nixon the president,
came through and said, you know what, it's okay, is
it odd? You're good? You're good man, You're gonna be okay.
It's only been a couple of years. You got thirteen,
You'll be all right. Well half a donated heavily. Oh,
I know it's campaigned, but just too to be able
(15:04):
to get a president to do that, no matter how
much money you're donating to them, because in the end,
it's you know, the public appearance of something like that.
But here's the deal. Jimmy Hoffa and a lot of
labor union leaders out there are like hugely beloved no
matter what they're doing, no matter what they've been convicted of.
(15:25):
Will you know, over the course of time and history,
will be beloved because there is this this perception, at
least from the outside. And and you know, like we said,
Jimmy Hoffa thought that he was doing the right thing,
or at least appeared to believe he was doing the
right least at the beginning. The ideology outweighed the ego
that exactly that ideology it ripples out through the public
(15:46):
of people who are assisted in that way. And this
is a one to one and some might accuse me
of being hyperbolic here, but it's almost the way you
hear about, uh, the way folks in my dan treated
Pablo Escobar, you know, very clearly bad guy, doing at things,
hurting people, probably directly hurting individuals in that community. But
there's this perception that he's the best chance they've got,
(16:08):
or he's actually looking out for the little people, you know,
and he cares in some way, and they call him
sant Pablo and all that stuff, even though completely transparent
that this guy is is no good. Well, in Haffa,
wasn't some mob boss, no exactly, but I don't want
to draw one similar exactly, but there's intentions to look
out for the the labor class, of the working class.
(16:33):
We can imagine, you know, I think that is a
good comparison. We can imagine supporters of Escobar and supporters
of Haffa, not that they're the same in the same
line of business, but we can imagine the supporters saying, hey,
this guy is the reason that we have a paycheck.
This is the reason that my family can live comfortably
or better than they would have otherwise. So we have
(16:55):
to remember also that with his enormous power, Jimmy Hoffa
could move the vote. He could sway hundreds of thousands
of people to vote for or against a given candidate.
And for the next few years, half A wages something
very like a war. He's fighting that ban on leadership
(17:15):
in court. He doesn't want to wait till and he's
also working behind the scenes, with mixed success, to reconsolidate
his power base within the Union. And then, of course,
as even a casual student of history will recall, things
don't work out the way half A planned. Or did they.
(17:36):
We're going to rejoin him on July after a word
from our sponsor, and we're back. J Halfa is in
a state of what the streets called deep beef. He
(17:58):
has numerous enemies, he hasn't made a ton of friends,
and he's alienated many of the friends he had. But
he wants to make peace, and he realizes he might
have to eat some crow, he might have to swallow
his pride, he might have to make some inroads with
people he swore he would never work with again. So
he leaves his home in Detroit and he meets the
(18:19):
two Tony's Anthony Tony Jack and Uh Anthony Tony Prow.
Tony Jack is a figure in the Detroit crime scene.
Tony pro is a mob affiliated union leader who's based
in New Jersey. So they're supposed to meet at this
restaurant in Bloomfield Township. Is that the Marcus red Fox?
(18:43):
I believe so, yeah, that they're gonna they're gonna squash
the beef. They're gonna settle their feud. At least that's
what Haffa thinks. So shows up, what we believe, at least,
his car shows up, and he appears to be the
only one there. You know, he's there. He's gonna meet
two people, but half was the only guy there, and
he's wondering what's going on. Assume we assume, because really
(19:08):
we have no idea. We have no evidence at least
that is um, that is concrete as to what occurred
after he showed up at that restaurant, or at least
when his car showed up, because his car was there.
But he was never seen again by anyone except for
(19:30):
the people responsible for what happened to him, or himself
responsible for whatever happened to him. It's a mystery. It's
one of the most longstanding mysteries that has existed in
this country, and um, yeah, one of America's most prominent, divisive,
important public figures had simply Kay's are associated. He disappeared
(19:52):
and we're almost a half a century into the post
halfa era? So what happened to Jimmy Hoffa? Here's where
it gets crazy. The answer really depends on who who
you ask. There's no shortage of theories that have popped
up over the intervening decades, and the most popular suspects
(20:13):
being the mob of course. But in some cases this
surprised me. US federal agencies. Interesting, right, did you guys
hear about that one? That's a weird one for sure.
I mean it makes sense considering that he was such
a persona on grata like for you know, Kennedy and
the U. S. Government. I mean, they were after him,
(20:33):
and he more or less shook the rap and then
was able to kind of get back into the game.
Well we'll get into it a little bit further, but
there's also the idea that a federal agency was involved,
but not in disappearing him by killing him or anything,
but by putting him into a protection of some sort. Right, Yeah,
(20:54):
so at this point in the if we take the
high level look at it, at this point in the
world of conspiracy and speculation, the fate of Jimmy Hoffa's
kind of entered urban legend status, which means that the
theories start to obey some of the troops we would
associate with folk tales or oral tradition. The general consensus
(21:18):
now is that the mob conspired to kill Haffa because
they wanted to stop him from becoming the King of
the Teamsters again. And that's because while he was locked up,
even though he wasn't locked up for the full thirteen
year sentence, while he was locked up, his former vice
president got pretty cozy with the mob, even more so
than Haffa was, and he was much more willing to
(21:40):
play some games. When Jimmy Hoffa got out, uh the
wise guys, the mafios knew that he would try to
rain them in a little bit and they wouldn't be
able to play all the reindeer games that they had
become so accustomed to. Make no mistake, they were probably
make ging more money under that vice president. What was
(22:03):
his name meant that was Frank fitz Simmons, Frank Edward I.
Believe Frankie Fitz. Yeah, so they were making they're probably
making more money under Frankie Fitz. Who on earth would
say no to UH to continuing to enhance their profits.
They weren't keen to mess with that relationship. So the
idea then is that the mob killed him or disappeared him,
(22:27):
and we see a lot of common troops. Just like
in other forms of folklore, there are tons of variations
on this theory. It's kind of like a kind of
like a bar joke or something, you know, where it's
like X walks into a bar. They followed the same,
just a mob hit and then some sort of industrial
process to destroy or hide Haffa's body. There are a
(22:49):
ton of examples, Yes, there are, indeed. Um One of
them is that Haffa was killed, placed in the trunk
of a car, then the car was crushed in a
mob affiliated scrapyard. Um. That would be a pretty clever
way to go about it, wouldn't that leave a lot
of physical evidence? Though, Like I don't know, you gotta
will get a wonder with it, like seep out the
cubed car, like the remains or anything like that. I
(23:12):
wonder what that would look like, Yeah, I imagine, so
it would have to definitely be a tightly controlled scrap yards.
Scrap yards can be really big. But this was also
in the days before DNA testings. True, it wouldn't fly today. No,
certainly not as much, specially if it was a known
kind of mob tied facility or whatever. Another one is
that he was hit in the head with a shovel
(23:34):
and buried alive. Where are these coming from? Cheeze dramatic?
I like it, but that one doesn't make the most sense.
Do you have any providence for the for the for
the origin of a one. Yeah, that one comes to
us from the great rumor mill. That doesn't That one
doesn't have a lot of sand to it. A lot
(23:54):
of a lot of these examples that we find came
out later after because of course this happened before DNA.
It also happened before internet, right, So a lot of
these come about from statements by former mafia associated individuals,
usually when they are attempting to seem as though they
(24:16):
have leverage so that they can get some juice with
the FEDS, maybe get a better deal up to an
including relocation and immunity makes sense, and that also makes
sense for some of the ones to follow, uh, which
seemed to be kind of variations on a theme. Right.
Halfa was murdered and his remains replaced in an oil
drum um Halfa and one container or another was thrown
(24:37):
into the Great Lakes, or was abducted by the FEDS
and thrown from an airplane. It's a waterproof planned full proof.
That's uh. I just think about that. When has when
has anybody said, you know, the best way to get
rid of this prominent figure is to take them on
an airplane and then, in full view of anyone who
(24:59):
happens to be, you know, looking up, let's throw them
from the plane. It doesn't that one, okay, So that
one comes from the FED. One specifically comes from a
guy named Joseph Franco. I have no idea whether he's
related to the actor. He was an old one time
associate of Haffa's, and Franco said that he kept the
story to himself for years because he wanted to use
(25:22):
the info as leverage in negotiating an immunity deal if
he were caught for other unrelated crimes. Spoiler alert, It
did not work out for Franco. No, it did not.
There's one that Paul is a particular fan of as well,
The idea that, uh, halfa became this sort of grizzly
(25:42):
hidden landmark for a sports team. Oh yeah. The idea
is that half was dispatched, shot baby whatever it was.
Then he was his limbs were taken apart, he was dismembered,
then frozen, and then get this guess, buried inside the
cement foundation of Giants Stadium. Now, this was then located
(26:04):
in Rutherford, New Jersey and East Rutherford, New Jersey. So
what's interesting about this, just to interject, is that there's
a nice mythic tie in here because in some ancient
civilizations and cultures thought when you were building a place
of great import, you were required to make a blood
(26:27):
sacrifice of some sort. This and cats in there right
right now. This doesn't work with that kind of left
hand path stuff because the idea is that he wasn't
killed on the site. If you really want the magic
to hit, it's got to happen, you know, live and
direct on the place where you plan to lay the stones. Yeah. Yeah,
I can't remember the movie that I just watched that
(26:51):
talked all about that, but it had uh the actor
who plays the Queen of Dragons. Uh. She was in
it and it was like a haunting horror movie on Netflix. Anyway,
I'll check it out. It's out there. They they mentioned
they mentioned burying a cat like oh and alive cat
in the in the walls jerks. Yeah. Gross. Well anyway,
(27:14):
in this case, it was in Giants stadium. Uh. And
this is pretty crazy because it originates from an interview
that a guy named Donald Francos gave in ninety nine
to Playboy magazine, which I want to say, at the
time was doing great journalism. Actually still Playboys Soldiers on.
(27:35):
I'm not as familiar. I'm not as familiar with modern
Playboy nowadays. I mean, there's the old joke that you
just read it for the articles, but apparently, like for
a while, it was absolutely a place where a lot
of short stories writers broke their work and kind of
went on to great things. My favorite Shell Silver Steam
poem was published in Playboy, and I stole a copy
(27:56):
as a kid so I could read the poem. Isn't
that weird? That is quite It's good. It's about the devil.
It's a whole thing. The one that was kind of filthy, Yes,
remember that one. That's a good one. What's the what's
the name of that? Oh, gosh, the devil and Billy Markham,
that's the one. Yeah. Um. And in that article in Playboy,
(28:18):
Um he claimed that Haffa was killed by a New
York Irish mafia boss by the name of Jimmy Coonan
and buried um at the home field of the New
York Giants in New York Jets football teams, so ac
Cordy to Franco's after Conan shot halfa with a silence
twenty two caliber pistol in a house in Mount Clemens, Michigan,
he in New York mafia hitman John Sullivan bagged up
(28:42):
the body parts and stored them in a freezer for months.
See that's weird because you would think you would want
to get rid of the body as soon as you can,
because every time anybody else who knows about the freezer,
even if they don't know there's a body in it,
could be uh an knew of exposure. But okay, so
they've gotten in this freezer for months. Apparently nobody opens
(29:06):
the freezer in this part of town. What do they
do after those months have passed? Well, you find a
stadium that is under construction, a giant concrete monstrosity, and
you find a place where concrete is being poured and
you place it surreptitiously underneath there. Right, that's the whole idea.
So so for real, though, Giant Stadium was under construction
(29:30):
and it was going to open up the next year,
or it was planned to at least, the bags were
then mixed into the concrete foundation in what became a
certain section. So if you go, if you went to
Giant Stadium and you looked at section one oh seven
down there deep, that's where Jimmy Hoffa late at least
according to this theory. And this section was located near
the end zone of the stadium's football field. There's one
(29:52):
one of the end zones. Yeah, there's one problem with this,
which is that there is no evidence other than these
claims by people speaking years after the fact. In fact,
the FBI, while they had initially entertained most descriptions or
allegations of the fate of Jimmy Hoffa, and they you know,
days and months following his disappearance, Uh, they really cooled
(30:15):
on this theory. And when the stadium was demolished in
the FBI did not even bother to show up and
search the site because they put him there. I'm just kidding,
that's that's not true. I'm joking, you know. I just
I don't think people really get thrown from planes as
often as fiction would have us believe. Well, that's the
(30:35):
that's the other part of the stories. He was thrown
from a plane and he went right through, straight through
that concrete and just like embedded inside there. And then
oh and the FBI went good enough, he was wet,
the concrete was still wet, and he just went, uh,
so let's get back to she writ she Wren is
the source of the claims that are made in the
book I Heard You Paint Houses? Uh and the Irishman.
(30:59):
The film is based in the book I Heard You
Paint Houses, she Wren says that he had betrayed Jimmy Hoffa,
and he says multiple times that Jimmy Hoffa was a
friend of his right and he said he pulled the
trigger because it was inevitable that someone was gonna kill
halfa and so he thought he felt honor bound that
(31:21):
it should be him, and he thought, also, you know,
at least I'll make it quick he'll die instantly. So
here's what he said happened. He said that he brought
halfa to a house in northwestern Detroit, and he stood
behind Jimmy Hoffa, and while Jimmy hoff was distracted, she
Wren shot him twice in the back of the head
the double tap, and then he said they cremated Haffa's
(31:42):
remains and a traction senerator in the suburbs of Detroit.
She Wren actually gave the address of the house, and
we'll get to this. Uh, we gave the address of
the house where the murders supposedly took place. Investigators treated seriously.
They searched this for evidence of the killing, and they
(32:02):
found traces of blood in the house, but later testing
revealed that this blood did not belong to Haffa, so
someone probably died. Maybe she Wrin was just misbearemembering this, however,
was just one of several searches conducted. Will get to
a few of those after a word from our sponsor,
(32:29):
and we're back. Now let's get into some of the
official attempts to find Jimmy, offer to recover his body,
or even to locate him if he was still alive.
Um so let's get let's jump to nineteen nine to
the FBI and Kenneth Walton, he's the agent in charge
of the FBI's Detroit office, and he was speaking with
(32:49):
the Detroit News UH in nine and he was talking
about how he knew what had happened to Halfa, And
we have a quote from him here, I'm comfortable, I
know who did it, but it's never going to be
prosecuted because we would have to divulge informants confidential sources.
Informants confidential sources. Yeah. Well, now let's just say I
(33:14):
can imagine in a case like this, with somebody like
Jimmy Hoffa that has so many connections to probably multiple
organized criminal organizations. Um that if you did, let's say,
charge somebody that you knew or you were aware of
who did it. But if by doing that, it's going
to compromise like two or three major let's say vice
(33:38):
investigations or you know, uh, investigations of conspiracy, like that
would be a hard that would be a difficult choice
to make, at least just to find the killer or
to apprehend the killer of another known criminal or associated criminal.
So like, why would why would you give up on
(33:58):
this other thing that is viable right now, just to
just to close that case. I don't know, yeah, because
if and I don't want to put words into the
mouths of the law enforcement here, but I think it's
a fantastic point, because if you think that someone is
already inherently corrupting kind of a dirt bag for one
reason or another, then do you feel the same moral
(34:22):
obligation to pursue a case, especially if it means pursuing
that case may uh preclude your ability to lock up
other living criminals who are out there still doing things
that you find morally or you know, legally, um terrible.
That's a really good point, man, I don't I mean
(34:44):
it would it would make sense that that Walton at
least believe, like truly believed he knew. Yeah, And I
would say also, I would say also to as as
anyone in the enforcement community listening to the show today,
including our n s A interns, even knows full well, uh,
(35:04):
I imagine that the vast majority of professionals working in
those fields would say, well, it doesn't matter whether I
like someone who is a victim of a crime. It's
my job, it's my career. Correct. But it is a
cold hard fact that somebody somewhere would have to make
the decision to, you know, if if there was and
(35:25):
this is the big if here, if there was a
conflict in that way that we're speaking of here, somebody
would have to make the decision to either continue uh
searching for Hafa and going down those leads, or saying, okay,
we gotta leave this alone. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's true,
it's true. The search continues. In two thousand and one, Uh,
(35:46):
you know, we had mentioned earlier the lack of DNA
evidence for testing. Now forensic DNA is a thing, forensic
DNA investigation. Rather, in two thousand one, these hair strands
found in the nineteen seventy five Mercury Marquis linked Haffa
to a vehicle that authorities believed was used in this disappearance.
(36:09):
This vehicle, this Mercury, was owned by a friend of
Haffa's named Charles Chucky O'Brien, and they were actually they
were actually friends. Police and uh survivors. Members of Haffa's
family had always believed that O'Brien played some sort of
role in the disappearance, but O'Brien for decades had denied
(36:33):
being involved in any shape, form or fashion. He said,
In fact, Halfa had never even been a passenger in
his car. Now, just a tip here for all the
ne'er do wells in the crowd today. If you want
a stone wall, that's a pretty that's a pretty good
way to do it, you know what I mean. That's
like just under the level of playing so dumb that
you say I own a car. Yeah, okay, we found
(36:57):
these hairs of Jimmy Hoffas in your car here. He's
never even been in there. I don't want a car.
What's hair? Guys, this is a lot for me to
take in. Gosh. But uh but this lead this search
also peter doubt because you see authorities linked Haffa or
(37:20):
is Us some strands of his hair to the car,
but they were not able to determine when Halfa would
have been in the car. This also could mean that
since he and Chucky hang out a lot, that maybe
the hair just got on some of Chucky's clothing or something.
And I think we maybe bury the lead here a
little bit. Chucky was uh more than just a friend.
He was half A's adopted son. And the way it's
(37:42):
portraying the movie. I was a little confused about it too,
because there's a scene where somebody pulls a gun on
Halfa during one of his trials or like, you know,
one of his corruption trials, and Chucky kicks the crap
out of the guy, and Haffa makes a big scene
about saying, as my boy, you know, like I raised
him or whatever. You run from a knife, your charge
a gun, You charge a gun exactly, um point being
(38:06):
it wasn't his blood sign, it wasn't his uh biological sign,
but essentially was someone he had taken under his wing
and referred to more or less as his adopted So
so my question is surely he if they were as
close as as as the record indicates, he would have
been in that car before. He's never been in my car.
What is a car? I have a car. I don't understand,
(38:26):
Charles w Chucky O'Brien. So there were more searches. They've continued.
We mentioned that two thousand and twelve search based on
the testimony of she Won or the statements of she Wren.
Investigators did search that residents based on a tip two
thousand twelve. They didn't they didn't find anything, and they
(38:47):
found some blood, but it wasn't office. I think every
time I hear the name Shearon, she Ra, Oh you know, yeah,
that wasn't me. I never understood what wasn't she woman
because there was this internal consistent he man, Yeah, and
then she Ra. Why couldn't it be he Ra? That'd
(39:10):
be cool. Actually, I was more of a ThunderCats guy.
I was the superior Muscley mutant show in my opinion.
Oh wow, we're doing the low fi dub step. That
was kind of the Hank Hill versus I was gonna.
I thought it's gonna be so much more intense than that.
(39:30):
I was kind of bracing myself, and because we were
we were reacting to your brace. It was we held
back because you were clearly I think we both thought
that you were. You were just letting the moment build
and you were going to scream it. Oh yeah, it
was great. We'll fix it in post No, I don't
need it, so it was great. Yeah, unrelated. Rewatched the
(39:53):
live action he man, I liked it. You know who
plays Skeletor uh not Dolph Loren uh Frank, No, Yeah,
that's it. And he he's the only person who hasn't
disowned the film because his kids liked it. He played
a very strange skeletor. Also, you know, some toy lines
(40:13):
just don't have the narrative heft to hold a feature.
You know, they even had man at arms in there. Anyway,
what else was Franklin go in? Oh yeah, he's in
a bunch of stuff, but he was not in the
Halfa investigation. Probably to wrap this one up. In uh June,
(40:36):
the FBI gets another tip and they search of field
in Oakland Township, Michigan. That's about twenty miles away from
where Halfa was last scene. There was a guy involved
in crime named Tony Zarelli. Not the stereotype, but this
is there's a Tony heavy tail and Zarelli gave the
(40:56):
gave the authorities info about where he said Halfa was buried.
He also described how Halfa died. He said, Oh yeah,
he's the he's the person who said that Halfa was
hit on the head with a shovel and buried alive.
But he said this in an e book that he
was selling for profit. Uh And nothing came of it.
(41:16):
So either the authorities were bad at digging or Zarelli
was miss from remembering. But at this point, no one
no one has verified any remains. The closest they've come
would be those strands of hair with Halfa's DNA. But
this also leads us to controversies. The Irishman is based on,
(41:38):
as we said, a single book. Both Scorsese and de Niro,
who plays she Wren, described the character she Wren in
the film as a fictional persona based on or loosely
inspired by the real guy. And furthermore, not all Halfa
experts agree with she Wren's story. A couple of them
(41:58):
think it's total millar. Oh. Yeah. The author, Dan Moldea,
he wrote the book The Halfa Wars and he's been
researching the disappearance of this gentleman for God for years.
So he was speaking with Robert de Niro and he
basically was trying to ward off de Niro, saying that he,
(42:19):
you know, he's got all these doubts about sheering story,
and he's telling DeNiro that sheer and Brandt were I for,
let's say, essentially running a con job on DeNiro saying
this is you should not be doing this, so like
why would you make this movie? Um? But again like
(42:40):
this is pretty this is a pretty interesting story. Even
if it's not true, I would say it's it's pretty
good storytelling and and it makes me want to watch it.
Are we in spoiler territory here for the film? I
feel like we've kind of danced around it, right, Uh
we can, Yeah, we could go ahead. Let's do the
spoiler countdown because it is a new film. Three you
(43:00):
and one there's I was. I didn't, I didn't haven't
done my homework. Is that much Before watching this I
knew it was based on a book. I did not
realize that it was meant to be unequivocally like this
guy killed Jimmy Hoffa, And when the moment in the
film where that happens, I wasn't expecting it. And then
I immediately googled Irish men fiction, you know, And I
(43:25):
think that's sort of the consensus is that it's a
little more fiction or at least, you know, conflation of
fact and fiction and is pure uh nonfiction storytelling, because
it again is based on one book, one man's account,
a deathbed confession. Essentially, you know, this guy did not
live much longer past this interview, and that's that's got
(43:46):
dramatized in the film as well, the fact that he's
delivering this story to the perspective camera, which is you know,
supposed to be the journalist of you know, which is
you are the stand in for that kind of as
a viewer. Excellent film. But when I saw that, I
was like, WHOA, Okay, I guess we're this is sort
of a hybrid thing I'm seeing here, like Once upon
a Time in Hollywood for example. Um, but if you
(44:09):
are to believe the book, then this this is how
it happened. I do want to bring something up my
my father in law talked with me about this pretty extensively.
His he is also a Tony and he told me that,
without getting into too much detail, if this kind of
thing was going to go down with somebody like Jimmy Hoffa,
(44:31):
the only way you could pull it off is to
get one of his closest associates or friends to do
it himself. Because so it would make sense for Sharon's
character to actually be the one who's able to get
close enough to do it. Because we haven't really talked
about this exactly, but I mean they're basically brothers in
the film. And there's another character the has the Buffaloni
(44:55):
crime family you know, it was Russell's played by Joe Pesci,
wonderful performance. Um. The three of them are kind of inseparable.
They're they're almost like a family. But Jimmy in particular
gets a really close relationship with his daughter and that's
the whole thing. Um. But yeah, he has trusts him
like a like a blood brother. Well, one of the
(45:15):
other reasons, I mean, think of the logistics. If you're
trying to pull off a job like this, you have
somebody who not only has a protective close circle, but
they also have a established schedule, calendar. People know where
and when they're supposed to be at the majority of times.
It's not like if you're just doing you know, uh,
(45:39):
if you're just landing in a strange town and finding
someone under a bridge that no one will miss for
a few weeks, Like this is an established thing where
you have you know, you have at most probably a
few hours to get out of town, right, So it's
it definitely I think your father in law is on
(45:59):
the money. Yeah, and it's kind of scary, but yes,
let's let's continue. So Dan Muldeya has his own theory.
He believes half as disappearance was in his mind, a
New Jersey operation. He said he's interviewed all the suspected
killers in his decades long search for the truth of
the matter, and he he thinks that it's most likely
(46:21):
that it was a production of New Jersey operators. Paul
Mission Control Decade raised a great point off air earlier
when we were talking, and he said, one thing that
he found, um, one thing that he found compelling was
that the story she runs account felt kind of understated,
like the way Nol depicted it. This this death is
(46:46):
you know, there's not a lot of gravitas build up.
It feels abrupt and brutal. If that is, and the
last one was the last one, promise, If that is
Jimmy Hoffa killed himself. We didn't talk about this. We're
not gonna talk too much about it because there's not
a ton of evidence to lean on here. But what
if he committed pseudo side, which, as we all know,
(47:09):
is the fancy pants cravat wearing word for faking one's death. Uh,
it is very very difficult to do successfully if you
want to make any money. Um, it is not impossible
to do if you want to just disappear and live
by your wits or if you have access to someone
who makes some very accurate idea of some sort. Right.
(47:30):
Could he have gone uh with the federal witness Protection program?
Could he have gone with your with the uh? Could
he have gone with the institution that is sometimes called
witless protection UH? And and if so, what happened to him? Well,
we know that Jimmy Hoffa died for legal purposes on July.
(47:55):
He was declared legally dead as we record today's episode.
His disappearance and his likely death have yet to be confirmed.
Let's do a little math. If he were alive in
nineteen as we record this, he would be a hundred
and six years old. That means even if somehow he
actually went off the grid, you know, changed his name
to Himmy Jaffa or whatever and lived in a small
(48:18):
town in Saskatchewan or something, he probably already passed away.
But that hasn't stopped the investigation. As a matter of fact,
this is this is one of the things we can
leave you with. The film and the book that we've
mentioned today may have inspired US investigators to get back
(48:39):
on the case. So this was December. This is right
now as we're recording this. As the Irishman has come out. Uh.
There's an interview with U S attorney Matthew Schneider, and
this guy was asked by you know, a reporter by
someone there, what do you you know? What do you
think about the Irishman? What are your thoughts? Well, his
statement was, uh, certainly intriguing. I will talk about this,
(49:03):
but not now. I have a lot of thoughts about it.
It's unresolved. I have my own theories. There will be
more to come on this. Yeah, I mean, you know,
I didn't mean to dismiss this whole thing as being
like some sort of fantasy. Obviously there's information in this
film and in this book that is meaningful. Um, but
(49:25):
you can draw your inclusions. But anybody like this is
actually really close to the story. Surely there's gonna be
some stuff that there's a ring of truth to, or
that he knows unequivocally is true. And I'd be interested
to hear uh this perspective. I think that it's the
people that are still alive that I think that can
really shed some light on which parts of this are real,
and that's yet to be determined. And this is also
uh TikTok situation because many of the people who would
(49:50):
have been in their prime and directly involved have passed on.
That's just how, you know, That's just how the body crumbles, right,
And yeah, it makes me. It makes me wonder if
a deathbed confession has already occurred. It just kind of
went unnoticed because the family and the surrounding people were
(50:11):
just like, okay, whatever, whatever, Grandpa, you're crazy or or
even um, Grandpa, what are you think? Mmmmmmm no, no, no,
no, no no no. We don't talk about their grandpa. Grandpa.
It's supposed to be America. You know the rules. Get
the pillow. I'm just you know, that was dark. I apologize.
We're gonna take it. Hey, Grandpa, We're gonna take a
(50:33):
quick trip over to the Giants Stadium. It's gonna be fine, Grandpa,
just come with us. The best view is from outside
the player. This is terrible, that field of dreams, right,
So we at this point past the torch to you,
fellow listeners, what do you think has this been solved
unofficially the way that the former region in charge of
(50:55):
the investigation believes it has. Will The answer to Jimmy
Hoffa's disappear Urrance UH is widely suspected death ever come
to light, why or why not? We want to hear
from you. You can find us on Facebook. You can
find us on Instagram. You can find us on Twitter.
Special shout out to our Facebook community page. Here's where
(51:16):
it gets crazy. We can't wait to swing by there
and see what you think about Jimmy Hoffa. Also, Hey,
you know, we're just gonna shoot our shot. If you
have information about the disappearance of hafa Um, send it,
send it to us. We won't wrat you out, we promise. Yeah,
ed cheering if you know what you're you know, relatives
(51:37):
did like let us know. Yeah, that guy's got a
Shrek tattoo. I did not know that he has a couple. Actually,
I think it's a Donkey and the Shrek. He's really
into Shrek? Is he the one who did I'm in
love with your body? Is that about Jimmy Hoffa? That's good,
that's good, Ben. I would prefer to believe it. But
the line I believe is now his bedsheets smell like you. Yeah, Jimmy.
(52:01):
I'm gonna look up the lyrics for this after we wrapped.
In the meantime, Hey, what do you do if you
hate the social meats, but you still want to tell
us what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. You give us a call.
You call one eight three three s T d W
y t K. Just give us a call. You'll hear
Ben's voice. There will be a beep and then just
(52:21):
say I'm in love with the obody and I will
be like, whoa, it was about the Jimmy Hoffa episode,
and then leave your message. We'll get it um. If
you don't want to do any of that stuff, but
you still want to contact us, you have an idea
for an episode, you want to tell us anything at all,
you can send us a good old fashioned email. We
are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff I Don't
(53:00):
want you to know, as a production of i heeart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows
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