Jimmy Hoffa disappeared under dubious circumstances in 1975, and we have been searching for him ever since. It seems like every few years some dying mobster gives a tip or a deathbed confession, and the cops begin digging up fields or tearing out basement floors to look for Hoffa’s remains. While his disappearance has been the focus of attention for decades now, it is often forgotten why Jimmy Hoffa was a public figure in the first place. As the President of the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters, Hoffa formed close ties with powerful organized crime figures including the Detroit Partnership and Genovese crime family in mutually beneficial relationships. It was those gangland ties that almost certainly led to Hoffa’s disappearance and likely death.
The Teamsters and the Mob
James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa didn’t invent union corruption, but he did take his union’s ties to organized crime to new levels. The well-established alliance between the Teamsters’ leadership and the Mob had already proven beneficial for both parties by the time Hoffa came on the scene. The Mob could help Teamsters land jobs and contracts using their ties to corrupt city government officials. Meanwhile, easy access to the Teamsters’ pension funds enabled the Mafia to expand its own operations into places like Las Vegas.
Hoffa was elected president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1957. At that time, the union’s relationship with organized crime was already well-known and under increasing public scrutiny. Hoffa’s predecessor, Dave Beck, was under indictment for fraud at the time of Hoffa’s election, and would later be convicted. Hoffa’s ascent to power in the union coincided with growing pressure on corruption and organized crime from the Federal Government.
Congress, and then later the Kennedy Administration, continued to scrutinize the Teamster’s role, and Hoffa in particular. He spent the 1960s – a time when he succeeded in building the Teamsters into the most powerful and formidable union in the United States – under indictment for several corruption-related crimes. In 1967, the Supreme Court upheld a jury tampering conviction that ha long been on appeal. Hoffa relinquished his position in the Teamsters and began serving an eight year prison sentence.
Nixon’s Commutation, and the End of Jimmy Hoffa
Despite multiple appeals, Hoffa ended up spending five years in prison. However, while incarcerated, the labor leader remained popular with the Teamster’s rank and file members, as well as their families. With the 1972 Presidential election looming, President Nixon commuted Hoffa’s prison sentence. Shortly afterwards, the Teamsters endorsed Nixon’s presidency. However, despite Hoffa’s seeming victory over authorities who had hounded him for decades, there was one critical stipulation in Nixon’s commutation: Hoffa could not engage in any union-related activities until 1980.
The Teamsters awarded Hoffa a $1.1 million lump sum pension after his release from prison, which left him financially secure. Despite this, Hoffa chafed at the conditions of his commutation, and longed for a role back within the Teamsters. However, in Hoffa’s absence, the new Teamster leadership had grown comfortable with their power and influence and were not at all interested in handing the reins back to Hoffa. This ultimately proved to be his undoing.
By 1975, Jimmy Hoffa was actively scheming to return to the Teamsters again, despite
considerable resistance from the union’s current leadership, and several reputed Mafia figures. In July 30, 1975, he departed his home in Pontiac Grand Ville Michigan to attend a meeting with local mafia officials at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant, apparently to discuss strategies to return to the Teamsters. He never returned home. Police found his locked car in the restaurant’s parking lot the next day, after his wife reported him missing. No trace of Hoffa was found in the subsequent investigation, and he was declared dead in 1982.
Jimmy Hoffa Burial Sites
In the ensuing decades, law enforcement found some minor clues in the disappearance – such as a strand of hair matching Hoffa’s DNA in a vehicle owned by a local mobster – but no one has ever been prosecuted for the disappearance or presumed murder. Acting on tips or deathbed confessions, authorities have spent the past several decades examining alleged Jimmy Hoffa burial sites, but all of these excursions have proven fruitless. Hoffa’s disappearance remains a mystery and has become a part of American folklore.
Conclusion: Robin Hood, or Just Hood?
Four decades after his disappearance, Jimmy Hoffa remains a polarizing American figure. As a man who spent years fighting for workers’ rights – at a time in this country when American workers had few champions and were clearly exploited – many people laud what he achieved on the picket line and in the Teamster’s front office. However, despite his record as a labor leader, Hoffa enabled the Mafia to use the Teamsters to expand their criminal activities across the United States as well, often to the detriment of American communities and the people who lived in them. It is difficult to judge Hoffa on one side of the coin without flipping it over, and recognizing that other, dirty side. In the end, it was Hoffa’s continued alliance with the seedier side of union activities that led to his undoing, and it is a disservice to the union’s rank and file members, and to history, to simply gloss over it all.