A new F.B.I. investigation is underway into the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. This mystery has been a fascination for American folklore for over 50 years. The investigation was focused on the former Jersey City landfill. A worker who was dying said that he had buried his body underground in a steel drum.
F.B.I. agents armed with a search warrant arrived in Jersey City at a plot of dirt and gravel the size of a Little League diamond below the Pulaski Skyway on Oct. 25 and 26 to conduct a “site survey,” according to the Detroit field office, which has led the investigation into Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975. According to the Detroit field office, the steel drum is believed to be hidden 15 feet below the ground, under the shadow of millions of drivers who have walked by it.
“F.B.I. personnel from the Newark and Detroit field offices completed the survey and that data is currently being analyzed,” Special Agent Mara R. Schneider, a spokeswoman, said on Thursday. The formal statement did no mention Mr. Hoffa and did not provide any details about a timeline for any possible excavation.
The new investigation, to be sure, has a familiar ring, as it follows several failed searches for Mr. Hoffa’s body over the years. Officers with backhoes were deployed to Michigan, where Mr. Hoffa last was seen outside a restaurant. They searched several locations including a farm and a driveway, as well as under a swimming pool.
In New Jersey, a popular urban legend had Mr. Hoffa’s remains buried under the old Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands. The 2019 film “The Irishman” raised yet another version of what may have happened, portraying Mr. Hoffa’s character shot and killed by his friend, Frank Sheeran, and his body incinerated. Hoffa scholars have long dismissed this theory, which was first proposed by Mr. Sheeran in his book before his death.
But an expert on the Hoffa case who brought the disclosure of the steel drum and its possible location to the F.B.I., Dan Moldea, a journalist who has written about the Teamster boss since before he disappeared, said the New Jersey site is “100 percent” credible, and that the new leads were very significant.
“A very prominent person disappeared from a public place 46 years ago and was never seen again,” Mr. Moldea said Thursday. “This case has to be solved.”
Records show that the F.B.I. has provided evidence to support this new lead. Records show that the F.B.I. received tips in 1975, shortly after his disappearance. Agents searched for Mr. Hoffa and found nothing. They then wrote off the tips.
“They had no idea where to start looking,” Mr. Moldea said.
The F.B.I.’s journey to the new location begins with a muddy summer day in 1975. The story of how F.B.I. discovered the new location begins in 1975, on a muddy summer afternoon. Frank Cappola, a teenage boy, worked at the former PJP Landfill close to the Skyway with his dad Paul Cappola Sr.
“While I was talking to my dad, a black limousine drove into our lot in the mud,” Frank Cappola recalled many years later, in 2019, at age 62, in a sworn written statement before a notary public. His father turned to a partner at the landfill and said, “They’re here.”
The boy watched as the men approached his vehicle. They spoke to the visitors and pointed to a distant corner of the landfill. He would learn the details later.
Jimmy Hoffa, once the leader of the Teamsters union, had fallen to the bottom of power by that summer 1975. After being convicted of jury manipulation in 1964, he was sentenced and released. His attempts to regain his union throne were rejected.
At the same time, a longtime friendship with the New Jersey Mafia boss Anthony Provenzano — “Tony Pro” — had soured badly. Men who operated in the pair’s orbit would later say that it was practically an open secret that Mr. Hoffa’s days were numbered.
Mr. Hoffa was visiting Bloomfield Township, Mich. on July 30, 1975 for a meeting to discuss this very issue. He was to meet with Mr. Provenzano as well as another mobster from the Machus Red Fox restaurant, which is a very popular one. He arrived at the Machus Red Fox, but the two other men were not there.
Jimmy Hoffa vanished with it.
The F.B.I. combed the restaurant’s credit-card receipts to track down potential witnesses from that day. A few people claimed that they saw Mr. Hoffa in front of the restaurant, where he climbed into the back seat of a vehicle that drove off.
Agents interrogated Mob bosses and henchmen as well as union leaders. They pulled dozens of them before grand juries. One possible outcome of Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance emerged among many, with the seemingly unlikely destination hundreds of miles away — a New Jersey landfill. The 87-acre landfill was owned in part by a man named Phil Moscato and was commonly referred to as “Brother Moscato’s dump.”
Ralph Picardo, a Teamster serving a unrelated murder sentence in New Jersey, became an informant for the F.B.I. in 1975 that Mr. Provenzano told him as early as 1974 that Mr. Hoffa “was destined to be killed,” according to F.B.I. documents.
Shortly after Mr. Hoffa disappeared, associates of Mr. Provenzano visited Mr. Picardo in prison, and during their conversation, said Mr. Provenzano had arranged for Mr. Hoffa’s execution and that the body was taken to New Jersey on a truck.
“Picardo only speculates that Hoffa’s body may be in Moscato dump in New Jersey,” the F.B.I. wrote in a report in 1979, “and has no direct knowledge of the exact location.” Mr. Provenzano died in 1988.
In Philadelphia, a second informant said that two mobsters brought up disappearance during a conversation. One said, “If the feds begin digging at the proposed dump in New Jersey, they would hit pay dirt,” and the other replied, “Yes, they sure will,” according to the report.
F.B.I. agents visited the dump in 1975 with a search warrant in a different missing person’s case, but in reality, they hoped to find Mr. Hoffa. They searched the dump, but didn’t know where to look.
The dump became a hazardous hazard. Underground fires lit night and day, emitting chemical fumes into the poor areas around the dump. The dump, then known as PJP Landfill at the time, was designated a Superfund site in 1983. This meant that it was an area of environmental disaster that needed to be cleaned up.
The landfill was capped after thousands of barrels were removed and hauled away. It was transformed into Skyway Park in recent years, a vibrant green belt that runs along the Hackensack River.
Moldea revisited the Hoffa case throughout the years. In 2019, when “The Irishman” opened to theater audiences and on Netflix, he praised the film’s engaging storytelling while calling out its climactic killing as untrue.
Around that time, Mr. Moldea was presented to Frank Cappola, a stranger from the landfill with a story about his father.
He recalled the 1975 muddy summer, with the black limousine and the conversation that took place between his father, Mr. Moscato (the partner), and the visitors. When people began gesturing to an area in the dump, Frank Cappola saw his father, Paul, react in anger: “Now the whole world will know!” he shouted with an expletive.
Frank didn’t know what he was talking about for years. In 2008, Frank was close to death and his father asked him to tell the story. He had never shared it with anyone. He encouraged his son, who was nearing death, to tell it when he felt the time was right.
The men in the limousine had come to instruct the men in the dump that Mr. Hoffa’s body was being delivered shortly and that they were to bury it, Paul Cappola told his son. Mr. Moscato advised him to do the job by himself.
“My father was upset with Mr. Moscato for pointing to that area of the landfill,” Frank Cappola wrote in a sworn statement in 2019, “because the dump was constantly under police scrutiny.”
“Unidentified people brought Hoffa’s dead body to PJP,” Frank Cappola wrote. “Because of the awkward position of Hoffa’s corpse after they removed him from whatever container he was in before, they were unable to place him, feet first, in a 55-gallon steel drum retrieved at PJP. So, they put him in the drum headfirst.”
Paul Cappola was left alone in the barrel with the body, and he was concerned that someone might have seen the men pointing earlier. He changed his mind.
“My father, who didn’t trust anybody, decided to dig a second hole with a company excavator and to place Hoffa in that location,” Frank Cappola wrote.
According to his son, the hole was buried in a patch of desolate state property near the dump. It was between 8 and 15 feet deep. According to his son, he buried the Hoffa bar first, then he added 15-30 chemical drums and chunks brick and dirt.
He then covered the entire area in dirt. He “placed something detectable just under the surface of the grave site, which I am willing to disclose to law enforcement,” Frank Cappola wrote. Paul Cappola informed his son that he never shared the location of the grave site with his partner or anyone else.
Frank Cappola died in March 2020 after suffering from long-term respiratory issues. He left his father’s secret with Mr. Moldea, who wrote about the disclosure. The F.B.I. He stated that he was contacted by the F.B.I. in 2020. He visited the site in November 2020, along with a Fox News crew. He said that the radar detected barrel-like shapes.
The site is located next to Interstate Waste Services. This trash collection company has been storing empty metal containers under the Skyway for many years. Isaac Suarez, a 19-year-old employee, said that workers were suddenly ordered to clear the site in late October. He saw the investigators arriving.
“They scanned the floor and found barrels,” Mr. Suarez said at the site, adding the location made sense. “If you were trying to hide somebody you killed, wouldn’t you want it to be in plain sight, but not?”
Source: NY Times
