Investigators hunting for mafia-linked union boss Jimmy Hoffa – whose 1975 disappearance featured in The Irishman – dig up a New Jersey landfill
- Hoffa was 62 when he vanished after a restaurant meeting on the outskirts of Detroit in July 1975, and his body has never been found
- His death is widely believed to have been ordered by Anthony Provenzano, a capo with the Genovese crime family and head of a New Jersey teamsters union
- The search for Hoffa has seen multiple sites dug up over the decades, mainly in the Detroit area
- Several rumors over the years have also pointed to New Jersey locations but nothing has ever been confirmed
- In 2019 a dying former worker on a landfill in Jersey City said that his father, in 2008, told him he was given Hoffaβs body and told to bury it
- On October 25 and 26 this year FBI teams from Detroit and Newark dug part of the former landfill site in the hunt for steel barrels
- The FBI has not discussed their findings but finding Hoffaβs remains would end a mystery 46-years in the making
FBI agents have searched a former landfill site in New Jersey in the hope of finding the final resting place of union boss Jimmy Hoffa, whose 1975 disappearance was told in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated film The Irishman.
Hoffa, born in Indiana, had lived in the Detroit area since he was a boy and had a cottage on Lake Orion, 40 miles north of downtown Detroit.
On July 30, 1975 he told his wife Josephine he would be home at 4pm to cook steaks for dinner, and headed out for a meeting at the Machus Red Fox restaurant 20 miles away, in Bloomfield township.
He called Josephine several hours later, angry that he had been stood up. He was never seen again; his green Pontiac Grand Ville was found in the parking lot of the restaurant the following day.
For almost 50 years police have been trying to find where Hoffa – who was declared dead in 1982 – was buried.
On Thursday it emerged that the FBI in October excavated a site in New Jersey, 650 miles from where he was last seen.
‘FBI personnel from the Newark and Detroit field offices completed the survey and that data is currently being analyzed,’ said Special Agent Mara R. Schneider, a spokeswoman, on Thursday.
Supporters of Hoffa are seen in Detroit in the 1960s, when he was charged with jury tampering
The New York TimesΒ reported that the dig, on October 25 and 26, took place in Jersey City, besides an old landfill site.
Material from the dig is currently being analyzed, with the hope of ending one of the most infamous mysteries of the last half century.
Hoffa, who was played by Al Pacino in Scorsese’s film, was an immensely powerful union leader whose ties to the mob alarmed Bobby Kennedy, the president’s brother and attorney general.
Hoffa at the time was, as James Neff wrote in his 2015 book Vendetta, the ‘permanent president of the biggest, baddest, most powerful labor union in American history.’
The union boss was convicted of bribery, conspiracy and jury tampering and was in prison from 1967-71.
On his release he tried to return to his powerful union position and resume his mafia ties, in particular his connections to Anthony Provenzano, a capo in the Genovese crime family.
Provenzano was the head of a teamsters association in Union City, New Jersey.
The mafia leader was unimpressed by Hoffa’s bid to return to his previous ways, and relations between the two men soured.
Provenzano was supposed to be meeting Hoffa at the restaurant in July 1975, to work out their differences.
Hoffa’s disappearance was widely believed to be on Provenzano’s orders.