Landfill owner’s son says he father showed him where Jimmy Hoffa was buried
DETROIT — Could new evidence solve once and for all the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance?
A leading Hoffa expert, author Dan Moldea, says yes.
Moldea said a former New Jersey landfill known as “Brother Moscato’s Dump” may hold the grave of the former Teamsters boss, who disappeared from a Bloomfield Township, Mich., restaurant on July 30, 1975.
Moldea has been covering Hoffa since before he disappeared and wrote the book “The Hoffa Wars” in 1978, based on dozens of interviews with key figures in the case. He said a new lead brings together the correct cast of characters, the right timeline of events and information from other interviews he has done in his decades of researching the case.
“I’ve never seen a lead this good for Hoffa’s body,” Moldea said. “I’ve been on six of these (digs) myself, and I’ve come away from all of them disappointed. But nothing was even in the same universe as this.”
Detroit FBI officials told the Detroit Free Press on Thursday that they haven’t yet heard of Moldea’s new evidence. So are they willing to search the dump if the tip pans out?
“Absolutely — if we had credible evidence that leads to a location,” said FBI spokeswoman Mara Schneider. “The case has been going on for so long, and there’s so much interest in finding Mr. Hoffa. We would very much like to be able to solve this.”
Moldea’s latest information comes from Frank Cappola, whose father, Paul Cappola, was a partner in the dump at the time Hoffa disappeared. The younger Cappola said that as his father was dying in 2008, he recounted what happened so that Hoffa’s family could eventually recover his remains.
Earlier this year, the younger Cappola signed a sworn affidavit for Moldea, spelling out his father’s version of events. It tracks with previous theories that Hoffa was killed in metro Detroit, stuffed in a drum, loaded onto a truck and driven to New Jersey.
Among the new details were:
• Hoffa’s corpse was brought to the dump for disposal.
• Because it was awkwardly placed in the drum in which it was transported, the body was moved to a new one.
• The corpse wouldn’t fit into the new drum feetfirst, so it was shoved in head-first.
• Cappola used a frontend loader to bury the barrel in a pre-dug hole at the dump.
• He covered it with 15 to 30 other drums containing chemical waste.
• Cappola buried a marker over the spot that should be easy to find.
The elder Cappola even showed his son, years later, the spot of the burial, according to the sworn affidavit. The younger Cappola has agreed to take a polygraph test and cooperate with law enforcement, Moldea said.
Moldea and Cappola recorded an interview with Eric Shawn of Fox News, which published Moldea’s account of his research in the case.
Moldea said that in 2007, he interviewed Phil Moscato, Cappola’s partner in the dump.
Moscato also claimed then that Hoffa was buried there, though he didn’t say where and he hinted that the body may have been moved.
The dump, formally known as the PJP Landfill, covered about 87 acres on the east bank of the Hackensack River in Jersey City, New Jersey. On a map, it’s about 3{ miles northwest of the Statute of Liberty.
The site was contaminated with toxic waste, and in 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency and the state of New Jersey began a cleanup that turned much of it into a park and wildlife preserve. About 37 acres of the property were capped and another 52 acres were sold in 1995, according to the EPA.
Part of it remains privately owned, and Moldea said he believes that Hoffa’s body remains where it was originally buried in 1975.
“We have reason to believe that it was not part of that EPA cleanup and that it was not moved,” Moldea said.
As to why Hoffa’s killers would take the risk of transporting his body more than 600 miles to New Jersey, Moldea said it may have been considered an insurance policy. An indicted mobster could attempt to strike a bargain with federal prosecutors, offering to locate Hoffa’s body in exchange for a lighter prison sentence, he said.
Moldea is conscious of the skepticism that accompanies any mention of locating Hoffa’s body after all these years. He also knows that a major motion picture, “The Irishman,” recently debuted to rave reviews and offers an alternative theory of Hoffa’s final days.
Moldea calls the movie “great filmmaking, but bad history.”
Still, he hopes people will see it because it puts the Hoffa case back in the headlines in a way that could solve it.
Moldea said he hopes that investigators, either in New Jersey or at the federal level, will listen to Cappola’s story and search at the dump. Because the story says the drum containing Hoffa’s remains was buried with other drums, the location should be easy to find. That might convince investigators to give it shot, despite previous misses.
“Ground radar should be able to detect a mass of metal there,” Moldea said. “If there’s a mass of metal there, then law enforcement has a decision to make. If it’s not there, there’s nothing to dig. This is a minimal investment.”
Hoffa was last seen outside what was then the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township. He called his wife, Josephine, from a nearby pay phone to say that he’d been stood up for his lunch with mobsters. He was never seen in public again.
The main theory presented to a grand jury was that the mafia killed Hoffa to prevent him from disclosing mob infiltration of the Teamsters, including its tapping into the union’s pension fund to finance its rackets.
Hoffa had resigned the Teamsters presidency after going to prison on charges of jury tampering, conspiracy and fraud. In 1965, a federal jury in Chattanooga, Tenn., convicted Hoffa of conspiring to accept illegal payments from a trucking company and later of trying to funnel a $10,000 bribe to the son of one of the jurors.