Search for Hoffa leads FBI to Jersey City landfill site
Teamsters boss and suspected mobster dissapeared in 1975
The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, a mystery that has gripped the American imagination for half a century on its ascent to national folklore, is the subject of a new FBI investigation centred on the site of a former landfill in Jersey City, New Jersey. A worker, on his deathbed, said he buried the body in a steel drum.
FBI 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 Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975. The steel drum is said to be buried about 15 feet below ground, in the shadow of countless millions of drivers who have passed it by.
“FBI personnel from the Newark and Detroit field offices completed the survey and that data is currently being analyzed,” Special Agent Mara R. Schneider, a spokesperson, said Thursday. The statement did not mention Hoffa by name and did not elaborate on a timeline for any potential excavation.
The new investigation, to be sure, has a familiar ring, as it follows several failed searches for Hoffa’s body over the years. In Michigan, where Hoffa was last seen outside a restaurant, officers with backhoes have searched various locations, including a farm, a driveway and beneath a swimming pool.
In New Jersey, a popular urban legend had 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 Hoffa’s character shot and killed by his friend, Frank Sheeran, and his body incinerated. That theory, advanced by Sheeran in a book before his death, has long been discounted by Hoffa scholars as unlikely.
But an expert on the Hoffa case who brought the disclosure of the steel drum and its possible location to the FBI, Dan Moldea, a journalist who has written about the Teamster boss since before he disappeared, said that the New Jersey site is “100 per cent 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,” Moldea said Thursday. “This case has to be solved.”
The new lead is bolstered by records showing that the FBI received tips as far back as 1975, immediately following his disappearance, that Hoffa was buried in the landfill in Jersey City. Agents searched and, finding nothing, wrote off the tips.
“They had no idea where to start looking,” Moldea said.
The story of how the FBI came to learn of the new location begins on a muddy summer day in 1975. A teenage boy named Frank Cappola worked at the former PJP Landfill near the Skyway with his father, 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 from a distance as the men approached the vehicle, where they spoke to the visitors and seemed to point to a remote corner of the landfill. He would later learn what was being planned.
By that summer of 1975, Jimmy Hoffa, who once commanded the powerful Teamsters union, had fallen from the heights of power. He served a prison sentence after being convicted of jury tampering in 1964, and his attempts to return to his union throne upon his release were not welcomed.
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 Hoffa’s days were numbered.
On July 30, 1975, Hoffa was in Bloomfield Township, Mich., for a meeting to address this very situation. And with that, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared.
A very prominent person disappeared from a public place 46 years ago and was never seen again
DAN MOLDEA JOURNALIST