Search leads FBI to Jersey City landfill
Mystery that has gripped American imagination subject of investigation
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’d 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 4.5 metres below ground, in the shadow of countless millions of drivers who have passed it by.
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.
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.
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.
On July 30, 1975, Hoffa was in Bloomfield Township, Mich., for a meeting to address this very situation. He was to sit down with New Jersey Mafia boss Anthony Provenzano and another mobster at the Machus Red Fox, a popular restaurant. But when he arrived, the other two men were not there.
And with that, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared.
One possible outcome of 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.”
Moldea continued to revisit the Hoffa case over the years. In 2019, when “The Irishman” opened to theatre audiences and on Netflix, he praised the film’s engaging storytelling while calling out its climactic killing as untrue.
It was around that time that Moldea was introduced to a stranger named Frank Cappola, the teenager from the landfill, with a story to tell about his father.
He recalled that muddy summer day in 1975, with the black limousine and the conversation between his father, 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. Then, in 2008, nearing death, Frank’s father summoned him to tell his tale, which he had shared with no one. He encouraged his son to reveal it when the time seemed right.
The men in the limousine had come to instruct the men at the dump that Hoffa’s body was being delivered shortly and that they were to bury it, Paul Cappola told his son. Moscato told him to do the job 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 with the body in the barrel, and worried that someone may have seen the men pointing earlier. He made a change in plans.
“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.
The new hole was on a desolate patch of unused state property just outside the dump, between 8 and 15 feet deep, the father told his son. He buried the Hoffa barrel first, followed by as many as 15 to 30 chemical drums and chunks of brick and dirt, he told his son.
Then he covered the whole area with 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 told his son he never shared the location with his partner or anyone else.
In March 2020, Frank Cappola died after longtime respiratory problems. He left his father’s secret with Moldea, who wrote about the disclosure. The FBI contacted him in 2020, he said. He visited the site with a Fox News crew and ground penetrating radar equipment in November 2020. The radar detected shapes that resembled barrels, he said.