Forty-one years ago tomorrow, former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa called his wife, Josephine, from a pay phone in Bloomfield Township at a resturant that no longer exists under its same name but is still operating under another name, to say he had been stood up at an afternoon meeting with two mobsters.
Being from Detroit you cannot help to be immersed in the Jimmy Hoffa story.
I was alive, young but alive, when the story played out.
The place where he disappeared from is next to a strip mall I go to often, so I pass by the resturant often and no matter what it still reminds me each and every time of Jimmy Hoffa.
It is still one of the biggest mysteries of the past few decades.
"Almost everybody who is involved has gone to meet their maker," said Keith Corbett, a longtime prosecutor who spent 25 years with the Organized Crime Strike Force of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit. "The list of people who have reliable information is really short. You could probably count them on one hand with a couple fingers left over. I think it's extremely unlikely that there will be any new developments in the case."
The closest investigators ever came to recovering a corpse was one strand of human hair that was found in a car that may have driven Hoffa to his death. DNA testing eventually confirmed it was Hoffa's.
Of course there are as many theories about what happened to him as the day is long.
The most widely accepted one which was 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.
No body was ever found.
Corbett theorizes that Hoffa was killed near the restaurant and the body was run through a cardboard shredding machine at Central Sanitation Services, a mob-owned garbage disposal service in Hamtramck that was destroyed in an arson fire about six months after Hoffa's disappearance.
A second theory places Hoffa's death at a Milford Township horse farm owned by Rolland McMaster, a Teamsters enforcer. Dan Moldea, author of the "The Hoffa Wars," has spent decades chronicling Hoffa and the Teamsters, including an interview with Salvatore Briguglio shortly before he was murdered.
"The best evidence ... is that Hoffa was driven to McMaster's farm where he was murdered by Sally Bugs Briguglio," Moldea wrote for a piece at ganglandnews.com, a website that chronicles the Mafia.
Hoffa's body was "then stuffed into a 55-gallon drum, and shipped via a Gateway Transportation truck to his final resting place," at a mob-owned landfill on the Hackensack River in New Jersey, Moldea wrote. Gateway was a trucking company whose president served as a trustee of the Teamster pension fund.
An interesting read of where his body probably is not can be found here.
A good video summary of the events are here too: