DETROIT (AP) – The FBI found no evidence of missing Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa during a search of land under a New Jersey bridge, a spokeswoman said Thursday.
The Pulaski Skyway now becomes another dead end in the decades-long mystery that has stretched from a Michigan horse farm to the East Coast: the whereabouts of the remains of one of the most powerful labor leaders in ‘America?
The 47-year-old became an enigma last year when he landed next to an old landfill under the Jersey City Bridge. The FBI conducted a search there in early June.
“Nothing of evidentiary value was discovered during this search,” said Mara Schneider, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Detroit.
“While we do not currently anticipate any additional activity at the site, the FBI will continue to pursue any viable leads in our efforts to locate Mr. Hoffa,” he said.
Schneider declined to comment further when asked for details about the dig.
Authorities believe Hoffa disappeared in suburban Detroit in 1975 while meeting with high-profile mobsters.
Dan Molea, a journalist who has written extensively about the Hoffa saga, said he was being briefed by the FBI in person by video conference Thursday.
He said the FBI and its contractors did not excavate at the exact site he had recommended.
“I’m not thrilled with the result. … My impression today was that they gave me the bad news: Thanks for the tip, but that’s over. That’s my interpretation,” Molea told The Associated Press.
“They dug very, very deep holes,” he said.
Molea was contacted by the FBI last year after he published a detailed account of Frank Cappola, who was a teenager in the 1970s when he worked at the former PJP landfill near the bridge.
Cappola said his father, Paul Cappola, who also worked at the landfill, described how Hoffa’s body was delivered there in 1975, placed in a steel drum and buried with other barrels , bricks and dirt.
Paul Cappola, worried that police were watching, dug a hole on New Jersey state property about 100 yards from the landfill and later moved the unmarked barrel there, according to Molea.
The story goes on
Frank Cappola spoke to Fox Nation and Molea before he died in 2020 and signed a document attesting to his late father’s story.
Molea said the FBI told him he didn’t dig in the exact spot he had recommended because the radar didn’t show anything suspicious underground.
“I think they missed that spot,” he said. “I think the body is there. We just can’t find it.”
Hoffa was president of the 2.1 million-member Teamsters union from 1957 to 1971, even keeping the title while in prison for trying to bribe jurors during an earlier trial. He was released from prison in 1971 when President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence.
There has long been speculation that Hoffa, who was 62, was killed by enemies because he was planning a Teamsters comeback. He was declared legally dead in 1982.
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