There's Hope Yet To Solve The Case
The FBI plans to investigate the purported deathbed confession of a former Pennsylvania Teamsters official that says he helped dispose of the body of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa.
The confession, said to have been written by Francis (Frank) Sheeran before he died Dec. 14 at age 83 in a nursing home near Philadelphia, says he flew to Pontiac in a small plane on the day Hoffa disappeared, picked up Hoffa's body from the killers and drove it to a Hamtramck trash incinerator where it was burned.
But the three-page document may turn out to be another false lead, like so many the FBI has tracked down since Hoffa vanished July 30, 1975. He was on his way to a reconciliation meeting with Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamsters boss, and Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone, a Detroit Mafia captain.
"It's definitely a forgery -- it's not his signature," Sheeran's daughter, Dolores Miller, of West Chester, Pa., said this week.
Miller said she thinks the document was created by Sheeran biographer John Zeitts of Omaha, Neb., to upstage a book to be published in June by another Sheeran biographer, Charles Brandt, a former Delaware chief deputy state attorney general.
Zeitts plans to bring his book out by late December.
Miller -- who is collaborating with Brandt -- said the purported confession's wording is strikingly similar to Brandt's earlier outlines, which Zeitts could have read during visits with Sheeran.
Zeitts, 59, said Friday that the confession is genuine and that Sheeran wrote it to clear his conscience about his role in Hoffa's disappearance. The FBI has said it believes Hoffa was killed to prevent him from regaining the Teamsters presidency and ending mob access to union pension funds.
Zeitts said Sheeran sent him the confession in November and he forwarded it last week to Hoffa's daughter, Barbara Crancer, a judge in St. Louis.
Crancer gave it to the FBI and the Free Press.
Sheeran, former president of Teamsters Local 326 in Wilmington, Del., was a longtime Hoffa loyalist and convicted racketeer who spent nine years in prison after Hoffa vanished.
In 1975, he took the Fifth Amendment before a federal grand jury in Detroit in the Hoffa case. Sheeran said in the 1990s that he knew who killed Hoffa, but denied personal involvement.
Sheeran told Philadelphia reporters that he'd tell all in a biography that he and Zeitts were writing. It was never published.
Zeitts said in a phone interview this week that he served time with Sheeran in a federal prison. He said he was there for sending pornography through the mail.
The confession doesn't contain a title, date or witness signatures.
It alleges:
Hoffa called Sheeran on July 27, 1975, to set up a meeting between Hoffa and Pennsylvania crime boss Russell Bufalino to resolve Hoffa's conflict with Provenzano. Hoffa called back the next day to say that he had set up a meeting with Provenzano for July 30 and that Hoffa wanted Sheeran there to "watch his back."
That night, Bufalino hinted to Sheeran that Hoffa would be killed so there was no reason for Sheeran to attend the meeting.
On July 30, Sheeran, Bufalino, their wives and Bufalino's sister-in-law headed to Detroit from Pennsylvania to attend a wedding.
Along the way, Sheeran left the group, went to an airstrip, flew to Pontiac and got into a car that had an address in the glove box.
Sheeran drove to the address and was met by Provenzano henchmen Salvatore Briguglio and brothers Thomas and Stephen Andretta, who were suspected but never charged in Hoffa's disappearance.
"The deed had already been done," the document said.
It said Sheeran drove Hoffa's body to Central States Waste Management trash incinerator, located in Hamtramck, and the body was burned.
Sheeran returned to Pontiac and flew back to the airstrip to rejoin his group.
"By having me in it, Russell was keeping me alive," the document said. "Important eyes were watching, and Russell was showing that my loyalty was to him first and that I would not be a 'loose end.' And being in it, there was no danger of me testifying."
Days later, the document said, Sheeran met at a New York City restaurant with incinerator owners Peter Vitale and Raffael Quasarano and others.
"After lunch, while walking to our cars, Pete Vitale told me that if I waited long enough, I could pay my respects to Hoffa in the soot surrounding his trash incinerator," the document said.
Miller said her father and Zeitts had talked for years about writing the book, but never did.
Several years ago, she said, Sheeran teamed up with Brandt, who had written a detective novel.
Brandt wouldn't discuss his book or how its details compare with the confession.
The FBI said it plans to look into the matter.
"The case is still open and we run down any leads we receive on it," FBI spokeswoman Dawn Clenney said Friday.
Who Was Jimmy Hoffa
James Riddle Hoffa (1913-1975 ?) was a noted American labor leader who is also well-known for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death.
Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana and was the son of a poor coal miner. His father died when he was young and Hoffa could not stay in school. Hoffa moved to Detroit to work in a warehouse. He was a natural leader who was annoyed at the mistreatment of workers, and in 1933, at just the age of twenty, he helped organize his first strike of "swampers," the workers who unloaded strawberries and other produce.
Hoffa rapidly advanced through the ranks of the Teamsters union, which organized truckers throughout the midwest and then nationwide through skillful use of quickie strikes, secondary boycotts and other means of leveraging union strength at one company to organize workers and win contract demands at others. The union also used less lawful means to bring some employers into line, creating the image of Teamsters as thugs that remains today.
Hoffa took over the Presidency of the Teamsters in the 1950's, when his predecessor, Dave Beck, was sent to jail. Hoffa worked to build the union and in 1964 succeeded in bringing virtually all American over-the-road truck drivers under a single national master freight agreement. Hoffa then pushed to try to bring the airlines and other transport employees into the union, greatly worrying the American government and business which saw how devastating a strike of all transportation systems could be for the national economy. For all the benefits that Hoffa and other Teamsters delivered for over-the-road drivers, other Teamsters locals did little more than sign sweetheart deals that made union officers rich and left workers poor. In industries such as garment delivery organized crime took over locals, then used their power to strike to bring an entire industry either under the mafia's control or at least vulnerable to blackmail.
Hoffa had a working relation with these racketeers, some of whom had played an important part in getting him elected General President of the Teamsters. Several Teamster chapter presidents were convicted for mob related crimes, and often would continue serving as Union leaders, including Antonio 'Tony Pro' Provenzano, in New Jersey. Moe Dalitz and Allen Dorfman funded many mob casinos, hotels, and other construction from the Teamsters pension fund.
Another group he definitely had close ties to was the Republican party. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both put pressure on Hoffa, attempting to investigate his activities and disrupt his ever-growing union. The Kennedys especially were sure that Hoffa had pocketed a great deal of union money. The AFL-CIO also disliked Hoffa, having expelled the Teamsters in the 1950s, and aided the Democrats against him.
In 1967 he was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In 1971, however, President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence on the condition that he not participate in union activities. Hoffa was planning to sue to invalidate that restriction in order to reassert his power over the Teamsters when he disappeared on July 31, 1975.
His fate is a mystery that continues to this day and there are many theories as to what happened to him. Among these are that Hoffa is buried under the New Jersey Turnpike or under the end zone at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. Another theory is that Hoffa was actually put in a cement-making machine and turned into cement. No theory has been proved and his body has not been found, but in 1983 he was pronounced dead and a death certificate was issued.
In the end, Hoffa was not nearly as beholden to the mob as his successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, who avoided prison by dying of cancer. While Hoffa was a brilliant tactician who knew how to play one employer off against another and who used the union's power to rationalize the industry by driving out weaker employers, Fitz was content to play golf [he always won when playing other Teamster officials] and taking in the other benefits of high office. The deregulation of the trucking industry pushed by Edward Kennedy and others in the late 1970s during Fitzsimmons tenure eventually destroyed much of what Hoffa had won for his members under the National Master Freight Agreement by making it much harder to maintain the high standards that Hoffa had achieved.
A motion picture of Hoffa's life entitled Hoffa was released in 1992 starring Jack Nicholson in the title role and Danny DeVito as a mobster. Half of it is factual.
The book The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa by Walter Sheridan is a noted guide to the trials in Tennessee of Hoffa, although biased as Mr. Sheridan was one of RFK's lawyers. The book Contract Killer by William Hoffman and Lake Headley goes into great detail about Hoffa's murder.
Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa currently leads the Teamsters.
