The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa
Bloomfield Township, Michigan, United States, 1975
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
James Riddle Hoffa was president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the truckers' union, from 1957 to 1971, when it was the largest union in the United States. Convicted in 1964 of trying to bribe a juror and of pension fund fraud, he went to prison in 1967. In December 1971 President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence on the condition that he not run any union until 1980. Hoffa challenged the condition in court, lost, and still tried to win back the presidency, against the will of mob bosses who held influence over the union and its pension fund.
On Wednesday, July 30, 1975, he went to a meeting set for 2 pm in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, a Detroit suburb, with Anthony Giacalone, described as a Detroit mob figure, and Anthony Provenzano, a New Jersey union leader tied to the Genovese family. Neither showed up. Between 2:15 and 2:30 pm, from a pay phone behind a hardware store, Hoffa called his wife to complain about the cake and said he would be home by 4 pm. The FBI estimates he left the place without a struggle around 2:45 pm; a witness said he saw him in the back seat of a maroon car with three other people. The next morning his car was found unlocked in the parking lot.
Sources
In the game
Back Seat
Bloomfield Township, a Detroit suburb, Thursday, July 31, 1975, 10 pm. In the back room of the Silver Pheasant restaurant, sealed off by the police, the chairs sleep upside down on the tables. Outside, in the empty parking lot, only a green Chrysler is left.
The main physical evidence was a maroon Mercury Marquis belonging to Giacalone's son, which Charles O'Brien, Hoffa's foster son, had borrowed that day to deliver a fish. On August 21, sniffer dogs picked up Hoffa's scent in the car, and in 2001 the FBI compared the DNA of a hair from the back seat with that of a Hoffa hairbrush and found a match; O'Brien always denied any involvement. No one was charged, several digs never found the body, and Hoffa was declared legally dead in 1982, with a date of July 30 of that year.
