Jimmy Hoffa, Jimmy Hoffa ran the Teamsters Union

Jimmy Hoffa, Jimmy Hoffa ran the Teamsters Union. At its peak, that union had nearly two million members. Hoffa had leverage over the movement of nearly every truck, every freight shipment, every supply chain in America. He was untouchable in ways that most powerful men only imagined. He was also deeply connected to organized crime. Robert Kennedy spent years attempting to prosecute him. Eventually, he succeeded. Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering and fraud in 1964. He served nearly five years in federal prison before Richard Nixon commuted his sentence in 1971, on the condition that Hoffa stay out of union leadership until 1980. Hoffa had no intention of honoring that condition. On July 30th, 1975, Hoffa drove to the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. He was meeting two men. A New Jersey Teamster official. A Detroit mob figure. He arrived at 2:00 p.m. He waited in the parking lot. He called his wife from a payphone to say the men were late. That was the last confirmed communication anyone received from James Riddle Hoffa. His car was found in the lot. He was not in it. There were no signs of struggle. No witnesses came forward credibly. No body was ever recovered. The FBI investigated for decades. Grand juries were convened. Informants came and went. One mobster claimed Hoffa had been shot in the back of a car and his body destroyed in a meat processing plant. Another said he was buried beneath a pool. A third pointed to a farm in New Jersey. Every site was excavated. Nothing was found. The names of those responsible are believed by investigators to be known. But without a body, without physical evidence, prosecution remained impossible. Hoffa was officially declared dead in 1982. His case was never closed.