Today in History—July 31: The Start of the Search for Jimmy Hoffa
On this day in 1975, a mystery began that remains unsolved: What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?
He started as a union organizer for Local 299 in Detroit and rose to become president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Under his leadership, the Teamsters became the largest labor union in the country. It was rumored that they had the country’s most misused pension fund under his leadership too, and Hoffa developed a reputation for ties to organized crime.
Despite this, Hoffa managed to stay out of legal trouble until 1967, when charges of jury tampering, mail fraud, and conspiracy caught up to him. His 13-year sentence was commuted in 1971, on one condition: No union activity for the rest of the decade.
Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.
But things had changed while Hoffa was inside. The balance of power had shifted. Hoffa’s successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, enjoyed better relations with organized crime than Hoffa himself had.
As Hoffa pushed—against the orders of his presidential commutation, no less—to reclaim power, he found himself at odds with the very mob figures who had earlier helped fuel his meteoric rise.
That’s how we get to 1975. Hoffa drove to a restaurant in a Detroit suburb to meet two reputed mobsters. He called his wife from a pay phone to say no one had shown up. His wife reported him missing on this day.
Later, witnesses reported seeing him getting into a maroon Mercury, and his green Pontiac was found unlocked in the parking lot. Hoffa was never seen again.
The driver of the Mercury claimed the blood in the back seat of the car came from a 40-pound salmon he was cutting into steaks.
To call the search exhaustive is an understatement. The FBI got involved almost immediately. The FBI remains involved, with the case still considered open. Investigators have searched suspected burial sites across the map. They’ve dug beneath a Michigan swimming pool, excavated a horse farm, checked a New Jersey stadium, and chased claims inspired by practically every deathbed confession offered by a Michigan made man since.
The search for his remains spans five decades and thousands of leads, but it’s never turned up a single piece of confirmed evidence.
The mystery has now outlived most of the people suspected of causing it.
- 62: Hoffa’s age at the time of his disappearance
- 1982: Year Hoffa was legally declared “presumed dead”
- $100,000: Hoffa’s salary during his tenure as president
- 1786: Robert Burns’s first volume of poetry is published, an immediate success
- 1912: Largely because of Black boxer Jack Johnson’s success against white opponents, Congress institutes censors on boxing films
- 2012: Michael Phelps becomes the most-decorated athlete in Olympic history
