The Jimmy Hoffa disappearance: The 46th anniversary
An update on the search for the remains of the labor leader
Editor’s note: Since July 30, 1975, the law enforcement community on the federal, state and local levels, along with an army of investigative journalists, have attempted to crack open the Jimmy Hoffa murder case. And now the solution to one of the biggest mysteries of the 20th century might be at hand.
Dan E. Moldea, author of the 1978 book The Hoffa Wars — who has been on Hoffa’s trail since his disappearance was first announced — believes this moment could come soon with the anticipated recovery of the ex-Teamsters boss’s remains.
Last July — for the 45th anniversary of Hoffa’s disappearance — The Mob Museum published two of Moldea’s articles about the Hoffa case:
- The first story, on July 8, 2020, chronicled his then-45-year-long investigation of the Hoffa mystery.
- The second story, posted 13 days later, detailed Moldea’s adventure with Frank Cappola, who showed him what he believed was the actual location of Hoffa’s remains in September 2019.
Moldea, who has refused to accept any money for this latest investigation until Hoffa’s body has been recovered and positively identified, declared: “If this actually happens, there will be many people to thank for their help and support. … But, if this does not succeed, the failure will be mine and mine alone. Either way, I will have no regrets. This is still the best lead I have ever seen or heard during my 46-year search for Jimmy Hoffa.”
Here is Moldea’s update for the 46th anniversary of Hoffa’s murder.
I would like to have a dollar for every person who said to me during the past 46 years, “The Mafia would have never murdered Jimmy Hoffa in Detroit and then shipped him for burial over 600 miles east to the PJP Landfill, aka ‘Brother Moscato’s Dump,’ under the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City.”
As anyone who has been following my ongoing Ahab v. White Whale slow-speed chase knows, I have bet everything I have that this is exactly what happened. Indeed, I have pushed “all in.”
Truth be told, though, just five months after the July 1975 killing, the FBI was the first to legitimize this theory. Based on the statements of Ralph Picardo, a flipped federal witness, U.S. prosecutors and FBI special agents sought and obtained a search warrant for the PJP Landfill and served it on PJP’s owner-operators, Phillip Moscato and Paul Cappola, on December 11, 1975, ostensibly looking for Armand Faugno, a murdered mobbed-up Jersey City loanshark.
To be sure, though, based on Picardo’s information, federal agents tried but failed to find Hoffa. The problem was they did not have a specific location for his unmarked grave in the 34-acre landfill.
But thanks to my key source whom I met in September 2019 — the late Frank Cappola, the oldest son of PJP co-owner Paul Cappola — I have now given what I believe is the exact location to federal investigators, which is only about 150 yards from the site they searched in December 1975.
So, if confirmed, the FBI’s 46-year investigation will be vindicated. And so will mine.
Here is how we got to this point.
* * *
On that hot summer afternoon 46 years ago this month, Jimmy Hoffa stood outside the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, just north of Detroit, waiting for a meeting with two Mafia figures, New Jersey labor racketeer Anthony Provenzano, a capo in the Vito Genovese crime family, and Anthony Giacalone, a feared mobster with the Detroit underworld. A third man Hoffa expected to meet was Leonard Schultz, a mobbed-up businessman connected to Tony Giacalone and his brother, Vito.
Hoffa was never seen or heard from again.
During the immediate aftermath of Hoffa’s disappearance, speculation about Hoffa’s fate ran rampant. There were dozens of theories about who killed him, where, and why. And there were hundreds of theories as to where his body wound up.
The Briguglios, the Andrettas and Brother Moscato’s Dump
Then, in November 1975, Ralph Picardo, who was in Trenton state prison for manslaughter, told the FBI that, based on his August 1975 conversation with Steve Andretta, a top lieutenant to Tony Provenzano, Hoffa was murdered in Detroit on July 30, 1975; stuffed into a 55-gallon drum; loaded onto a Gateway Transportation truck; and shipped to New Jersey.
Asked by the FBI to speculate, Picardo said he believed that Salvatore Briguglio, another key Provenzano associate, had killed Hoffa and that he might be buried at “Brother Moscato’s Dump” in Jersey City, New Jersey, under the Pulaski Skyway, the bridge that connects Jersey City and Newark.
On December 4, 1975, federal prosecutors called, among others, Briguglio and Andretta, along with their brothers, before a federal grand jury in Detroit. All four took the Fifth.
Also called and taking the Fifth was Rolland McMaster, a powerful Teamsters official whom I believed from the outset of my investigation was responsible for the disposal of Hoffa’s body. I was present at the federal courthouse that day and met McMaster for the first time. I had previously only interviewed him by phone.
A federal law enforcement official told me privately that McMaster’s alibi for the day of the murder was that he was with his brother-in-law, Stanton Barr, who was the head of the steel division of Gateway Transportation. Also, one of McMaster’s top associates, Jim Shaw, was a long-haul driver for Gateway.
Along with McMaster, I also interviewed Barr and Shaw at length. All three denied any role in the Hoffa murder conspiracy.
That same month, on December 11, the FBI obtained a search warrant for Brother Moscato’s Dump, serving it on its two co-owners, Phillip Moscato, a soldier in the Vito Genovese crime family, and Paul Cappola, a mobbed-up Jersey City businessman. However, federal agents did not have a specific location to search for Hoffa’s body within the 34-acre site, so they came up empty.
Later, in October 1976, I conducted an exclusive three-and-a-half-hour recorded interview with Briguglio and Andretta. Although they conceded nothing, I got them on the record about Andretta’s prison visit to Picardo, as well as Briguglio’s concern about the accusations against him as Hoffa’s actual killer and his knowledge of Brother Moscato’s Dump.
Also that day, I interviewed Briguglio and Andretta’s brothers, Gabriel and Thomas, respectively. They, too, denied any wrongdoing.
McMaster and Gateway Transportation
In September 1978, I published my first book, The Hoffa Wars, a chronicle of Hoffa’s rise and fall. In that work, I remained faithful to Picardo’s story, except for the trip to New Jersey and his speculation about Brother Moscato’s Dump. But I still embraced his information that Briguglio was Hoffa’s killer and that a Gateway truck had shipped Hoffa’s dead body to its final destination.
Charles Crimaldi, a member of the Chicago Outfit, had persuaded me during an exclusive interview that, after the murder, Hoffa’s body was taken by truck to a location where he was “crushed and smelted” in a car compactor. Significantly, the steel division of the Detroit terminal of Gateway Transportation — which was headed by Stanton Barr, McMaster’s brother-in-law — was located near the Ford River Rouge Plant where tons of steel were crushed and smelted every day.
In May 2006, FBI agents raided a farm in Wixom, Michigan — which at the time of the Hoffa murder was owned by Rolland McMaster. The FBI was looking for Hoffa’s remains based on information provided by Donovan Wells, a former business partner of McMaster and Barr. At the time of his cooperation with the FBI, Wells was in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, after his conviction for hauling a load of marijuana. At the time of Hoffa’s disappearance, Wells and his family lived on the McMaster family farm.
The FBI never unearthed Hoffa’s remains or any evidence in 2006 that he had been killed on McMaster’s farm, but Wells — who passed an FBI polygraph test — provided the Bureau with important new information about Hoffa’s disappearance: Rolland McMaster, Tony Provenzano and Stan Barr were together at a restaurant in Detroit on July 29, 1975, the night before Hoffa vanished. Wells also heard a portion of their conversation, which was clearly about Provenzano’s scheduled afternoon meeting with Hoffa on July 30, as well as the need for McMaster and Barr to have well-established alibis.
In addition, Wells’s wife, Monica, claimed that on the afternoon of Hoffa’s disappearance, she saw two or three dark-colored cars speeding onto a dirt road at the farm, roaring past the farmhouse on an adjacent dirt road. When she reported to McMaster what she had seen, McMaster replied, “Blondes who talk too much don’t get old.”
Although I believed for years that the crime scene of Hoffa’s murder was either at McMaster’s farm in Wixom or his home in Southfield, which was just a few minutes from the Red Fox restaurant, I did not have any real evidence.
Years later, journalist Scott Burnstein, a respected expert on the Detroit Mafia, developed an underworld source close to Lenny Schultz, the third man whom Hoffa expected to meet on the day he vanished. According to Burnstein’s source, Hoffa was taken from the Red Fox to Schultz’s home where he was murdered.
And then, according to Burnstein’s source, Hoffa’s body was given to Rolland McMaster.
Meeting Brother Moscato
From April 2007 to January 2014, I conducted a series of exclusive recorded interviews with Phillip Moscato, the co-owner of Brother Moscato’s Dump. During those seven years, Moscato, whom I liked and respected, told me, among other things, that “Picardo basically had it right,” adding that a) In Act One, Hoffa was picked up at the Red Fox and delivered to the scene of the crime by Vito Giacalone, Tony Giacalone’s younger brother; b) In Act Two, Hoffa was indeed murdered by Sal Briguglio; and c) Hoffa was shipped to New Jersey, via Gateway, and buried at his dump in Jersey City — where the FBI had conducted a cursory search in December 1975.
Moscato died on February 16, 2014, without giving me everything he knew about Hoffa’s murder. Still, I had promised him I would not reveal the details of what he did tell me during our recorded interviews until after he was gone.
I chose to publish this astonishing confirmation of Picardo’s information on July 30, 2015 — the 40th anniversary of Hoffa’s disappearance — in Jerry Capeci’s widely respected anti-Mafia online publication, Gang Land News. Notably, in that story, I credited the FBI with being right about the location of Hoffa’s remains in 1975 — even though federal agents did not have an exact location for the unmarked grave and neither did I.
In addition, Capeci and I spoon-fed my story to the New York Daily News, which, also on the 40th anniversary, ran it under the headline: “EXCLUSIVE: New evidence emerges on Jimmy Hoffa’s possible fate, suggests feds were on right track searching N.J. dump.”
After spending 29 years, from 1978 to 2007, believing that Hoffa’s body had been crushed and smelted in Detroit, I now embraced what Moscato had told me, “Picardo basically had it right,” and that Hoffa’s body was buried at Brother Moscato’s Dump, also known as the PJP Landfill, which Moscato had co-owned with Paul Cappola, who died in March 2008, six years before Moscato passed.
The Cappola family
In February 2019 — after seeing me on a television news show claiming that Hoffa’s body was at Moscato’s dump — Paul Cappola’s youngest son, Florida businessman Paul Cappola Jr., cold-called me, saying that his oldest brother, Frank Cappola, might know something important about the Hoffa case. Although I was extremely interested in pursuing this new lead, Frank Cappola did not agree to speak with me until the following September.
Then, after six telephone interviews over the next three weeks, we met in New Jersey. I personally paid for Frank’s travel expenses from Florida.
In short, Cappola told me that his father had given him a deathbed confession in 2008, which included the exact location of Hoffa’s unmarked grave.
On September 29, 2019, Cappola picked me up at my hotel in Secaucus and drove us to the PJP Landfill where he gave me a tour of the site. During that visit, Cappola showed me what he believed was the exact location of Hoffa’s unmarked grave, which was the size of a little-league baseball diamond — under the Pulaski Skyway. I filmed the entire visit.
After a lengthy formal interview the following day, which I also recorded, Frank, at my request, executed a sworn declaration on October 7, attesting under the penalty of perjury to his specific knowledge of the location of Hoffa’s remains. He also agreed to cooperate with the law enforcement community and to take a polygraph test.
In short: At the end of July 1975, Paul Cappola Sr. allegedly received the assignment to bury Hoffa’s murdered body from Phillip Moscato, his partner at the PJP Landfill in Jersey City and a reputed soldier in the Vito Genovese crime family. Defying Moscato in retaliation for this unwanted task, Cappola interred the body at a location that only he knew … under a section of the nearby Pulaski Skyway and about 150 to 300 yards from where Moscato had instructed him to bury it.
Among other details, Frank Cappola told me that his father revealed to him that he had buried Hoffa in a 55-gallon drum and then piled 15 to 30 steel barrels, filled with chemical adhesives, on top of the ex-Teamsters boss.
To me, this was an absolutely stunning revelation.
After I left New Jersey, Cappola and I remained in close contact by phone. On January 10, 2020, while having dinner with me and the love of his life, Joy DiBiaso, at a restaurant in Secaucus, Cappola, who had long suffered from a chronic respiratory condition, collapsed at the table. Despite our pleas, he refused to go to the hospital that night. However, Joy forced him to go the following day. Shortly after admission, he was put on a ventilator and in a drug-induced coma.
Sadly, Cappola died two months later on March 16 without ever regaining full consciousness.
So, just to be clear, the only person in the world who actually knew what happened to Hoffa was Frank’s late father, Paul Cappola. The only person Paul told was his oldest son, Frank. And the only person Frank told — and showed “the exact location” — was me.
Preliminaries
Immediately after our tour of PJP in September 2019 and with Cappola’s approval, I put together a production team for a documentary about his story. Our team captain was Beaux Carson of Carson Signature Films, a trusted friend of mine since the early 1990s and a specialist in life-rights arrangements. Almost immediately, again with Cappola’s approval, Carson’s agent, Richard Lawrence, opened negotiations with Ari Mark, the co-founder of the award-winning production company and showrunner Ample Entertainment.
All four of us agreed that no one would accept any money until Hoffa’s body was recovered and positively identified by the FBI. If and when that happened, Ample would negotiate a deal with a major media organization to finance a documentary about my successful 46-year search for Hoffa’s remains, based on Cappola’s information.
If I was wrong about the location of Hoffa’s remains, there would be no deal.
Inasmuch as we believed we knew the location, we needed to arrange for a ground-penetrating-radar examination of the site. Because of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic and other obstacles, we did not sign our contract with Ample, which would arrange for the mechanics of the GPR and a possible excavation, until August 2020.
Meantime, after reading my two stories for The Mob Museum, several colleagues — excellent researchers all — admonished me, claiming that I had forgotten that the PJP Landfill, aka Brother Moscato’s Dump, was an EPA Superfund site during the 1980s. Thus, they argued, the 15 to 30 chemical drums piled on top of Jimmy Hoffa — encased in a 55-gallon steel drum at the bottom of an eight- to 15-foot hole — would have been collected and disposed of as part of the overall EPA cleanup.
However, Frank Cappola had stated in his sworn declaration: “[B]ecause of my father’s decision to bury Hoffa’s body off the PJP property, it is possible, even probable, that the grave was not affected by the EPA cleanup. In other words, the burial site likely still exists and is intact.”
Just to be sure, I obtained the EPA’s record of its multi-year, cleanup operation at PJP and found a map showing the agency’s site boundary. Confirming what Cappola had stated under oath, I was relieved to see that the actual location of Hoffa’s remains under the Pulaski Skyway was a few hundred feet beyond the EPA’s eastern perimeter.
Further, local property records showed that Hoffa’s alleged unmarked grave was, indeed, not buried on PJP property. Instead, it was on state property, regulated by the New Jersey Department of Transportation, which controlled everything on and under the Pulaski Skyway.
So, led by Beaux Carson, our team began planning for the ground-penetrating-radar analysis of the site identified by Cappola. However, when Carson contacted the Department of Transportation to make the necessary arrangements, an agency official told him that we needed a permit, which would take more time than expected.
Eric Shawn and Fox News
I had known and respected correspondent Eric Shawn of Fox News since the spring of 2004 when he was busy promoting Charles Brandt’s book, I Heard You Paint Houses. Shawn’s filmed reports embraced the thesis of Brandt’s work that Frank Sheeran, Hoffa’s loyal friend and ally, had killed the ex-Teamsters boss. Shawn immediately adopted this scenario as his own, a theory he then faithfully promoted for the next 15 years.
To me, Sheeran — whom I had briefly interviewed for my 1978 book and who then threatened, in writing, to sue me for defamation after its release — was lying. I continue to insist that Sal Briguglio, not Sheeran, had performed the killing.
To his credit, despite our disagreements, Shawn frequently included me in his filmed reports, using me as his designated contrarian. In fact, without Shawn, the movie The Irishman probably never would have been made. It was his enthusiastic reporting, featuring Sheeran as Hoffa’s killer, that supercharged interest in the project, adopted by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro with their “great-cinema-but-terrible-history” motion picture.
Between 2004 and 2019, Shawn almost singlehandedly had kept the Hoffa case alive and on the public’s radar. Consequently, whether I liked it or not — with ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC expressing zero interest in the Hoffa cold case — Fox News was the only game in town.
During the summer of 2019, Shawn offered me a consulting contract to work with Fox on a new angle of the Hoffa project, which I had originally developed five years earlier. Because I liked and trusted Shawn, I agreed to work with him personally, but I refused to either sign a contract with Fox or to accept any money from Fox — other than routine travel expenses, limited to train fares and hotel rooms, which Fox placed on its corporate credit card.
Unfortunately, the story Shawn and I were exploring soon became more complicated than expected, primarily because our key source refused to sign a sworn statement and failed to pledge full cooperation with the law enforcement community.
Ironically, it was that source who converted Shawn’s view of the Hoffa case from “Frank Sheeran did it” to “Ralph Picardo was right.”
By this time, Frank Cappola had come into my life. However, Fox News, at first, did not take him seriously and reneged on its agreement to pay for Cappola’s plane fare from Florida to New Jersey — which forced me to pay that expense personally.
Cappola was extremely upset because Fox had inconvenienced and embarrassed him. And I was upset with Fox for putting me in such an awkward position with Cappola.
Meantime, I understood that Shawn, whom I now considered a friend, was caught in the middle.
But to be clear, I did not ask to be reimbursed for Cappola’s travel expenses — and I rejected Fox’s offer to cover them after the fact. I had no contract with Fox, and, considering how badly Cappola had been treated already, I was not going to place him at the mercy of Fox News. I had interviewed him seven times by phone over the past three weeks, and, thus, I appreciated his true importance. And I protected him as I would any of my prized sources.
Cappola believed that Fox had so disrespected him that he refused to have anything to do with the network, cancelling an interview I had arranged between Cappola and Shawn for September 30, 2019. And Cappola’s continuing anger was aggravated by my ongoing defense of and loyalty to Shawn, causing severe problems between Cappola and me. At one point, in the midst of an argument about Shawn, Cappola threatened to cease his cooperation with me.
Finally, Cappola relented and, as a personal favor to me, grudgingly agreed to sit down for a brief interview with Shawn on October 11 at Rutt’s Hut, a popular restaurant in Clifton, New Jersey, that specializes in deep-fried hot dogs.
At this quick but friendly interview, during which I sat at the table while Shawn, who was both contrite and charming, asked his questions, Cappola did not give any details about the specific location of Hoffa’s unmarked grave at PJP.
In his subsequent hour-long report, broadcast on December 1, Shawn relegated Cappola to the final few minutes of his program. Cappola, who again felt disrespected, told me that he wanted nothing further to do with Fox.
On March 20, 2020 — four days after Cappola died and after our other story had completely faded — Shawn published a lengthy article, featuring Cappola and touting his information about Hoffa’s unmarked grave at PJP.
Inexplicably, Shawn did not even mention my name in his story.
I was so upset with Shawn that when I later appeared live on his weekend news show on August 1 — to commemorate the 45th anniversary of Hoffa’s murder two days earlier and Cappola’s information — I said sarcastically at one point during the interview that I did not want Fox Newsto beat me on my own story.
In response, Shawn sent me a harsh email, critical of my indiscreet comment. That led to an airing of grievances between us, culminating in a peace agreement.
The GPR test
Later in August, I invited Shawn — whom, apart from Fox, I wanted as the independent host of my team’s documentary — to accompany me for my return to PJP for the ground-penetrating-radar examination that Beaux Carson and Ari Mark at Ample Entertainment were arranging to feature in our anticipated film.
As a quid pro quo, Shawn agreed to showcase my work about Cappola and PJP in his next broadcast report for Fox and to help my team publicize our project. Specifically, Shawn said he wanted to do “a documentary about a documentary.”
Shawn was so grateful for my invitation that he offered to arrange for Fox to pay for the GPR examination. In addition, a Fox producer boasted to Carson that Fox had connections in the New Jersey state bureaucracy that would make it unnecessary for us to obtain any written authorization for our visit to the site.
In response, my team stepped aside, allowing Fox to take the lead on the GPR and with the state of New Jersey.
In the end, the Fox producer was wrong. Just like my team, Fox News needed the state’s permission. So, with our team still allowing Fox to keep control, Beaux Carson walked the Fox producer through the process and introduced him to the key person in the state bureaucracy — with whom my team had already been in negotiations for several weeks.
Also, a nearby waste-disposal company routinely used the state’s property under the Pulaski Skyway, including the area cited by Cappola, to park its large steel dumpsters. So, in addition, Fox needed to arrange for them to be cleared out before the GPR test could be conducted.
On November 24, 2020, a cameraman from my production company and I met Shawn and the Fox team at PJP. However, the top Fox producer, who never spoke to me about the location, had arranged for the wrong area under the bridge to be cleared of steel dumpsters.
After I pointed out what appeared to be a fatal error for our mission that day, I received word from the Fox producer that the waste-disposal company had refused Fox’s request to take the time and manpower to atone for Fox’s mistake.
Because of this situation, I was badly shaken. I had everything riding on a successful outcome of the GPR review. If the search came up empty, regardless of the state of the site, I assumed that my project was dead — and that no one would be returning my phone calls.
Hoping to get lucky and while being filmed by multiple cameras, I gave Fox and the GPR technician Cappola’s best-educated guess as to the exact location of Hoffa’s unmarked grave. And I showed them a video and still photographs of Cappola pointing to it.
Further, we were not just looking for a single buried 55-gallon drum. Rather, we were also looking for the 15 to 30 steel barrels, buried on top of the drum containing Hoffa. Essentially, we were searching for a sheet of steel that would light up the GPR apparatus.
The problem was that the clutter of dumpsters at the site was so tightly packed that in most places only one person could walk in the small spaces between them.
But then we got lucky. About 20 minutes into the GPR examination and working in the area that I had pointed out, the technician detected what appeared to be steel barrels under a path between two of the dumpsters at a location 12 feet to the north and three feet to the east, which was blocked farther east by a heavy seven-foot-high dumpster.
The Fox producer who had earlier arranged for the wrong area to be emptied immediately redeemed himself by somehow arranging for the removal of several dumpsters that were obstructing the location where the barrels were detected.
After that limited area was cleared and the GPR technician went back to work, the 12-foot-by-three-foot perimeter of steel barrels stretched to 12-by-15. Shawn and I, along with everyone else present, were cautiously jubilant.
Mercifully, I was still in the game and my phone calls continued to be returned.
Dampening the mood, Fox later fed the results of the GPR examination to the New York Post — a subsidiary of News Corp, also the parent company of Fox News. Celebrating the GPR success, along with discussing Frank Cappola’s amazing story, the Post article did not mention either Eric Shawn or me.
Consequently, I have to wonder what Fox has planned for this monumental, history-making story if and when my work, culminating my 46-year investigation, is confirmed by the FBI.
The one-way street
In September 2020, two months before the GPR examination, two FBI special agents contacted me by phone and asked for my cooperation on the Hoffa case, based on recent articles I had written and television shows on which I had appeared. Inasmuch as I was in a “use it or lose it” situation and needed the FBI, as required by law, to perform the excavation, I was more than happy to oblige.
In fact, I told both agents that, from soup to nuts, my team wanted to give them everything they needed “on a silver platter,” leaving them “with nothing to do but DNA the contents of the unmarked barrel at the bottom of that unmarked grave” under the Pulaski Skyway.
Notably, when the Hoffa investigation was red hot back in 1975, I made it my business to know several federal agents personally. But, respecting the traditional “one-way-street” ritual between reporters and the FBI, no federal agent had ever spoon-fed information to me. Yet I could always depend on some of them to make sure I never went off track. If I did, they would gently guide me back onto the proper path without violating their oaths.
Today, I am, once again, on the now-familiar one-way street with the FBI, contributing all the information I have while receiving nothing in return. And even though I do not really know any of these current federal agents very well — some of whom were not even born when Hoffa died — I am cooperating without complaint and with total enthusiasm.
To be clear, I have given the FBI every document, photograph and videotape requested, along with any other materials I think might be useful. But, recognizing how busy the FBI is with pending 21st century problems — such as the Capitol Insurrection and foreign cyber-warfare, among other serious national-security threats — I can understand why the Bureau is taking a considerable amount of time to solve a 20th century mystery.
However, I do know — from our sources on the ground in Jersey City — that the area pinpointed by the late Frank Cappola has been protected for several months. No one can get close to “The Spot” for any unauthorized digging or malicious vandalism.
If this alleged location of Hoffa’s remains is confirmed, it will vindicate the FBI’s original theory of Hoffa’s whereabouts, as well as its December 1975 search warrant on the PJP Landfill and its entire 46-year investigation.
The FBI deserves that. And when that moment finally arrives, I want — and deserve — to be present at the scene to witness and report on this unfolding history.
Dan Moldea is a veteran investigative reporter and the author of 10 books, including The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa; Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob; Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football; The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive Means, and Opportunity; and Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer: Adventures in the Jungles of Crime, Politics, and Journalism.
Key characters in the Hoffa case and their dates of death
(*) interviewed by Dan Moldea
*Thomas Andretta: January 25, 2018
*Stanton Barr: November 13, 2019
*Salvatore Briguglio: March 21, 1978
Russell Bufalino: February 25, 1994
*William Bufalino: May 12, 1990
*Frank Cappola: March 16, 2020
Paul Cappola Sr.: March 8, 2008
Anthony Giacalone: February 23, 2001
Vito Giacalone: February 19, 2012
*Louis Linteau: October 13, 1978
*Lawrence McHenry: January 17, 1994
*Rolland McMaster: October 25, 2007
*Phillip Moscato, Sr.: February 16, 2014
*Charles O’Brien, February 13, 2020
Ralph Picardo (federal witness): January 26, 2004
Anthony Provenzano: December 12, 1988
*Salvatore Provenzano: May 27, 2013
*Jack Robison: July 27, 2003
*Leonard Schultz: September 6, 2013
*Jim Shaw: March 31, 1987
*Frank Sheeran: December 13, 2003
*Donovan Wells (federal witness): September 5, 2019
Still alive, as of this writing (July 22, 2021):
*Gabriel Briguglio, living in New Jersey
*Stephen Andretta, living in New Jersey
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