71 Facts About Jimmy Hoffa

From an early age, Jimmy Hoffa was a union activist, and he became an important regional figure with the IBT by his mid-twenties.

Jimmy Hoffa secured the first national agreement for teamsters' rates in 1964 with the National Master Freight Agreement.

Jimmy Hoffa played a major role in the growth and the development of the union, which eventually became the largest by membership in the United States, with over 2.3 million members at its peak, during his terms as its leader.

Jimmy Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, a connection that continued until his disappearance in 1975.

Jimmy Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud in 1964 in two separate trials.

Jimmy Hoffa was imprisoned in 1967 and sentenced to 13 years.

In mid-1971, he resigned as president of the union as part of a commutation agreement with US president Richard Nixon and was released later that year, but Jimmy Hoffa was barred from union activities until 1980.

Jimmy Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana, on February 14,1913, to John and Viola Jimmy Hoffa.

The family moved to Detroit in 1924, where Jimmy Hoffa was raised and lived for the rest of his life.

Jimmy Hoffa left school at the age of 14 and began working in full-time manual labor jobs to help support his family.

Jimmy Hoffa married Josephine Poszywak, an 18-year-old Detroit laundry worker of Polish heritage, in Bowling Green, Ohio, on September 25,1937.

Jimmy Hoffa began union organizational work at the grassroots level as a teenager through his job with a grocery chain, which paid substandard wages and offered poor working conditions with minimal job security.

Jimmy Hoffa was then invited to become an organizer with Local 299 of the Teamsters in Detroit.

Jimmy Hoffa played a major role in the union's skillful use of "quickie strikes," secondary boycotts, and other means of leveraging union strength at one company, then to move to organize workers, and finally to win contract demands at other companies.

For Jimmy Hoffa to unify and expand trucking unions, he had to make accommodations and arrangements with many gangsters, beginning in the Detroit area.

Jimmy Hoffa worked to defend the Teamsters from raids by other unions, including the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and he extended the Teamsters' influence in the Midwest from the late 1930s to the late 1940s.

Jimmy Hoffa then rose to lead the combined group of Detroit-area locals shortly afterwards and later advanced to become head of the Michigan Teamsters groups.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Hoffa obtained a deferment from military service in World War II by successfully making a case for his union leadership skills being of more value to the nation by keeping freight running smoothly to assist the war effort.

At the 1952 IBT convention in Los Angeles, Hoffa was selected as national vice-president by incoming president Dave Beck, the successor to Daniel J Tobin, who had been president since 1907.

Jimmy Hoffa had quelled an internal revolt against Tobin by securing Central States' regional support for Beck at the convention.

Jimmy Hoffa took over the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, at the convention in Miami Beach, Florida.

Jimmy Hoffa then tried to bring airline workers and other transport employees into the union, with limited success.

Jimmy Hoffa was then facing immense personal strain as he was under investigation, on trial, launching appeals of convictions, or imprisoned for virtually all of the 1960s.

Jimmy Hoffa was re-elected without opposition to a third five-year term as president of the IBT, despite having been convicted of jury tampering and mail fraud in court verdicts that were stayed pending review on appeal.

Jimmy Hoffa had first faced major criminal investigations in 1957, as a result of the McClellan Committee.

On March 14,1957, Jimmy Hoffa was arrested for allegedly trying to bribe an aide to the Select Committee.

Jimmy Hoffa denied the charges, but the arrest triggered additional investigations and more arrests and indictments over the following weeks.

Robert Kennedy had been frustrated in earlier attempts to convict Jimmy Hoffa, while working as counsel to the McClellan subcommittee.

In May 1963, Jimmy Hoffa was indicted for jury tampering in Tennessee, charged with the attempted bribery of a grand juror during his 1962 conspiracy trial in Nashville.

Jimmy Hoffa was convicted on March 4,1964, and subsequently sentenced to eight years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Jimmy Hoffa spent the next three years unsuccessfully appealing his 1964 convictions.

Jimmy Hoffa began serving his aggregate prison sentence of 13 years on March 7,1967, at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

When Jimmy Hoffa entered prison, Frank Fitzsimmons was named acting president of the union, and Jimmy Hoffa planned to run the union from prison through Fitzsimmons.

Fitzsimmons decentralized power somewhat within the IBT's administration structure, forgoing much of the control Jimmy Hoffa took advantage of as union president.

On December 23,1971, less than five years into his 13-year sentence, Jimmy Hoffa was released from prison when US President Richard Nixon commuted it to time served.

Jimmy Hoffa regained his freedom, but the commutation from Nixon did not allow Jimmy Hoffa to "engage in the direct or indirect management of any labor organization" until March 6,1980.

Jimmy Hoffa contended that he had never agreed to that condition.

Jimmy Hoffa sued to invalidate the restriction so that he could reassert his power over the Teamsters.

Jimmy Hoffa ultimately lost his court battle since the court ruled that Nixon had acted within his powers by imposing the restriction, as it had been based on Jimmy Hoffa's misconduct while he was serving as a Teamsters official.

Jimmy Hoffa faced immense resistance to his re-establishment of power from many corners and had lost much of his earlier support even in the Detroit area.

In 1975, Jimmy Hoffa was working on an autobiography, Jimmy Hoffa: The Real Story, which was published a few months after his disappearance.

Jimmy Hoffa had earlier published a book titled The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa.

Provenzano had once been a friend of Jimmy Hoffa's but became an enemy after a reported feud when both were in federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s.

In 1973 and 1974, Jimmy Hoffa asked him for his support to regain his former position, but Provenzano refused and threatened Jimmy Hoffa by reportedly saying he would pull out his guts and kidnap his grandchildren.

Jimmy Hoffa disappeared on July 30,1975, after he had gone out to the meeting with Provenzano and Giacalone.

Linteau and Jimmy Hoffa had been enemies early in their careers but eventually became friends.

Linteau was out to lunch when Jimmy Hoffa stopped by and so Jimmy Hoffa talked to some of the staff present and left a message for Linteau before he left for the Machus Red Fox.

Jimmy Hoffa's wife told him she had not heard from anyone.

Several witnesses saw Jimmy Hoffa standing by his car and pacing the restaurant's parking lot.

Two men saw Jimmy Hoffa, recognized him, and stopped to chat with him briefly and to shake his hand.

Jimmy Hoffa made a call to Linteau in which he again complained that the men were late.

At 7 am the next day, Jimmy Hoffa's wife called her son and daughter to say that their father had not come home.

Jimmy Hoffa called the police, who later arrived at the scene.

The Jimmy Hoffa family offered a $200,000 reward for any information about the disappearance.

Investigators and Jimmy Hoffa's family suspected that O'Brien had a role in Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance.

Giacalone and Provenzano, who denied having scheduled a meeting with Jimmy Hoffa, were found not to have been near the restaurant that afternoon.

On December 9,1982, Hoffa was declared legally dead as of July 30,1982, by Oakland County, Michigan Probate Judge Norman R Barnard.

The Hoffex Memo noted that Provenzano was not senior enough to order a Mafia hit, though it did not rule out the possibility that his or someone else's personal vendetta against Jimmy Hoffa was a motive.

Dan Moldea mentioned the possibility that Jimmy Hoffa had retaliated against his Mafia opponents by co-operating with investigations against them.

Vincent Piersante, the state government's former chief investigator into the Jimmy Hoffa case, doubted that Jimmy Hoffa could have seriously threatened the Mafia in this way, as any incriminating information he knew either would have incriminated himself or concerned crimes that were outside of the statute of limitations.

Piersante suggested that the killing was accidental, and that the men who were sent to meet Jimmy Hoffa were only meant to be "insultingly low-level messengers".

Jimmy Hoffa argued that Hoffa had no realistic prospects for a comeback, that the disappearance did not share the usual characteristics of a Mafia hit and that it risked encouraging action against organized crime.

The theory is that O'Brien was used as an "unwitting dupe" to lure Jimmy Hoffa away, because Jimmy Hoffa was suspicious of Provenzano and would not have entered the car unless there was a familiar figure present.

Jimmy Hoffa instead suggested that Vito "Billy" Giacalone was the familiar figure.

Therefore, the Hoffex Memo suspects Jimmy Hoffa was lured away to a different murder location.

James Buccellato, a professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University, suggested in 2017 that it was likely that Jimmy Hoffa was murdered one mile away from the restaurant at the house of Carlo Licata, the son of the mobster Nick Licata.

Buccellato doubts that the Mafia would have entrusted an Irish American with this role and believes that Jimmy Hoffa would have refused to travel that far from the restaurant.

Jimmy Hoffa's body was rumored to be buried in Giants Stadium.

Former FBI agent Robert Garrity, who worked on the Jimmy Hoffa case, dismissed Kuklinski's claims as a hoax.

In January 2013, the reputed gangster Tony Zerilli implied that Jimmy Hoffa was originally buried in a shallow grave, with a plan to move his remains later to a second location.

Zerilli said the plans were abandoned and Jimmy Hoffa's remains lay in a field in northern Oakland County, Michigan, not far from the restaurant in which he had been last seen.