"It Gets Dark Every Night"

The Violence that had swirled around Teamster Local 299 in Detroit for the past year had preyed on Jimmy Hoffa's mind. It wasn't the violence per se, since Hoffa and violence were hardly strangers. It was the why behind the recent incidents and bombings that bothered him. First, a boat belonging to Dave Johnson, president of Local 299 and a loyal Hoffa supporter, had been blown out of the water. Then Ralph Proctor, an official of Local 299, had been severely beaten by two men. Finally, the parked car of Frank Fitzsimmons' son had been blown up near a Teamsters hangout.

"I can't understand the damn thing, Jerry," Hoffa said to me late last spring. "Dave Johnson's boat blown up--broad daylight. The Fitzsimmons kid's car--broad daylight. Ralph getting stumped by two guys--broad daylight. I just don't understand it."

"Why don't you understand it, Jimmy?"

"Well, because it gets dark every night."

•

Broad daylight. Wednesday, July 30, 1975, was going to be a scorcher. Hoffa's wife, Josephine, later told me that her husband seemed edgy and unsettled that morning--and it wasn't just the heat. "He didn't get up and start raking the yard as he usually did; he was upset. I'd never seen him like that."

The temperature was in the 80s by ten that morning, and Hoffa told his wife he was going to lie down on the picnic table and that she should wake him at one p.m.; he had a meeting to attend. At five minutes past one, Josephine woke him. He showered, kissed her twice (which bothered her at the time, because it "wasn't like him" to kiss her twice), got into his car and left.

Hoffa drove to Pontiac, where he stopped at Airport Service Lines, a limousine firm owned by Louis "The Pope" Linteau, a longtime friend. Linteau wasn't there, but a couple of employees later said that Hoffa appeared very nervous. But he did go out of his way to mention the names of three men he was supposed to meet. When the employees were later questioned, they could not recall the names of the men. The Hoffa family hired a psychiatrist, however, and under hypnosis, the names emerged: Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone, Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano and Leonard Schultz.

At 2:30, the phone rang in the Hoffa home.

"Has Tony Giacalone called?" asked Hoffa.

"No," said Josephine.

"When he calls, tell him I'm waiting for him at the Red Fox restaurant on Telegraph."

(Josephine later told me, "I knew it was a message. He was telling me that if something happened, I'd know....")

While Hoffa waited outside the restaurant, two men recognized him and greeted him. They asked, "How's it going?" Hoffa replied, "Never felt better in my life."

At 3:30, Hoffa called Linteau from the restaurant. Linteau later said that Hoffa was angry. "Tony Jack didn't show, goddamn it," he said. "I'm coming out there."

The call was the last anybody heard from Hoffa.

•

Alibis. At the time the meeting at the Machus Red Fox restaurant was supposed to be taking place, Tony Giacalone was getting a haircut and a manicure at the Travelers Tower building in Southfield, a ten-minute drive from the restaurant. The building also houses the Southfield Athletic Club, a fancy exercise club run by Schultz's two sons and a favorite hangout of Giacalone's. Police sources told me that the activity that normally went on at the club was almost a routine: "Tony Jack walks in, sits down and starts doing business. One at a time, men approach him, talk quietly for a few minutes and walk away. It's like something out of The Godfather."

On that afternoon, Provenzano was on conspicuous display at a union hall in New Jersey. As for Schultz, he claims he was working in his garden.

"It's damn funny," Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., said later. "Everybody involved in this damn thing was either getting his nails done or was someplace with 10,000 witnesses when Dad disappeared."

•

Four o'clock came and went. At home, Josephine was starting to worry. If Hoffa were going to be late, he would have called. Supper was generally served at four or shortly thereafter. The hour passed without word and Linteau went to Hoffa's home to wait with Josephine. They waited all night. About seven Thursday morning, Linteau drove to the restaurant, where he found Hoffa's car. Linteau told me he knew there was trouble when he found that the door on the driver's side was unlocked; Hoffa was a stickler about keeping car doors locked. Linteau looked around and left his business card on the steering wheel. A few minutes later, he called Joe Bane, president of Teamster Local 614 in Pontiac, at his Southfield home. The line was busy, so Linteau had the operator interrupt with an emergency call. He told Bane that Hoffa was missing. Bane headed for the Hoffa home after calling a police friend and telling him to check out Hoffa's car. Jimmy, Jr., flew in from Traverse City, where he was vacationing, about the same time.

The vigil, already tense, continued. Jimmy, Jr., went to work and calls were made to any and everyone who would have any idea what was going down. Speculation ran wild. At the Hoffa home, the hope was that it might be "only" a kidnaping, but the fear of a "hit" was in everyone's mind. Hoffa's daughter, Barbara Crancer, was met at the airport about five p.m. Thursday by Bane. A little after six p.m.--27 hours after the disappearance--Jimmy, Jr., notified the police. Hoffa was now officially missing. The FBI was notified but did not officially enter the case. (There was as yet no evidence of a Federal crime.)

Friday and Saturday passed with no word from Hoffa. Several times a day, I spoke with Jimmy, Jr., and his sister. Barbara, as Hoffa once told me, "is a lot like me, while Jimmy, Jr., is more like his mother." Barbara was now displaying her father's traits. She was on the phone constantly and she was making demands. By the time she got through to Edward Levi, U.S. Attorney General and Clarence Kelley, FBI Director, she was shouting.

"You used 2000 agents to put my father in jail," she said. "How about using a couple of agents to find him!"

A short time later, the Attorney General acted. On the basis of an anonymous threat--Kelley announced that extortion demands had been received by the Hoffa family--the FBI was entering the case. As a newscaster put it in a lead story on a Detroit station: "The FBI, which has yet to solve the Patricia Hearst case, has finally entered the Jimmy Hoffa case."

•

Josephine Hoffa is a friend of Jeane Dixon's, the "seer" who became famous for having predicted the assassination of John Kennedy. Josephine told me that she had called Dixon just after the disappearance of her husband. Dixon told her, "Jimmy's alive--and he knows something very important." On Monday, the fifth day after the disappearance, Josephine said she woke up clutching her heart. "I knew then--and only then--that Jimmy was dead." Later that same morning, she received a call from Dixon. "I'm sorry," Josephine said Dixon told her, "but Jimmy's dead. He's in the water somewhere."

I'm not much of a believer in such things, but something that happened to me the next day, Tuesday, made me wonder. I had made a television appearance on Dennis Wholey's AM Detroit show to discuss the Hoffa case, and just after going off the air, I was told there was an urgent call for me from an unidentified woman. Her voice was trembling. She mentioned the name of a man and added, "He knows what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. He has a boat and they were both in the boat and they went to Harsens Island [an island in Lake Saint Clair]." She then hung up. I checked out the lead. The man she mentioned does own a boat, is very rich and has been linked to organized crime. The man has to remain anonymous for now, because the FBI is checking him out and the allegation may turn out to be spurious. But what unsettled me was the date the woman mentioned Hoffa had been in the boat: It was the fifth day after his disappearance. I told no one about the telephone call.

A week later, an elderly Detroit woman claiming to be a psychic appeared on a local television show and claimed she had had visions of Jimmy Hoffa. She said she could "see" him under water, shot twice in the head. He was naked, she said, with a strap around his chest. Hoffa's body could be found, she concluded, floating "near Harsens Island."

Then, in late September, there was new information, which police took more seriously. A Mob informant contacted the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, then gearing up to probe the Hoffa affair under the chairmanship of Henry Jackson. He knew where Hoffa's body was buried, he said. It was not underwater but underground, somewhere in a field in Waterford Township, about 15 miles from the Machus Red Fox restaurant. Reports from the street had it that the Mob was holding one of the men involved in eliminating Hoffa and that the Mafia wanted the body found. That would place the murder under state jurisdiction and thus take Federal pressure off the Mob--a result the Mafia badly wanted, since, as rumors had it, it was not directly involved in the hit. Police investigators, armed with shovels and bulldozers, plowed up the field but found nothing after three days. Officials vowed to continue digging.

•

Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien describes himself as Hoffa's "foster son," having been close to the Hoffa family since childhood, and is active in Detroit union politics. Today, the Hoffa family claims that O'Brien greatly exaggerated his ties to Hoffa. When O'Brien refused to be questioned in the days after Hoffa's disappearance, police officials said he was "missing" and began to leak their suspicions that O'Brien might somehow be involved.

"Missing, shit!" O'Brien told me later. "Who the hell started this bullshit?" He was unapologetic about his friendship with Giacalone and explained that he had had dinner with the Giacalone family on Friday, August first, at a restaurant in Port Huron. On Saturday, he'd gone to the barber in the Southfield Travelers Tower building, where he'd seen Giacalone again. And on Sunday, he'd flown to West Memphis, Arkansas, to be with his new wife. "So where do they get all this 'missing' shit?" he asked. He got madder. "The fucking Feds are leaking this right and left, and if it keeps happening, I'm going to do some talking. Fuck the FBI!"

O'Brien and Hoffa had been close, but according to Jimmy, Jr., and Linteau, they became estranged in November 1974. O'Brien had ambitions to take over the presidency of Detroit's Local 299, headed by Dave Johnson. At the time, Richard Fitzsimmons, son of Hoffa's archfoe Frank Fitzsimmons, was running against Johnson. O'Brien felt he could represent Hoffa's interests against Fitzsimmons better than Johnson could. So he made his pitch: "I tried to convince him that it'd be better if I were there [in the presidency] versus a guy 68 years old [Johnson]. With my youth, and using Jimmy's methods, I could get 299 back the way it was before he left. I really opened up to him, but Jimmy wouldn't give me his support. He's a compromiser and he was only looking for a deal to make everybody happy."

A week later, O'Brien denied he'd "pitched" Jimmy at all. When I reminded him that he'd told me about it and quoted the conversation verbatim, he just shook his head and said, "Hell, no! Hell, no! Hell, no!" It seemed to me that under the pressure, O'Brien was "spinning," trying to have it every which way.

O'Brien nonetheless insisted there had been no falling out between them. Still, there were rumors--and accusations--that he had switched sides, that he'd thrown his support behind Fitzsimmons. O'Brien denied it at every opportunity, but Jimmy, Jr., took me aside and said, "Then why did Chuckie go visit Fitzsimmons in Washington on August fourth--exactly five days after Dad disappeared?"

Jimmy, Jr., made no bones about his suspicions regarding O'Brien's involvement. The confrontation between the two men came early Friday morning, August first. O'Brien gave me his version: "Jimmy called and asked me to come out to the house. When I arrived, I could see he was frazzled. I said, 'Jimmy, you look exhausted. Why don't you go to bed and we'll talk in the morning?' Jimmy said no, he wanted to talk. And he immediately launched into me as if he was some kind of prosecutor. I told him to calm down, but he only got madder. 'You know more than you're talking about! I think you're involved!' I looked at Jimmy and said, 'I've had the guts taken out of me in my lifetime, but you just cut 'em out.' "

During that week, O'Brien came under increasing fire. He admitted to police that he was in the area of the Red Fox restaurant the day Hoffa disappeared. He admitted borrowing a car belonging to Tony Giacalone's son. When the FBI examined the car, bloodstains were found on one of the seats. "I was delivering a fish, a 40-pound salmon, to Bobby Holmes's house," O'Brien explained. "The fuckin' blood was from the fish." FBI analysis later concluded that the blood was "not of human origin."

O'Brien continued to profess complete innocence. "It's tearing me up," he said. "Little Jimmy and Barbara are tearing my guts out demanding I take a lie-detector test! What the hell is wrong with them?"

O'Brien did not take a polygraph test. When subpoenaed before the grand jury convened to investigate Hoffa's disappearance, he took the Fifth Amendment.

•

Provenzano finally met with reporters on the front lawn of his Hallandale, Florida, home. "You're embarrassing me in front of everyone in the neighborhood," he said, wearing a white swimming suit. "You guys make me look like a mobster. I'm not. I'm just a truck driver."

Tony Pro denied he was in Detroit the day before Hoffa disappeared, as some reports had it, and claimed he hadn't been in Detroit for years. As to Jimmy's disappearance, just days before: "Jimmy was--or is--my friend." A slip of the tongue, perhaps, but reporters leaped on it. "You can put any verb you want!" Tony Pro barked, and he stalked into the house.

•

Tuesday evening, August fifth, in a pouring rainstorm, Jimmy, Jr., and Barbara walked to the white-metal picket fence that surrounds the Hoffa compound. "We are offering a $200,000 reward," Jimmy told waiting reporters, "for information about my father." There had been rumors from the underworld that a contract had been put out on Hoffa and that the price was $100,000. A reporter turned to a colleague and said, "Boy, I'll bet the hit man's pissed off. A hundred grand for the job--but he could have made two hundred by just reporting where Hoffa's body is." No one laughed.

I had been told by a source in Washington that the FBI was working on a theory that Joseph Zerilli, the reputed godfather of the Detroit Mafia, had been asked to go to the commission and get a contract. Zerilli allegedly is one of a dozen Mafia commissioners in the country. I mentioned this to Bane while we talked after the news conference and he looked at me and said, "If that's true, you can bet one thing--that ain't no three--two vote." A little later on, Bane said, "You know, Jerry, I don't think we'll ever see the little guy again."

Bane and I were both physically and mentally exhausted. It started raining harder, so we went to a nearby bar. Bane was clearly concerned about having gone to the Hoffa home. He looked at me and quietly said, "Jerry, they can't think bad of me for going to the aid of an old friend's family in time of need, can they?" I knew Bane was talking about rival Teamsters.

"No," I said, "I wouldn't think so, Joe."

•

A couple of days later and still no news--just more theories. Jimmy, Jr., and I were talking. "The old man was a fool," he said. "I don't mean a fool disrespectfully, I mean a fool because he'd take on anybody." He was silent for a moment, then added, "I even gave him my Smitty because he was concerned."

I knew it was unlikely that Hoffa had had the Smith & Wesson with him on that Wednesday, because he hadn't carried a gun for years. But as Jimmy, Jr., said, Hoffa had to know whoever he met that day. "If someone tried to take him in that parking lot," he said, "Dad would have jumped him then and there. He had to know and he had to trust whoever he got into the car with."

It was during this period, a week or so after the disappearance, that one theory began to gain currency on the street: Tony Giacalone, allegedly Detroit's most feared enforcer, had been given the contract. Two weeks before Hoffa disappeared, he was visited at his home by Giacalone and his brother, "Billy Jack." They proposed a meeting that would include Provenzano, on the pretext of burying the hatchet between Hoffa and Provenzano after a longstanding disagreement. I was told by a close friend of Hoffa's that twice in recent weeks a meeting had been scheduled--but Tony Jack had begged off.

With Giacalone's name out in the open, with O'Brien's movements under question, I and the other reporters covering the case began to dig into the motives of the supposed hit. In the months preceding Hoffa's disappearance, the possibility that Hoffa might win his court fight to end the ban against participating in union activity was becoming increasingly real. The court of appeals was going to rule in Hoffa's favor, went one argument. Another theory involved a Presidential pardon. If Nixon could be pardoned, why not Hoffa? Or, more to the point, Hoffa's old mentor, Dave Beck, had been pardoned earlier in the year by President Ford. Many observers felt that might be a test balloon: If there were no public outcry, it would be a clear signal that Hoffa could safely be pardoned, too. There was no outcry. Finally, Hoffa had expressed to me a feeling that Attorney General Levi was about to recommend a Presidential pardon. (Levi, however, later denied this publicly.)

•

Subpoenas for the grand jury investigating Hoffa's disappearance began to be issued on Monday, August 25. I had asked a source in the FBI whom they expected to call to the stand. "It's simple," he told me. "We're going to paper the country with subpoenas."

The parade to the fourth floor of the Federal Building in Detroit began the day after Labor Day. The first witnesses to testify were the employees of Linteau's limousine service who had recalled under hypnosis the names of the men Hoffa said he was meeting. The next day, September third, it was Chuckie O'Brien's turn. He appeared with his attorney, James Burdick, and was decked out in an open-collared shirt and sports jacket. But despite his natty attire, he clearly showed fear--and, in my opinion, it was not the grand jury he was afraid of. He spent exactly six minutes inside the grand-jury room. Outside, O'Brien withheld comment and Burdick delivered an attack on the Federal Government and on the grand-jury system. Walking down the street, jostled by a crowd of reporters and cameramen, O'Brien said virtually nothing. I was still with him when he arrived at a nearby garage. I quietly asked, "Chuckie, did you take the Fifth?" O'Brien stared at me a moment and just as quietly said, "Yes. Numerous times." O'Brien got into Burdick's car and sped away for the airport, where he boarded a flight to Florida.

On Thursday, Leonard Schultz was called as a witness. Schultz was expected to take the Fifth but pulled a surprise. He talked for more than two hours. Several times, he came out of the jury room and conferred with his attorney.

The scene in the hall was like a carnival. Joe Bane, Jr., had brought a lawn chair and got into a hassle with a U.S. marshal who demanded he remove the chair. After a loud argument, he did so. Linteau was tired of waiting, so he started pushing a mop down the corridor. Crowds of witnesses, marshals, attorneys and reporters milled about. Before testifying, Schultz got into a loud argument with a television reporter, calling him a whore. The reporter yelled back at him and the argument continued for about 30 minutes. And during all the commotion, a few feet behind the closed doors, the grand jury probed.

Joe Bane appeared to testify and was in and out after three minutes: He, too, took the Fifth. "You know, Jerry," he said to me, "those cocksuckers are after me. I've been told I'm going to be indicted on another union matter. You know I wanted to talk, to do anything to help Jimmy, but you can't trust the lousy motherfuckers. Sure as hell they'd throw me a curve." Joe Bane, Jr., spent about the same amount of time before the grand jury and also admitted to taking the Fifth. Linteau spent several hours telling what he knew.

The morning of Monday, September eighth, was unseasonably cool. Tony Jack Giacalone, dressed in a pearl-gray Western-cut suit, fought his way through the mob of reporters gathered in front of the Federal Building. He spoke not a word and walked directly to the elevators leading to the grand-jury floor. "My God," said a network artist who had sketched hundreds of courtroom faces, "he really is a mean-looking man."

There was a long wait, but at 12:15 Giacalone finally entered the grand-jury room. He was out three minutes later. The reporters swarmed around him again, but he refused to reply, giving them only an icy stare. On the elevator going down, one reporter made himself heard: "Can you just give us a correct age, Mr. Giacalone?" Not a muscle in his face moved. The reporter persisted: "We'll just say you're under 40." For the first time, Giacalone cracked a smile. The journalists followed him out onto the street. TV reporter Robert Bennett got into a revolving door behind Giacalone in a building down the street. Tony Jack looked back and, as he stepped out onto the sidewalk, jammed the door backward into the reporter's face. And with that gesture--as of this writing--the case of Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance was effectively slammed shut.

•

Did organized crime order James Riddle Hoffa executed? Police, the FBI and reporters close to the case think so. They also think Hoffa was murdered because of his public struggle to regain the presidency of the International Teamsters Union. As to the Mob figures involved, the Hoffa family, at least, thinks it knows who they are. On September ninth, when Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., said publicly that he thought his father had been assassinated, he was pressed for details. "The names have been publicized," he replied.

Hoffa's son also still considers Chuckie O'Brien a "prime suspect," an accusation O'Brien says he resents bitterly. "I loved the ground that man walked on," O'Brien told me. "I'd go myself first." And what of the Teamsters under Frank Fitzsimmons? If only because of the Mob ties that go back 20 years, it seems reasonable to assume there is some connection. If the Mob, with its lucrative trade in Teamsters business, feared that Hoffa would replace the easygoing Fitzsimmons, it is also reasonable to assume it would make a choice of one over the other. Fitzsimmons continues to deny any knowledge of the affair and will admit to no connection whatever with the Mob. (In fact, when I suggested as much to him over the telephone one day this past summer, he practically spat at me over the wire.) In any case, the driver of a car seen in Pennsylvania may be asking the most tantalizing question of all. The car had a bumper sticker on it. It read, Fitz--Where's Jimmy?