Family Of Hoffa Mourns 20 Years After He Vanished Fate Of Ex-Teamster Chief Remains A Historic Mystery

What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?

The question that has plagued Hoffa’s family, the FBI and Teamsters and became a staple of American labor lore remains without answers.

In their place, a memorial service was held Sunday at Most Holy Trinity Church, 20 years to the day after James R. Hoffa vanished without a trace.

“There’s an emptiness that we have and we’re never going to resolve it,” his son, James P. Hoffa, said before the service.

The 54-year-old labor lawyer is campaigning for the position his father once held at the head of the mighty Teamsters union.

“This is a closure today. We’ve lost a loved one, but we’ve got to go on. Today is a healing day,” Hoffa said.

With no funeral and no grave, it was the family’s first chance for formal grief. About 300 friends, Teamsters and others joined them to mourn and pay tribute to one of the labor movement’s toughest, most powerful men.

“Jimmy Hoffa never died. Where working men are out on strike, Jimmy Hoffa is at their side,” his son, echoing the labor ballad “Joe Hill,” told the gathering.

Hoffa, who had only a seventh-grade education, launched his rise to power from Detroit Teamsters Local 299, which he had transformed from a tiny, cash-starved local into a 15,000-member behemoth.

As Teamster president, he negotiated in 1964 the first industry-wide contract, the National Master Freight Agreement.

He “literally touched millions and millions of workers in this country … who know a quality of life that was not possible before Jimmy Hoffa,” said Ed Scribner, Metropolitan Detroit AFL-CIO president.

Barbara Hoffa Crancer, the labor leader’s other child and a circuit judge in St. Louis, said the service was important, but she was not giving up her court battle to see the government file on her father’s disappearance.

She flipped through an album of photographs from her father’s life in a touching remembrance. “Looking at these pictures evokes in me a great sadness and pride,” she said.

On July 30, 1975, 62-year-old James R. Hoffa got into a maroon Mercury in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in suburban Bloomfield Township. He was never seen again.

He was declared legally dead in 1982, two years after the death of his wife, Josephine.

Though the FBI says it knows who was responsible for what it terms Hoffa’s murder, no one has ever been charged.

Hoffa served four years in prison for jury tampering and defrauding a Teamsters pension fund before President Nixon commuted his sentence in 1971 and barred him from union activity until 1980.

In 1975, Hoffa was fighting to overturn that ban and regain the presidency of the international Teamsters.

The FBI theory holds that Teamsters hoping to prevent that used their connections to organized crime to have him killed and his body concealed somewhere.

Some say he’s buried in an oil drum off the Florida coast, others that he was dismembered and crushed in an auto cruncher in Detroit. Another rumor is that he was tossed into a garbage incinerator, or entombed in concrete at New Jersey’s Meadowlands stadium.

Wherever he’s hidden, he’s hidden well.