Hoffa Search: 'Looks Bad Right Now'

The police walking slowly through the cornfield were paying little attention to the rustling crop that surrounded them. Their heads were down, their eyes focused sharply on the tilled earth of the field 100 miles southwest of Detroit. Gradually, as they worked their way up and down the rows, a thick layer of dust settled on their polished black boots. For six long, hot hours, the men doggedly checked out the report they had received by phone. Finally, they gave up and went away, convinced that wherever he was, Jimmy Hoffa--the man of the streets and highways--did not lie buried beneath the alien corn.

As the week wore on, both the police and the Hoffa family were ready to try almost anything to find the former Teamster boss who had so suddenly vanished on July 30. At week's end an FBI laboratory technician was analyzing some stains found in a car belonging to the family of reported Mafia Leader Anthony ("Tony Jack") Giacalone; there was some fear that the spots might be Hoffa's blood. Other efforts included the hypnotizing of people who had talked to Hoffa shortly before he disappeared, in the hope of coaxing some leads from their memories of the recent conversations. Within Hoffa's family, which posted a $200,000 reward for his return, a bitter feud developed as one member sharply accused another of knowing more about the affair than he was saying.

Lucrative Deals. To make matters worse, anonymous phone calls threatened Hoffa's relatives. The general tone, said one federal source, was "You saw what happened to him--you're next." Interpreted very broadly, the calls constituted acts of extortion, a federal crime, and that was enough to allow the FBI to plunge into the case. With hundreds of agents joining squads of state and local policemen already working on the mystery, the hunt for clues turned up a new rogues' gallery of underworld figures who were said to have had an interest in getting Hoffa out of the way. Conducting its own manhunt, the Hoffa family went so far as to ask Mickey Cohen, the former Los Angeles mobster, to make some inquiries among his old contacts. "I hope to God it's different," Cohen said, "but it looks bad right now."

It does. Hoffa may have been kidnaped or have simply disappeared for dark reasons of his own, but TIME has learned that federal authorities believe the cocky, stubby union leader has been murdered. The suspected reason: to prevent him from disrupting the lucrative deals between the Mafia and the Teamsters that had developed since 1967, when Hoffa was imprisoned for jury tampering, fraud and conspiracy. Under the benign leadership of Frank Fitzsimmons, Hoffa's hand-picked successor as president, powerful local Teamster chiefs allowed the Mob to wheel and deal with the union's $1.3 billion pension fund. Gangsters from Chicago and Cleveland arranged loans from the fund for clients who were less than impeccable credit risks, then harvested illegal kickbacks. Nor did the Teamsters protest when mobsters took over control of a number of Las Vegas casino-hotels built with multimillion-dollar loans from the union's gigantic pension fund.

Federal officials theorize that the Mafia grew nervous as Hoffa, released from jail in 1971, tried to regain the Teamster leadership from Fitzsimmons, who by then did not want to give up the job. Not that Hoffa had been above working with the Mafia when he was in power, but he was no man to push around. "The Mafia clans had smooth sailing with Fitzsimmons," explains one Justice Department official. "They didn't want Hoffa rocking the boat."

First Steps. About six months ago, federal officials have learned, the Mob took the first steps to protect its Teamster operations from Hoffa. The alleged organizers of the scheme were Giacalone, 56, reportedly the Mafia's overseer of rackets in Detroit, and Anthony ("Tony Pro") Provenzano, 58, the unofficial boss of the Teamsters in New Jersey and a man of national influence in the union. Both men have known Hoffa for years, Giacalone as a friend and Provenzano as a rival.

Provenzano, federal sources say, has long been closely associated with the Mafia. The son of Sicilian immigrants, he was born on New York's Lower East Side. At 15 he was a trucker's helper and at 18 he was driving. Tough and shrewd, he rose rapidly to become president of the New Jersey Teamsters Joint Council 73, a job that gave him control of the organization's affairs in the state. One of his more harmless interests was to keep racing pigeons in a coop on the roof of Local 560 in Hoboken. During his reign as council president, the state union was racked by violence, and two of Provenzano's enemies disappeared just as abruptly as Hoffa: John Serratelli, a Teamster business manager who got into a business squabble with Tony Pro, and Mike Ardis, a Teamster organizer who challenged Provenzano's authority. Serratelli disappeared in 1959 and Ardis in 1971; neither has ever been found.

In the mid-'60s, International Vice President Provenzano was high in the power structure of the Teamsters. Provenzano made much of his supposed friendship with Hoffa. At a testimonial banquet for the Teamster chief in 1965, Tony Pro rose to declare: "May he and his family live as long as they want, and never want as long as they live."

Big Egos. Inevitably, despite those protestations of affection, Provenzano clashed with Hoffa. "Each of them had an ego as big as a six-axle truck," says one federal agent. "For a time, they tolerated each other. But when Hoffa began to slip from power during the long trials that led up to his jailing, Tony Pro reviled him."

In 1966 Provenzano was sent to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa., for extorting $17,100 from a trucking firm in Rensselaer, N.Y. While in prison and since, Provenzano continued ruling the New Jersey council through his brother Salvatore ("Sammy") Provenzano, who took over his post as president. In 1967 Tony Pro was joined in Lewisburg by Hoffa, and their feud worsened. Provenzano was angry because Hoffa refused to reinstate his Teamsters pension, which he had lost by being jailed. (Hoffa, however, managed to get himself a $1.7 million pension settlement from the union.)

Released from prison in 1970, Provenzano became a firm ally of Frank Fitzsimmons in his plan to keep the union presidency. Fitzsimmons was reportedly planning to set up Tony Pro as the boss of the Teamsters Joint Council in New York, a job that would make the two Provenzano brothers the czars of all the Teamsters in the East. Daniel Sullivan, a former Teamster official and reformer, remembers ominously that on May 5, 1974, Hoffa told him: "Tony Pro threatened to pull my guts out or kidnap my grandchildren if I continued to attempt to return to the presidency of the Teamsters."

When Hoffa's sentence was commuted in 1971 by President Richard Nixon, the terms of his release from prison prohibited him from taking part in Teamster affairs until 1980. But Hoffa was fighting that ban in court, while month by month he was gaining more influence in the union. Earlier this summer, Provenzano and Giacalone tried to lure him to "sitdowns" to discuss an armistice in his war against Fitzsimmons. Although Hoffa rejected the initial feelers from Giacalone, he agreed early in July to consider getting together with Provenzano.

Hoffa's office records, surrendered to the FBI by his family, show that he accepted a specific Giacalone-Provenzano proposition in late July. On July 30, the day he vanished, his office calendar bears the notation "TG--2 p.m.--Red Fox." Apparently expecting to meet Tony Giacalone, Hoffa went to the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township outside Detroit--and then disappeared. The last word from him was a phone call to his wife Josephine at 2:30. "I wonder where the hell Tony is," Hoffa said. "I'm waiting for him."

There is an additional curious piece of evidence that indicates Hoffa thought he was going to meet Giacalone and Provenzano. Late that morning, Hoffa stopped off at an airport bus company owned by a friend and chatted with four of the employees. Afterward, the four were unable to recall whom Hoffa had said he was going to meet. But when the Hoffa family arranged for a psychiatrist to put them under hypnosis, they remembered the names of Giacalone and Provenzano.

On the afternoon that Hoffa vanished, both Giacalone and Provenzano were on prominent display elsewhere. Tony Jack made an appearance in the steam rooms of the Southfield Athletic Club near Detroit, and Tony Pro hobnobbed with Teamsters at union locals in Hoboken.

Giacalone promptly denied any plans to meet with Hoffa, and Provenzano put on an extraordinary performance to proclaim his innocence. A few days later, clad in white bathing trunks, he smilingly welcomed reporters and television cameramen to his expensive home just north of Miami. "I don't know where Jimmy went," he insisted. "I'm as shocked as anyone by his disappearance, and if I can do anything to help find Jimmy, I will."

Provenzano later shooed the newsmen away. "You're embarrassing me in front of everyone in the neighborhood. You guys out on the lawn make me look like a mobster. I'm not. I'm just a truck driver." Provenzano consented, however, to give a photographer a guided tour of his house. A Doberman pinscher snarled behind a door ("He could take your arm off," advised Tony Pro), but the rest of the house was peaceful. There was a big swimming pool out in back, a pool table in one room, and a handcarved teak bust that the host volunteered was worth $250,000. In the living room hung an original oil portrait of Provenzano's mother, which he said he had commissioned "to honor her." Noting that the photographer was sweating as he left, Tony Pro remarked with a laugh: "Hey, you think you weren't gonna get out of here alive or something?"

Strange Twist. That same day the Hoffa story took another strange twist with the emergence of Charles ("Chuckie") O'Brien, 41, Hoffa's foster son, who had disappeared the day after the former union leader dropped out of sight. Authorities were told that O'Brien, a $45,000-a-year Teamster organizer, had been seen in the vicinity of the Red Fox on the day Hoffa vanished. O'Brien stoutly insisted that he had not been in the area. But he readily admitted that he was there the following morning by what he claimed was a bizarre coincidence. He said he was often picked up at the site by a Teamster official and driven to work--a claim that checked out.

As the investigation went on, O'Brien appeared to be a prime suspect despite the fact that he was known in the past to have been fiercely loyal to Hoffa, who had taken him into his family when he was three. The boy's father had just died--O'Brien claims he was killed on a picket line--and the Hoffas were very friendly with the mother, who was working as a union organizer. (She later remarried and started a new life.) Hoffa never formally adopted O'Brien, although he once took out the necessary papers to do so, but the chubby Teamster official had always regarded Hoffa as his father--"the only father I've ever had."

Go-Go Girl. Still, authorities learned that O'Brien had had his differences with Hoffa within the past year. O'Brien admits quarreling with Hoffa in November when he wanted to run against David E. Johnson, a Hoffa stalwart, for the presidency of Detroit's powerful Local 299. Last month O'Brien married a go-go girl, a match that did not receive the full blessing of Hoffa, who has his puritanical side. Law officials were also interested in learning much more about reports that O'Brien was heavily in debt--perhaps by as much as $100,000--after investing in a movie that bombed.

It also turned out that Hoffa's family considers O'Brien to be a turncoat, claiming that he made a separate peace with Fitzsimmons. The Teamster president gave O'Brien a highly paid job as an organizer for the southern conference of the union. Authorities noted that O'Brien was very close to Giacalone, whom he calls "Uncle Tony." In the past, O'Brien had often driven Hoffa to meet Giacalone, or vice versa.

Questioned by FBI agents, O'Brien denied knowing what had happened to Hoffa, a claim that aroused the bitter skepticism of none other than his foster brother, James P. Hoffa. The two had never got along, their differences beginning with boyhood rivalries for Hoffa's affections. When O'Brien reappeared, young Hoffa insisted that he undergo a lie-detector exam, saying: "I demand, I demand, I demand that you take the test." But O'Brien's lawyer urged him not to undergo testing because the process was too "inaccurate."

At week's end the FBI and other law-enforcement officers were still sifting through the testimony of Chuckie O'Brien and the other fragmentary bits of evidence. They chased down and then dispelled rumors that Hoffa had withdrawn $1.2 million of his pension settlement just before his disappearance. Hoffa's family kept saying that he must still be alive, but the possibility that he had just vanished on his own or been abducted seemed increasingly remote with every passing day. Local 299 President Johnson discounted the kidnaping possibility. Said he: "I don't think that Jimmy Hoffa can be held in a house against his will."

Investigators were considering various ways of gaining access to a sprawling private hunting preserve northwest of Ann Arbor that is owned by Louis ("Big Louie") Ruggirello, a prosperous entrepreneur who has been imprisoned for cheating on his income taxes. Ruggirello often invites his friends in to hunt for deer and foxes and other game. The lawmen want to roam the grounds to hunt for the body of Jimmy Hoffa.

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