New clue found in Jimmy Hoffa disappearance

DNA

September 07, 2001

DNA tests have turned up a new clue in the disappearance of the former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, who was last seen in 1975 and is believed to have been the victim of a mob hit, the FBI said Friday.

The Detroit News reported that FBI scientists had used new DNA technology to match a hair from Hoffa with one found in a car driven by a one-time friend on the day the labor leader was last seen. An FBI official in Washington told CNN that the report was accurate.

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The FBI matched DNA from Hoffa's hair -- taken from a brush -- with a strand of hair found in a 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham driven by longtime friend Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien on July 30, 1975.

James P. Hoffa, who followed in his father's footsteps to become Teamsters president, said his family welcomed the development while urging federal officials to quickly bring the case to trial.

"The family seeks closure on this important issue," said the younger Hoffa, now running for re-election. "We should bring to justice those people who were responsible for my father's disappearance."

John E. Bell, special agent in charge of the Detroit FBI bureau, said O'Brien, who has denied any role in Hoffa's disappearance and has long maintained Hoffa was never in the car, has been reinterviewed. Bell was quoted as saying that DNA tests were done on all of the evidence, but wouldn't comment on the results.

Bell said federal agents have met regularly in the past 11 months to discuss the case. Thomas V. Fuentes, the chief of the FBI's organized crime section in Washington, was quoted saying that "prosecutorial decisions might be made within the next 24 to 30 months."

Federal officials said in a federal court affidavit filed in June that they might decide whether to prosecute someone in connection with the case by December 2003.

The new evidence is significant because it apparently puts Hoffa in a car that police had suspected -- but couldn't prove -- was used in Hoffa's disappearance.

Hoffa was last seen at Machus Red Fox restaurant in suburban Detroit. He was there ostensibly to meet with reputed Detroit Mafia street enforcer Anthony Giacalone, who died earlier this year of kidney failure at age 82, and Anthony Provenzano, chief of a Teamsters local in New Jersey who died several years ago after being convicted in another murder case.

Hoffa believed Giacalone had set up the meeting to help settle a feud between Hoffa and Provenzano.

Neither man showed up for the meeting, and both said a meeting had not been scheduled. The FBI said at the time that the disappearance could have been linked to Hoffa's efforts to regain power in the Teamsters and its effect on the mob's control of the union's pension funds.

O'Brien, who now lives in Memphis, Tennessee, was driving a car that day that he said he borrowed from Giacalone's son, Joe.

The elder Hoffa was 62 at the time of his disappearance and had been released early from a prison by President Richard Nixon on condition that he not seek high union office. He had served time for mail fraud at the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, penitentiary where Provenzano also had been an inmate.

The Hoffa family has long believed O'Brien, who had a falling-out with Hoffa in later years that was virtually unseen on the outside, was somehow involved in the elder Hoffa's disappearance.

"I'm disgusted with him, and I have no intention of talking to him," James P. Hoffa said Friday.

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