My 48-year investigation of the Jimmy Hoffa murder case, Part 42 of 44
“It’s going to be a great day tomorrow”
Federal officials ordered the release of Don Wells from a Kentucky prison shortly after the Wixom dig concluded—even though no one outside the law-enforcement community knew exactly what Wells had claimed to cause such an uproar. To this day, the search warrant which authorized the excavation at the Wixom farm has remained sealed.
That was what I wanted to discuss when I visited Wells and his wife, Monica, at their home on August 14, 2009. It was the first time I had seen him since I interviewed him in 1976.
Meantime, Rolland McMaster had died of natural causes at 93 years old on October 25, 2007, at his horse farm on Clyde Road in Michigan’s Hartland Township.[1] Wells had had a falling out with him years earlier—after Wells learned that McMaster was thinking about having him killed.
My visit to Wells came during the same trip that I described in the Prologue to this book in which a con man claimed to know the site of Hoffa’s final resting place—on a farm once operated by McMaster but was now owned by his brother-in-law, Stanton Barr.
Getting down to business after we enjoyed Monica’s breakfast, I asked about the now-famous moment—as told by his former attorney—in which Wells was looking out of a window with McMaster on the night of Hoffa’s disappearance. Watching what appeared to be a rolled-up carpet being lowered into a hole—which had just been dug by a nearby backhoe—McMaster supposedly said to Wells, “That was Jimmy going down.”
Wells’s response? . . . That never happened.
What he did witness—and the information about which he took and passed an FBI polygraph test—had happened the night before.
On Tuesday evening, July 29, between 8:30 and 9:00, Wells was at Carl’s Chop House in downtown Detroit with McMaster and Stanton Barr, the head of the steel division of Gateway Transportation Company.[2]
Wells explained, “We usually met there to talk. We were all in business together. We owned property, along with trucking and trailer companies.
“Suddenly, Tony Provenzano comes up and starts banging on the table, ‘It’s going to be a great day tomorrow! A great day tomorrow! Right, Mac?’ And he slapped Mac on the back. Mac says, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’
“Then, Mac and Tony Pro walked back towards the bar.
“And I asked Stan, ‘What the hell is going on? What does he mean, it‘s going be a great day tomorrow?’
“And Stan said, ‘Well, Provenzano and Hoffa are going to make up. They’re going to bury the hatchet tomorrow.’” Wells alleged that Barr had told him that Tony Giacalone and Chuck O’Brien were making the arrangements.
Wells continued, “A few minutes later, Mac and Provenzano came back. And Provenzano stood between Mac and Stan, and he said, ‘I’ve got my brother back there.’”
Wells looked at Provenzano’s table and saw Tony Giacalone who was sitting with two people he did not recognize. Wells also alleged that O’Brien was at the table.
Wells continued, “Before Provenzano returned to his group, he said to Mac and Stan, ‘Do you guys know where you’re going to be tomorrow?”
“Mac said, ‘Yeah, we’re all straight on that.’”
After Provenzano left the table, Wells said to Barr, “Stan, we’re supposed to have a meeting with the credit company tomorrow.”
Barr, who appeared completely oblivious to whatever was going on between McMaster and Provenzano, replied, “We’re going to have to forget about that. I have to go to Chicago tomorrow with Mac.”
Wells did not see McMaster again for a day and a half. Meantime, McMaster and Barr had changed their plans on July 30. In lieu of flying to Chicago, they drove to Gary, Indiana, which is about a four-hour drive. At the moment that Hoffa disappeared, McMaster and Barr were clearly out of town—although they returned to the Detroit area that night, according to both of their statements to the FBI.
While in prison in 2006, Wells also told the FBI about a pre-dug hole at McMaster’s Wixom farm in Milford Township, which was also called “Idle Acres”—near the end of a long dirt path, which ran north off Pontiac Trail, past the main farm house, and up against the tree line at the back of the farm.
According to Wells, McMaster’s had dug that hole several weeks before Hoffa vanished.
Wells drew a diagram for an FBI special agent, indicating that the hole, which could have been fifteen-feet deep, was on the side of the path and beyond a set of railroad tracks that ran east and west through McMaster’s farm.
What made this story even more significant was that Wells’s wife, Monica, had been alone at the farm while McMaster and Barr were out of town on business during the afternoon that Hoffa disappeared.
Monica, standing in the kitchen and looking out of a window towards McMaster’s driveway, told me, “During the mid-afternoon, I saw three dark-colored cars coming from the east on Pontiac Trail at a high rate of speed. They turned right onto the path next to the house and drove straight back to the area where a hole had been dug. I once asked Mac what the hole was for. He said that he was going to build a barn there. But he never did.”
Monica confirmed that “the hole was to the right of the path, just across some railroad tracks that ran across the back of the property.”
Monica said that the cars that sped onto the property “surprised me. I was at the kitchen sink, and they came by very fast. Usually when people came there, they would make an appointment with Mac. It was very strange.”
After twenty or thirty minutes, the three cars sped off the property the same way they had entered.
The farm was located exactly 15.36 miles from the Red Fox restaurant where Hoffa was last seen.
Monica added that McMaster did not come back to the farm that night, noting that he had gone to his other home on Wildbrook Drive in Southfield—which was a mere five-minute drive or just 2.74 miles from the Red Fox.
This was the house on the car tour that one of my FBI sources had arranged for me on October 31, 1975. Clearly, even then, there was a suspicion that this was the private residence where Hoffa had been taken and killed. (Stan Barr later bought this property on Wildbrook.)
During the evening of Hoffa’s murder, Monica told her husband about the speeding cars when he came home. Wells simply thought that they were looking at some structures near the tree line at the back of the farm.
The early rumors about Hoffa’s disappearance didn’t start to break until the following day.
Monica continued, “The next time I saw McMaster, I said, ‘Mac, something strange happened. Three cars went up the road very fast, and they went straight back.
“He just said that the people in the cars were looking at horses. . . . But there were no horses where the cars went. The horses were in the barn to the left of the house.”
During their conversation, Monica asked, “Mac, did you know that Mr. Hoffa is missing?”
She said that McMaster became very quiet and then replied, “’Young-un’—which is what he called me—‘our brother, Jimmy, has met his demise.’”
In the midst of our interview, Monica showed me an exhibit she had put together on a large poster board for my visit, displaying numerous photographs of McMaster’s farm as it appeared during the mid-1970s. She pointed out where she was standing in the farmhouse when the three cars came roaring by on the day of Hoffa’s disappearance. Also, she had a picture of the path they traveled, which led to the tree line.
Don Wells also drew a diagram for me of the property—and where the hole had been pre-dug. He agreed with his wife that it was north of the railroad tracks and just east of the road.
At that point of our interview, I suggested that we drive to their old farm and try to reconstruct what they had seen. Both of them were concerned about the new owner of the property who was angered by the commotion that resulted from the 2006 excavation.
Telling them not to worry, I grabbed the photo display that Monica had prepared, and we went outside to Wells’s car.
When we arrived at what was once the front of McMaster’s Wixom farm on Pontiac Trail, we saw that the main house was long gone. Grass and dirt now covered most of the path that the three fast cars had traveled on the afternoon of Hoffa’s disappearance. Everything on the farm had been subdivided and reconfigured.
The landmark railroad tracks were on the other side of a tall fence—which was the property of the new owner of the northern portion of what was once McMaster’s farm—the area that had been searched by the FBI in 2006.
At my request, Wells then drove us around the farm to the front entrance of that property, which was adorned with “No Trespassing” and “No Admittance” signs. Ignoring all of these warnings, I told Wells to drive down the winding driveway to the main house.
Just outside the garage, we saw a man in gray overalls, working on the engine of a pickup truck.
I grabbed the picture exhibit Monica had prepared and walked up to the mechanic, leaving Don and Monica in the car behind me. After I introduced myself, I asked the man where I could find the owner.
To my surprise, he said that he was the owner. His name was Ron Lusk.
At first, Lusk appeared a little annoyed that three uninvited strangers had just driven onto his property. But when I showed him Monica’s exhibit, indicating how his farm had looked during the 1970s, he could not have been more accommodating.
I motioned to Don and Monica to join us. I introduced them to Lusk, saying that they had once lived on his property. Lusk immediately started asking them questions about the photographs that Monica had collected.
Don and Monica began drawing his attention to the contrasts between what had been and what was now on the property. And Lusk expressed fascination to learn how his farm was once configured.
I asked Lusk if we could see the site where the FBI had torn down and then rebuilt the barn in its effort to look for Jimmy Hoffa.
“Sure,” Lusk replied, telling us to drive to another parking area and adding, “The government really did build us a nice new barn. . . . It was like a carnival around here.”
Returning to the car with his wife and me, Wells drove down the narrow road alongside the new red barn which loomed large on the right. We pulled into the parking lot at the end of this structure, which was perpendicular to two older red barns where farmhands were attending to several horses.
As we stepped out of the car, we saw a tall man in a cowboy hat and a red shirt. I went up to him, introduced the three of us, and asked, “Where are the railroad tracks that ran along this property?”
The man named Doug, who turned out to be the farm’s manager, pointed to the area near a tall fence—the same fence that we had earlier seen from the other side.
As I walked towards the fence, I stepped onto a dirt road. I looked back at Don and Monica, asking, “Is this the path that started on Pontiac Trail, the one on which Monica saw the three fast cars that day?”
Don and Monica came over to where I was standing and looked around the area. Then, for a further perspective, we walked towards the tall fence.
They confirmed that we were on the dirt road that once ran north and south off Pontiac Trail, alongside McMaster’s farmhouse.
About ten yards from our side of the fence was another long path that stretched east and west and was littered with discarded railroad ties.
“Jesus, Don,” I said, now standing where the two paths intersected. “Is this where the railroad tracks were?”
Both Don and Monica came over, along with Doug—and now Ron Lusk who had also joined us.
All four of them agreed that we were standing at the location of the now abandoned railroad tracks, as well as the road that had once run from Pontiac Trail to the back of the farm near the tree line.
Pulling Don and Monica off to the side, I asked privately, “Okay now, where was that pre-dug hole?”
Both Don and Monica agreed that it was in a field north of the railroad tracks and east of the road.
When we walked just a few yards to that location, it was nothing more than a fenced-in pasture, occupied at that moment by two horses, which appeared as interested in us as we were in the land they were occupying.
However, the site of the 2006 FBI dig was north of the railroad tracks and about twenty to thirty yards west of the road—the site of the new red barn built by the FBI.
I am not even going to try to hazard a guess as to why the FBI chose to dig west of the road instead of east—and, of course, the FBI is not talking.[3] Actually, Wells never made any claim about this hole—at least to me—beyond the fact that it once existed.
Regardless, the big untold story here is that Don Wells—who passed an FBI polygraph test—witnessed Rolland McMaster and Tony Provenzano together at a restaurant in Detroit on July 29, 1975, the night before Hoffa disappeared. Wells also heard a portion of their conversation which was clearly about Provenzano’s scheduled 2:00 P.M. sitdown with Hoffa on July 30, as well as the need for McMaster and his brother-in-law, Stanton Barr, who headed the steel division of Gateway Transportation, to have established alibis for that same afternoon when Hoffa was last seen.
After my interview with Wells and returning to the East Coast, I visited my best underworld-connected source who was in a position to know the specific details about the Hoffa murder—but discloses information with the same frequency as a kosher butcher sells pork chops. To my surprise, in response to my latest appeal, he confirmed Wells’s contention that Tony Provenzano was in Detroit the night before Hoffa vanished—an allegation that Provenzano had always denied.
Then, my source permitted himself to add that there is much more to the story about the Hoffa murder than is known—although he conceded that Ralph Picardo basically had it right. Even though the source refused to confirm that Salvatore Briguglio was Hoffa’s killer, he did dismiss any and all speculation that Frank Sheeran committed the murder.
“I’m not going to talk about Sal,” he told me, “but I can assure you that Sheeran had no role in the actual killing of Jimmy Hoffa.”
ENDNOTES
[1] I had been personally devastated by the sudden death of 55-year-old John Sikorski, my long-time friend and “brother” since his days at PROD. John had first explained the background of Rolland McMaster to me on August 5, 1975, while I was with NBC News. On August 23, 2008, John did not feel well after a quick jog in his neighborhood in Northampton, Massachusetts. As John’s physician-wife, Anne, was driving him to the hospital, he had a massive heart attack and was pronounced dead soon after. John and Anne had two children, Kim and Christy. I did one of the eulogies at his funeral.
[2] Married to his third wife, the former Marilyn A. Turner, at the time of his death, Rolland McMaster was divorced from Elaine Mastaw, his second wife. (He divorced his first wife, Yvonne, in 1961.)
Stanton Barr was married to Elaine Mastaw’s sister, Terry, for 54 years. Terry Barr died on November 12, 2012.
[3] From June 17-19, 2013, another FBI-led search for Jimmy Hoffa captured national headlines, based on information provided by Anthony Zerilli, a former top leader of the Detroit underworld.
Tony Zerilli’s father was Joseph Zerilli, the long-time boss of the Detroit Mafia, also known as “The Detroit Partnership.” During the early 1970s, the elderly Zerilli handed the day-to-day operations to his son. However, Tony Zerilli, the acting boss, was indicted and convicted on federal racketeering charges and went to prison in 1974, forcing Joe Zerilli to leave his emeritus status and return to the throne. He served as the boss until his death in October 1977.
In the midst of his tenure, he appointed Jack Tocco as his underboss. (Tocco’s father, William, had married Joe Zerilli’s sister.)
While Joe Zerilli and Jack Tocco were running The Partnership, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975. And because Detroit mobsters—such as Tony and Vito Giacalone—were likely involved in the murder conspiracy, Zerilli and Tocco must have given their approval for this crime.
Shortly after Zerilli died in 1977, Tocco assumed control of the Detroit Mafia. And after Tony Zerilli’s release from prison in 1979, Tocco appointed Zerilli as his underboss.
First cousins, Tocco and Zerilli were not thugs. They were both college educated—with degrees in finance from the University of Detroit. Also, they were both Mafia royalty in that they each had married daughters of Joseph Profaci, who headed one of New York’s Five Families until his death in 1962.
Tony Zerilli had a reputation as a bad-tempered man who shot off his mouth. During the early 1960s, he was caught on an FBI recording device, plotting to kidnap Jimmy Hoffa. Apparently, that talk never went passed the discussion stage.
Reporter Scott Burnstein, who specializes on investigations of the Detroit underworld, told me that Tocco and other Detroit gangsters had held Zerilli responsible for unwittingly providing information to federal law-enforcement officials about The Partnership’s illegal activities, including its hidden ownership of a major casino in Las Vegas. The federal investigation led to the 1996 RICO indictments and subsequent convictions of nearly the entire hierarchy of the Detroit Mafia, including Jack Tocco and Tony Zerilli, both of whom went to prison.
When Zerilli was released in 2008, Tocco, as punishment for his indiscretions, had already demoted him and declared him as a persona non grata. Out respect for Zerilli’s father and father in law, Tocco allowed Zerilli to live, but he left him in the wilderness, without a family and with no real money. According to Burnstein, “Tocco took away Zerilli’s stripes and put him on the shelf.”
Consequently, the 85-year-old Zerilli, looking for a score, cooperated with reporters Marc Santia at WNBC in New York and Kevin Dietz of WDIV in Detroit. Hoping to sell his story, Zerilli told them that he knew where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, citing a specific property in Oakland Township, about twenty miles north of the Red Fox.
On January 13, 2013, the two reporters went wide with their exclusive story. Simultaneously, Zerilli created a website, “HoffaFound.com,” saying: “Federal agents have claimed Anthony Zerilli is a main character in the infamous unsolved mystery regarding the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, according to NBC. Zerilli is finally breaking his silence after decades of refusing to answer any questions.”
Upon the public release of this information, investigators went to the local land records office and discovered that in 1975 the property was owned by Jack Tocco.
As soon as that story broke, I issued a statement on my website, saying: "If Zerilli is doing this in a cynical effort to seek revenge on Jack Tocco, the FBI will see right through it. But, if Zerilli is giving the FBI details that are consistent with what is already known, then his story could be extremely important. We are waiting for the FBI to weigh in."
Five months later, on June 17, the FBI started an excavation of the property.
I appeared on CNN that afternoon, saying, "When the FBI takes these things seriously, I take these things seriously. I’ve been involved in this thing now for thirty-eight years. We would like to see this thing end once and for all. We would like to see this case solved."
The following day—Day Two of the three-day dig—I received a copy of a twenty-one-page PDF download that Zerilli was selling on his website for $4.99. His version of events for Hoffa’s murder—supposedly based on what Tony Giacalone had told him—completely shocked me while simultaneously making me even more skeptical of his story. According to this account, Jack Tocco had ordered Hoffa killed and instructed Giacalone to handle the details.
Giacalone allegedly told Zerilli that he and his brother, Vito, had gone to the Red Fox, ostensibly to pick up Hoffa. However, because the backseat of their car was loaded with boxes, they told Hoffa that there was no room for him, adding that he should get in the car behind them. In that second car, according to Zerilli, were Peter Vitale and Jimmy Quasarano with Anthony Palazzolo behind the wheel.
Zerilli then claimed that these three Mafia guys took Hoffa to the Tocco property. Upon their arrival, Hoffa was pulled from of the car and tied up. Quasarano supposedly hit Hoffa in the head with a shovel after which he was thrown into a pre-dug hole. Zerilli said that he was still alive when they buried him and placed a “cement slab” over his grave.
Meantime, Zerilli absolved Tony Provenzano and his supporting cast in New Jersey of any role in the abduction and murder. There was no mention of Chuck O’Brien, Frank Sheeran, or Rolland McMaster.
The simplicity of Zerilli’s story was impressive—inasmuch as the same characters, all Detroit mobsters, were allegedly responsible for Hoffa’s pickup, murder, and disposal. But I just could not imagine Hoffa getting into a car alone with these three hard-core Mafia figures, especially Vitale and Quasarano whom he had known and done business with years earlier. He was well aware of how dangerous they were.
Contacting me for comment after I had read Zerilli’s statement, the Detroit Free Press reported:
Dan Moldea, author of The Hoffa Wars who has been following Hoffa’s disappearance for decades, said he’s not sure he buys Zerilli’s story and sees some holes in it.
“Why would they keep the trophy buried in the backyard?” Moldea said, referring to Hoffa’s body. “You chop up a body. You burn a body. You don’t leave it laying around for it to be found. I’m just kind of surprised that they would allow the body to remain intact.”
But, to me, there was an even bigger problem, which NBC News explained:
Zerilli’s overall account also differs in several ways from the accumulated evidence regarding Hoffa’s disappearance, according to Moldea.
“This is very problematic for a lot of people, myself included, if the body is found out there,’’ Moldea said. “The scenario that Zerilli is putting out there is basically saying, 'Forget everything you've ever heard about the Hoffa case, here's the whole new scenario.' It would be dismissing 38 years of intelligence.”
On Day Three of the dig, ABC’s Good Morning America allowed me to repeat my admonition in a filmed report, saying:
Still, others are skeptical about Zerilli's claims, arguing it's a ploy to push his new book.
Moldea (on screen): "It's a complete departure from all the intelligence we have heard about this case over the past 38 years."
Later that morning, the FBI called off the search, declaring that nothing relevant to the Hoffa investigation had been found.
When the Associated Press called and asked me why solving the Hoffa case still mattered, I replied: “An American citizen vanished in broad daylight from a public street in an American city without a trace. There are countries where that is a daily occurrence—but that cannot be tolerated in America. . . . It’s legitimate for the FBI to keep investigating and searching when the evidence, the timelines, and the cast of characters are right.”