My untold relationship with the FBI in the Jimmy Hoffa murder case (Part 1)
Working on the FBI's "one-way street"
Introduction
This is part one of a partial timeline of my investigation of the murder of Jimmy Hoffa. I primarily focus this document on the history of—what I believe is—the location of Hoffa’s remains: an alcove under the Pulaski Skyway, near the former PJP Landfill, aka “Brother Moscato’s Dump,” in Jersey City. I also disclose my relationship with the FBI throughout this investigation.
The FBI received its first lead about this dumpsite in or about November 1975 when federal agents flipped prison inmate Ralph Picardo, who told them, among other things, that he believed that Hoffa was buried at Moscato’s dump.
Notably, Phillip “Brother” Moscato, the co-owner of the landfill and a reputed Mafia figure, confirmed to me during a series of exclusive interviews between 2007 and 2014 that Hoffa was, indeed, buried at PJP, adding, “Picardo basically had it right.”
However, the only person who supposedly knew the exact location of Hoffa’s unmarked grave was the man who buried him: Paul Cappola, Moscato’s partner at PJP, who allegedly disposed of Hoffa at Moscato’s direction.
The only person Paul told was his oldest son, Frank. . . . The only person Frank told was me.
And, as Frank instructed before he died in March 2020, I presented the entire case to the FBI between September 2020 and March 2021. After that, I responded to any and all inquiries from federal agents.
Early work
In November 1974, at age twenty-four, after declaring that I was an independent investigative journalist in graduate school at Kent State, I received a job as a columnist for The Reporter. This small, Akron-based weekly newspaper served the black community in northeastern Ohio. The publication's owner, William Ellis, had been a young attorney on the NAACP’s legal team for the 1954 Supreme Court landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education.
Soon after, on a cold and dark street corner in downtown Akron during the early morning hours of December 17, 1974, the late Gordon “Mac” McKinley, a leader of Teamsters United Rank and File (TURF)—an anti-Mafia, pro-union reform group—gave me a black ledger book. It contained a long list of suspicious loans from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, many of which had gone to the Mafia under the guise of, among other business concerns, speculative real-estate ventures and Las Vegas casinos.
Based on Mac’s remarkable document and my subsequent interviews with various sources in the overworld and the underworld, I published an eight-part series—“The Teamsters, Their Pension Fund, and the Mafia”—from January 25 to March 15, 1975.
After reading my work, legendary investigative journalist Jonathan Kwitny of the Wall Street Journal called. He asked me to assist him by doing some research for his planned three-part series about the union’s pension fund. Kwitny’s articles ran in the Journal on July 22-24.
Jimmy Hoffa disappears
The following week—on July 30, 1975—Jimmy Hoffa vanished. Jon and I spent the next few days searching for Hoffa, highlighted by an exciting adventure in Eagle River, Wisconsin, on August 2, 1975.
Failing to find Hoffa but looking for another assignment, I flew to Detroit where NBC labor reporter Irving R. Levine hired me to do research for his crew’s investigation. While with the network, I obtained a well-informed source inside the Teamsters. Based on his information, NBC allowed me to focus much of my time on the role of labor racketeer Rolland McMaster, a ferocious Hoffa enemy whom I believed then and still believe was behind a series of mysterious, violent acts in Hoffa’s Local 299 before his killing.
I also believed that those behind the 299 violence were also involved in Hoffa’s murder. In other words, I still think that McMaster, who died in 2007 and whom I interviewed at length, was a central character in the Hoffa murder.
From the outset, I speculated that the Hoffa killing was a three-act drama with different characters in each act: In Act One, Hoffa went to the Machus Red Fox restaurant in a Detroit suburb in anticipation of a meeting with two Mafia figures, Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone of Detroit and Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano of Union City, New Jersey, along with Lenny Schultz, a businessman associated with Giacalone. Supposedly, none of these men showed up.
In Act Two, Hoffa was picked up by persons unknown and taken to an unknown location where he was murdered.
In Act Three, the co-conspirators disposed of his body.
Connecting with the FBI
On September 4, 1975, after I completed my work for NBC in Detroit and New York, I returned to my home in Akron. Eleven days later, I completed a detailed fifteen-page theory about what had happened to Hoffa and sent it to the FBI field office in Detroit. I alleged that McMaster and members of his goon squad were behind the Local 299 violence and might have played a role in Hoffa’s murder.
On September 24, an FBI special agent interviewed me and wrote an official FBI-302 report, stating:
Specifically, Moldea advances the theory that Hoffa’s disappearance and other incidents of Teamster related violence have been the work of Rolland McMaster and other former Teamster International organizers who worked for McMaster in the Teamster Central States Division for Steel and Special Commodities in the early 1970s. In his theory, Moldea sets forth sufficient factual info, which indicates he has good sources close to McMaster and knowledgeable of his union activities.
On October 15, two FBI special agents came to my home and interviewed me for two days. Although I refused to give them the name of my principal source without his permission, the agents, who encouraged me to return to Detroit to continue my independent investigation, wrote two additional reports.
In the October 16th 302 report, the lead agent stated:
Moldea played two tape recorded conversations with his source. He stated that he was unable to provide interviewing Agents with duplicates of the tapes but he did consent to allowing the interviewing Agents to listen to them. In these conversations, his source told of the activities of an I.B.T. Task Force, headed by Rolland McMaster.
In the October 17th FBI report:
Moldea provided a great deal of information from a source who claims to have worked for Rolland McMaster in “task force” comprised of about 15 men whose overt purpose was to organize non-union truckers; but whose actual purpose was to instigate labor violence and unrest. Allegedly, McMaster would then extort money from trucking firms for a guarantee of labor peace.
Moldea and his source feel that McMaster and his “task force,” acting on orders from above, are responsible for various instances of labor violence, including Hoffa’s disappearance.
Moldea appears sincere, resourceful, cooperative, and is attempting to convince his primary source to cooperate with the FBI.
Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. and the Detroit Free Press
On October 28, taking the advice of the FBI agent but without an assignment with a media organization, I returned to Detroit where I received an introduction to James Hoffa Jr., the attorney-son of the murdered Teamsters boss, at his downtown law office. During our first meeting, I explained my theory about McMaster to Hoffa, who immediately called the local FBI and asked an agent with whom he was on a first-name basis to come and meet me.
Within a half-hour, two FBI special agents walked into the office. As instructed by Hoffa, I repeated my information about McMaster. The agents, who said they were already familiar with my work, confirmed to Hoffa that my information was solid and that my investigation of McMaster was both important and trustworthy.
After the FBI agents left, Hoffa declared that he believed that I had cracked the mystery of the violence in Local 299. Hoffa offered me $2,100 in reward money from the “Hoffa Reward Fund,” a reserve of contributions donated by local unions and private individuals, among others, who wanted the Hoffa case solved. Hoffa Jr. served as the administrator of the fund.
I accepted the reward because I had not made any money since I left NBC and recognized that I deserved it for my ground-breaking work.
On October 31, an FBI special agent invited me to lunch and then gave me a car tour of some key sites in Detroit, including Rolland McMaster’s home near the Red Fox and the Leland House, a hotel in downtown Detroit where several of McMaster’s goons stayed during the days before and after Hoffa’s murder. He also drove me to McMaster’s farm in nearby Milford Township.
From our discussions, this FBI agent listened to what I had to say about the case. Although he refused to disclose information developed by the FBI—aka the traditional “one-way street” between a reporter and an FBI agent—he agreed to keep me moving forward. If he knew I was on a wrong track, he would warn me to move to another.
On November 5, I began a freelance assignment with the Detroit Free Press. Per our agreement, I focused on a single story: the McMaster goon squad and its shakedowns of trucking companies around the country. I worked with two Free Press staff reporters on the project. And, on my own time, I continued to investigate the Local 299 violence and the Hoffa murder case.
My two partners did not believe that McMaster played any role in Hoffa’s disappearance.
The December 1975 grand jury
The first big, public break in the Hoffa case came on December 3, 1975, when the U.S. Strike Force Against Organized Crime in Detroit revealed that Salvatore and Gabriel Briguglio and Stephen and Thomas Andretta, four long-time associates of Tony Provenzano—along with an unknown fifth person—would appear before a federal grand jury in Detroit the following day.
On December 4, when Free Press City Editor John Oppedahl came to my desk and told me that McMaster was the fifth man at the grand jury, I ran to the federal courthouse to meet him in person. McMaster, whom I had previously interviewed by phone, told me he took The Fifth.
Another person who appeared was McMaster’s brother-in-law, Stanton Barr, the head of the steel division for Gateway Transportation, whom I also interviewed.
The Briguglio and Andretta brothers were implicated in the murder by Ralph Picardo, a government witness who had placed them on the FBI's radar screen. At the time, Picardo, a member of the Provenzano crew, was serving twenty years for manslaughter in Trenton State Penitentiary.
According to Picardo, a few days after Hoffa disappeared, Steve and Tom Andretta, along with an accountant used by all three, had visited him at the prison. While Steve and Picardo were alone, Andretta allegedly gave him some specific details about how the Hoffa murder had been executed.
On or about November 4, 1975, Picardo began discussing what he knew about the Hoffa case with the FBI, cutting himself a deal and winding up in the federal witness protection program.
Picardo disclosed that Provenzano had given Sal Briguglio an assignment to kill Hoffa in either 1973 or 1974.
Picardo added that, after the murder, Hoffa's body was placed in a 55-gallon oil drum and shipped via a Gateway Transportation truck to an unknown destination in New Jersey.
After the Free Press published my story about the McMaster goon squad in June 1976, I left the newspaper. A week later, I began my next freelance assignment for the Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated Washington columnist, Jack Anderson. Jack published my story about McMaster and the Local 299 violence on the first anniversary of Hoffa’s disappearance: July 30, 1976.
Brother Moscato’s Dump
When pressed by the FBI to speculate on the actual location of Hoffa's body, Picardo suggested "Brother Moscato's dump," aka the PJP Landfill in Jersey City, where other victims of the Provenzano group had allegedly been laid to rest, according to Picardo.
On December 11, 1975, FBI special agents executed a search warrant at the landfill, claiming that they were looking for the remains of a missing loan shark named Armand Faugno. In fact, they were looking for Hoffa. But, without a specific location to search in the forty-acre site, the exploration failed to yield Hoffa’s remains.
On January 27-28, the federal law-enforcement community met for an important conclave about the Hoffa case to discuss its status. The result was The Hoffex Report, a summary of the best evidence collected about Tony Provenzano, Tony Giacalone, the Andretta brothers, the Briguglio brothers, and Rolland McMaster, among others.
Later, during my exclusive face-to-face interview on October 25, 1976, with the Briguglio brothers and Steve Andretta, as well as with Tom Andretta by telephone, all of them denied any role in Hoffa's murder. No real surprise there, but I couldn't help but notice the extent to which they tried to dispel Picardo's account of Hoffa's murder and where his body was most likely buried.
Sal Briguglio, Hoffa's alleged killer, scoffed to me during our recorded interview, "They said we took Hoffa from Detroit, put him on a truck, brought him all the way down here in a fifty-five-gallon drum, and we put him in Brother Moscato's dump."
But, because no one, not even the FBI, could advance that lead, the information about “Brother Moscato’s Dump” appeared dead.
The Charles Crimaldi diversion
In my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, I went along with much of what Ralph Picardo had told the FBI. I alleged that 1) Salvatore Briguglio had killed Hoffa, 2) Hoffa’s body was stuffed into a 55-gallon oil drum, and 3) it was transported via a Gateway Transportation truck to an unknown destination. However, at that time, I did not embrace Picardo’s information about Hoffa’s post-mortem trip to New Jersey.
Also, during my interview with Charles Crimaldi—a Chicago mobster turned federal witness whom I had met via a federal law-enforcement source—he convinced me that the Mafia would not have taken the risk of transporting Hoffa from Detroit to New Jersey, adding that his information was that Hoffa was disposed of in a car compactor in or near Detroit.
Consequently, after I learned that Gateway’s steel division—which McMaster’s brother-in-law, Stanton Barr, headed—was near Ford Motor’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, I wrote that, after Hoffa was murdered and stuffed into the barrel, the Gateway truck likely took him to the Ford location where he was “crushed and smelted,” consistent with what Crimaldi had told me.
The 2006 FBI search of McMaster’s farm
In May 2006, the FBI obtained a search warrant and began a two-week excavation of a farm in Milford Township, Michigan, formerly owned by Rolland McMaster—the same farm the FBI special agent showed me in October 1975.
The FBI’s source was the imprisoned Donovan Wells, whom I had interviewed about the murder in 1976. The Wells family lived with McMaster’s family on the farm during the summer of 1975.
Unfortunately, the FBI search failed to yield Hoffa’s body. But still, the New York Times reported:
After a thorough and comprehensive search, no remains of Mr. Hoffa have been located," Judith M. Chilen, an assistant special agent, said at a news briefing at the farm entrance. Ms. Chilen added that she was convinced that his body had been buried on the farm and that there was "no indication that it has been moved.” (Emphasis added)
During my August 2009 interview with Don Wells, we went to the farm the FBI had excavated three years earlier. And we determined conclusively that the FBI had dug in the wrong place.
Not a complete loss, though, the FBI was greatly interested in Wells’s information about what had happened the night before Hoffa’s murder.
On the evening of July 29, 1975, at a local restaurant, as Wells, McMaster, and Barr were having dinner, Tony Provenzano stepped up to them, slapped his hand on their table, and said: "It's going to be a great day tomorrow! A great day tomorrow! Right, Mac?" And he slapped McMaster on the back.
Provenzano then asked McMaster to accompany him to the bar for a private conversation.
While they were gone, Wells asked Barr what was going on. Barr replied that Provenzano and Hoffa were meeting the following day to settle their differences—and that Tony Giacalone was making the arrangements for the sitdown.
When Provenzano and McMaster returned to the table, Provenzano pointed to McMaster and Barr and asked, "Do you guys know where you're going to be tomorrow?"
McMaster responded, "Yeah, we're all straight on that."
On the day of the murder, McMaster and Barr met with Gateway Transportation executives in Gary, Indiana.
Significantly, Wells passed an FBI-administered polygraph test, giving credence to everything he told federal agents.
Phillip “Brother” Moscato
In early 2007, my friend and colleague, investigative journalist David Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, and I were investigating a corrupt judge in Florida. To help finance our research, I received a grant from The Journalism Fund of The Nation Institute, administered by another colleague, investigative journalist Joe Conason.
During our work, I discovered that the Mafia guy who had allegedly made payoffs to the crooked judge was Phillip Moscato Sr., the co-owner of “Brother Moscato’s Dump” in Jersey City.
Racing to the phone, I called and interviewed Moscato, a reputed soldier in the Vito Genovese crime family. He invited me to come to his home in Ocean, New Jersey, to discuss the matter further.
Between our first interview in April 2007 and his death in February 2014, Moscato, declaring that “Picardo basically had it right,” grudgingly provided me with the following information about the Hoffa case:
In Act One, Detroit mobster Vito Giacalone—the brother of Anthony Giacalone, whom Hoffa expected to meet at the Red Fox on the day he vanished—was the driver of the car that picked up Hoffa.
In Act Two, Giacalone drove Hoffa to the scene of the crime where Salvatore Briguglio murdered him. Moscato did not give me a location for the crime.
In Act Three, after the killing, Hoffa was stuffed into a 55-gallon drum, loaded onto a Gateway Transportation truck, shipped to New Jersey, and, indeed, buried at Moscato’s Jersey City dump. . . . Moscato, whom I always respected, did not give me a specific location for Hoffa’s unmarked grave at the site.
Over a year after Moscato died in February 2014, I published the details of my interviews with him on July 30, 2015, for the 40th anniversary of Hoffa’s murder. The New York Daily News did its own story about my work that same day.
So, according to Ralph Picardo and Phillip Moscato, Hoffa’s body was buried at Brother Moscato’s Dump. However, like the FBI special agents armed with a court-authorized search warrant in December 1975, I had no exact location to begin my search.
Four years later, I got lucky.
Next: My untold relationship with the FBI in the Jimmy Hoffa murder case (Part 2)
Corpus Delecti: Behind Dan Moldea’s forever quest to find Jimmy Hoffa.
This a MUST read from investigative journalist Dan Moldea, who brings you the absolute facts. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA all the way!!!!