My untold relationship with the FBI in the Jimmy Hoffa murder case (Part 5)
The first GPR test in November 2020
Pictured near the PJP Landfill in Jersey City on November 24, 2020, from left to right are Eric Shawn of Fox News, GPR tech man Steve Psihoules, and DEM. (Photo by BB: Copyright © Dan E. Moldea 2020. All rights reserved.)
Introduction to Part 5
This is the fifth in a series of columns about my relationship with the FBI during the murder investigation of Jimmy Hoffa who disappeared from a Detroit suburb on July 30, 1975.
It features new materials, as well as updated excerpts from my memoir, Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer, along with my articles, essays, and reports. Having specialized in investigations of the Teamsters and the Mafia since December 1974, I hit the ground running and began my research about this case the day after Hoffa vanished eight months later. My first book, The Hoffa Wars, was published in 1978.
Here are the previous installments of this series:
* November 26, 2023: “Working on the FBI’s ‘one-way street” (Part 1)
* December 10, 2023: “Frank Cappola enters the fray” (Part 2)
* January 14, 2024: “The FBI calls six months after Frank Cappola dies” (Part 3)
* January 21, 2024: “My team and our negotiations” (Part 4)
* February 25, 2024: “The first GPR test in November 2020” (Part 5)
A quick summary of Parts 1-4
* In November 1975, federal witness Ralph Picardo revealed to FBI agents that Jimmy Hoffa was: 1) murdered in Detroit, 2) stuffed into a 55-gallon oil drum, 3) loaded onto a Gateway Transportation truck, and 4) shipped to New Jersey. . . . Based on his experiences with the mobsters who engineered the killing and at the request of the FBI, Picardo speculated that Hoffa was murdered by Salvatore Briguglio and buried at “Brother Moscato’s Dump,” aka the PJP Landfill, in Jersey City.
* During our exclusive interviews between 2007 and his death in 2014, Phillip “Brother” Moscato, a soldier in the Vito Genovese Mafia family, told me that Picardo “basically had it right” and that, indeed, Hoffa was buried in an oil drum at his landfill, which was co-owned by his business partner, Paul Cappola. He also confirmed that Briguglio did the killing.
* In September 2019, Frank Cappola, the oldest son of Paul Cappola, told me that his father, at the direction of Moscato, had buried Hoffa. However, in retaliation against Moscato for assigning him the difficult task of committing this criminal act, Frank said that his father secretly buried Hoffa in an oil drum at a site adjacent to the dumpsite—in an alcove under the Pulaski Skyway, adding that he had placed fifteen-to-thirty steel barrels in the grave on top of the Hoffa oil drum.
* Frank gave me a personal tour of the area on September 29, 2019, which I filmed. Also, at my request, he executed a sworn affidavit on October 7, 2019, attesting to the details of what his father had told him shortly before his death in 2008.
* Frank Cappola died of a respiratory ailment in March 2020. Six months later, the FBI contacted me to discuss Frank’s information. And, as Frank instructed, I cooperated fully with the FBI and the law-enforcement community.
* Before his death, Frank approved of the team I put together to produce a documentary about my investigation of the Hoffa case, featuring Frank’s groundbreaking information. Also, our production team learned that the alcove under the bridge was owned and controlled by the New Jersey Department of Transportation and that we needed to qualify for written authorization from the state in order to gain access.
Fox News, aka “The only game in town”
I had known and respected correspondent Eric Shawn of Fox News since the spring of 2004 while he was busy promoting Charles Brandt’s book, I Heard You Paint Houses. Shawn’s filmed reports embraced Brandt’s thesis that Frank Sheeran, Hoffa’s loyal friend and ally, had killed the ex-Teamsters boss. Shawn, who interviewed Sheeran in 2001, immediately adopted this scenario as his own, a theory he then faithfully promoted for the next fifteen years.
In my opinion, Sheeran — whom I had briefly interviewed for my 1978 book and who then threatened, in writing, to sue me for defamation after its release—was lying. He had given many conflicting versions over the years.
Since December 1975, I have believed that Sal Briguglio, not Sheeran, did the killing. That is what Ralph Picardo first alleged to the FBI in November 1975 and that is what Phillip Moscato confirmed to me in 2013. I had interviewed Briguglio four times between October 1976 and February 1978. He was shot and killed in New York on March 21, 1978.
To his credit, despite our disagreements, Shawn frequently included me in his filmed reports on Fox News, using me as his designated contrarian. To be sure, without Shawn, the movie, The Irishman, which was based on Charlie Brandt’s book, probably never would have been made. It was Shawn’s enthusiastic reporting, featuring Sheeran as Hoffa’s killer, that supercharged interest in the project, later embraced by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro with their “great-cinema-but-terrible-history” motion picture.
Between 2004 and 2019, Shawn almost singlehandedly kept the Hoffa case alive and on the public’s radar screen. Consequently, whether I liked it or not—with ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC expressing zero interest in the Hoffa cold case—Fox News was the only game in town.
During the summer of 2019, Shawn offered me a consulting contract to work with Fox on a new angle of the Hoffa project, which—long story short—I had originally developed five years earlier. Because I liked and trusted Shawn, I agreed to work with him personally, but I refused to sign a contract or to accept any money from Fox—other than routine travel expenses, limited to train fares and hotel rooms, which Fox directly placed on its corporate account.
Unfortunately, the story Shawn and I were exploring soon became more complicated than expected, primarily because our key source refused to sign a sworn statement attesting to his claims and then failed to pledge full cooperation with the law-enforcement community.
Ironically, though, it was that source who converted Shawn’s view of the Hoffa case from “Frank Sheeran did it” to “Ralph Picardo was right.” Eric totally abandoned the Sheeran theory.
Enter Frank Cappola
In September 2019, Frank Cappola came into my life. However, Fox News, at first, did not take him seriously and reneged on its agreement to pay for Cappola’s plane fare from Florida to New Jersey—which forced me to pay that expense personally.
Cappola was extremely upset because Fox had inconvenienced and embarrassed him. And I was upset with Fox for putting me in such an awkward position with Cappola.
Meantime, I understood that Shawn, whom I considered a friend, was caught in the middle.
But to be clear, I did not ask to be reimbursed for Cappola’s travel expenses—and I rejected Fox’s offer to cover them after the fact.
Cappola believed that Fox had so disrespected him that he refused to have anything to do with the network. He canceled an interview I had arranged between him and Shawn for September 30, 2019—the day after he gave me a tour of the site. And Cappola’s continuing anger was aggravated by my ongoing loyalty to Shawn, causing daunting problems between Cappola and me. At one point, in the midst of an argument over my defense of Shawn, Cappola threatened to cease his cooperation with me.
After several follow-up calls, Frank and I worked out our problems. And, after he signed a sworn statement at my request on October 7, attesting to what he knew, he relented and, as a personal favor to me, grudgingly agreed to sit down for an interview with Shawn on October 11 at Rutt’s Hut, a popular restaurant in Clifton, New Jersey.
At this brief but friendly interview—during which I sat quietly at the table on camera, allowing Shawn to ask his questions uninterrupted—Cappola did not give any details about the specific location of Hoffa’s unmarked grave at PJP. Everything they later learned about that came from me.
However, in his subsequent hour-long broadcast report, aired on December 1, Shawn relegated Cappola to the closing moments of his program. Cappola, who again felt disrespected, told me that he wanted nothing further to do with Fox.
On March 20, 2020—four days after Cappola died—Shawn published a lengthy article, featuring Cappola and trumpeting the information about Hoffa’s unmarked grave at PJP.
Inexplicably though, Shawn did not even mention my name or my contributions to this story.
I was so upset with Shawn that when I later appeared live on his weekend news show on August 1—to commemorate the 45th anniversary of Hoffa’s murder two days earlier—I said sarcastically that I did not want Fox News to beat me on my own story.
In response, Shawn sent me a harsh email, critical of my comment. That led to an airing of grievances between us, culminating in a peace agreement.
Fox takes the lead on the GPR test
Later, in August, I invited Shawn — whom, apart from Fox, I wanted as the independent host of my team’s documentary—to accompany me for my return to PJP for the ground-penetrating-radar examination. Beaux Carson, the captain of my production team, was working hard to gather the necessary documents from the NJ-DOT for the GPR test.
We had selected award-winning film producer Ari Mark of Ample Entertainment to do the documentary about our investigation.
As a quid pro quo, Shawn agreed to showcase my work about Cappola and PJP in his next broadcast report for Fox and to help my team publicize Ari Mark’s film project. Specifically, Shawn said he wanted to do “a documentary about a documentary.”
Shawn was so grateful for my invitation that he offered to arrange for Fox to pay for the GPR test. In addition, Fox producers boasted to Carson that Fox had connections in the New Jersey state bureaucracy that would make it unnecessary for us to obtain any written authorization for our visit to the site.
In response, my team stepped aside, allowing Fox to take the lead on the GPR examination.
In the end, the Fox producers were wrong. Just like my team, Fox needed the state’s written authorization. So, with our team still allowing Fox to keep control, Carson walked the Fox team through the process and introduced them to the key person in the state bureaucracy—with whom Carson had already been in negotiations for several weeks.
Problematically, Interstate Waste Services, a waste-disposal company adjacent to the site, routinely used the state’s land under the Pulaski Skyway, including in the alcove cited by Cappola as the location of Hoffa’s body, to park its large steel dumpsters. So, in addition, Fox needed to arrange for them to be cleared out before the GPR test could be conducted.
On November 22—two days before the scheduled GPR examination—I asked real-estate executive Bob Burke, my team’s essential eyes and ears in Jersey City, to visit the PJP Landfill and take photographs of the alcove. We wanted to see whether, as promised, the dumpsters owned by the nearby Interstate Waste Services had been removed.
Sadly, Bob reported that they were not. The alcove was packed with side-by-side dumpsters with little space between them. I sent Bob’s photographs to the members of my team in Los Angeles, as well as to Eric Shawn at Fox, who assured me that they would be cleared out by Game Day.
On November 23, I drove to New Jersey and checked into the Embassy Suites in Secaucus. From the outset, I had refused to accept any money from Fox. But for this event, since Eric and Fox would take the lead on the GPR test, I accepted Fox’s offer to direct-pay my hotel bill for two nights.
On Monday night, after hearing nothing from Eric, I called and, once again, expressed my concern for the condition of “The Spot,” adding that the clutter of dumpsters would make our scheduled GPR search almost impossible.
Shawn’s producer at Fox, Rob Monaco, had accepted the task of handling this matter. I had met Monaco during my earlier work with Shawn. I viewed him as a resourceful producer and a good guy.
Shawn assured me that Monaco would take care of everything and that “The Spot” would be clear by the time we arrived.
Also that night, I had dinner with Bob Burke—by then a trusted friend whom I invited to accompany me to the GPR examination the following morning.
Fox clears the wrong alcove
On November 24, my team’s showrunner, Ari Mark of Ample Entertainment, arranged for his cameraman in New York, Andrew Dunn, to meet me in my room at the hotel at 7:30 A.M. for a pre-PJP-GPR filmed interview. I gave Andrew a briefing about the case and what had led to this moment, as well as my definitions of success and failure.
To me, success was receiving confirmation from Fox’s GPR technician that he had located barrels in the alcove that might be those that Frank Cappola’s father had buried with “The Trophy,” my code name for Hoffa’s body.
Failure was finding nothing. After all, there was no known reason why anything from the PJP Landfill would be buried under the bridge on state property. For me, personally, failure meant that this project was dead and that no one would be returning my phone calls.
At 9:10, Andrew Dunn and I, in our separate cars, met Bob Burke at the Secaucus exit on the New Jersey Turnpike. We followed Bob to the site in Jersey City and arrived at PJP at about twenty minutes later.
Knowing that, via Fox, we had a permit from New Jersey’s Department of Transportation, the three of us drove past the guard house at the headquarters of Interstate Waste Services and alongside the Pulaski Skyway to “The Spot.”
It was the first time I had been there since my life-altering tour with Frank Cappola on September 29, 2019. At that time, the area was, for the most part, wide open with few dumpsters or vehicles.
However, when we arrived at the alcove, it was still completely packed with dumpsters, just as depicted in Burke’s photographs over the weekend. Some appeared to be ten yards long and seven feet high.
While Dunn and I were taking pictures and filming the area, three people came up to us. Because all of us were masked with the coronavirus spiking in New Jersey, I did not recognize Fox producer Rob Monaco, whom I had earlier met through Shawn and grew to respect for his hard work.
To my surprise, Monaco chided us, saying that we were too early and could not be on-site until noon. After reminding Monaco that Fox was only there because of my information and at my personal invitation, I complained that the site was filled with dumpsters which I had been told would be removed.
When Monaco showed me an area under the bridge that he had arranged to be emptied, I replied that he had cleared the wrong alcove.
However, Interstate—which had already done a considerable amount of work but in the wrong place—refused to do anything further. The company essentially told Fox, “It’s your mistake, not ours.”
This was potentially a fatal error that jeopardized our entire operation. Because of this devastating situation, much of the alcove was totally inaccessible.
In spite of the fact that my credibility was on the line under the worst possible circumstances, I tried hard not to remain angry. I just started hoping for a little luck—perhaps for the GPR technician to catch an edge of a field of barrels in the small spaces between the tightly packed dumpsters.
The GPR test
After I gave everyone my recitation about what Frank had told me in September 2019, I pointed to an area that Frank had said was his best “educated guess” as to the location of The Trophy. I even showed Shawn the video of Frank pointing to it.
Importantly, we were not just looking for a single buried 55-gallon drum. Rather, we were also trying to detect the fifteen to thirty steel barrels, buried on top of the drum containing Hoffa. Essentially, we were searching for a sheet of steel that should have lit up the GPR apparatus.
As our work began, I barked good-naturedly at the GPR technician, “Get lucky!”
Along with the video camera in my hand, I was wearing a body camera, attached to the breast pocket of my sport coat.
Within a few minutes, the technician, walking through a narrow path between two dumpsters, hit his first anomaly, a rounded object on his screen, which he said could be the top of a barrel.
Seventeen minutes later, just a few feet away, he discovered two more in the same pattern.
Seven minutes after that, a few steps away, he found another.
Clearly, his machine was detecting something he felt was important. When he completed his scan, he explained that he had discovered what could possibly be a buried field of steel barrels that ran twelve feet to the north and about three feet to the east.
But further exploration to the east was impossible because a large dumpster was blocking the perimeter.
At that point, Shawn told everyone that Fox producer Rob Monaco was going to try to arrange for the removal of the obstructing dumpster, along with four additional dumpsters in front of it.
Partially redeeming himself, Monaco pulled a rabbit out of his hat and somehow managed to convince Interstate to move those five dumpsters.
It took over an hour.
Six minutes after the last dumpster was hauled away, the GPR technician resumed his work.
He quickly discovered another anomaly adjacent to the field of suspected buried steel barrels. He called it a “breach of data” and a “soft spot” which clearly showed that, at some point in the past, someone had dug a hole four-to-nine feet deep. The hole, which was filled with different dirt than its surroundings, contained nothing detectable.
Eleven minutes later, the technician saw more suspected barrels to the east.
The plot of barrels had expanded to twelve-by-fifteen feet.
The results of the Fox-GPR test
Explaining the GPR test, Shawn wrote:
Fox Nation hired Ground Penetrating Radar Systems, a nationwide company that uses radar technology and high-frequency electromagnetic radio waves that reflect objects underground, to search for any evidence of buried barrels. The radar revealed numerous curved shapes, like half-moon objects on top of each other, that GPRS Project Manager and specialized radar technician Steve Psihoules told us are pieces of metal, along with a delineated underground pack of dirt, indicating that a pit had at one time been dug and then filled in.
What Psihoules called metal “round anomalies” were described as being similar to the size of large drums.
“We are getting another round anomaly right here,” Psihoules said as he scanned the ground and the radar screen revealed numerous round objects at the spot where Frank had pointed out as Hoffa’s burial site.
“We are all getting them at a similar height as well. I am getting similar anomalies,” Psihoules said as he scanned the area using a grid-pattern. “You can tell that there was something that was disturbed here,” Psihoules explained as he stopped at one of his findings. “It’s almost like excavated . . . something happened here. It is definitely metal.”
Mercifully, with these detections, I was still in the game, and my work was still credible. . . . And my phone calls would continue to be returned.
In my report to our team on November 29, I wrote:
When I saw the clutter of dumpsters upon our arrival at PJP last Tuesday, I thought that this was “mission impossible.” But we got lucky—and might have found what we came there to find, . . . the barrels that Frank Cappola said that his father had buried on top of The Trophy. . . .
In short, Steve of GPRS detected what appear to be the tops of barrels in four locations about four-to-eight feet below the surface in a 12-by-15-foot area. He also found a “break in the data” or a “soft spot” adjacent to the plot of barrels, which appears to be man-made but contains nothing detectable.
Bob Burke has come up with an excellent explanation of what caused this. In short, Paul Cappola, when digging the hole, had to lower his excavator as the hole got deeper. The soft spot was likely caused by the excavator—or by the front loader as it placed the barrels in the grave.
BTW: Eric said on tape: “This is the best we could have hoped for.”
The FBI: “We want to control the science”
On December 22, with Shawn’s permission, I reported the results of the Fox-GPR test to the FBI, adding that my team, led by Beaux Carson, was preparing to move ahead with the hazardous-waste examination at PJP, along with our own GPR test of the area without the obstructing dumpsters, and then, if possible, our private excavation for The Trophy.
At that point, the FBI intervened, insisting that they wanted “to control the science” and to do so on their own terms.
Recognizing that the FBI must have the final say on the identification of Hoffa’s remains, Carson gave the FBI the names of the two hazardous waste companies with which he had requested and received bids for scans and excavation.
Bottomline, there are 200-million square miles of surface on the Earth. On September 29, 2019—with the help of Frank Cappola—I pushed all my chips into the pot, betting that Jimmy Hoffa was located in that small alcove under the Pulaski Skyway near the PJP landfill, aka “Brother Moscato’s Dump” in Jersey City.
Then in November 2020, with the help of our team—as well as Eric Shawn and his people at Fox—we had, hopefully, narrowed the search down to a twelve-by-fifteen-foot area. It was a joint effort.
Because Fox had paid for the GPR examination, my team and I allowed Shawn and Fox to break the news about the GPR test during their broadcast on January 29, 2021.
Although my work was generally acknowledged in the Fox Nation report, it was anything but the “documentary about a documentary” that Shawn had proffered. With Fox grabbing maximum credit for my discovery—as well as my arranging Shawn’s interview with Cappola and my invitation to Shawn to participate in the GPR test—it was nothing more than Fox’s self-congratulatory spiking of the football followed by a celebratory dance in the end zone with no mention of my team, except in the quick credits at the end of the program.
Also, in two print stories—clearly spoon-fed by Fox to the New York Post and the Daily Mail—my name was not mentioned in either story. Once again, Fox grabbed full credit.
In the months that followed, my anger at and disappointment with Eric Shawn simmered, but I tried hard to get along while he led a lobbying effort of the U.S. Department of Justice to release the entire Hoffa case file, an effort I publicly supported and continue to support.
Later though, as fate would have it, “the science” determined that the “Foxhole,” as my team called it—the Fox-GRP test results in the alcove under the Pulaski Skyway in November 2020—turned out to be nothing of any importance at all.
NEXT (Part 6): My command performance before a star-studded crowd at the FBI field office in Newark
I am pressing my bet on Dan Moldea. I can’t wait for him to say, “Eureka, I found it.” This chapter is most interesting and compelling; a fascinating “cliff hangar”. Why is the Department of Justice not releasing the entire file. What information is being purposely withheld? Onward Dan Moldea!