My untold relationship with the FBI in the Jimmy Hoffa murder case (Part 6)
My command performance before a star-studded crowd at the FBI field office in Newark
Above: My selfie in the alcove under the Pulaski Skyway while I was giving DOJ and FBI officials a tour of the unmarked grave of Jimmy Hoffa on March 11, 2021. I was not permitted to photograph my guests.
Introduction to Part 6
This is the sixth 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)
* March 3, 2024: “My command performance before a star-studded crowd at the FBI field office in Newark” (Part 6)
A quick summary of Parts 1-5
* 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.
* Grateful for the invitation to my team’s planned ground-penetrating-radar test, Fox News offered to pay all the expenses. However, even after a Fox producer cleared obstructions from the wrong location on game day, the GPR technician hired by Fox still appeared to detect steel barrels in the alcove, which seemed to save the project—even though “The Foxhole” later turned out to be much ado about nothing.
Preparing to perform for the FBI
On February 22, 2021, I received a call from “FBI SA-1,” the special agent who had first contacted me five months earlier. He invited me to the FBI’s Newark field office on March 11 to discuss my evidence about the location of the body of Jimmy Hoffa. Earlier attempts to arrange this meeting were foiled by the international pandemic that restricted travel and personal contacts.
On March 8, I filmed a pre-Newark “memo to self” from a prepared script:
I am going to Newark this week—on March 11, 2021—for a long-anticipated meeting with several members of the law-enforcement community. . . .
We have been planning this meeting since September 18, 2020. My main contact is [FBI SA-1] in the Newark field office. As part of the preparations for this event, I created a webpage that is not anchored to any other site. It contains most of my key documents, videos, and photographs, among other materials. . . .
My job on Thursday will be to convince these federal law-enforcement officials that my documentation is credible—and that the remains of Jimmy Hoffa are exactly where Frank Cappola showed me, near the former PJP Landfill in Jersey City. The body was buried on state property, under the Pulaski Skyway, the bridge that connects Jersey City and Newark.
This location, also known as “Brother Moscato’s Dump,” was the FBI’s suspected burial site in December 1975, five months after Hoffa’s disappeared. That same month the FBI obtained a search warrant, ostensibly looking for Armand Faugno, a murdered loan shark. In fact, federal agents were searching for Hoffa, but they never knew exactly where to look in this large area of land. So, nothing was found.
If Cappola’s information is correct, then the FBI’s oldest theory about the location of Hoffa’s remains will be completely vindicated.
After our meeting in Newark, I have been told that we will drive as a group to the PJP Landfill where I will be giving this distinguished group a tour of the location, based what the late-Frank Cappola showed me.
So, in short—if they believe my documentation and I present myself well—they will, hopefully, prepare an affidavit that will be the centerpiece of a proposed search warrant that will be approved by the federal court in Newark.
I have been told that I will be invited to a possible dig down the road which will be done quietly and discreetly. There will be no empty vaults opened live in front of a national television audience on that day.
If this effort succeeds, I will have many people to thank for helping to make it happen. However, if it fails, then the failure is mine and mine alone.
Notably, though, I have been investigating the Hoffa case since Day One, and this is the best lead I have ever seen or heard of in this case. I am in high confidence that the 55-gallon barrel that has held Hoffa under a pile of fifteen-to-thirty barrels since 1975 is still there.
I am Ahab, and the Hoffa case continues to be my white whale—46 years later.
The meeting at the FBI’s Newark field office
On Thursday, March 11, I took the early morning train from Union Station in Washington, D.C. to Penn Station in Newark. I arrived at about 9:45 A.M.
I was met by my team’s cameraman, who filmed me as I left the station. We walked across the street where I checked into my room at The DoubleTree Hotel.
The cameraman and I did some preliminary filming before I called FBI SA-1 to say that I had arrived. FBI SA-1 told me that the meeting had been delayed while he picked up his guests from Detroit at the Newark airport, giving the cameraman and me another 45 minutes to explain a) what I was walking into, b) what I needed to happen, and c) what I expected to happen.
At around noon, FBI SA-1 called and said that he had just dropped off his guests at the FBI field office and would meet me in front of the hotel in about five minutes.
When FBI SA-1 arrived, the cameraman and I introduced ourselves. The cameraman said that he would wait outside the field office during the meeting. FBI SA-1 cautioned him, saying that he could not film at or near the FBI building because of security concerns.
However, he left open the possibility that the cameraman might be allowed to film everyone who went to the PJP Landfill after the meeting.
During our conversation in the car, I asked the FBI man how much information his guests knew about what I was offering. He replied, “We are starting from scratch.”
After the short drive to Newark’s FBI field office, FBI SA-1 entered a heavily secured parking area. As instructed by FBI SA-1, I left my cameras, recorder, and mobile phone in my backpack which remained in the backseat of the car.
After I was cleared and received my visitor’s badge inside the building, FBI SA-1 led me through a maze of locked doors.
Then, after a quick elevator ride, we entered a conference room where we saw eight people, six men and two women, seated at a large table. Others walked in after we arrived.
Along with FBI SA-1 and the assistant chief of the Newark field office, those present included:
* Saima S. Mohsin, Acting U.S. Attorney (Eastern District of Michigan)
* Grady O’Malley, Assistant U.S. Attorney (District of New Jersey)
* Marc A. Silski, FBI Special Agent (Detroit)
I introduced myself to everyone in the room, bumping knuckles in lieu of shaking hands. In addition, as Beaux Carson, my team captain, had advised, I gave each person in attendance a hard copy of the webpage I had created for FBI SA-1 on November 12, 2020.
Looking around the room, I sensed that many of those present were not even born when Hoffa disappeared 46 years earlier.
As a prelude to my talk, I lauded Grady O’Malley, a legendary federal organized-crime prosecutor in New Jersey. Also, as a young man, he had spent a year in the NBA, playing for the Atlanta Hawks.
Over forty years earlier, O’Malley had interviewed federal witness Ralph Picardo, whom I view as the firewall of the Hoffa case. Further, O’Malley told me that the night before our meeting he had spoken with the former lead prosecutor in the Hoffa case, Robert Stewart, the highly respected former chief of the U.S. Strike Force in Newark. Both O’Malley and Stewart respected Picardo’s version of events. And that immediately put me at ease.
O’Malley was the only person present who was older than me. We were also the tallest people in the room. I am six-four. O’Malley is six-five.
I gave those in attendance a copy of a draft report I had completed, which included:
* an account of my 46-year personal journey with the Hoffa case, which began on Day One of the Hoffa investigation in July 1975;
* a timeline of the significance of PJP, aka “Brother Moscato’s Dump;”
* evidence that the alleged location of Hoffa’s unmarked grave was not part of the EPA cleanup during the 1980s;
* my reasons for publicly revealing the exact location of Hoffa’s unmarked grave in my July 21, 2020, article for The Mob Museum;
* an additional printed catalog of documents that I did not place on my website; and
* the events that led my team to yield control of the GPR examination on November 24, 2020, to Fox News. At the time of our meeting in Newark, the Fox-GPR test had not yet been discredited.
Further, I gave FBI SA-1, an extra copy of my October 25, 1976, three-and-a-half-hour, tape-recorded interview at Local 560 in Union City, New Jersey, with alleged Hoffa murder suspects, Salvatore Briguglio and Stephen Andretta, along with their attorney, Bill Bufalino, and Sammy Provenzano, the brother of Anthony Provenzano who had allegedly engineered the killing.
When I saw FBI SA-1 give the tapes to Marc Silski from the Detroit field office, whom I learned at the meeting was the special agent in charge of the overall Hoffa investigation, I interpreted that as confirmation of who made the decisions.[1]
My presentation
Seeing that there was no real agenda for the meeting, I simply stood up and began a monologue about the key events between July 30, 1975, and the tour that Frank Cappola gave me of the PJP Landfill on September 29, 2019.
I did not record the meeting. However, I assumed that the FBI did memorialize it—which was fine with me.
I opened by explaining that this was my “use it or lose it” moment and that I was prepared to give this star-studded group anything they wanted to make their case for a search warrant.
Early on, I learned that the key document in the FBI’s investigation was the affidavit that Frank Cappola had executed at my request on October 7, 2019. Federal agents and analysts in Newark were actively attempting to corroborate every detail.
Here is the general summary I gave to the FBI of what I believed happened, insisting that the Hoffa murder was a three-act drama with different characters in each act:
In Act One, Jimmy Hoffa was picked up in a car driven by Vito Giacalone, according to what Phillip Moscato told me. I added that, based on other source information, there might have been one or two other cars involved.
In Act Two, consistent with what my friend and colleague, reporter Scott Burnstein, had learned, Hoffa was taken to mobbed-up Detroit businessman Leonard Schultz’s home where he was murdered. I believe that the killer was Sal Briguglio, based on what Ralph Picardo told the FBI in 1975 and what Phillip Moscato confirmed to me in 2013.
In Act Three, after the murder, the killers drove Hoffa’s body to Rolland McMaster’s farm where he was placed in a 55-gallon drum and loaded onto a Gateway Transportation truck, allegedly driven by Gateway long-haul driver Jim Shaw, one of McMaster’s top lieutenants, who drove Hoffa’s body to New Jersey where he was buried near PJP, aka “Brother Moscato’s dump.”
An FBI official asked, "Why drive Hoffa so far? And why keep the body intact?”
I repeated what Moscato had suggested to me—that Tony Provenzano wanted to control Hoffa’s remains which he viewed as a possible bargaining chip.
I then revealed that I knew as a fact that an indicted Mafia figure had tried to use the location of the body to negotiate a plea-bargain deal with the prosecution for an unrelated crime. I added that I did not hear this from some mob guy but rather from a special agent for the FBI.
Also, incorporating my seminal work about Rolland McMaster’s role in Local 299 violence, I explained how Frank Fitzsimmons—upon his election as union president in 1971—had inherited the 1961 IBT constitution in which Hoffa had centralized all power in his own hands, giving him the ability to throw renegade locals into trusteeship, like Detroit’s Local 299.
In other words, Hoffa was closed out institutionally from returning to the presidency of the Teamsters. Consequently, he sought revenge on his enemies.
I discussed Hoffa’s cooperation with a federal grand jury in Detroit, a Senate committee in Washington, D.C., and his shockingly revealing Playboy interview with reporter Jerry Stanecki in June 1975, a month before he vanished.
As the meeting was ending, one of the FBI special agents asked me, “How sure are you that Hoffa’s there?”
To that I replied, “One-hundred percent. I’m all-in.”
I reminded them that the only person who knew the exact location of Jimmy Hoffa’s body was Paul Cappola who buried him. . . . The only person Paul told was his oldest son, Frank. . . . And the only person Frank told was me.
And then, I told the world in an article for The Mob Museum on July 21, 2020.
The cameraman oversteps
Just before the meeting concluded—as we were preparing for our trip to PJP—FBI SA-1 was called out of the room. When he returned, he appeared terribly upset, saying first privately to me and then in front of the others that my cameraman was stopped and questioned outside the FBI field office for filming the building in defiance of what FBI SA-1 had told him.
Upon being confronted, the cameraman said that he was with me.
Consequently, after a successful meeting, I received the blame for the cameraman’s bad behavior.
As all the goodwill we had built over the past ninety minutes appeared in danger of collapsing, I insisted that—“my hand to God”—I had nothing to do with the cameraman’s decision.
On defense, I asked, “Why would I jeopardize everything that [FBI SA-1] and I have created over the past several months—just to get some film of the FBI building?”
Even though tempers cooled and the trip to PJP was still on, the earlier permission we had received to film the DOJ-FBI tour at PJP was revoked.
At PJP with officials from the DOJ and the FBI
About a dozen of us drove to the site in Jersey City where I gave them a portion of the tour that Frank Cappola had given me in September 2019, focusing on the alcove under the bridge.
According to Frank, after his father buried Hoffa, he moved the PJP office-trailer, which was normally parked in the alcove, directly over Hoffa’s unmarked grave.
On several occasions, in writing and during our conversations, I suggested to the FBI that they find the orientation photographs from their December 11, 1975, search at PJP, hoping that one or more of those pictures might confirm the exact location of Hoffa’s remains.
Walking around the alcove, I led the group to the exact spot where the Fox GPR had detected steel drums under the surface in November 2020. I also showed them the location where we believed Paul Cappola’s excavator had created “a ramp,” which was next to what the Fox GPR technician identified as a field of steel drums. As Bob Burke, a key member of our team, surmised, the deeper Cappola dug, the lower he had to position the excavator.
I warned the FBI that the fifteen-to-thirty barrels on top of Hoffa’s oil drum were filled with chemical adhesives that might be toxic and could cause an environmental disaster after the ground above it was cracked, such as a toxic plume or even an explosion.
I added that my team captain, Beaux Carson, had earlier given FBI SA-1 the contact information for two environmental cleanup companies we wanted to use before the FBI stepped in “to control the science.”
As an aside, I asked Detroit Special Agent Marc Silski, the official in charge of the Hoffa cold case, about a rumor I had heard that the FBI had a wiretap of Detroit mobster Tony Palazzolo confessing to his role as Hoffa’s killer.
My friend and colleague, Scott Burnstein, the world’s expert on the Detroit Mafia, was the first to report that story.
The special agent replied, smiling, “I don’t remember.”
I was cool with that answer. Silski and the others would not have flown to New Jersey to see and hear me if they actually had a credible recorded confession from mobster Tony Pal.
Returning to the task at hand, I told SA Silski and FBI SA-1 that, because the alcove was “far off the beaten path,” any excavation could be done quietly and discreetly. In saying that, I insisted that I had a right to be present if and when the excavation occurred.
I reminded them of the FBI debacle in 2006 during the official search of Rolland McMaster’s farm in Wixom, Michigan. Because the FBI did not release federal witness Donald Wells from prison to attend the excavation, federal agents depended on an erroneous diagram of the property, causing the FBI to dig in the wrong place.
Before I left the scene, I repeated that the members of my team and I had refused to make any deals or accept any money from a media organization until the FBI recovered and positively identified Hoffa’s body.
An early review
Speaking of my performance, FBI SA-1 wrote: “Mr. Moldea put on an impressive presentation today which I believe was well received. We now need to digest everything and people in positions much higher than myself will make decisions going forward.”
ENDNOTE
[1] After the meeting, I asked SA Silski for a digital copy of my tape-recorded Local 560 interviews with Briguglio, Andretta, Bufalino, and Provenzano. He agreed to my request and later sent me a CD.
Although I did not witness it, I assumed that FBI SA-1 also gave Special Agent Silski the recording of an interview I did with Phillip Moscato during which he discussed Hoffa’s body at his dump after delivery by a Gateway truck.
Further, I gave FBI SA-1 a July 2013 taped interview I had with Moscato during which he confirmed that “Picardo basically had it right” while corroborating federal witness Don Wells’s claim to me that Tony Pro was in Detroit on the night before Hoffa’s murder.
I told those present that when I heard about the 2013 failed search in Oakland County, Michigan, based on mob boss Tony Zerrilli’s information, I called Moscato and asked him what he thought.
To that Moscato replied, “I think I already told you what happened.”
This story has facts about the Hoffa disappearance that I had never heard. Dan Moldea’s investigative work is “priceless”. There is no question that this mystery will be solved; Dan is unrelenting, has pounding questions, and a superb detective that is not confined by regulations and deference of the “good ole boy” destructive policies that can dwarf the truth.
Brilliant work!