My untold relationship with the FBI in the Jimmy Hoffa murder case (Part 7)
"The Mystery Mound"
Photo: “The Mystery Mound,” July 28, 2021 (Copyright © Bob Burke 2021)
Introduction to Part 7
This is the seventh 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)
* March 10, 2024: “The Mystery Mound” (Part 7)
A quick summary of Parts 1-6:
* 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.
* On March 11, 2021, a special agent for the FBI arranged for me to meet with a group of DOJ and FBI officials at the FBI field office in Newark. After the meeting, we went to the alcove under the Pulaski Skyway where I reconstructed the tour that Frank Cappola had given me in September 2019.
A call from the top guy
After he first contacted me about the Jimmy Hoffa murder case in September 2020, FBI SA-1, my designated mid-level FBI contact, was the only active FBI agent with whom I communicated. I had decided to remain loyal to the agent who brought me into the action.
Seeing how hard he was working—including arranging my meeting with DOJ and FBI officials from Detroit and Newark at the Newark field office on March 11, 2021—I never went around him or over his head to speak with anyone else with more influence and power.
On April 9, a month after our meeting in Newark, FBI Special Agent Marc Silski of Detroit, the lead agent on the Hoffa cold case whom I had met in Newark, called. Among other requests, he wanted me to introduce him to Bob Burke, our key team member in New Jersey who had known Frank Cappola since they were children.
Without asking SA Silski why he wanted to speak to Bob, I simply passed along his message.
After their conversation, Bob, a successful businessman and already a trusted friend of mine, reported to me that he and Silski had a long and friendly conversation but added that Silski had not given him any new information.
On April 29, a law-enforcement official told Beaux Carson, our team captain, that his office had received information that the FBI had declared the PJP site as an official crime scene.
Of course, the FBI refused to confirm it.
The following day, Beaux and I asked Bob to check out the location. After he returned, Bob called and said that he entered the property with no problem. In addition, he had shot some videos. They showed that half of the alcove was cluttered with dumpsters—although they, remarkably, appeared organized. He noted that some of the dumpsters had markings, such as “X2,” “X4,” and “X5.”
My homages to the FBI
On May 20, I published an homage to the FBI on my blog, writing:
I would like to have a dollar for every person who has said to me during the past 46 years, “Hey Ahab, the Mafia would have never murdered the White Whale in Detroit and then shipped him for burial 650 miles east to the PJP Landfill, aka ‘Brother Moscato’s Dump,’ under the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City.”
As everyone who has been following my current Ahab-White Whale slow-speed chase knows, I have bet everything I have that this is exactly what happened.
In fact, five months after the July 1975 killing, the FBI was the first to legitimize this theory.
Based on the statements of Ralph Picardo, a flipped federal witness, U.S. prosecutors and FBI special agents sought and obtained a search warrant for the PJP Landfill and served it on PJP’s owner/operators, Phillip Moscato and Paul Cappola, on December 11, 1975, ostensibly looking for Armand Faugno, a murdered mobbed-up Jersey City loan shark.
To be sure though, based on Picardo’s information, federal agents were actually looking for the White Whale. The problem was that they did not have a specific location for his unmarked grave in the 53-acre landfill.
But thanks to my main source—the late-Frank Cappola, the oldest son of PJP co-owner Paul Cappola—I have now given an exact location to federal investigators, which is about 150 yards from the site they searched in 1975.
So, if confirmed, the FBI’s 46-year investigation will be vindicated.
Three days later, on May 23, I published a second homage to the FBI, explaining:
Phillip Moscato—a soldier in the Vito Genovese crime family and the co-owner of “Brother Moscato’s Dump,” aka PJP Landfill—died in February 2014. I had promised him that I would not reveal the details of our recorded interviews between 2007 and 2014 until after he was gone.
Among other things during those conversations, Moscato, whom I respected, told me that the FBI’s key witness, Ralph Picardo, "basically had it right,” indicating that Jimmy Hoffa was buried at the Jersey City landfill he co-owned and co-operated with Paul Cappola—the same 53-acre area that the FBI had searched in December 1975, five months after Hoffa vanished.
I chose to publish this astonishing confirmation on July 30, 2015—the 40th anniversary of Hoffa’s disappearance—in Jerry Capeci’s popular anti-Mafia publication, Gang Land News.
Notably, in that story, I credited the FBI with being right about the location of Hoffa’s remains in 1975—even though federal agents did not have an exact location for the unmarked grave.
In addition, we spoon-fed the . . . story to the New York Daily News, which ran it under the headline: “EXCLUSIVE: NEW EVIDENCE EMERGES ON JIMMY HOFFA'S POSSIBLE FATE, SUGGESTS FEDS WERE ON RIGHT TRACK SEARCHING N.J. DUMP.”
Once again, Paul Cappola personally buried Hoffa’s body at PJP. The only person he told just before his death in 2008 was his oldest son, Frank Cappola. And the only person Frank, who died in March 2020, told was me in September 2019.
Frank, who executed a sworn statement at my request, pledged his full cooperation with federal investigators. He also offered to submit to a polygraph test—which he did not live long enough to take.
Earlier this year, complying with Frank’s wishes, I gave the details—including the exact location that Frank showed me on film during our tour of PJP on September 29, 2019—to the law-enforcement community. It was about 150 yards from the site they searched in December 1975.
As I have said repeatedly, if true, this will vindicate the FBI’s 46-year investigation of Hoffa’s murder.
Revisiting the 2020 Fox GPR test
On July 23, while I was finishing my latest article for The Mob Museum, I asked FBI SA-1 if he could give me a statement in the aftermath of the Newark meeting. He authorized the following quote: “I have met with the FBI, and I have given them everything I have. In my opinion, they are taking this information seriously.”
On July 28, in my summary of events for the 46th anniversary of Hoffa’s murder, I published, among other news, my version of the GPR examination nine months earlier. The story included details of my messy situation with Fox News which arranged the test.[1]
On November 24, 2020, a cameraman from my production company and I met [Fox correspondent Eric] Shawn and the Fox team at PJP. However, the top Fox producer, who never spoke to me about the location, had arranged for the wrong area under the bridge to be cleared of steel dumpsters.
After I pointed out what appeared to be a fatal error for our mission that day, I received word from the Fox producer that the waste-disposal company had refused Fox’s request to take the time and manpower to atone for Fox’s mistake.
Because of this situation, I was badly shaken. I had everything riding on a successful outcome of the GPR review. If the search came up empty, regardless of the state of the site, I assumed that my project was dead. . . .
About 20 minutes into the GPR examination and working in the area that I had pointed out, the technician detected what appeared to be steel barrels under a path between two of the dumpsters at a location 12 feet to the north and three feet to the east, which was blocked farther east by a heavy seven-foot-high dumpster.
The Fox producer, who had earlier arranged for the wrong area to be emptied immediately redeemed himself by somehow arranging for the removal of several dumpsters that were obstructing the location where the barrels were detected.
After that limited area was cleared and the GPR technician went back to work, the 12-foot-by-three-foot perimeter of steel barrels stretched to 12-by-15. Shawn and I, along with everyone else present, were cautiously jubilant.
The New York Times enters the fray
Also on July 28, I received a call from Mike Wilson, a respected veteran reporter for the New York Times. My team’s award-winning showrunner, Ari Mark, the co-owner of Ample Entertainment who was planning to produce our documentary, had introduced us earlier in the month.
According to my notes:
Mike Wilson from the NYT called. He was in Jersey City and en route to PJP. I stayed on the phone [with] him and steered him to “The Spot.” When he arrived, he said that the area was almost devoid of dumpsters. He wanted to know [where] “The Spot” was, and I sent him a photograph. When he sent me back a photograph, I was stunned.
At “The Spot,” . . . there was a large mound which [looked] fifteen feet to the north and south, ten feet east and west and about four feet high. The ground had clearly been dug up and then filled in with dirt and debris that was not from that area. Mike said that it looked like a dump truck had come in and dump a load. . . .
I told Mike that [he] might be witnessing history.
Photographers from the New York Times also came to the site to take pictures and film of The Mound and the surrounding area.
I contacted my team and gave them a report. All of us were completely baffled.
Was this part of some elaborate soil analysis by the FBI? Had there been an excavation? And, if so, had anything been removed—like thirty steel barrels or even a body stuffed in a 55-gallon oil drum?
I made an official inquiry to the FBI, asking if federal investigators had authorized whatever drama had occurred at the site. To my surprise, I could get neither a confirmation nor a denial.
On August 4, I spoke again with Mike Wilson, who told me that he had just contacted the public affairs officer at the FBI field office in Detroit, asking if they had engaged in any kind of activity in the alcove under the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City. To my complete shock, the FBI denied it on the record.
Fearing that something unauthorized had occurred, I decided to go to PJP the next morning.
On August 5, I took the train to Jersey City. Bob Burke—who had injured his head from a fall during his last trip to the site on July 28—picked me up. We drove to the alcove to examine the area. But when we arrived, The Mound was gone, completely flattened. The dirt and debris that once formed The Mound had been pushed, apparently by a bulldozer, to the north, near the Hartz Mountain building.
Still, while at the site, I took 70 still photographs and eighteen videos.
On August 6, I wrote a report to our team, noting that The Mound was just a few feet away from the perimeter detected by the Fox-GPR test the previous November.
I shared my report with FBI SA-1, who, seeing my concern and knowing that I was ready to take some action, assured me that The Mound had been a legitimate creation. But he refused to tell me anything else.
After hearing that, Beaux Carson spoke with one of his own law-enforcement sources who told him that the FBI had collected and analyzed soil samples which confirmed that the ground in the alcove was contaminated.
In our minds, the source of the contamination was a load of as many as thirty steel barrels filled with toxic chemicals—leaking during the past 46 years—that Paul Cappola had buried on top of the 55-gallon drum that still contained Jimmy Hoffa.
However, it was still unclear who had removed The Mound—although the FBI did not appear alarmed that The Mound was gone.
Along with the FBI, our other top suspects for flattening The Mound were the New Jersey Department of Transportation, which controlled everything on and under the Pulaski Skyway, and Interstate Waste Systems, which parked its dumpsters in the alcove with the DOT's permission.
Beaux and Bob
On September 3, neither Beaux Carson nor I could reach FBI SA-1. Even though he rarely told us anything, he always gave us the courtesy of a return call.
Beaux and I assumed that the FBI was engaged in some secret operation. We believed that FBI SA-1, an honest and decent man, had gone silent because he could not tell us the truth and did not want to tell us a lie. Consequently, he was simply not responding.
That same day, Bob Burke, who had visited me in Washington the previous week, again returned to the site. He saw two men surveying the area for a private construction company. Bob concluded that they were likely doing work related to a project to repair a nearby exit ramp off the Pulaski Skyway. In other words, it had nothing to do with us.
However, while at the site the following day, a security guard from the adjacent Interstate Waste Service spoke with Bob.
According to my notes:
[The security guard] explained that, during the past six weeks, the FBI had been all [over] the area. He added that they entered the Interstate offices, flashing badges. He also said that they had secured the area in the alcove that we suspect is the location of The Trophy.
To us, this was further confirmation that the FBI was exploring and testing the ground in the alcove.
On September 14, I sent FBI SA-1 an email, saying:
[M]y team is on standby, remaining quiet, staying loyal, and operating in good faith, as promised.
Notably, as I have told you before, my luggage is still packed and sitting in my living room. I am waiting for “the call,” telling me to come up there for the grand finale, which will, no doubt, last for several days.
I’m hoping that my guest invitation will be from soup to nuts—beginning to end—regardless of how many days it takes.
If there is anything we can do for you between now and then, please tell Beaux or me.
“Plausible deniability”
A private dispute erupted between Beaux Carson and Bob Burke. When I tried to intervene and make peace, both of them told me to back off, explaining that they were giving me “plausible deniability.”
Bob would only tell me that a close friend of his had a construction company with a division that specialized in ground-penetrating-radar examinations. He said that his friend offered to finance our team’s next GPR test of the site.
Bob had set the date of our GPR assessment for September 23.
Before making my reservation on Amtrak, Beaux and I asked Bob to return to PJP to see if the dumpsters were cluttering the alcove. If so—as they were for the Fox test the previous November—the new GPR examination would be pointless until the dumpsters were removed.
Obliging, Bob took photographs of the site and sent them to Beaux and me. All three of us agreed that, once again, the configuration of dumpsters appeared to be well organized and that someone—presumably the FBI and/or its subcontractors—had created a blind where federal agents could move in heavy equipment and work without being seen from the little road that ran east and west under the bridge.
Further complicating matters, the weather forecast called for heavy rain in Jersey City on September 23.
Because of the bad weather and the possibility of angering the FBI, I decided that I wanted better weather and more information. Consequently, I asked Bob to postpone his GPR until September 27—a four-day delay.
Bob became angry with me for the sudden change of plans after he made his complicated arrangement with the GPR company. Consequently, neither Beaux nor I could reach Bob by phone, email, or text.
The FBI’s 2006 mistake
On September 23—fearing that the FBI was not going to invite me to the grand finale—I posted a blog about the FBI’s little-known 2006 mistake when it did not invite its key source to be present at the excavation of the crime scene—an event that I noted to my audience during our March 2021 meeting in Newark.
Over the past 46 years, I have watched the FBI and its important work on the Jimmy Hoffa murder case—up close and personal. Since his disappearance in July 1975, I have shadowed and sourced the bureau’s investigations and every public excavation, much of which was chronicled in my 1978 book. Although to date, none of those digs have been successful, all of them were legitimate, possessing the necessary timelines and casts of characters to make them credible. . . . There are no exceptions.
In all of that time, I have witnessed the FBI make only one bad mistake.
In May 2006, the FBI served a search warrant on the owner of a farm in Wixom, Michigan. . . . Trucking executive Donovan Wells—doing time in a Lexington, Kentucky, federal prison for hauling marijuana—was the source of the information upon which the warrant was based. Among several other major revelations, Wells gave the FBI a lead about a large hole dug at the farm shortly before Hoffa vanished. At that time, the farm was owned by Rolland McMaster, one of the top suspects of the FBI’s investigation and the biggest target of my own investigation since Day One in 1975.
But, instead of releasing Wells and escorting him to the site to help with the FBI’s search, FBI special agents decided to keep him in prison, instructing him to draw a diagram of the farm and the specific location of the pre-dug hole. Significantly, Wells had passed a polygraph test arranged by the FBI.
So, without Wells present, the FBI determined from the diagram alone that the pre-dug hole was beneath a recently constructed barn, which the FBI proceeded to tear down, looking for trace evidence. . . . Nothing was found.
In August 2009, I visited Don Wells—who had been released from prison and whom I had first interviewed in 1976—at his home in Walled Lake, Michigan. The first thing I requested was a copy of the diagram he had given the FBI. . . . To my surprise, the diagram was poorly drawn and confusing, so I suggested that we, along with his wife, drive out to the farm.
When we arrived, Don and I examined the diagram and went to its key notation—the intersection of a dirt road and a set of railroad tracks. Then, Don showed me the exact location of the pre-dug hole, which was east of the intersection. However, the location of the new barn, which the FBI had rebuilt for the owner, was the same distance but west of the intersection.
In other words, the FBI had dug in the wrong place. This unfortunate mistake by the bureau could have been avoided if they had simply invited their main source to participate at the site of the excavation.
My request to the FBI for a little information
On October 19, Bob Burke sent me a message, assuring me that all was well between us and that he had taken a brief hiatus to attend to his family and business responsibilities. That was a huge relief.
Six days later, on October 25, I sent FBI SA-1 an email, saying:
To business: Even though I am completely in the dark, I am doing everything I can to hold my team together. As promised, none of us has accepted any money until The Trophy is recovered and positively identified. And we have done nothing to jeopardize whatever you are doing. . . .
I get the one-way street thing—although back in 1975-1978, I was the trusted beneficiary of a little more two-way traffic. . . .
[C]ould you give me any indication of how much longer we have to wait. Another week before the weather gets bad? Another month? Another year?
FBI SA-1 simply replied:
I apologize that I cannot share details about what goes on behind the scenes, those are my orders and there are reasons which need to remain confidential. This has nothing to do with you.
To be completely honest, we have and remain extremely engaged in the matter. I appreciate your patience and I can sense your frustration.
ENDNOTE
[1] Dan E. Moldea, The Mob Museum, “The Jimmy Hoffa Disappearance: The 46th Anniversary,” July 28, 2021. (Part Three)
Excellent series about the real Jimmy Hoffa Story!
This is getting into material that the public would never know or find out about. I thoroughly enjoy Dan's investigative research. Absolutely top shelf. "It is so good; it makes me want to put things back that I never stole." Thank you Dan.