My untold relationship with the FBI in the Jimmy Hoffa murder case (Part 9)
Napco detects a third location in the alcove
Napco and friends, from left to right: Jared DeSantis, Keith McHugh, Mike Ryan, Jenish Vaghani, Jim O’Keefe, James O’Keefe, Kevin O’Keefe, Dan Moldea, Sean O’Keefe, and Bob Burke. . . . In front on the ground is Napco’s sophisticated GPR apparatus, used in two separate searches for Jimmy Hoffa’s remains. (Copyright © Kevin O’Keefe/Napco, June 14, 2022. All rights reserved.)
Introduction to Part 9
This is the ninth 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)
* March 17, 2024: “The FBI executes a search warrant for the alcove” (Part 8)
* April 7, 2024: “Napco detects a third location in the alcove” (Part 9)
Celebrating construction debris
On December 4, 2021, Beaux Carson, our team captain, had a conversation with a source who was close to the FBI investigation—and knew some but not all of what had happened on October 25-26 during the court-authorized search for Jimmy Hoffa in the alcove under the Pulaski Skyway. In his report to me and our showrunner, Ari Mark of Ample Entertainment—who was producing our documentary and had spent a considerable amount of time and money on our project—Beaux wrote:
The FBI used a small excavator and other equipment to dig a series of test-pits or commonly referred to as test-pulls in the environmental industry. These are large holes in the ground.
While digging under the Pulaski Skyway, the FBI encountered/hit a large section of construction debris. The FBI and their team were also digging under extremely poor weather conditions. The weather conditions were so bad the dig-team was wondering why they (the FBI) were digging under such bad conditions.
[During the second day of the search,] the FBI/dig-team stopped. Apparently, the excavator that was being used on-site was too small, not sturdy enough and the arm of the excavator couldn't go deep enough into the pit. Not to mention the excavator could not break-up some of the large pieces of construction concrete/debris that they encountered.
During all of this (the dig) there was a statement made by the dig-team. They said, "there was nothing down there except construction debris".
Hearing that, Beaux believed that the FBI should be celebrating this discovery. He recalled what Frank Cappola had stated in the sworn declaration he executed at my request on October 7, 2019, in which he specifically noted that his father, Paul Cappola, had placed construction debris over the steel barrels, covering the 55-gallon drum that contained Hoffa’s remains.
Beaux was right. Frank wrote in his affidavit:
f. Unidentified people brought Hoffa’s dead body to PJP. Because of the awkward position of Hoffa’s corpse after they removed him from whatever container he was in before, they were unable to place him, feet first, in a 55-gallon steel drum retrieved at PJP. So, they put him in the drum headfirst. Then, they sealed the container. My father saw but never handled Hoffa’s dead body.
g. After those people left, my father likely placed the steel drum containing Hoffa’s body on a front loader. Then, he positioned the drum at the bottom of the large hole my father dug, which was eight-to-fifteen feet deep.
h. I will reveal the exact location of that hole to law enforcement, along with two additional and provable details about that site.
i. My father then placed as many as fifteen to thirty chemical drums in the hole where Hoffa’s body was encased, along with chunks of brick and dirt. (Emphasis added)
j. Notably, as a common practice, the chemical drums would be marked. The steel drum that contained Hoffa’s body was likely not marked.
k. Then, my father covered the grave with a bulldozer, which completed his task. The site was his secret.
Also, during my last trip to the alcove the previous November, I discovered a dumpster filled with construction debris. In fact, the New York Times later published a photograph of me leaning against that dumpster, loaded “with chunks of brick and dirt.“
Beaux contacted FBI SA-1 to remind him of this. FBI SA-1 was my mid-level source with no decision-making power but to whom I had remained loyal since he first contacted me in September 2020. I had introduced the special agent to Beaux, and they developed their own relationship. To be clear, when Beaux spoke to the FBI, he spoke for me.
FBI SA-1 replied verbally, saying, according to Beaux:
“We are not giving up, it's far from over, as you know I can't tell you much, but what I can tell you is this, there are many agents working on this around the clock, many man-hours are being spent, we are taking this very seriously, there are many tests being conducted as we speak and we are we will be returning back to the site.
“You will also be very happy to know when we make our announcement on our findings whatever they may be, that we covered every square-inch of the site and did a thorough job.”
The FBI remains silent
On December 7, 2021, Allan Lengel, the executive editor of Deadline Detroit, a friend of mine for whom I had published several articles over the years, released his filmed interview with Timothy Waters, the outgoing special agent-in-charge of the Detroit field office of the FBI.
In my blog, I wrote:
Allan asked SA Waters about my September 2020 request for an FBI search for Hoffa’s remains at an obscure but specific location in an alcove under the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City—over 600 miles from the scene of his 1975 killing.
Although he does not reveal very much, SA Waters does note that what the bureau has collected—from me and other sources—was sufficient for federal agents and federal prosecutors to execute an affidavit for a requested sealed search warrant.
Upon receipt, a federal judge—on the basis of the strength of the contents of and documentation supporting that sworn declaration—agreed that “probable cause” existed and, thus, approved the request.
In the aftermath of the two-day search in late October by the FBI of my targeted site, SA Waters said that the FBI is using “the latest technology” to arrive at The Truth of this latest drama in the Hoffa case.
On December 19, Beaux Carson received additional information from his source who told him that the FBI was working hard to verify the specific details of Frank Cappola’s affidavit and how his father, Paul Cappola, buried Hoffa in a 55-gallon oil drum and then piled fifteen-to-thirty steel barrels on top of that oil drum.
Beaux said that his source knew as a fact that the FBI did not attempt to find any DNA evidence. Also, he predicted that the long-awaited FBI excavation would likely take place in the spring.
On Christmas Eve, I sent a note to FBI SA-1, saying:
I have turned down every television show on which I have been invited since the news of your search warrant was detailed by the New York Times. I have repeatedly said and written that I do not want to say or do anything that could jeopardize the FBI’s investigation.
By the way, one other thing I’m also saying and writing: “The FBI is doing a great job. I have complete faith that it will arrive at a truthful decision. If this effort does not succeed, the failure will be mine and mine alone. I take full responsibility and will offer no excuses.”
I am also saying: “Success will vindicate the FBI’s 46-year investigation of the Hoffa murder case.” After all, it was the FBI that flipped Ralph Picardo, who started all of this.
Other than offering his best wishes to our team for the holiday season, all we could get out of FBI SA-1 was the following quote: "I’m not allowed to say anything. The FBI is doing a lot of work behind the scenes.”
Nearly three months later, on March 11, 2022—still hearing nothing—I tried to push harder for more information from FBI SA-1, writing to him:
To business: Here’s our theory about what your team is up to behind the scenes. . . .
If you had found nothing in October, you would have been very direct and told us. That’s the kind of honest and direct man you are.
We believe that you have confirmed Frank’s basic story about what is buried in the alcove on state property under the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City—although we cannot figure out whether or not you have discovered and collected The Trophy’s DNA. Obviously, we are hoping that you have—and that you will be returning to the site to dig up the unmarked grave to confirm it . . . if you haven’t done so already.
If you haven’t, I would still appreciate an invitation to be present for that monumental event. With respect, I think that I deserve that.
Further, we believe that your team is not satisfied with simply recovering and identifying The Trophy’s remains. We believe that you are pooling all of your considerable resources into a heroic effort to solve this case once and for all.
In my ongoing attempt to be helpful, if you are interested in Rolland McMaster, Gateway long-haul driver Jim Shaw, and Larry McHenry, I have hours and hours of recorded interviews with them.
BTW: Today—March 11—is the one-year anniversary of our one and only face-to-face meeting in Newark which included that star-studded group you put together.
Later that same day, Beaux spoke to his source who was close to the FBI investigation. He told Beaux that the FBI found “an anomaly” in the alcove that could possibly be Hoffa’s unmarked grave.
From the description Beaux gave me, I assumed that the location was the same as that described by an eyewitness to the FBI search, Isaac Suarez, an employee of the adjacent Interstate Waste Systems, to one of our team’s investigators, Sean Weppner—along with Mike Wilson of the New York Times and me—on November 12, 2021. That perimeter was about twenty yards south of what we called, “The Notch,” an indented portion in the back wall of the Hartz Mountain building.
When Beaux asked about the site discovered during the Fox-GPR test on November 24, 2020, his source told him that the FBI had concluded that what we called “The Foxhole” was empty and had been eliminated from any further consideration.
Three days later, on March 14, correspondent Eric Shawn broadcast the latest of his five-part series of special reports on Fox Nation, the Fox News subscription service, about the Hoffa case. Just as he had done after the FBI search of the alcove was made public, Shawn pretended that I did not exist and had contributed nothing to their investigation, cutting all references to me and my work out of his film.
In fact, without me, Fox had nothing—no interview with Frank Cappola and no invitation to the site for the GPR test. And, just to be clear, I never asked for or received any money from Fox for anything I did.
But, not knowing what we had learned about the Fox-GPR test, Shawn and Fox continued to embrace and promote their good faith but now-secretly discredited GPR search in the alcove.[1]
Napco enters the fray with a secret GPR test
On March 17, 2022, Bob Burke, our team leader in Jersey City, called and shocked the hell out of me. He said that four months earlier on November 16, he had secretly arranged for his friends—Jimmy and Kevin O’Keefe of R.S. Knapp/Napco, aka Napco, their Lyndhurst-based construction company—to perform a very sophisticated GPR scan in the alcove.
Bob and Jimmy O’Keefe had grown up with and were long-time friends of the late Frank Cappola.
On another assignment, Napco had just completed a complicated forensic review, using its high-tech instruments while collecting building data for the investigation of Miami’s tragic Champlain Towers collapse in June 2021.
Bob explained that he had given me “plausible deniability” by not revealing Napco’s GPR examination to me. He did not want to place me at odds with the FBI.
Even though I was completely floored by this news, I immediately remembered that—after my last trip to the site on November 11-13—our team had received evidence that a small group of unknown people had performed a GPR test in the alcove also on November 16.
At the time, we assumed that federal agents had returned to the site after executing their search warrant on October 25-26. In fact, it was Napco acting independently.
After hearing what Bob had told me, I was not exactly clear on where Napco discovered what its technicians believed were steel barrels in the alcove.
When I asked for the GPR test results, Bob replied that Napco’s crew detected anomalies consistent with steel barrels at a location several yards from the site detected by Fox News.
Bob added that he had been in contact with Marc Silski of the FBI’s field office in Detroit. Silski was the special agent-in-charge of the Hoffa murder case. I had met SA Silski at the joint Detroit-Newark conclave on March 11, 2021, at which I presented my evidence to the DOJ and the FBI.
A few days later, SA Silski called and asked me to introduce him to Bob. I had discussed Bob and Frank’s long-time friendship at our 2021 conclave.
During their first conversation in March 2021, Bob and SA Silski got along well. While they were chatting, Bob made it clear that he was a member of my team.
Further, Bob had arranged for Kevin O’Keefe and two other Napco executives to speak with SA Silski during a conference call on March 20, 2022.
Significantly, Beaux Carson and I had been dealing exclusively with FBI SA-1, and I feared that adding SA Silski to the mix could complicate our delicate relationship with FBI SA-1—whom we knew was reporting to SA Silski.
But I was not in a position to complain. Bob, Kevin, and Napco had done something truly extraordinary by taking the initiative and giving our investigation a new lease on life.
Unlike the GPR apparatus used to discover “The Foxhole,” Napco’s more advanced technology allowed their technicians to see thirty-plus feet below the surface. Lesser GPR machines, like the one used by Fox, cannot see that deep.
On my team, Beaux and Bob were still at odds. Consequently, both were giving me information that they did not want me to share with the other.
For instance, Bob did not want me to tell Beaux about his dealings with SA Silski in Detroit—who oversaw the Hoffa case. Beaux demanded that I keep secret the information he was receiving from his contacts close to the Newark field office of the FBI, as well as what little information we were specifically receiving from FBI SA-1, our mid-level source who had no decision-making power.
Napco’s second search confirms the first
By April 14, 2022, FBI SA-1 was still not returning the calls from either Beaux or me, so we speculated that something big was about to happen.
I asked Bob to return to the alcove to evaluate the situation. The pictures Bob took and sent to me were absolutely stunning. The alcove was completely clear of all dumpsters, and the ground therein had been flattened by a bulldozer. Also, a single orange plastic traffic cone had been placed exactly where Isaac Suarez of Interstate Waste Systems told us that the FBI had taken soil and core samples on October 26.
Several cameras, presumably placed by the FBI, were on the back wall of the Hartz Mountain building pointed at the alcove.
On April 19, Bob Burke called and told me that Napco’s Jimmy and Kevin O’Keefe had performed a second GPR examination earlier that day in the alcove, adding that they had detected what appeared to be twelve randomly placed steel barrels in a fifteen-foot hole.
This was the fourth GPR scan at the site. . . . The first was the Fox-GPR on November 24, 2020. The second was the FBI’s court-authorized search on October 25-26, 2021. The third was Napco’s first GPR search on November 16, 2021. And now the fourth was Napco’s second examination on April 19, 2022.
But the even bigger news was that the two GPR technicians working for Napco had done blind studies, separate independent tests at different times. And, with the second tech man not knowing the location of the detection of steel barrels from the November 2021 search, he came to the same conclusion during his April 2022 search.
To be sure, Napco was not suggesting that its scans had detected Jimmy Hoffa's body. However, those scans appeared to confirm the information that Frank Cappola had given to me exclusively in September 2019 about how his father, Paul Cappola, had buried Hoffa in the alcove.
Two days later, Bob sent me five underground scans from Napco’s April 2022 GPR test. According to my notes on April 21, Paul Cappola, who had allegedly buried the 55-gallon drum containing Hoffa’s body, had used an excavator to dig at an angle so that he could easily lower the Hoffa drum and the additional steel barrels into the deep hole. I chronicled:
Bob explained that Paul Cappola, Sr., when he buried Hoffa, used his excavator to create a 45-degree ramp which began at the access road and pushed north to what is “Location #1” on the photographs, which is the lowest point in the hole. . . . The drums are detectable—12 of them, randomly dropped in the hole.
Near the ramp, Napco detected a 10-foot-by-3-foot test pit where the FBI gathered soil samples.
Without knowing the results of the November 2021 test, Napco’s new GPR technician’s test independently discovered the exact same site where the first technician had detected buried steel drums six months earlier.
That same night, Bob sent me Napco’s entire seventeen-page report—which included all the underground scans. I spent the evening reading the report and shaking my head in complete awe and with total respect. . . . I think I even had tears in my eyes because I believed that our long journey had finally come to an end.
The following day, April 22, Kevin O’Keefe sent the scans to SA Marc Silski at the FBI’s Detroit field office. . . . The scans were not sent to FBI SA-1 in Newark—and that would later cause some real problems.
On June 8, Bob Burke invited me to come to New Jersey to meet Kevin and Jimmy O’Keefe, along with the other members of the Napco operation.
I asked Bob and Kevin if I could invite Mike Wilson of the New York Times, whose aggressive and courageous reporting on this case was truly “fair and balanced.” Of course, they wanted me to extend the invitation to Mike.
On June 14, I took the train to New Jersey and attended a private briefing that Napco arranged. Mike Wilson was present and had brought along a New York Times photographer, Bryan Anselm, whom I had met with Mike at the alcove on November 12.
Napco’s top people provided an impressive presentation of its GPR operations and findings for November 16, 2021, and April 19, 2022, along with their grand display of the underground scans and other 3-D photographs of the alcove.
On June 29, after receiving an invitation from the newspaper’s high command, Bob and Kevin visited Mike Wilson and his editor at the New York Times Building on the west side of Midtown Manhattan. They answered their questions and showed them their documentation.
From the outset, Mike and The Times were properly skeptical but thoroughly interested and always independent.
On June 28, the day before Napco’s meeting with The Times, I debased myself again with FBI SA-1, laying out my latest plea for more information and my request to be invited to the denouement:
I’m pretty sure that you will agree that I have been good and helpful. And I have been loyal.
I have done everything you asked me to do. And I haven’t done anything you told me not to do.
I have never gone over your head or attempted to go around you in order to obtain information from any of your colleagues, including but not limited to Marc in Detroit and Grady in Newark.
I decided months ago that I am going to leave the prom with the one who brought me. And that’s you.
From the outset, I have wanted you and me to make history together.
Meantime, I have been doing everything humanly possible to hold together my excellent and ever-growing team while none of us have asked for or received any money for our group project—until your team, aka “the good guys,” recovers and positively identifies “The Trophy.”
As I have always said, when you communicate with Beaux, our team captain, you are communicating with me.
And, of course, I am still hoping that I will be invited to The Grand Finale. . . .
But, for the moment, I am asking if you can get permission to give me some sort of a status report—personally.
Thank you, as always, for your consideration.
What I did not realize when I sent that message was that the FBI had already come and gone—and were already hanging me out to dry. . . .
NEXT IN PART 10: “The FBI dug in the wrong place”
ENDNOTE
[1] On April 23, 2022, Eric Shawn invited respected author and investigator Scott Burnstein on his weekend news program to solicit his opinion about the FBI’s current investigation.
From the outset of my disclosure about Frank Cappola’s information, Burnstein—the world’s expert on the Detroit Mafia and one of the top experts on the Hoffa case—was doubtful that the FBI would find Hoffa’s remains in Jersey City. But, qualifying this, Scott replied to Eric on camera:
I'll put it at 50-50. And the only reason I give it 50 percent validity is because of Dan Moldea. A lot of this is coming from, or all this is coming from Dan Moldea’s research and reporting and his interview with Brother [Phillip] Moscato. And it brings us back to the former site of the PJP Landfill, where the feds were in subsequent months after Hoffa disappeared in July 1975. . . . Now, 47 years later, we're back looking at that property again. . . . Dan's the godfather on this. And Dan kind of brought us here. You guys [at Fox] obviously helped along the way, but this is the best tip that the FBI's gotten in ten years.
On May 18—as public confidence was growing that Hoffa's remains might soon be found and recovered—I received an email from a top executive producer at Fox Nation with an attached complaint signed by him and five other Fox News employees, including Eric Shawn.
The document made numerous false and misleading claims about my relationship with Fox and my work during the Hoffa investigation.
In my opinion, it was a smear letter, cynically attempting to minimize my role in this case while dishonestly inflating Fox News’s contributions. Once again, without me, Fox had nothing—no interview with Frank Cappola and no invitation to the site for the GPR test.
Great,with meticulous detail.