Catalog to the 44-part series of my 48-year investigation of the Jimmy Hoffa murder case
A modern-day Ahab in pursuit of his white whale
When I first started researching the Teamsters and the Mafia as a 24-year-old independent investigative reporter in December 1974, I immediately and intentionally broke a cardinal rule of journalism and took sides. Clearly recognizing the good guys from the bad, I aligned myself with the Teamsters United Rank and File, aka TURF, an old-school but solidly pro-union reform organization which was standing against the corrupt and mobbed-up Teamsters Union.
The following month, Gordon “Mac” McKinley, a TURF leader in Akron, Ohio, and a warehouseman for a local trucking company, introduced me to the Professional Drivers Council on Safety and Health, aka PROD, a spinoff of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen in Washington, D.C. I immediately took PROD’s side, too.
PROD was directed by one of Nader’s most talented attorneys, Arthur Fox, whom I always admired and respected. Arthur’s top deputies, Michael DeBlois and John Sikorski, became two of my closest friends. Before he went to NYU for his law degree, John, a Harvard magna, became PROD’s executive director when Arthur stepped up as the group’s general counsel.
Meantime, during the spring of 1975, I had the honor to meet the legendary Ken Paff, who had earned his undergraduate degree in physics at Berkeley where he was an activist in the university’s famed Free Speech Movement. After abandoning his work towards a Ph.D., Ken moved to Cleveland and led an effort to organize a more progressive, worker-run, rank-and-file-reform organization, Teamsters for a Decent Contract (TDC), which was preparing for the upcoming battle over the union’s National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA) the following year.
Other great reformers associated with the creation of TDC with whom I was acquainted and always respected were Dan La Botz and Bob Grant of Chicago; Mel Packer of Pittsburgh; and Lester Williams, the president of the TURF chapter in Cleveland. Along with Ken, they were all intelligent, tough, and highly principled people. So, predictably, I stood with TDC.
TDC was officially created in August 1975, the month after Jimmy Hoffa disappeared on July 30—which I began investigating from Day One. At the outset, rank-and-file reformers helped me with my work, giving me leads and protection.
After the NMFA negotiations and just before the June 1976 Teamsters Convention in Las Vegas, TDC was renamed, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). That September, the formal TDU founding convention was held at Kent State University where I had earlier gone to graduate school. As with TURF, PROD, and TDC, my loyalty was with TDU.
After Hoffa vanished—and I started working full-time on that murder case, doing free-lance assignments with the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, the Detroit Free Press, and columnist Jack Anderson—I withdrew from Kent State’s master’s program, leaving me with only an undergraduate degree from my beloved alma mater, the University of Akron.
In lieu of writing the required thesis for my advanced degree, I chose instead to write a book about Hoffa’s life and times. Notably, citizen activist Ralph Nader introduced me to my first literary agent, Philip Spitzer, who represented my first major published work.
I dedicated my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, to, among others, “the members of the Teamster rebel movement who have been blackballed, beaten, and killed in their pursuit of a more democratic union.” I chronicled the violent history of the Teamsters’ rank-and-file reform movements in my work, along with the Hoffa murder case.
The Hoffa Wars, published by Paddington Press in August 1978, chronicled the rise and fall of former Teamsters general president Jimmy Hoffa. In this book, according to the Associated Press, I was the first to present the case that Hoffa and two Mafia figures—Carlos Marcello of Louisiana and Santo Trafficante of Florida—were involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A year after my work was published, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations came to the same conclusion in its final report. G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel of the committee, declared: “The mob did it. It’s a historical fact.”
I also revealed new details about the CIA-Mafia plots to murder Cuban premier Fidel Castro, as well as excerpts from my exclusive interviews with the men identified by the FBI as Hoffa's killers, including Salvatore Briguglio, the alleged triggerman. I also exclusively uncovered and disclosed new information about a series of acts of violence in Hoffa’s home local in Detroit—Teamsters Local 299—that preceded Hoffa’s disappearance.
A blatant attempt to suppress my book—detailed in a June 29, 1978, New York Times article—was unsuccessful. Times literary writer Herbert Mitgang wrote, “Publishing lawyers said that the attempted delay of the Moldea book was one of the first examples of [a] possible loss of independence—with implicit censorship—where there is a conflict on a controversial nonfiction book."
The Hoffa Wars was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and excerpted by Playboy. It was syndicated by the New York Times in the United States and worldwide by The Observer of London worldwide.
The book was published in mass market paperback by Grosset and Dunlap in September 1979 after three hardcover printings. It has also been translated into French, Italian, and Japanese.
Retitled, The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa, the book was re-released in January 1993. Open Road Media published the eBook edition in 2015, followed by a trade paperback edition in 2021, as part of its Forbidden Bookshelf series.
Commenting on The Hoffa Wars, the Chicago Tribune described it as being "as extensively researched a volume as one is likely to come across in the field."
The Wall Street Journal wrote, "Mr. Moldea's view of [the Hoffa] wars, which reached its greatest intensity when Robert Kennedy was Attorney General, may explain not only Mr. Hoffa's disappearance but the assassination of John Kennedy as well."
The Washington Post stated, "If Moldea were a prizefighter, he would be a kind of Rocky Graziano. He never, never quits punching. Moldea never relents."
New York magazine wrote that it was "passionate, detailed, and coherent. . . . The superiority of the Moldea book lies in the inherent drama of the unfolding history."
The Christian Science Monitor called it, "well-documented, detailed, and terrifying."
The Village Voice said that the book was "a fascinating inside history of the union, its triumphs and corruption."
The Houston Post stated that The Hoffa Wars was "definitive and will likely serve as the touchstone for all future speculation and books exploring Hoffa's fate."
Convoy, the voice of the Teamsters' rank-and-file reform movement, added, "Moldea provides a very valuable contribution. He helps explain the rank-and-file tradition for today's reform movements. He understands that tradition, because he's no outsider to it."
Below is a catalog of the 44-part series about my investigation of the Teamsters, the Mafia, and the murder of Jimmy Hoffa from December 1974 to February 2014, excerpted from the third edition of my memoir, Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer.
In the coming weeks and months, I will present, in considerable detail, what has happened since 2014.
1/44. Becoming a writer
2/44. Set up in Chicago
3/44. Jimmy Hoffa disappears
4/44. At the Red Fox
5/44. The goon squad
6/44. The Local 299 violence
7/44. Manitoulin Island
8/44. A guerrilla writer in New York
9/44. The man in the black Cadillac
10/44. Dealing with the FBI
11/44. Back to Detroit
12/44. The Hoffa Reward Fund
13/44. A surprise witness at the grand jury
14/44. The payoff man
15/44. Brother in The Bond
16/44. Confronting McMaster
17/44. “Jimmy ran off to Brazil with a black go‑go dancer”
18/44. Calling Sally Bugs at Local 560
19/44. My lunch with Hoffa's alleged killers
20/44. Death threat
21/44. The contract
22/44. To Washington, D.C.
23/44. “Who is Frank Sheeran?”
24/44. "To do two things at once is to do neither"
25/44. The Hoffex Memo
26/44. The killing of the President
27/44. “I think my dad knew Jack Ruby”
28/44. Findings
29/44. Brill and S & S get tough
30/44. Briguglio and I get whacked
31/44. Paddington to the rescue
32/44. The New York Times creates me
33/44. Yes, we have no Central Sanitation
34/44. The U.S. House Assassinations Committee
35/44. Helping TDU and PROD make peace
36/44. “The mob did it. It’s a historical fact.”
37/44. The Paddington bankruptcy
38/44. Fear causes indecision
39/44. Frank Sheeran’s conflicting confessions
40/44. Not a distinction without a difference
41/44. “They’re digging at a farm in Wixom”
42/44. “It’s going to be a great day tomorrow”
Very educative in the psychologies of power building and of cognitive maneuvering for control, in a very slippery environment.
Abilities to perceive others' interests, elements of conflict, deadly errors to avoid, and grounds for success, may be essential.
BUT HOW TO BUILD THESE ABILITIES IN ONE'S DAILY BEING (BEHAVIOR)?