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Fifty years ago today, at 2:30 p.m. in the parking lot of a Bloomfield Hills, Michigan restaurant, Jimmy Hoffa vanished. He was seen getting into a Maroon Mercury and disappeared forever, starting one of the greatest mysteries in American history.
Hoffa’s family is asking President Donald Trump to make public all the Hoffa case FBI files to find out what the government knows and has kept hidden for half-a-century to finally provide the answers to the iconic case.
“I call on President Trump to release the Hoffa files once and for all,” said Hoffa’s son, James P. Hoffa. Hoffa sat down for an exclusive interview for the final two episodes of the Fox Nation series “Riddle: The Search for James R. Hoffa with Eric Shawn.”
“Let’s find out what really happened. President Trump, release the files,” Hoffa said. “I don’t know what’s in those files. That’s why we have to have them released, and the American public, the Teamsters union, the Teamsters union members, our family deserve it, and I think you’ll do it.”
JIMMY HOFFA’S SON: WHO KILLED MY DAD, WHY, AND WHAT IT DID TO MY FAMILY
Tens of thousands of pages of FBI reports, interviews and summations, such as the 1976 “HOFFEX Memo,” which documented what the bureau knew at the time, have been released by the FBI or obtained through reporters’ Freedom of Information Act requests.
But Hoffa pointed out that a vast amount of material remains redacted, blacked out, making it difficult to determine vital information and identities.
“They say it’s still an ongoing case, and when you get the material from the FBI, it’s all redacted, you can’t read it,” he said.
In 1989, his sister, Barbara Crancer, filed a federal lawsuit against the Justice Department to pry open the 69 volumes of documents and memorandums about her father’s case that were in the government’s possession. But the DOJ even refused to provide an index of what it had.
“You can sit forever clipping newspaper articles and waiting for deathbed confessions,” Crancer said at the time. She hoped the release would provide “an ending.”
Crancer and The Detroit Free Press obtained several thousand pages in 2002 after the newspaper spent a decade pursuing the case and sued the Department of Justice twice. Pulitzer Prize-winning Detroit Free Press reporter David Ashenfelter was part of that effort and tells Fox Nation that it is long past time for the government to release the Hoffa files.
“The FBI knows as much as it’s ever going to know about the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. I doubt that it’s ever going to prosecute anyone, so it should tell his family what it knows. But as we’ve seen, the government is slow to give up its secrets,” he said.
In 2021, as part of the “Riddle, The Search for James R. Hoffa” series, Fox Nation reported on the push by then-New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, now the Trump administration Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency, to get the FBI files released. He filed a formal congressional request to open the Hoffa files to the public.
“It would be fantastic closure for the Hoffa family, for those who knew him, and for the American public,” he said. “Declassification should have been done years ago.”
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Zeldin submitted a “Congressional Mandatory Declassification Review,” but the request was turned down, as were the others.
The FBI routinely cites the fact that the Hoffa investigation remains an open, ongoing case and that the bureau cannot compromise the case by releasing classified material.
The latest episode of “Riddle: The Search for James R. Hoffa” reports that investigators and observers have narrowed Hoffa’s killers down to two members of the Detroit Mafia, Vito “Billy Jack” Giacalone and Anthony “Tony Pal” Palazzolo.
James P. Hoffa told Fox Nation that he believes Giacalone picked up his father in the car that day to drive him to the location where he was murdered. He blames Giacalone and his older brother, Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone, for being the mobsters behind the killing, along with then-Teamsters Union president Frank Fitzsimmons.
“The only way to stop him was to kill him.”
Hoffa was planning to reclaim the presidency of the Teamsters union by challenging Fitzsimmons, but Hoffa’s son said Fitzsimmons and the mob decided to kill his father to prevent him from taking back the union. Hoffa was vowing to rid the Teamsters of the organized crime elements that he accused Fitzsimmons of permitting to run rampant in the union. The mob was making hundreds of millions of dollars from the union’s billion-dollar Central State pension fund that Hoffa said Fitzsimmons loaned to the mob to help build Las Vegas.
Fox Nation reports the new claim that an informant told the FBI that he was present when Hoffa was killed and said that Vito “Billy Jack” Giacalone murdered Hoffa. Such information would likely have been documented in the FBI records, but so far the information has not been released.
Detroit mob reporter Scott Burnstein, who runs Gangsterreport.com, has reported that “Billy Jack’s” brother, “Tony Jack,” told his fellow gangsters that another mobster, Anthony “Tony Pal” Palazzolo, killed Hoffa. Burnstein, and others, believe that both “Billy Jack” and “Tony Pal” were the Mafia hit time who drove Hoffa to where he was killed, most likely a house owned by Detroit Mobster Carlo Licata.
“They actually got together to kill him because they couldn’t stop him any other way,” Hoffa said. “The only way to stop him was to kill him.”
Giacalone’s son, Jackie Giacalone, has told Fox Nation that he does not know what happened to Hoffa, and Palazzolo’s family did not comment to Fox Nation.
The FBI will not comment on the claims, citing the ongoing investigation that remains an open case.
But that is not stopping the Hoffa family from continuing its decades-long quest to have the files finally made public.
“My sister was very active in trying to bring a lawsuit to get all the records from the FBI regarding the disappearance. And we’ve worked very hard on keeping the case alive. We keep in contact with the FBI,” he said. “But it doesn’t bring him back.”
He said every July 30 is difficult for him, his sister, and their family. They are marking the 50th anniversary of the disappearance privately.
“It’s a hard day. We always spend time thinking of it. I mark my calendar every year and realize that it is a special time, a time to remember and also to say, remember all the bad things that happened, and the fact is that I had a great father, and he did a great job raising our family.”
And without the final answers that he said could come with Trump releasing the FBI files, the Hoffas are left with an emotional emptiness.
“We don’t have closure. To this day, we don’t have closure because we don’t have a grave, and it’s amazing what that means to people,” he said. “We have a hole in our heart right now because we don’t know what happened to him, and we don’t have closure on his disappearance.”
Watch all eight episodes of “Riddle: The Search for James R. Hoffa,” now streaming on Fox Nation.
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