Labor leader Jimmy Hoffa's fate remains a mystery

First of all, he's dead. On that, pretty much everyone agrees.\nBut 27 years after James Riddle Hoffa set off for lunch and found oblivion, instead, his remains have not been found. No one has been arrested for the union leader's murder. His final moments remain a secret, kept by a few.\nLike Amelia Earhart, like Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa may be missing forever.\n"Unfortunately, this has the markings of a great 'whodunit' novel without the final chapter," prosecutor David Gorcyca said last week. New DNA evidence, he said, was not enough to support state criminal charges in Hoffa's disappearance.\nThere have been allegations that his body is entombed in concrete near section 107 of Giant Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands, or ground up and thrown to the fishes in a Florida swamp or obliterated in a mob-owned fat-rendering plant that has since burned down. After more than a quarter century, the Hoffa trail is a cold one.\nThe 16,000-page FBI file on Hoffa's disappearance -- case number HQ 9-60052 -- remains open. At this point, the feds have been investigating his death nearly as long as they investigated him in life.\nThe Teamsters have a storied history of corrupt leaders: Dave Beck, who took the Fifth Amendment in congressional testimony 142 times; Roy Williams, convicted of conspiring to bribe a U.S. senator; Jackie Presser, who died before he could face charges that he embezzled $700,000 from a Teamsters local.\nNone had Hoffa's notoriety.\nA ninth-grade dropout, he led his first job action at age 18 when a boss at a food warehouse fired two of his co-workers for getting dinner. Hoffa's men refused to unload a perishable shipment of strawberries, and management soon capitulated.\nHoffa took charge of the Teamsters in 1957. He earned the loyalty of his members with contracts that improved their standard of living dramatically. It was under Hoffa that the Teamsters won their first national trucking contract.\nHe also earned the enmity of Robert F. Kennedy. First as counsel to a congressional committee investigating the unions, then as attorney general, Kennedy went after Hoffa. In those early days of television, viewers watched the baby-faced Kennedy spar with the brutish, fireplug-like Hoffa, whom he accused of corruption and mob connections.\nIt took a while, but Kennedy won. In 1967, Hoffa went to jail, sentenced to 13 years for jury tampering and fraud, but he refused to give up the Teamsters presidency. Only after he quit the job in 1971 did Richard Nixon pardon him.\nFrom the moment he was released, he agitated to get his job back.\nThat may have doomed him. The mob had worked out a comfortable arrangement with Hoffa's successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, and was resistant to change.\nIt is believed that "Hoffa was killed by the mob because he wanted to make a comeback and recapture the presidency," says crime writer Thomas L. Jones.\nJones says at about 1:15 p.m. of June 30, 1975, Hoffa left his summer home at Big Square Lake, 40 miles north of Detroit.\nHe told his wife, Josephine, that he was going to meet with Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone, a figure in the Detroit mob; it is also believed that Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamsters leader, was in on the meeting.\nHoffa went to the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township and waited in the parking lot. At 2:30 p.m., he called his wife -- had Giacalone called to say he was going to be late? Jones says a real estate salesman stopped to chat.\nAnd then Hoffa vanished.\n"Maybe he took a little trip," said Giacalone when he heard the news.\nAn FBI memo theorizes that Hoffa got into a 1975 maroon Mercury Brougham owned by Joey Giacalone, Anthony's son, and driven by Chuckie O'Brien, a trusted friend whom Hoffa had taken in as a child.\nO'Brien denies it -- he says he used the car to deliver a frozen salmon to a local Teamsters official. A year ago, the FBI found that DNA taken from a hair found in the car matched hair taken from Hoffa's brush.\nHoffa probably thought he was being taken to another site where he would meet Giacalone and Provenzano. The car's actual destination, and the method by which Hoffa met his demise, are all conjecture.\nThe supermarket tabloid Weekly World News reported that "Jimmy Hoffa Was Turned Into Dog Food!" Of course, on another occasion, the paper claimed: "Jimmy Hoffa Fled to Mexico For a Sex-Change Operation! Teamsters Boss Wasn't Murdered -- But He Isn't the Man He Used to Be!"\nIn the same way Judge Crater's disappearance inspired countless jokes in the 1920s -- smart alecks would arrange for the New York City jurist to be paged in public places -- Hoffa's vanishing act has been fodder for humorists.\nJohnny Carson claimed that when they removed evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker's makeup, they found Jimmy Hoffa underneath. Someone penned a mafia Valentine: "Lie down with me -- It's my final offa, Or you'll be lying wit' Jimmy Hoffa."\nMore recently, there was the Jimmy Hoffa computer virus: Once infected, your program will never be found again.\nAnd that seems to be Hoffa's fate.\nTony Pro and Tony Jack are dead -- Provenzano of a heart attack in prison, Giacalone of heart and kidney problems at age 82. Salvatore Briguglio, listed by the FBI as a suspect, was rubbed out in front of a Mulberry Street restaurant in New York's Little Italy in 1978.\nEven Machus Red Fox is gone -- it folded in 1996.\nOnly the Hoffa mystique remains, embodied most prominently in his son, James P. Hoffa, the current president of the Teamsters. He's a lot more polished than his dad -- he's a lawyer, not an outlaw, and he was even a guest of President Bush at this year's State of the Union address.\nAt 61, he's just a year younger than his father was when he stepped off the face of the Earth.