Labor boss and mobster Jimmy Hoffa vanished without a trace in 1975, almost certainly murdered by the Mafia. Since then, the search for his body has captured the American imagination. Indeed, some believe he's buried underneath what was once the New York Giants stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. In recent weeks though, the FBI has been surveying a former landfill in Jersey City. Last year, a man named Frank Cappola gave a written deathbed confession to a Hoffa researcher in which he claims he was at the PJP Landfill when his father and others put Hoffa inside a 55-gallon steel drum and buried it.
From the New York Times:
The men in the limousine had come to instruct the men in the dump that Mr. Hoffa's body was being delivered shortly and that they were to bury it, Paul Cappola told his son. [The landfill's co-owner Phil] Moscato told him to do the job himself.
"My father was upset with Mr. Moscato for pointing to that area of the landfill," Frank Cappola wrote in a sworn statement in 2019, "because the dump was constantly under police scrutiny."
"Unidentified people brought Hoffa's dead body to PJP," Frank Cappola wrote. "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."
Paul Cappola was left alone with the body in the barrel, and worried that someone may have seen the men pointing earlier. He made a change in plans.
"My father, who didn't trust anybody, decided to dig a second hole with a company excavator and to place Hoffa in that location," Frank Cappola wrote.
According to FBI special agent Mara R. Schneider, ""F.B.I. personnel from the Newark and Detroit field offices completed the survey and that data is currently being analyzed."
image: James P. Hoffa ─ World Telegram & Sun photo by John Bottega (CC0)
