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FBI searches former Jersey City landfill for Jimmy Hoffa’s body

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JERSEY CITY, N.J. — The mystery of Teamsters’ boss Jimmy Hoffa has once again sent federal agents on a search for his body.

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This time, the FBI combed a former landfill in Jersey City for Hoffa’s remains.

A worker had given deathbed confession that he buried Hoffa in a steel drum in the landfill in the shadow of the Pulaski Skyway, The New York Times reported.

Frank Cappola signed a written statement that was also notarized, that he was at the landfill when a black limousine came to the property.

Cappola said his father and his father’s business partner, who both owned the property, spoke to the car’s occupants and pointed them to a remote area of the land.

Later, Cappola, who was a teenager at the time of Hoffa’s disappearance, found out the plans just before his father died in 2008, he said.

Cappola said his father was there when Hoffa’s body arrived, but he was upset that the property was going to be the site, “because the dump was constantly under police scrutiny.”

His father also didn’t use the area that had been selected to allegedly dump the barrel that held Hoffa’s body.

“My father, who didn’t trust anybody, decided to dig a second hole with a company excavator and to place Hoffa in that location,” Cappola said in the statement.

The hole was outside of the dump, on state-owned property between eight and 15 feet down. He placed the barrel in the hole, put 15 to 30 chemical drums on top and filled the hole with brick and dirt. Cappola said that his father “placed something detectable just under the surface of the gravesite, which I am willing to disclose to law enforcement.”

Eventually, Cappola revealed his father’s secret to journalist Dan Moldea, who covered Hoffa before his disappearance, the Times reported.

Cappola died in March 2020. The FBI contacted Moldea after he wrote about Cappola’s claims. In November 2020, a Fox News crew, along with Moldea, visited the site and using ground-penetrating radar, detected shapes that looked like barrels.

FBI agents served a search warrant to conduct what they called a site survey on the land that is about the size of a Little League baseball diamond.

Agents worked at the site on Oct. 25 and 26 and the data that was collected over the two days is being analyzed, Special Agent Mara Schneider said, according to NBC News reported.

Schneider did not name Hoffa and didn’t say when a possible excavation of the sitecould happen.

But NBC News confirmed the FBI is looking for Hoffa’s body.

Hoffa was the president of the Teamsters Union from 1957 until he was sent to prison for conspiracy and fraud in 1967, according to Biography. His sentence was commuted by President Richard Nixon.

Hoffa disappeared in 1975, last seen outside of a restaurant in Michigan, and has never been found. He was in the midst of trying to get his union presidency position back at the time. He had been scheduled to meet with a mob-connected union leader from New Jersey at the restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, but he was the only one to show up, according to Biography.

There have been several searches for Hoffa including at a farm, driveway and even under a swimming pool, the Times reported.

There have been rumors that Hoffa was buried under the old Giants Stadium, and after the 2019 film “The Irishman,” it was thought that he was killed by friend Frank Sheeran and his body was destroyed by fire. Hoffa scholars think that scenario is unlikely.

Moldea said the New Jersey landfill scenario is “100 percent” credible and the information was significant, the Times reported.

The FBI actually had received tips in 1975 right after Hoffa’s disappearance, that he was buried in a landfill in Jersey City. But when agents searched and found nothing, they discounted those tips.

Moldea said agents didn’t have a place to start looking at the time, the Times reported.

Read more at The New York Times.

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