Jimmy Hoffa's Bones Found in NYC Earthquake?

by Kathryn Casey

We all knew it was bound to happen, just didn’t know when.

Who could have predicted that a 3 on the Richter Scale earthquake would hit Manhattan last month, rocking Broadway harder than the Rockettes and pummeling Wall Street as soundly as rising interest rates? Then the bizarre quietly happened on the upper West Side. In a historic building, a former hotel that’s been refurbished into multimillion-dollar apartments, one of the few remaining original basement walls split open and bones were seen walled up behind it.

Whose bones? That’s where this story gets truly interesting.

A team of forensic anthropologists swarmed the site, wondering if they'd discovered the remains of an early New Yorker. When a rope was found around the skeleton's neck, NYPD summarily hung yellow tape and kicked everyone else out. It could have taken months even years to identify the victim, but one of the detectives found a stash of clothes at the skeleton's feet and noticed, “Looks to me like that stuff's from the seventies. Look at all that polyester."

“Hey, didn’t John Gotti keep a room here when it was that dump of a hotel?” asked another cop. “Seems to me that he did.”

“Wouldn’t it be a hoot if we finally found Jimmy Hoffa?” said a third, with a snort. “I always figured Gotti was involved in Hoffa’s disappearance.”

Teamster president and ex-con Hoffa, of course, vanished without a trace from outside the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, on July 30, 1975. The feds had long suspected that Hoffa’s disappearance could be tied to the Mafia. He was well known to have underworld connections. In fact the afternoon he disappeared, Hoffa was scheduled to nosh with Detroit mobster Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone and New Jersey labor leader Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, a member of the Genovese crime family. To the officers on the scene that day, those facts made the Gotti connection plausible if not probable.

Also backing up their suspicions, this wasn't the first time NYC had been suggested as Hoffa's final resting place. In 2006, Lynda Milito, wife of Gambino crime family member Louie Milito, claimed that her husband once told her he had killed Hoffa and dumped his body near Staten Island’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Rumors aside, it wasn't until police checked records and determined the clothes found with the skeleton matched those Hoffa was last seen in – a dark blue short-sleeved shirt, blue trousers, white socks and black Gucci loafers – that the possibility Hoffa's remains had finally been found seemed realistic. At that point, the FBI closed down all access to local police and secretly moved in and took over the investigation.

Now, of course, DNA can’t be processed overnight. But the FBI put a priority stamp on the request. Results came back this morning, and they were astonishing. “What we have here is April Fools Day,” said Sergeant Phil Esterhaus. “Hey, be careful out there! You could get spoofed.”

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