![]() And the labor world into which he entered was an especially unforgiving one.Īn American company fighting unionization in the early 20th century would have several different resources at its disposal and most of them were violent. With his father gone by the time he was seven and his last day in school coming at just 14, the young Hoffa was a manual laborer supporting his family before most other kids were graduating high school. ![]() Jimmy Hoffa - born in Brazil, Indiana on Februwas a labor warrior from a young age. With almost no hard evidence and very few witnesses - all of whom would probably be dead by now - this cold case has remained wide open to broad speculation and self-serving fabrications.īut to understand why the Mafia killed him and why he was such a force in American life, you have to go back to the very beginning of Jimmy Hoffa’s career. Once you’ve set the wildest theories to the contrary aside, the remaining questions have only to do with the details: exactly which mob boss ordered the hit, who pulled the trigger, and what they did with his corpse. But despite a half-century of myth-making, most authorities on the matter agree that there really isn’t much mystery about what happened to Jimmy Hoffa: he was killed by the Mafia. As with the Romanovs or the Lindbergh baby, whenever there is a high-profile suspected murder case and no body left behind, myth-making is bound to fill in the gaps. Perhaps even more than his once-great power, Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance is what makes his larger-than-life story fascinating to this day. Kelley/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Jimmy Hoffa, who gave up his position as Teamsters president after his prison sentence for fraud and bribery, sitting at a table during a Teamsters convention. After all, Robert Kennedy once called Hoffa the second most influential man in America, outranked in power only by the president himself. It would be all that anyone would talk about, and in 1975, Jimmy Hoffa was that big a deal in American life.īack then, unions were still a powerful force in the country in ways they aren’t today and Hoffa was the single most visible face of the union movement. To give those not old enough to remember Jimmy Hoffa an idea of the impact he and his vanishing had, imagine what the next 50 years of news cycles would look like if Mark Zuckerberg or Bernie Sanders just vanished tomorrow without a trace. His leadership was marked by both his contentious wielding of his enormous power and his cult-like popularity - as well as his longstanding ties to the criminal underworld.īut even those elements alone don’t fully explain why Jimmy Hoffa’s life story, let alone his infamously unsolved 1975 disappearance, remains so captivating? James Riddle Hoffa - yes, that is his real name his mother’s maiden name was Riddle - was the controversial president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union from 1957 to 1971. ![]() But if you’re under a certain age, the first two you might ask are “why do some people care so much about what happened to him?” or even, “who was Jimmy Hoffa, again?” There are many questions surrounding the life and death of Jimmy Hoffa. As America's most powerful labor leader, Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa battled with the government and then the mob - before infamously disappearing forever. ![]()
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