June 27, 2019 — Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t appear to have been laid to rest in Hillsdale, Michigan. A search for the remains of the slain Teamsters boss by the Michigan State Police last week at a parcel of property in southern Michigan once owned by a family member of a known mob capo came up empty, according to MSP officials. Hoffa famously disappeared on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 on his way to meet Detroit mafia street boss Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone and high-ranking New Jersey monster Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano at a restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, 175 miles away from Hillsdale County where the search took place last week using mainly a pack of cadaver dogs. One source says the property searched belonged to descendants of the Badalamenti family. Emmanuel (Bad Manny) Badalamenti was the Detroit mafia’s capo in southern Michigan for many years, stationing his activities out of the Monroe area. His brothers Caesar and Joe were respected mobsters in Detroit’s Tocco-Zerilli crime family and leading members of its “Zip” faction with bloodlines traced to Sicilian mafia royalty. At the time of his murder, Hoffa was trying to reclaim the Teamster presidency against the wishes of his one-time benefactors in the mafia. He relinquished the post he had ridden to epic heights of power in the 1960s when he was serving time in prison for bribery, fraud and jury tampering. Giacalone was Hoffa’s longtime contact in the mob. Provenzano, the most powerful Teamster on the east coast in his heyday, was a friend-turned-enemy of Hoffa’s whose support Hoffa desperately needed to procure in order to win a 1976 election. Neither Tony Jack, nor Tony Pro showed up for the meeting that fateful afternoon 44 years ago and Hoffa was last seen getting into the backseat of Giacalone’s son’s car and being driven out of the restaurant’s parking lot. Hoffa was declared legally dead in 1982. The FBI and Michigan State Police have combined to conduct a seemingly endless line of heavily-publicized searches and digs in a quest to unearth Hoffa’s body over the past four and a half decades to no avail. No charges have ever been filed in the case and the investigation into Hoffa’s kidnapping and killing remains open and active to this very day, as evidenced by this recent search. Tony Giacalone died of kidney failure in 2001. Tony Provenzano dropped dead of a heart attack in prison in 1988. Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese will release a film this fall on Netflix about Hoffa’s murder starring Robert DeNiro as Pennsylvania mob hit man Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran and Al Pacino as Hoffa. The movie is based on a 2004 book written by Delaware lawyer Charlie Brandt about his client Sheeran, who claimed to have been the shooter in the Hoffa hit. Sheeran died in the months before the book was released.
