Nothing about Jimmy Hoffa is more famous than the fact that, on July 30, 1975, he vanished from the face of the earth.

Once the most powerful union boss in the world, not a trace of him has been seen since that day.

Though he was absent, the small-statured Hoffa left an immense impact that, when thoroughly investigated, extends far beyond his own mysterious vanishing to one of history’s largest conspiracies: the assassination of the 35th president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Even if he didn’t squeeze the trigger, I’m in no doubt that Hoffa played a leading role.

To grasp his role and the reasons behind his involvement in the assassination, it’s important to remember the enormous wealth and power wielded by the mob-influenced International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Encompassing a variety of roles from truck drivers and factory workers to slot machine installers, this expansive labor union was one of the major forces in the country during the post-war era.

More to the point, its enormous riches – and, in particular, the multi-million-dollar pension fund – were at the disposal of the mafia.

Hoffa, the General President and a close associate of senior dons, was effectively a banker for organized crime, funding lucrative mob-linked investments and well-paid jobs for ‘friends’.

But as 1962 turned into 1963, Jack Kennedy’s Department of Justice – run by younger brother Bobby – was pouring relentless heat on criminal conspiracies in general and Hoffa in particular.

Bobby wanted Hoffa behind bars and would seemingly stop at nothing to achieve it. Hoffa wanted the Kennedys dead.

James Riddle Hoffa was born in the small mining town of Brazil, Indiana, in February 1913, the third of four children for John, a coal driller of Dutch descent, and Viola.

When John died at the age of 38 – probably killed by the job, as Hoffa always believed – his widow went in search of work, finally landing in Detroit, Michigan.

There, Viola held down as many as three jobs, including polishing radiator caps at an automotive plant.

Meanwhile, teenaged Jimmy supported the family by working on the loading docks of the Kroger Grocery and Baking Company. It was a formative experience.

Hoffa and his co-workers received 32 cents an hour, but if the job only took four hours of a 12-hour shift, the remaining eight hours were lost without pay.

Along with co-workers, the gutsy 17-year-old planned a strike. They waited, strategically, for a load of perishable Florida strawberries to arrive at the loading dock then suddenly walked off the job.

Hoffa, a skilled negotiator, got the Kroger management to cave in to a series of demands, including their right to strike, which was unlawful in Michigan at the time, a pay rise, an insurance plan, lunch breaks and smoke breaks.

It was the start of a remarkable ascent.

A post as an organizer for Detroit’s Joint Council 43, an affiliate of the Teamsters, followed next. Hoffa was relentless, recruiting new truck drivers at every turn, but violence was never far away.

Recalling the 1930s, Hoffa said, ‘Every time you went near a place to organize, you’d get picked up and sent to jail. The police beat you on the head with night-sticks. It was a mess.

‘The employers hired every hoodlum strike breaker in town… the police and the ex-cons lined up together against us.’

In time, Hoffa recruited his own ‘professional hoodlums and gangsters’ to combat the management thugs. One associate said that it was not long before ‘Jimmy dealt with the mob on a regular basis’. 

He ‘knew that organized crime people could hurt him and his organization,’ recalled Rolland McMaster, a longtime Hoffa ally.

‘So, he got along with them… If you don’t have some of those friends, you could get ate up, and you wouldn’t know what happened to you.’

The Detroit mafia helped Hoffa rise to power in the Michigan Teamsters, then the Chicago mob handed him the Midwest while introducing him to New York mobsters.

And it was through their influence – and in particular that of Giovanni Ignazio Dioguardi, aka ‘Johnny Dio’ – that Hoffa clinched the national election.

At the age of 44, he was the General President with an office at Teamsters’ modernist headquarters in Washington, known as the ‘Marble Palace’.

But there was a price for that support. The mob expected all manner of benefits from cushy jobs with big expense accounts to easily approved loans from the pension fund.

Although the fund was technically controlled by a board of trustees, it was Hoffa who directed the investments.

Over time, the union pumped more than $300 million into building Las Vegas hotels and casinos jointly owned by the New York and Chicago mafia. Hoffa is reported to have taken ten percent for himself but, even then, the loans were profitable business for the Teamsters.

By the 1950s the union’s links with organized crime were coming under scrutiny – and no wonder.

As Bobby Kennedy, then a young senator, wrote, the Teamsters were ‘the most powerful institution in this country aside from the United States Government itself.’

The heads of New York’s five mafia families had a stake in the union, which meant they could exert significant control of the US economy. A national strike could have strangled America within hours.

Moreover, the mafia had almost complete freedom with the Teamsters’ giant piggy bank.

The first major threat to Hoffa and his friends came when, in 1957, Bobby was appointed chief counsel and investigator to the United States Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management.

Known as the Rackets Committee, this was a powerful and long-running investigation into links between the unions and organized crime.

Bobby Kennedy soon placed a target on Hoffa’s back and subpoenaed Teamster-connected mobsters to appear before the senators.

Hoffa felt persecuted, not without reason. Bobby had no intention of playing fair.

One Teamster attorney called Bobby Kennedy ‘a sadistic little monster’.

Another complained: ‘We had guilt by association, guilt by marriage, guilt by eating in the same chophouse, guilt by the general counsel’s amazement, guilt by somebody else taking the Fifth Amendment, guilt by somebody else refusing to testify.’

When Bobby believed mobsters were ducking his subpoenas, he would subpoena their wives. In most cases, this was pure harassment and abuse of power.

Rackets Committee investigator Pierre Salinger, a future White House press secretary, compared the rift between Hoffa and Bobby to a ‘blood feud’, which likely started when Hoffa seemed to get the better of Bobby in front of the nationally televised proceedings.

‘Hoffa made Kennedy look pretty bad,’ said a justice department attorney. ‘Bobby never forgave him for this.’

The competition between Hoffa and Bobby, who Hoffa referred to as ‘Booby’ or ‘Bobby Boy’, continued outside the hearing room and, on one occasion, became physical.

Bobby seized hold of Hoffa from behind while the two were in a Capitol Hill restaurant but a shocked Hoffa, no stranger to fist fights, sprang to his feet and, as one witness put it, grabbed Bobby ‘by the front of his jacket and bounced him up against the wall’.

Despite all the powers at his disposal, 1500 witnesses and 20,000 pages of testimony, Bobby failed to pin anything on Jimmy Hoffa. Then, in 1960, he left the Rackets Committee to run his brother Jack’s presidential campaign.

Bobby took the failure personally and promised colleagues, ‘the game isn’t over’. And on becoming attorney general in 1961, it was time for a re-match.

One of Bobby Kennedy’s first moves was to instruct Walter Sheridan, an ex-FBI agent who had also worked for the National Security Agency, to set up a special unit to combat labor racketeering.

It became known as the ‘Get Hoffa Squad’.

‘They go to school and investigate my kid…’ complained Hoffa. ‘They go around to his friends and say, ‘How many suits of clothes has Jim Hoffa got? How much money does he carry in his pocket?’

‘You wouldn’t believe some of the creepy stuff they are pulling.’

Bobby and the Get Hoffa Squad even launched investigations into Hoffa’s attorneys, a scare tactic violating Hoffa’s civil rights, specifically his Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

By now, Hoffa, like his mafia associates, had had enough.

In late September 1963, Ed Partin, an inmate at a jail in Baton Rouge, told guards that Jimmy Hoffa had asked him to assassinate the attorney general.

According to Partin, a former business agent for the Teamsters, Hoffa told him, ‘I’ve got to do something about that son-of-a-bitch Bobby Kennedy. He’s got to go.’

Partin claimed that Hoffa went on to say that Bobby ‘drives alone in a convertible and swims by himself. I’ve got a .270 rifle with a high-power scope on it . . .

‘It would be easy to get him with that.’

In growing need of powerful allies, Hoffa drew closer to leading Gulf coast mafia dons, Carlos Marcello from New Orleans and Santo Trafficante from Florida.

They, too, were under fire from the Department of Justice – and loathed the Kennedys with special venom.

As I explain in my new history of the American mafia, Borgata, it was Marcello and Trafficante who, with some CIA and FBI cooperation, sprang the fatal trap for Jack Kennedy in Dealy Plaza, Dallas – and, in doing so, granted Jimmy Hoffa his wish.

Attorney Frank Ragano represented all three men, Trafficante Marcello and Hoffa, although he was closest to Trafficante.

Ragano later recalled how, in February 1963, Trafficante was complaining about the Kennedys and said, ‘Somebody is going to kill those sons-of-bitches. It’s just a matter of time.’

On another occasion, as Ragano wrapped up business with Hoffa and was leaving to visit Marcello and Trafficante in New Orleans, the union boss said, ‘Something has to be done. The time has come for your friend [Trafficante] and Carlos [Marcello] to get rid of him, kill that son-of-a-bitch John Kennedy.’

Ragano thought nothing of it; Hoffa was a hot-head, after all. And later, when seated at a dinner with the southern mob bosses, he relayed Hoffa’s message, he expected to give them a laugh.

‘[Hoffa] wants you to do a little favor for him,’ said Ragano, cueing up the punchline. ‘You won’t believe this, but he wants you to kill John Kennedy.’

Ragano waited for the dons to break out in laughter yet was shocked to see them exchange icy glances.

As he explained, ‘I had blindly intruded into a minefield I had no right to enter: that without my knowledge, the thought of killing the president had already seriously crossed their minds.’

How Trafficante and Marcello came to execute their plan and kill Jack Kennedy, I explain elsewhere in my book. But their reaction following the assassination on November 22, 1963, is telling.

That same evening, Santo Trafficante met Ragano for dinner telling him, ‘The son-of-a-bitch is dead… This is like lifting a load of stones off my shoulders… Our problems are over…

‘Now they’ll get off my back, off Carlos’s [Marcello’s] back, and off [Hoffa’s] back.’

Jimmy Hoffa, too, was jubilant. He phoned Ragano and said, exuberantly, ‘Have you heard the good news? They killed the son-of-a-bitch.

‘This means Bobby is out as attorney general. Lyndon [Lyndon Johnson, the new president] will get rid of him.’

Bobby Kennedy’s war on organized crime was, indeed, over. Hoffa and his friends had won.

When, a little later, he was asked about the attorney general in a television interview, Hoffa said of his would-be nemesis, ‘Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.’

Yet his victory was short-lived. In March 1964, the long-time President of the Teamsters was convicted of jury tampering and fraud and sent to jail for 13 years. And even with a presidential pardon from Richard Nixon in 1971, there was little time or freedom left for Hoffa in this life.

By the autumn of 1975, the legend of his dramatic disappearing act was all that remained.