December 6, 2002

Federal investigators accused U.S. Justice Department superiors of derailing the last, best chance of solving the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance in 1978 by refusing to force former President Richard Nixon and Teamsters Union President Frank Fitzsimmons to testify before a Detroit grand jury, newly obtained FBI records show.

Agents said they thought the Nixon White House, with Fitzsimmons' help, had solicited $1 million from the Teamsters to buy the silence of Watergate burglars, the records reveal.

FBI agents and prosecutors hoped Nixon's testimony could be used against Fitzsimmons to force him to reveal how Hoffa disappeared in 1975, or risk going to jail.

The Justice Department's refusal to bring Fitzsimmons before the grand jury made it "highly unlikely" the Hoffa case would be solved, the records show.

The alleged hush money scheme was never proved. And even if Justice Department officials had granted the FBI's wishes, there was no guarantee that the effort would have snared Hoffa's killers.

The revelations were contained in more than 2,000 pages of previously secret FBI documents that the Free Press obtained through a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

The records show that the Detroit FBI office sent a memo to the agency director in November 1978, stressing that Fitzsimmons -- who denied any knowledge of Hoffa's disappearance -- could hold the answers to the mystery.

"It would be a gross understatement to state that Fitzsimmons is the key to the solution of this case, and yet he represents the major problem encountered with the Department of Justice," the memo said. "Fitzsimmons should have appeared long ago before the federal grand jury in Detroit to answer questions about his association with Hoffa and any possible involvement he had in dealings leading up to Hoffa's disappearance. To date, the Department of Justice has refused to allow Fitzsimmons to testify."

A retired Teamsters' attorney who knew Fitzsimmons and Hoffa said Tuesday he found it unlikely that Fitzsimmons was involved in Hoffa's disappearance or knew about the plot beforehand. Fitzsimmons died in 1981.

"It would be unthinkable that he would be capable of something like that," said David Uelmen, the retired attorney, who practiced in Milwaukee. "It would be just so out of character for him."

Uelmen said someone in the union would have snitched by now if Fitzsimmons had been involved.

"Union people could not keep that kind of a secret," he said.

Time running out

The newly released documents indicate the effort to question Nixon, his aides and Fitzsimmons two years after the disappearance was considered the last, best shot at solving the case.

"What happens after that is people start dying" because of the age of the case, Robert Stewart, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Buffalo, N.Y., who helped lead the investigation, said Tuesday.

None of the FBI documents suggest that Nixon knew anything about Hoffa's disappearance.

Hoffa disappeared July 30, 1975, from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township.

The FBI said Hoffa went there to meet with Detroit Mafia figure Anthony Giacalone and Anthony Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamsters official with mob connections. Hoffa and Provenzano had feuded since serving time together in the 1960s in a federal prison in Pennsylvania, and Giacalone set up the meeting ostensibly to make peace, FBI records say.

But the FBI thought Giacalone lured Hoffa to the meeting so Provenzano's henchmen could kill Hoffa to prevent him from regaining the Teamsters presidency and shutting off the Mafia's access to union pension funds. Hoffa's body has never been found.

In December 1971, four years before Hoffa disappeared, Nixon commuted Hoffa's 13-year sentence for jury tampering on condition that Hoffa stay out of union activities until March 1980.

Investigators concluded that Nixon had commuted Hoffa's sentence to generate political goodwill with the Teamsters but added the restrictions at the request of Fitzsimmons, who feared Hoffa would try to unseat him.

Sources had told the FBI that the Teamsters had promised to give $300,000 to Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell, apparently for political purposes, to secure Hoffa's release. Other sources said the money was never paid.

Fitzsimmons later transferred Teamsters legal business to a law firm where Nixon aide Chuck Colson eventually would work, the records say. Colson, who did prison time for his involvement in the Watergate affair and who now runs a prison ministry, said Tuesday there was no connection between the commuted sentence and the change in Teamsters legal business.

In January 1973, six months after five men were arrested on charges of breaking into Democratic Party Headquarters at the Watergate complex to gather intelligence for Nixon's re-election campaign, burglar Howard Hunt demanded $1 million as hush money in the burgeoning scandal, which led to Nixon's resignation, the documents said.

Watergate angle?

At some point, the documents say, Nixon told White House special counsel John Dean and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman that he knew where he could get $1 million in cash.

The FBI was told by informants that Colson picked up at least half of the $1 million during a trip to Las Vegas. The FBI suspected White House operatives obtained the money from Provenzano and the mob, with Colson's help. Fitzsimmons is alleged to have come up with the other $500,000.

Colson, who is now chairman of Prison Ministries Fellowship in Reston, Va., said Tuesday that he never was involved in such a scheme.

"I never knew anything about a million-dollar payoff," he said. "It was the most outrageous charge ever leveled against me."

Colson said he testified about the matter before a Watergate grand jury. He said the Watergate special prosecutor told him the source of the payoff story was a prison inmate who later was discredited.

Fresh reinforcements

Stewart, the former federal prosecutor, wrote a memo in April 1977 to Kurt Muellenberg, chief of the Justice Department's organized crime and racketeering section, imploring his superiors to direct more resources to the fading Hoffa investigation.

"The Hoffa investigation has reached an impasse," Stewart said in the memo. He said investigators were discouraged, and no progress could be made without an infusion of new agents to replace departing agents, as well as a commitment to continue pursuing the case.

He wanted, among other things, to get Justice Department approval to bring Nixon, Colson, Hunt and other White House figures before the grand jury, along with Fitzsimmons.

"Since the objective of this facet of the investigation is to place Fitzsimmons in a position where he will become a cooperative and truthful witness, which should then produce direct evidence against Provenzano and Giacalone of their involvement in the conspiracy to murder Hoffa, it is necessary to establish that Colson and Fitzsimmons were responsible for generating the $1 million," Stewart wrote in the memo.

"The one individual who could prove the matter beyond a doubt is Richard Nixon," Stewart said.

Stewart said he wasn't sure whether Nixon would cooperate, given that he had been pardoned by successor Gerald Ford for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, but "he must certainly appreciate that while the pardon may protect him as to whatever happened in the White House, a fresh perjury committed in a current grand jury would place him in dire jeopardy."

Stewart also wanted to subpoena Air Force flight logs to establish whether Colson flew to Las Vegas to pick up the $500,000 in January of 1973. Investigators said the Department of Defense responded that there were no records available.

A year and a half after Stewart wrote his memo, FBI agents in Detroit followed up with a plea of their own -- and made it clear they still had their sights on Fitzsimmons.

"Roadblocks began to appear within the Department of Justice regarding the solution to Hoffa's murder," the Detroit office said in a Nov. 24, 1978, memo.

Change of heart

The FBI had planned to subpoena Fitzsimmons to testify before the grand jury in 1975, but plans were changed for unspecified reasons. Fitzsimmons was subpoenaed to appear on March 1, 1978.

But one day earlier, Fitzsimmons' lawyer called the federal prosecutor in charge of the case to arrange for transportation from the airport to the courthouse. An hour later, documents say, assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Coffey got a call from Marvin Loewy, a Justice Department organized crime official, who wanted to know whether Fitzsimmons was a target of the Hoffa probe.

When Coffey said he was, Loewy asked Coffey whether the grand jury appearance had been approved by department higher-ups, the documents said. Coffey said he hadn't sought approval, but asked Loewy about getting it. Loewy said Benjamin Civiletti, a deputy attorney general, wasn't available for a decision and told Coffey to submit a written request.

Within minutes of talking to Loewy, Coffey received a call from Fitzsimmons' lawyer who said he understood his client's grand jury appearance had been postponed indefinitely, the FBI memo said.

Robert Garrity, a former FBI agent in Detroit, said Tuesday that he was in the room when the call came from Fitzsimmons' lawyer.

"He got the right lawyers who called the right people to squash the subpoena," he said. "That's what I think happened."

The records and the people interviewed Tuesday offered no explanation for the reluctance to have Fitzsimmons testify. The documents say Fitzsimmons was a government informant from 1972 to 1974 in an unspecified matter, but it was unclear whether this was a factor to not subpoena him in the Hoffa case.

Documents say the Justice Department officials had never let Hoffa investigators know that Fitzsimmons had cooperated with the government.

In March 1978, Coffey and two other FBI agents sent in the written request for the grand jury appearance.

Eight months later, they still hadn't received a reply. Fitzsimmons never appeared before the grand jury, according to agents who worked on the case.

Loewy and Civiletti said Tuesday that they could not recall anything about the scenario laid out in the memo.

Stewart and Garrity said Tuesday that although they disagreed with the decisions by higher-ups in the Hoffa case, they thought the decisions were based purely on philosophical differences about whether to demand the grand jury appearances.

In 1978, agents were more harsh.

"This investigation has continued for over three years and has uncovered evidence of political payoffs and obstruction of justice, not to mention Hoffa's actual abduction," the FBI memo from 1978 said. "If Fitzsimmons is not brought before the grand jury, the investigation will suffer enormously and total resolution of the case would appear highly unlikely."

Fitzsimmons died three years later, never appearing before the grand jury, investigators told the Free Press.

Giacalone and Provenzano, both dead, denied any role in Hoffa's disappearance.

Although Provenzano had threatened on at least two occasions to kill Hoffa and kidnap his children, Provenzano insisted that he loved Hoffa.

"If what I've told you isn't the truth," he told the FBI several days after Hoffa's disappearance, "may my youngest granddaughter have cancer of the eyes."

 

The article originally appeared in the Detroit Free Press on December 4, 2002 written by David Ashenfelter and Jim Schaeffer.