January 18, 2020 — The FBI in Detroit wants to talk to the sons of two deceased New Jersey underworld figures in relation to their recent claims of knowing where iconic slain Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa is buried. Phil Moscato, Jr. and Frank Cappola did interviews last year with Fox News investigative reporter Eric Shawn for his docu-series Riddle: The Search For James R. Hoffa which ran on the Fox Nation streaming service speaking on what they were clued in on about the Hoffa hit by their old men. Moscato and Cappola’s dads were linked to Garden State gangster Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, the New York Genovese crime family’s crew boss in New Jersey, who was feuding with Hoffa at the time he disappeared.
“We are aware of the two individuals who claim to have knowledge on the whereabouts of Mr. Hoffa…..and the FBI welcomes the opportunity to speak to them,” wrote the Detroit FBI in an official statement issued to Fox News this week.
Hoffa, 62, went missing on the afternoon of July 30, 1975, on his way to a lunch meeting with Provenzano and Detroit mob street boss Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. Moscato, Jr.’s father, Phil (Brother) Moscato was the top loan shark in the Provenzano crew and controlled juice-loan and gambling territory across New Jersey and up into parts of New York. Brother Moscato and Paul Cappola, Frank Cappola’s pops,co-owned the PJP Landfill in Jersey City, a location FBI agents scoured for Hoffa’s body via a tip early on in the investigation, but came up empty. The elder Cappola was a gambler and mob associate, not a “made man” or a mafia “soldier,” like Brother Moscato was.
Moscato, Jr. told Shawn that in the weeks before he died of cancer in 2014 his dad told him Hoffa was first buried at the PJP Landfill, however, soon moved to its final resting place in nearby Carlsbad. The reason for the move was the deal Tony Pro’s driver, Ralph (Little Ralphie) Picardo cut with the feds from behind bars. It was Picardo’s tip that first sent federal investigators to dig up the PJP Landfill back in 1976.
Cappola says his dad told him that he personally buried Hoffa in a metal drum on the PJP property. Paul Cappola died of heart failure in the 2000s. Frank Cappola says his father pointed out the burial spot to him on a walk through the property in the 1980s.
In an interview with best-selling author and renowned Hoffa expert Dan Moldea in the last year of his life, Brother Moscato admitted to being responsible for disposing of Hoffa’s body, telling Moldea that after he was killed in a suburban Detroit residence, Hoffa was stuffed in a 55-gallon drum and shipped from Detroit in a Gateway Transportation truck to New Jersey for burial at PJP.
Brother Moscato told both his son and Moldea that Hoffa’s killer was Salvatore (Sally Bugs) Briguglio, the Provenzano crew’s main hit man. Sally Bugs himself was whacked gangland-style in 1978. Gateway Transportation was owned by another ally-turned-rival of Hoffa’s, legendary Teamsters thug Rolland (Big Mac) McMaster. On the 40th anniversary of Hoffa’s disappearance, Moldea reported that Moscato said Hoffa was kidnapped by Detroit mob capo Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone, Tony Jack’s younger brother, shot in the back of the head by Briguglio and then put in the ground at a parcel of PJP property located under the Pulaski Expressway.
Hoffa rose to the Teamsters presidency in 1957 with the backing of the Giacalone brothers and their bosses in Detroit’s Tocco-Zerilli crime family and achieved worldwide fame. Tony Provenzano was his most valuable asset in the union on the east coast and a close friend until they clashed in prison in the late 1960s over pension insurance benefits Hoffa’s wife and kid were receiving but Tony Pro’s wife and kids weren’t. Tony Jack’s wife was a cousin of Provenzano’s.
Hoffa was sent to prison in 1967 for bribery, fraud and jury tampering. He earned an early release via a White House commutation contingent on him giving up the presidency of the mammoth truckers’ union to his vice president Frank Fitzsimmons.
Upon walking free, Hoffa set off on a campaign to get his job of Teamsters president back, a task Fitzsimmons was reluctant to comply with and the mafia flat out didn’t want to occur. When he did a series of television and print media interviews in 1974 and the first part of 1975 and lobbed threats at mob leadership, proclaiming his desire to cleanse the union of organized crime influence, his days were numbered.
The Giacalone brothers were Hoffa’s longtime contacts in the Italian mafia and were tapped to arrange the details of the execution, per FBI records. Tony Giacalone was at his Southfield Athletic Club headquarters at the time Hoffa vanished from site in Tony Jack’s son’s car five miles down the road at the Red Fox. Joey Giacalone’s 1975 maroon-colored Mercury Marquis is the only piece of physical evidence ever recovered in the Hoffa case. Hoffa’s DNA was discovered in the trunk.
Billy Giacalone was “off the radar,” unaccounted for by law enforcement on the day Hoffa went missing, shaking his normal FBI tail that morning. Tony Provenzano was playing cards at his union hall in New Jersey all day.
Tony and Billy Jack died of natural causes in their own beds in 2001 and 2012, respectively. Tony Pro died of a heart attack in prison in 1988 while serving a life sentence for an unrelated labor-union murder.
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