March 9, 2020 – Another person has come forward to say they believe they saw Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa’s body disposed of at the old Raleigh House disco and banquet hall in Southfield, Michigan, just four miles up the road from where Hoffa was last seen alive. The 62-year old Hoffa vanished from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 on his way to meet Detroit mobster Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone and New Jersey mafioso Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano.
A former food-service employee claims he witnessed a car matching the description of the vehicle Hoffa was seen getting into at the Red Fox dumping what he suspects was a body in the trash compactor at the Raleigh House around Midnight that night and then a sanitation truck immediately scooping the contents of the compactor and driving away. The FBI began eyeing Raleigh House as a potential dump site for Hoffa early on in its investigation due to the establishment’s mob ties, specifically its’ sanitation contract with Central Sanitation, a trash company owned by three capos in Detroit’s Tocco-Zerilli crime family.
Preferring not to reveal his identity, the witness recounted the following:
“I always partied at Raleigh House back then, it was a real hot-spot and you always heard the whispers about who owned the place, who was hanging out there. That night, I got into a fight with a guy at the bar over a girl and I got tossed from the place. They booted out the backdoor and told me to come back next weekend. I was getting ready to leave and I saw two cars drive into the parking lot, a black Lincoln Continental and a maroon-colored Mercury Marquis. The guys in the Continental were big and brawny. They went to the trunk of the Mercury and pulled something heavy out. There were a few of them and they tossed it in the trash and signaled for the truck that was kind of idling in the background. The truck loaded up what was just dumped and went off into the night.”
Through his career, the man making the claim was employed for food-service companies with owners who had relatives in the Detroit mob. The company he worked for at the time Hoffa disappeared had a family connection to Tony Giacalone. Hoffa was last seen getting into a maroon-colored Mercury Marquis owned by Tony Jack’s son, Joey.
Hoffa himself was friendly with Raleigh House owner, Sammy (The Cigar) Lieberman, a former Purple Gang-affiliate and popular Metro Detroit restaurateur. Sammy the Cigar hosted Hoffa’s welcome home party in the Raleigh House banquet hall when he was released from prison four years earlier. The Purple Gang was the city of Detroit’s Jewish mob during Prohibition, with remnants of the group still wielding power in the local underworld well into the latter part of the 20th Century.
Throughout his rise up the ranks of the Teamsters union, Hoffa relied on several ex-Purple Gangers as part of his powerbase. By then, those Purples were working for the city’s Italian mafia, the Tocco-Zerilli crime family, the organization responsible for putting Hoffa into the union’s presidency in 1957.
At the time of his disappearance, Hoffa was in a boiling hot feud with the mob over his desire to win back the top post in the Teamsters following relinquishing the reins in order to snare a White House commutation and early-release from his prison term for fraud. Hoffa was beefing with Tony Provenzano, an east coast Teamsters power broker, on a personal level stemming from a physical altercation they had behind bars over pension-fund insurance benefits being covered for Hoffa’s family but not Provenzano’s while they served their time.
Lieberman was a larger-than-life character known for his trademark stogie, string of delicatessens and a tradition of delivering Passover meals of his famous matzo ball soup to all the Jewish inmates at Jackson State Prison every spring. He opened the Raleigh House in 1962 in Northwest Detroit on 7 Mile Road and eventually moved it to a bigger building in suburban Southfield which held an event space, a performance venue and a bar and nightclub called the Lion’s Den.
Singer Paul Anka played a set of shows at the Raleigh House in 1976. A number of ex-Purple Gangers and Italian mob figures from the area frequented the Raleigh House, drank at the Lion’s Den bar and if you believe underworld lore, financed Lieberman’s restaurant and catering empire.
The FBI received tips in the months after Hoffa went missing that Hoffa’s body was put into the trash compactor on the Raleigh House property and then picked up by a Central Sanitation truck and driven away to a landfill 25 miles away. Central Sanitation was owned by mob capos Raffaele (Jimmy the Goon) Quasarano, Peter (Bozzy) Vitale and Dominic (Detroit Fats) Corrado and had a garbage-removal contract with Lieberman and Raleigh House. Other informants told the FBI and Michigan State Police that Hoffa’s body was disposed of in an incinerator at Central Sanitation in Hamtramck, Michigan, a municipality within Detroit city borders.
Central Sanitation burned down in 1978 before the FBI could execute a search warrant for the premises. A previously Vitale-owned sanitation company in the Detroit area (Tri-County Sanitation) was allegedly used to incinerate the bodies of a dozen victims of mob violence in the 1950s and 1960s, per federal informants.
Hoffa’s remains have never been found and nobody has ever been arrested for his kidnapping and murder. Lieberman died of natural causes in 1981 at 71 years old. He sold his interest in Raleigh House less than a year after Hoffa’s disappearance.
Quasarano and Vitale were observed by FBI surveillance units in New York visiting a Genovese crime family social club in East Harlem the week following Hoffa being killed, presumably traveling there to report the details of the hit to the “Commission,” (the American mafia’s board of directors). According to FBI records related to the still-ongoing Hoffa murder probe, Quasarano was one of the nation’s biggest mob narcotics traffickers and Vitale was the “Godfather of Greektown,” Detroit’s main downtown entertainment district. Both Vitale and Quasarano were linked to the Hoffa murder investigation from early on.
The only piece of physical evidence collected by investigators in the Hoffa case was the maroon-colored 1975 Mercury Marquis owned by Joey Giacalone and the FBI believes Hoffa was kidnapped in and his body transported to its disposal in. It was seized by the feds 10 days after Hoffa vanished. Traces of Hoffa’s DNA were found in the backseat and trunk of the car thought to have been used by the Giacalone crew-assembled hit team to pull off the mob murder of the century.
Tony Giacalone, the face of the Detroit mob for more than 40 years, was Hoffa’s liaison to the upper echelons of the mafia in the Midwest and the man authorities believe quarterbacked the entire Hoffa murder plot. He died of kidney failure in 2001 staring down the barrel of a federal RICO indictment.
In 2006, a Metro Detroit woman named Elizabeth Ward came forward and told FBI agents that her and her deceased first-husband, Kenneth Tubman, saw a maroon Mercury Marquis in the Raleigh House parking lot in the minutes after Hoffa was last seen just four miles away getting into a car matching that description. Tubman identified as Chuckie O’Brien at the wheel and two other men in the backseat, one of them appearing to be pressing down on something or someone on the floorboard. Ward said she saw a Central Sanitation truck idling in the back of the parking lot at the same time her and her husband witnessed the commotion going on in the Mercury Marquis.
O’Brien was Hoffa’s surrogate son and admittedly had possession of Joey Giacalone’s Mercury Marquis that day, but has always denied any role in his adopted dad’s slaying. Tubman claimed to recognize O’Brien from his time working as the manager at Darby’s, a successful Northwest Detroit deli and restaurant and where Hoffa and O’Brien would often eat together. O’Brien, a Teamsters business agent, had also been close to Tony Giacalone since he was a child and referred to him as “Uncle Tony.” Today, he’s 84 and lives in Florida.
Most experts dismiss the likelihood that O’Brien was involved in the Hoffa murder conspiracy – citing a lack of trust by the conspiracy’s shot callers –, however, in Martin Scorsese’s new Netflix film The Irishman, based on the NY Times Best-Selling book I Heard You Paint Houses, O’Brien (played by Jesse Plemons) is portrayed as the man who drives Hoffa (played by Al Pacino) to his slaughter at the hands of self-confessed mob assassin Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran (played by Robert DeNiro). O’Brien’s stepson, highly-respected Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith wrote a widely-acclaimed book last year titled In Hoffa’s Shadow in which he lays out a convincing argument absolving his stepfather of playing any part in the Hoffa hit. Goldsmith penned a NY Times op-ed over the weekend condemning Scorsese, Pacino, DeNiro, et, al, for spreading lies about O’Brien in his depiction in their movie.
The post A Rage Up In The Raleigh House: Man Says He Watched Jimmy Hoffa’s Body Get Dumped At Detroit Disco appeared first on The Gangster Report.