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This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.

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The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones to the mysteries we will examine.

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In 1967, Jimmy Hoffa began serving a 13-year prison sentence.

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It was the beginning of the end for the man who was called America's most powerful labor leader.

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Hoffa was pardoned four years later, but his troubles were far from over.

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On July 30th, 1975, he left home and disappeared without a trace.

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Was Jimmy Hoffa kidnapped or murdered?

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If so, why and by whom?

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Did he flee to a distant country?

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Why did Jimmy Hoffa disappear?

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Be firm, but return to work and wait for the government of the United States to be able to make the decision,

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don't take the law in your own hands or you're going to hurt me.

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Don't do it, please.

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As president of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa commanded a workforce larger than the United States Army.

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Hoffa was a leader gifted with great charisma, one of America's working-class heroes.

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One day in 1975, Hoffa went to a meeting at a suburban Detroit restaurant.

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He has not been seen since.

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My father, James R. Hoffa, has been missing for some 32 hours.

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He left for an appointment at Max's Red Fox restaurant at approximately 1.30 p.m. Wednesday, July 30, 1975.

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He called home at approximately 2.15 p.m. We have not heard from him since.

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Down in this lot here.

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Acting on anonymous tips, local authorities searched the Detroit suburbs for a body.

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Jimmy Hoffa is still missing. He was a powerful man, president of the world's largest labor union.

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But powerful men make enemies. Who might have wanted Hoffa out of the way and why?

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Is it conceivable that he was kidnapped for ransom or that he deliberately dropped out of sight?

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The answer to the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance might be found by tracing his spectacular rise to power.

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Violence was commonplace in the working world Jimmy Hoffa entered during the late 1920s.

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Police and strike breakers battled fiercely with union workers as the labor movement gained momentum.

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In his teens, Hoffa joined a small Detroit local in the Teamsters Union of Truckers and Warehousemen.

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As a fearless young organizer, he helped engineer dozens of strikes to improve working conditions.

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Truckers began hauling more and more of the nation's freight as our highway system expanded.

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The Teamsters grew into a powerful union.

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Hoffa moved quickly up the Union Executive ladder. By the age of 33, he headed local 299 in Detroit.

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Eleven years later, in 1957, Hoffa ran for international president of the Teamsters.

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He gained support in locals all over the country by brilliant politicking.

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When the delegates were pulled, Hoffa triumphed by a 3-1 margin.

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Pete Camarada is Co-Chairman of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

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Well, when Hoffa spoke to the rank and file, he was always able to reach them.

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And even though Jimmy Hoffa was a little man, he had a certain amount of charisma about him.

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When you shook hands with Jimmy Hoffa, even though Hoffa was a little fella, 5'5'' or something like that,

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you thought you were shaking hands with somebody much bigger.

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Hoffa was willing to get right down in the street with the brothers and win what they had to win.

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That's what people loved him for.

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In 1967, the master freight agreement gave Hoffa more power than any union leader before him.

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Now, truckers nationwide would be bound by the same contract.

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To many businessmen and politicians, this was a frightening prospect.

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What scared them is the fact that Jimmy Hoffa could say to 400,000 Teamsters or 450,000 Teamsters at the time to park the trucks in Nate Parkwell.

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If Teamster truckers carried most of America's food, fuel and clothing for the marketplace,

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is it possible that Jimmy Hoffa had too much power?

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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Clark Mullenhoff.

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Jimmy Hoffa had more uncontrolled power than any other person in the United States, including the president.

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He was not accountable to anyone.

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He controlled employers, he controlled politicians through his gifts of union funds and cash,

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or through his use of anti-labor charges against the political figures.

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He controlled everything that moved on a truck.

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Hoffa never used his power to shut down the nation's commerce.

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Publicly, he played the part of a labor statesman.

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We're asking for language-dealing with safety of equipment.

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I don't have to.

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We're asking for wage increases.

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People who knew Hoffa said that privately, he was a hot-tempered and ruthless man.

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Well, from the first time I met Jimmy Hoffa throughout his whole life,

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he was a totally confident, cocky, banner-rooster type of individual.

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He could be most ingratiating and pleasant, even boyish.

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He says I have friends.

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But he can turn around and snap his fingers and become a tyrant if he were crossed in any respect.

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To the rank and file, Hoffa was a powerful boss who won good contracts.

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Enemies, however, claimed he made deals with employers outside Detroit,

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allowing them to pay his teamsters a substandard wage.

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Hoffa centralized Teamster Power and took control of the huge Central States pension fund.

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He lent millions to build gambling casinos.

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An estimated $170 million of Teamster pension funds went into Las Vegas.

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There are also charges that Hoffa had ties to organized crime.

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From at least the mid-1940s, Jimmy Hoffa was dealing with organized crime figures in all parts of the country.

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He was using them to enforce his dictates on local labor leaders who were honest.

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He was also using them as a network for his own advancement and his own power.

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He put them in power in various unions from one end of the country to the other.

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The best answer in regards to hoodlums and what have you is the fact that every strike we have with employers who really want to fight,

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they revert to hiring hoodlums.

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And unless we know who our enemy is, unless we're in a position to do something about it, you'll lose your strike.

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But who controlled whom?

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What was the real relationship between Hoffa and men like New Jersey's Tony Provenzano?

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You've got people in Detroit, at least 15 who have police records.

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You've got Joey Glimko in Chicago. I say you're not tough enough to get rid of these people then.

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Well, I don't propose to be tough.

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You haven't moved against any of them?

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I don't propose to act tough. I have a follow-up constitution of the International Union.

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I don't frighten too easily.

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Well, you know, I don't intend to have the impression left, as been stated publicly, that I am controlled by gangsters.

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I am not controlled by them.

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Mr. Hoffa, I'm certainly...

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From 1957 to 1963, Attorney Robert Kennedy and his brother, Senator John Kennedy, feuded bitterly with Hoffa,

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as the McClellan Committee probed labor crimes.

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When John Kennedy was elected president in 1960, he appointed his younger brother, Attorney General.

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Bobby declared all-out war on organized crime.

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Hoffa was indicted for extortion, perjury, wiretapping, jury tampering, and pension fund embezzlement.

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Somehow, he managed to avoid conviction.

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Hoffa's bag of tricks included efforts to buy off sheriffs, prosecutors, congressmen, senators, governors,

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and he tried to influence cabinet officers and he at least compromised them.

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He even tried to buy me off, and he came out just out of the blue sky and said,

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Every man has his price, Clark, what's yours?

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After seven years of prosecution, Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering

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through the testimony of a disgruntled teamster.

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Later, he was found guilty of embezzlement.

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In 1967, Hoffa surrendered to authorities to serve his term.

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The fateful series of events that would lead to Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance had begun.

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In search of, we'll continue in a moment, here on the History Channel.

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In 1967, ex-teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa headed for Lewisburg Penitentiary to serve his term.

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He may have regretted the involvement with gangsters that had led to his downfall.

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But Hoffa's knowledge of the underworld would become an even greater burden in prison.

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For nearly four years, Jimmy Hoffa brooded in his cell as his power slipped away.

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Meanwhile, Hoffa's trusted aide, Frank Fitzsimmons, began his takeover of the Teamsters Union.

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I wish to announce that I am a candidate for the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

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And we'll run for that office at the International Union Convention,

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which begins July the 5th in Miami Beach, Florida.

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Eligible for parole in two years, Hoffa resigned his union office so that Fitzsimmons could run.

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It was a decision he would later regret.

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Once elected, Fitzsimmons solidified his position by making friends in the White House.

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He personally appealed to Richard Nixon to pardon Jimmy Hoffa.

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I believe it.

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Unknown to Hoffa, Nixon added conditions to his pardon, banning him from union activity.

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Hoffa would say later that had he known about the restrictions, he would have refused to sign the pardon papers.

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In semi-retirement, Jimmy Hoffa found himself trapped in another kind of prison.

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To Hoffa, freedom, even life itself, meant a return to union power.

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Hoffa retained his amazing popularity.

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Observers thought that if Jimmy's lawyers were able to reverse the Nixon restrictions,

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Hoffa could win back the Teamster presidency from Fitzsimmons.

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But Jimmy never got the chance.

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July 30th, 1975. Jimmy Hoffa headed for Arandabu with two Teamster officials, Anthony Giacalone and Tony Provenzano,

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a former ally with whom Hoffa had had a fistfight in prison.

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At 2 p.m., Hoffa arrived at the Maccus Red Fox restaurant.

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After waiting half an hour, he entered the restaurant and telephoned his wife to check whether Giacalone had called.

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Josephine Hoffa has not seen her husband since.

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Take power, power's down here.

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Police searched the area for clues or a body.

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But industrial Detroit provides countless places to dispose of a course.

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There has been nothing, no calls or notes.

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As a police official, what do you think happened?

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There's too much to speculate on. I believe it was just too early, perhaps next 24, 48 hours.

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Could someone have snatched Hoffa from the restaurant in broad daylight?

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Charlie Schatz was an old friend.

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Jim would have never walked into a trap. It's been tried before.

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This has been somebody that's been very close to Jim that he trusted.

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Hoffa's foster son, Chuckie O'Brien, was questioned.

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Police found blood in the car O'Brien was driving, but tests proved it was that of a fish.

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Hoffa's family waited in vain, hoping desperately to hear from his kidnappers.

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No ransom message ever arrived.

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But what about the men Hoffa was supposed to meet?

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Tony Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone had airtight alibis for the time of Hoffa's disappearance.

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Both denied arranging any meeting with Jimmy.

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Ironically, in 1978, Provenzano went to prison for the murder of another teamster official.

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Four of Provenzano's associates were also summoned to a grand jury hearing.

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Sal and Gabriel Bregulio and Thomas and Stephen Andretta, each refused to talk.

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In 1978, Sal was murdered gangland style on a New York street.

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The government still has no case for the murder of Jimmy Hoffa,

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but the testimony of a mafia hitman turned government informant is considered by the FBI to be a plausible description of the kidnapping drama.

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Investigative reporter Dan Molday has been researching the Hoffa case for five years.

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In the first act, Hoffa drives from his home, arrives at the restaurant expecting to meet two under-road figures.

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He's picked up by one, perhaps two close associates, driven to a private residence four minutes away from the restaurant,

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where he is ambushed and killed.

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His body is then stuffed into a 55 gallon drum and taken to a location where it is placed in a compactor for junk cars.

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It is crushed and it is smelled.

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Hoffa's body will never be found.

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If Hoffa's disappearance was a mafia hit, what was the motive?

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FBI investigators believe Hoffa was killed to protect lucrative mob deals.

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Joe Irwin knew Hoffa for three decades.

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Well, they had to get Jimmy Hoffa out of the way because probably within a month he would have been free of his parole deal

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and he would have went back into the union and he would have taken over without a doubt from Fitzsimmons and crew

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and he would have eliminated every damn one of them.

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The motive for Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance goes beyond his mere ambition to regain the general presidency of the team's union,

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which he was institutionally closed out from anyway.

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Hoffa was becoming increasingly unpredictable and was becoming dangerous for the mob to allow to continue operating.

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Dan Molday believes an angry Hoffa had begun to squeal about connections between the mafia and the CIA in Cuba.

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Cuba had long been a stronghold of organized crime and gambling.

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When the Cuban Revolution broke out, the mob sold arms to both sides.

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After Castro came to power, he began throwing gangsters out of Cuba.

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There is strong evidence that mobsters and the CIA were plotting to kill Castro

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and that Jimmy Hoffa was the original liaison between them.

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The evidence is also clear that in 1975 during the Church and Committee's investigation of the Castro assassination plots

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that Hoffa was indeed giving information to the Church Committee about his knowledge and perhaps even his participation in these plots.

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Sam Giancana, who was planning to speak before the Church Committee, was murdered exactly one month before Hoffa disappeared

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and I believe these two murders are connected.

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Only weeks before his disappearance, Hoffa had completed a book in which he made bitter charges against Frank Fitzsimons.

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He implicated mobsters by name and specifically mentioned the end of his friendship with Tony Provenzano.

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This book may have been Hoffa's death warrant.

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Receivably, he knew enough secrets to send dozens of mobsters to jail or the electric chair.

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Did Hoffa know the secret behind the crime of the century?

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On November 23, 1963, John Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas.

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The alleged killer was Lee Harvey Oswald, whose Cuban connections were documented by the Warren Commission.

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Oswald's murderer, Jack Ruby, had well-known ties to mobsters.

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According to Dan Molday, FBI records indicated that Ruby phoned Hoffa AIDS repeatedly during November 1963.

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Hoffa hated the Kennedys for mercilessly hounding him during the McClellan hearings.

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But did he know more than the rest of us about the president's murder?

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In September of 1962, Sanos Tropicani and his Florida Underworld figure were speaking with a FBI informant.

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During the conversation, which included the Hoffa's personal approval of a $1.5 million dollar team's repension fund loan for Tropicani's associates,

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Tropicani went into a rage over Kennedy's pursuit of Hoffa and indicated to the FBI informant that Kennedy was going to be hit.

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During my investigation, the FBI informant indicated that Tropicani also added that Tropicani had, quote, made it clear that it was Hoffa

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who was making the arrangements for the president's assassination.

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Jimmy Hoffa's connection with Kennedy's murder is tenuous.

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More certain is that Jimmy was involved with organized crime.

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Was he murdered by mob enemies, as the government believes?

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Could he have fled to avoid assassination? Or is he still being held in Communicado?

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For society, the moral is clear. When underworld power is linked to mighty institutions and charismatic leaders, no one is safe.

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Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance was the final twist in a long and turbulent career.

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Gifted with unique talent and charisma, Hoffa could have been one of our country's great leaders.

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He began on the loading docks and earned his status as a working class hero.

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But like so many leaders, Hoffa was corrupted by his tremendous power.

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He was unable to see the folly of his alliance with the underworld until it was too late.

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Coming up next, agents investigating the murder of radio DJ Alan Berg uncover a white supremacist conspiracy on FBI The Untold Stories.

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Then, histories, crimes and trials chronicles the hunt for serial murderers in the case of the Zodiac Killer and the Green River case.

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The Untold Stories