We are on E! Entertainment – Hoffa show

By Joel Thurtell

Joelontheroad.com on E! Hoffa show

What an odd coincidence that my blog should debut on Sunday, Dec. 9, the same day I’ll be appearing on E Entertainment’s show about the fate of Jimmy Hoffa, the late Detroit Teamsters leader. The show is at 8 p.m.
Now, how did I merit being filmed as an expert on the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa? Certainly not because I AM an expert.

Pure chance. A couple years ago, I wrote a story about a Taylor cop named Jeff Hansen who wrote a crime novel set in Detroit. Jeff can write with authority about Detroit because he grew up there and was a Detroit cop after he got out of the Marines. Jeff self-published his novel, WARPATH, and I happen to be interested in people who try to break into print without the usual baggage of agent and commercial publisher. Last spring I called him to check in, see what was new. It was one of those serendipitous calls.

There was indeed something new. Jeff had developed a theory about Hoffa, He didn’t convince me his theory was correct, but he sure persuaded me to write a story about it.
I wrote the story, and it ran in the Community Free Press Detroit and Southfield editions last July 8. Sometime in September, I got a call from a producer for E Entertainment out in Los Angeles. Would I be interviewed for a show about Hoffa? Frankly, I’d never heard of E Entertainment. We watch almost no TV in our house. In the days when I was employed by the Free Press, my desk faced Susan Tompor, the Free Press personal finance columnist. I told Susan about the call. “Ever hear of E Entertainment?” I said. “Ever hear of it,” she said. “It’s a big deal.”

So I agreed to be interviewed. The producers wanted to talk to me at my desk. That posed something of a problem for me, see, because my desk at the time – and, well, at ANY time – could only have been cleared with help from a front-end loader. Jeff’s theory involved crematory ovens at Detroit’s Grand Lawn Cemetery. I cleverly suggested that we meet at the cemetery rather than at the Free Press Southfield office. I would show them the ovens. Maybe we could even drive along the streets where Hoffa’s corpse theoretically was taken to its final resting place.
I actually thought I’d sold them on that idea, and was quite relieved that I wouldn’t have to hire a moving firm to clean my desk. But at the last minute, I learned that they weren’t going to the cemetery after all. They for sure would be at my office, the producer said, preferably at my desk. TV people have this thing about reporters’ desks. Okay, I said, but NOT AT MY DESK! There was a big vacant corner office in our suite and I told them we’d have to do the interview there so as not to disturb my colleagues who were always, always, ALWAYS hard at work.

The day before the crew arrived, I got an email from the producer with a list of questions I was expected to answer. Man, this was worse than a Ph.D. general exam. In a panic, I called LA and said no way could I do this. I am not a professor of labor history. Don’t worry, I was told, you can work it out with the interviewer to kill some of the questions. I said okay, I’ll do it. But to be safe, I stopped at the Plymouth library and checked out three or four books on Hoffa. Not only that, I spent the better part of the evening trying to read them.

The next day, the crew showed up at our office. They took about an hour to redecorate the big corner office, hanging a photo of Tiger Stadium so it would be behind me, and laying out some Hoffa books I left around, thinking they might do that. I’d even started cleaning off my desk, but gave it up. Good retirement project, I figured, not realizing how soon that would be. The interviewer and I went over the questions and she agreed not to ask me some that made me uncomfortable. We went into the office, where the cameraman turned off the overhead lights and turned on a set of bright fluorescents aimed straight into my eyes. The idea was to create a macabre atmosphere. The camera went on and the interviewer began asking me questions. I battled with my memory and I struggled to keep my eyes open against those bright lights. Despite our agreement to cut some questions, she asked every one of them. I actually answered everything, but I don’t have a clear memory what I said.

Stress was the name of the game, and I was mightily relieved when that hour of quizzing and bright lights was over. But the camera people still had ideas. Apparently, my colleagues didn’t look as busy as I’d made them out. The camera people found me at my computer, and sure enough, my overburdened and sloppy desk made it onto E!

Here, reprinted courtesy of the Detroit Free Press, is the July 8, 2007 story I wrote about Jeff Hansen and his idea of how Jimmy Hoffa met his end. In the original story, I confused my and Hoffa’s whereabouts and said it happened in the Brightmoor neighborhood. Grand Lawn is close to Brightmoor, but no cigar. I corrected the story.

FORMER DETROIT COP THINKS HE KNOWS THE FATE OF TEAMSTERS LEADER

Byline: BY JOEL THURTELL

Jimmy Hoffa’s last car ride took less than two minutes.

On July 30, 1975, he rode one long block south from a two-story house at 17841 Beaverland on Detroit’s west side and turned right – west – on Grand River Ave.

He passed the greens of William Rogell Golf Course and a scenic footbridge, crossed the woodsy Rouge River, cruised past the brown brick Redford Granite Co. building and the Mt. Vernon Motel, made a U-turn and rode east a few yards on Grand River. He came to a brief stop in front of an iron service gate to Grand Lawn Cemetery.

The gates were opened, and Hoffa entered the cemetery. But the once powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters leader did not enjoy any of these sights. He was dead, having received two bullets in the head from his trusted old pal Frank Sheeran back in the Beaverland house.

Now, whether Hoffa really met his end this way is uncertain. Sheeran, the only person who claims it went down like this, died four years ago of cancer.

But the scenario makes perfect sense to Jeff Hansen, a Taylor cop who grew up in the Brightmoor area and later worked the same streets as a Detroit police officer.

Hansen – author of the Detroit-based fictional crime book “Warpath” (Spectre Publishing, 2004) – has added a coda to Sheeran’s claim that he killed Hoffa in the Beaverland house at the command of mobsters. Hansen claims to have solved the mystery of what happened to Hoffa’s body. Rumors that Hoffa was buried under the New York Giants’ football stadium in New Jersey or under a Milford horse farm or maybe burned at a mob-controlled incinerator are baloney, Hansen says.

Hansen thinks Hoffa was cremated minutes after Sheeran dropped the murder pistol in the vestibule of the Beaverland house, either at Evergreen Cemetery at 7 Mile and Woodward, or more likely at Grand Lawn Cemetery at Telegraph and Grand River. His alleged proof: a pair of cremation ovens “a minute away from the Beaverland house” in the mausoleum at Grand Lawn, built two years before Hoffa vanished.

My drive from the Beaverland house to that gate lasted one minute, 37 seconds. I was not going fast. A minute from Beaverland to Grand Lawn? Possible. That doesn’t make Hansen’s hypothesis correct. He bristled when I called it “conjecture,” but that’s what it is. Fascinating conjecture, though.

Sheeran’s story received wide publicity three years ago thanks to “I Heard You Paint Houses,” a book by former Delaware chief deputy attorney general Charles Brandt. Brandt recorded long statements by Sheeran about his life as a Mafia hit man. Sheeran claimed he killed Hoffa at the command of Mafia boss Russell Bufalino. “Painting houses” referred to the blood left after people are shot. Sheeran also claimed to do “carpentry,” meaning he disposed of bodies.

According to Sheeran, Hoffa had more than one enemy’s house “painted.” Lured to the Beaverland house by Sheeran, Hoffa had his own house “painted” when Sheeran fired two shots into his brain.

In 2003, Brandt videotaped Sheeran’s deathbed confession to having murdered Hoffa on July 30, 1975.

A TV report on Sheeran’s confession to Brandt started Hansen thinking about Grand Lawn.

He’d worked as a cop in the old 8th Precinct, patrolling the streets around Beaverland and Grand Lawn Cemetery near Grand River and Telegraph. He wondered what Hoffa might have been thinking as the car came down Telegraph toward Grand Lawn Cemetery before he was shot. Hansen read Brandt’s book. It was the first time someone had actually confessed to killing Hoffa.

Sheeran described the area around the Beaverland house accurately, noting the Rogell golf course and precisely locating the house where he said he killed Hoffa. But the book was missing a piece of the puzzle. How did the mob get rid of Hoffa’s body?

The Hoffa file

Hoffa was a high-profile figure. He’d spent time in prison for jury-tampering. The Justice Department had restricted his union activities, even though he’d paid President Richard Nixon and his attorney general, John Mitchell, half a million dollars for a pardon. In 1975, he was threatening to reveal the mob’s entanglement with Teamsters pension funds – even though he himself turned the Central States Pension Fund into the Mafia’s private piggy bank. Organized crime wanted to shut him up, wrote Brandt.

While the FBI was busy in May 2006 digging up a Milford horse farm, Hansen was thinking about Grand Lawn – he had even called the Detroit FBI office and reported his theory.

He visited the cemetery and saw two crematory ovens in a mausoleum building. “It’s like being struck by lightning,” he said. “This cemetery was chosen because it’s near the house.”

Hansen said that Rod Milne, who managed the cemetery in 1975, told him, “We were doing cremations left and right” in 1975. Later, Hansen said, Milne recanted.

Milne’s wife, Carol, said she doubts Hansen’s theory, but admitted it might have happened. She wasn’t sure if cremations were done at Grand Lawn in 1975. Hansen said he found a Grand Lawn interment log that records two cremations the day Hoffa went missing. Carol Milne said that often crematory workers didn’t look at the bodies before they incinerated them. A burial transit permit could have been faked by a Mafia-friendly funeral parlor, Hansen thinks.

No need to take Hoffa to Giants Stadium or a horse farm at Milford.

Not a federal case?

So why is it important where Hoffa was killed and where his body went?

Charles Brandt explained that the FBI has spent many years and lots of money in the hunt for Hoffa, assuming that he was kidnapped (a federal crime) from the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, murdered and his remains shipped somewhere out of state (another federal offense).

In all those years, the FBI has refused to release a complete, uncensored copy of the voluminous Hoffa file.

“Once they accept what Frank Sheeran said, the FBI completely loses jurisdiction of the case,” Brandt said. “They would have no reason to hold onto the file. It’s not a kidnapping. The murder occurred in the city of Detroit. Nobody crossed a state line. It’s actually a Detroit homicide.”

For more on the Jimmy Hoffa mystery, see Charles Brandt’s Web site www.hoffasolved.com or Jeff Hansen’s www.spectrepublishing.com.