Post by JoannaL on Nov 18, 2019 17:13:10 GMT -5
'I Know Where Jimmy Hoffa Is Buried'
“I know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, absolutely,” says Phillip Moscato, Jr., son of Phillip “Brother” Moscato Sr., a member of the Genovese crime family. And not only this, he also knows who killed him – Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio. “Sally Bugs is the one who pulled the trigger in Detroit,” he adds.
Moscato Sr. died of liver cancer in 2014 at the age of 79 and according to his son, his father told him who killed Hoffa and what happened to his body. “I am the only person who knows the location of his final resting place,” he brags. “He is there, I believe one hundred million percent, I know it is.”
Federal investigators have long believed Hoffa, who disappeared July 30, 1975, was killed in Detroit by Genovese crime family mobsters, who transported his body to New Jersey. It is also believed he was buried at the PJP Landfill, a large dump in Jersey City owned by Moscato’s father. But Moscato claims that after one of his father’s Mafia cohorts flipped and cooperated with the FBI in November of 1975, four months after Hoffa vanished, the body was moved.
“Brother” Moscato took the Fifth before the federal grand jury probing Hoffa’s disappearance. Although he was a multi-millionaire who owned restaurants in Florida and New Jersey, Brother was also a major Garden State mobster. A 1972 FBI report described him as “one of the top loan sharks in Hudson and Bergen county New Jersey ... an LCN (La Cosa Nostra) Member and labor racketeer, reputed to be a ‘hit man.’”
Moscato, Sr. was close to Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, whom federal prosecutors claim orchestrated Hoffa’s disappearance. Tony Pro, a notorious Genovese family New Jersey Capo, also served as president of the Jersey City Teamsters Union Local 560. He held a long-standing personal animus toward Hoffa that centered on money, and his bosses opposed Hoffa’s attempts to regain the presidency of the Teamsters Union. Provenzano ordered Hoffa’s body be brought back to New Jersey “as a trophy,” Moscato says. “Tony Pro is the one who put it all together. He is the one who wanted the body brought back to New Jersey, that is why the body was brought back here. The thing between all of them was, the body comes back to Jersey. It was a Jersey thing, and there’s a Jersey guy in control now. Keep him close, keep him where we can see him. It kind of sounds like a sick thing, but that’s the way it was,” he explains. “It was a control-type deal. Kind of like a trophy. He wanted him in Jersey and that was his trophy, and he wanted everybody to understand. That’s how it went down back then.”
Moscato related his stunning story in an exclusive Fox Nation interview for a new episode of Riddle, The Search for James R. Hoffa, and myFox News Channel reporting on the case. He claims his father finally decided to come clean toward the end of his life and told his tale on the day he was discharged from the Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune to go home for hospice care in 2014. “He was a tough guy, one of the toughest guys to ever come out of Jersey City,” Moscato says. “He was a straight-up, old-school mobster. He was going out of his way. He wanted to be home with my mother, with my family, it was probably the scariest day of my life.”
According to Moscato, when his mother, Angela, went to the hospital cafeteria to bring back lunch, his father took the opportunity to reveal what he knew to his son. As they sat together on the hospital bed, back-to-back because of his dad’s back problems, his father told him the secrets. “My mother goes and leaves and he says, ‘I’ve got a few things I want to talk to you about,’ and I’m thinking take care of your mother, I’m going to hear all that, and is there anything financial that I have to take care of,” he recalls. “We spoke about things of this sort and then he drops a bombshell on me. He says I have something I want to tell you and I want you to listen real good. He says, ‘I need to tell you the location of where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean you’re going to tell me the location?’ He says ‘I’m going to tell you where Jimmy Hoffa is buried,’ and he told me. He gave me the location of where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.”
It took several years for Moscato to process and fully absorb what his father said, to put the pieces together and then become comfortable with sharing it. He finally decided to come forward earlier this year after watching a television news segment on the Fox News Channel concerning the Hoffa investigation. The segment featured Eric Shawn, former Fox News Producer Ed Barnes and noted Washington, D.C. investigative journalist and author Dan Moldea, who is considered the most prominent Hoffa expert in the country.
Moldea, who started on the Hoffa beat in 1974 and went on to write the landmark book The Hoffa Wars in 1978, first interviewed Moscato Sr. (above) in 2007 and had earned the family’s trust through the years. Moldea then teamed up with the others on the Fox Nation investigation. “He was a stand-up guy,” Moldea says of Brother Moscato. “Hoffa is killed in Detroit, loaded into a 55-gallon drum and taken to New Jersey. Moscato confirmed to me that Hoffa’s body was brought back to New Jersey.” According to the author, the mobster told him, “They said that me and Sal Briguglio buried Hoffa in my dump ... brought the truck in and Hoffa was in there and we buried him.” Still, he refused to reveal where Hoffa’s remains ended up after they were removed from the dump.
In November of 1975, Ralph Picardo, a member of Tony Pro’s crew, tipped off the FBI about Hoffa’s murder and suggested he was buried in “Moscato’s dump.” This apparently prompted the mobsters to move the body to another location before the Feds found it. “Once they hear that Ralph Picardo is talking and informing, and actually locating Brother Moscato’s dump as the site of the body, which it was at that point, that the whole Provenzano crew decided to go ‘red alert’ to get the body out of there,” Moldea adds.
Picardo’s son, Ralph Picardo, Jr., told Shawn his father was telling the truth about the murder. “I am confident in what he said. There is an overwhelming possibility the remains will be found ... the chances are getting better with the passage of time,” Picardo Jr. said.
The bureau searched the dump, but came up empty-handed, not surprising if the body had already been moved. In fact, Sal Briguglio was so brazen that he and two of the other suspects, his brother Gabe and Thomas Andretta, put up a $10,000 reward to be paid to “anyone who unearthed Hoffa’s corpse” in the dump, money they knew would never have to pay because the remains were no longer there.
Some FBI and Department of Justice officials have claimed Briguglio was the shooter, however, prosecutors were unable to make a case against him before he was shot to death in a suspected mob rub-out on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy in 1978, three years after Hoffa disappeared. His murder remains unsolved. “Sally Bugs, yes ... was the one,” Moscato insists. “It was a Sal Briguglio hit ... I remember Sally from when I was a little kid.”
“Briguglio was given the actual assignment and, thereafter, he notified the interested parties of its successful completion on the evening of 7/30/75 either personally or through a third party,” a 1976 U.S. Federal Strike memo read. The Department of Justice report also claimed Briguglio was attempting to get his hands on a backhoe, presumably for the purpose of burying Hoffa. According to the memo, two unidentified men “found themselves urgently in need of a backhoe on Thursday morning (7/31/75),” which happened to be the day after Hoffa disappeared.
“An informant advised a Strike Force Attorney in Newark that Briguglio had borrowed a backhoe around the time of Hoffa’s disappearance,” the heavily-redacted memo continued, indicating the backhoe appeared to have been borrowed from the nearby Orlando Construction Company. The president of Orlando Construction had been identified as Thomas Principe, a “reputed high ranking member of the powerful Genovese crime family.”
Moscato declined to reveal the exact location where his father said Hoffa’s remains were buried, but the Fox Nation investigation turned up two possible spots in the New Jersey Meadowlands, the traditional burial ground for Mafia victims. One is now a paved parking lot and the other is a plot of abandoned land. There also are reports of a third site, a vacant plot of land in Carlstadt, New Jersey, along the Hackensack River. The address is 200 Outwater Lane and the parcel has no historical mob provenance. The former boss of the Genovese crime family’s New Jersey operations, John DiGillio, was found dumped in a body bag at the location in 1988 and there have been rumors Jimmy Hoffa is buried there. For years, the address was a marina and it has a sinister past. A 1982 Carlstadt police report describes 200 Outwater as “tantamount to a western shoot-out movie ... with larceny, rape, theft, explosion, arson, burglary.”
Alfred Porro, president of Riverview Associates, a company that bought the land in 1988, was an attorney who represented many local reputed mobsters in business dealings and one of them was Moscato’s father. Porro and others told Fox News there had been talk that Hoffa was possibly buried at the location. In November 1975, when Hoffa’s corpse was possibly disposed of there, the site was vacant. The parking lot wasn’t paved and it was loosely covered in stones and shingles. There is now a former night club and golf driving range on the property, which is currently for sale.
Moscato refuses to confirm 200 Outwater Lane is the location where his father told him Hoffa was buried, or if the site is the other location that Fox Nation has identified in the Meadowlands nearby. He claims he is waiting for further confirmation of a few more details that would corroborate the information before going public. When he does, he promises he will tell what he knows to law enforcement authorities in a sworn affidavit so law enforcement can commence digging for Hoffa’s remains.
Interest in the Hoffa disappearance has been heightened by the release of the Netflix film The Irishman, based on the claim of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran that he killed Hoffa. Shawn met Sheeran in 2001 and was told he shot Hoffa in the head with a .22 caliber handgun in a house in Detroit. In 2004, the reporter led the Fox News team to the location, where blood was discovered on the floor in a pattern that matched Sheeran’s story. The FBI. confirmed that 28 drops of blood were human, however, the bureau was able to extract DNA from just one sample, and determined it came from “an unidentified male,” not from Hoffa. Authorities deemed Sheeran’s story “unfounded.”
“The man that killed Jimmy Hoffa was Sal Briguglio (above), he was the triggerman,” Ralph Natale, former Philadelphia Mob Boss Ralph Natale, writes in his book Last Don Standing, wherein he recalls his days running the Mafia in the City of Brotherly Love in the 1990s. Of Sheeran, Natale told Fox Nation he “did nothing. His whole life was a lie. He didn’t kill him, not in a million years.”
Nonetheless, Charles Brandt, the author of Sheeran’s biography, I Heard You Paint Houses, on which the film is based, and Chip Fleischer, the book’s publisher, stand by Sheeran, who died in 2003. Brandt has denied that Sheeran fabricated the story to sell a book, insisting Sheeran did it. “It is the law of confession, the law of corroboration and it’s satisfied over and over again,” he insisted.
In the meantime, Moscato hopes his information will help prosecutors find Hoffa’s remains and the case can finally be put to rest, which, he believes, will bring the Hoffa family some solace. James P. Hoffa, the former labor leader’s son, is the current president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and his daughter Barbara is a retired judge in St. Louis, Missouri. “A big part of this is the Hoffa family,” Moscato says, adding that it is his desire to act responsibly. “I really want this to happen. For them never knowing, I am hoping that this ... will give them a little closure. People will say, ‘Oh he should just tell that poor family,’ and I understand that, believe me, I really understand that, I do,” explains. “It’s partly why I am going slow. I want to make sure that when it comes out, it comes out the right way. I want them to feel comfortable about the location that I am giving. too. This is a process that I am doing. I am just not blurting it out. But the story is together, it is definitely together, it makes sense. I’m a son, I’m a dad, I’m a Grandfather, and I can only imagine ... I cannot imagine what they must have went through and what they still go through,” he continues, “and I want to be a part of making that better. It’s been too long. The family deserves it, they really do.”
Fox News has called for the full release of the government’s still-secret Hoffa files so that all information concerning the disappearance and suspects can finally be made public. The Hoffa family supports this effort.
Source: Eric Shawn, Fox News, November 19, 2019.
