The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

In the standard homicide investigation, the principal question is: whodunnit? In the case of Jimmy Hoffa it was more a question of: who didn’t do it? At least three Mafia hitmen — Donald Frankos, Louie Milito and Richard «The Iceman» Kurlinski — have claimed to have offed the Hoff. Motives likewise abound. Hoffa was stealing from the Mob, elements loyal to Fitzsimmons (like Hoffa, a Mafia associate) sought to prevent Hoffa’s return to the union leadership, Hoffa carried too many secrets about the Mob’s role in the assassination of RFK and Marilyn Monroe …

In the three decades since Hoffa’s disappearance, there have been many unsuccessful searches for his remains. All manner of rumours have surfaced about the body being under the Giants’ Stadium, or in a swamp, compacted by a car-crusher, or processed through a meat rendering plant.

Frank «The Irishman» Sheerhan was a Teamster official, a close associate of Hoffa, and a Mafia hitman. Near the end of his life, as he lay dying of cancer, he confessed to his lawyer Charles Brandt that it was he who had gunned down Hoffa at his house in Detroit.

Brandt: How many shots were fired at Jimmy?

Sheerhan: Two.

Brandt: You were the shooter?

Sheerhan: That’s right.

Brandt wrote a book based on Sheerhan’s confession, I Heard You Paint Houses, that has convinced many Sheerhan was telling the truth. DNA evidence taken from the car and from the house support Sheerhan’s version. In the FBI’s original «Hoffex» memo, Sheerhan was listed as a prime suspect but, despite FBI pressure, he refused to talk until his deathbed confession. According to Sheerhan, Hoffa’s body was cremated in a Mafia-run funeral parlour.

Sheerhan identified two brothers, Tom and Steve Andretta, as the «cleaners» who tidied up the house after the killing. Both men are listed among the FBI’s original suspects.

While no one was ever convicted for the Hoffa murder, the Department of Justice prosecuted more than 30 Mafia figures for other crimes uncovered during the Hoffa investigation. In a twist of divine justice, everyone likely to have participated in the Hoffa murder ended up doing time anyway.

Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa was murdered by the Mob: ALERT LEVEL 9

Further Reading

Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank «The Irishman» Sheerhan and the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa, 2004

Sam and Chuck Giancana, Double Cross: The Story of the Man Who Controlled America, 1992

Dan E. Moldea, The Hoffa Wars, 1978

Hollow Earth

You didn’t think Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1863) was fiction, did you?

Believers in Hollow Earth theory hold that the earth is a shell with openings at the poles. Inside lives an advanced civilization, the Agartha, who sometimes emerge into our world in UFOs.

Hollow Earth theories date back to Ancient Greece, whose people believed that the dead lived in an underworld called Hades. Modern Hollow Earth theory can be traced at least to the 17th-century British astronomer Edmond Halley, who proposed that our world consists of four concentric spheres and that its interior is lit by a luminous atmosphere. The aurora borealis is caused by the escape of this luminous gas through the thin crust at the poles.

The idea of the Hollow Earth was especially promoted by 1812 War veteran John Cleves Symmes; after his death in 1829 a stone monument was erected in Hamilton, Ohio — it showed, naturally, a Hollow Earth. According to Symmes, the main entrance to the inner world was located at the North Pole. Cyrus Teed, an alchemist from Utica, N.Y., was so obsessed with the idea that we humans live in the inner world that he founded a religion based on the idea, Koreshanity, in 1888. In 1913, Marshall B. Gardner published Journey to the Earth’s Interior, in which he rejected Halley’s notion of concentric spheres but maintained that inside the Earth was a sun 600 miles (1,000km) in diameter. And Hollow Earth theory really hotted up in the 1940s with a series of articles by Richard Shaver in Amazing Stories magazine, in which he recounted his meetings with aliens living inside the earth.