It’s been 39 years since Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. On every anniversary of Hoffa’s disappearance, a new theory emerges about the location of his final remains. Here are just a few of them:
• Hoffa’s body was put in a 55-gallon steel drum, and carried off in a truck, then buried on the grounds of a toxic waste site in New Jersey.
• His body was mixed into the concrete that was used to construct the New York Giants' football stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.
• He was entombed in the concrete foundation of a public works garage in Cadillac, Mich.
• Another rumor places him under the helipad of the Sheraton Savannah Resort Hotel, which used to be run by the Teamsters.
What does Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance have to do with the state of garbage in America? Garbage is a real business. Tony Soprano as the Italian-American Mafioso lording over the junk business isn’t just mythological fodder for cable TV. The Mafia did rule over the garbage industry for almost a century.
In New York, Nicholas A. Rattenni was not only the father of Alfred (“Nick Jr.”) Rattenni, but a man of notorious reputation, and widely considered to be the “czar” of the Westchester County garbage carting industry, controlling 90 percent of the county’s private garbage-hauling operations. Rattenni was also reputed to be a lieutenant in the Genovese family.
The Genovese family expanded their close-fisted reign over the garbage industry and ventured into new territories: Upstate New York in Rockland and Orange counties; into New Jersey and Connecticut; and eventually into Florida. Investigations of the Genovese family activities going back to 1957 indicate that their operations included numerous organized crime connections; control of the unions transporting garbage; the use of force, coercion and murder; the bribery and coercion of elected public officials; and bid-rigging and monopoly tactics to inflate the price of hauling contracts.
Even into the late 1980s, high-level government investigations and top-tier news coverage indicated the waste industry was still very much a Mafia-driven affair in love with the profits derived from racketeering, corruption, and price-fixing associated with the hauling and disposal of garbage.
In his New York Times article, “The Garbage Game,” Ralph Blumenthal reported that “Despite more than 30 years of investigations and prosecutions, the private carting industry in the New York City area, New Jersey and parts of Florida remains controlled by organized crime.”
Beginning of the end
There is every reason to suggest that government intervention and subsequent investigations escalated only because so many witnesses reported that the toxic waste materials being unlawfully dumped in landfills were beginning to have an impact on public safety.
For example, much of the toxic waste dumped into the Penaluna Landfill in Warwick, N.Y., posed a threat to nearby Greenwood Lake, which is a major water supply to nearly 1 million people. Local government officials who were on the take — and there were many — would have allowed the Genovese family to reign over garbage indefinitely if the gangsters weren’t so sloppy and increasingly dangerous. Their unlawful disposal of hazardous waste had now grown to become known as “poisoning the public for profit.”
It wasn’t until 2013 that the Protection of the Environment Operations Amendment (Illegal Waste Disposal) Act amended the Protection of the Environment Operations Act of 1997 to more effectively deal with illegal waste disposal and fraud. Why did they wait so long to create legislative protection?
A Dirty Business:
What Ever Happened to Jimmy Hoffa?
By Patricia Vaccarino
Photo: John Bottega, World Telegram & Sun