Michael Franzese: ‘I Found Out The Shooter of Jimmy Hoffa and Here’s The Proof’ | HO!!

For half a century, one question has haunted America like a ghost that refuses to rest: What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?
The labor icon vanished on a humid afternoon in July 1975, last seen outside a Detroit restaurant, and was never heard from again. No body. No crime scene. Just silence.

Every decade brings a new theory, a new confession, a new “last man to see him alive.” But this time, the voice claiming to know the truth comes from inside the world that killed him.

That voice belongs to Michael Franzese, former captain of New York’s Colombo crime family—one of the few high-ranking mobsters to walk away alive. And when Franzese says he’s uncovered who pulled the trigger on Jimmy Hoffa, the world listens.

The Legend and the Fall

Born James Riddle Hoffa in 1913, he rose from a warehouse laborer to president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, America’s most powerful union.

He organized men who had nothing—truck drivers, warehouse workers, freight haulers—and gave them everything: contracts, pensions, dignity. Under Hoffa’s leadership, the Teamsters grew into a behemoth of 2.2 million members and billions in assets.

But power, in mid-century America, was never clean. To shield workers from company thugs, Hoffa forged uneasy alliances with the Mafia. The mob lent “muscle,” and Hoffa, in return, opened access to the Teamsters’ multibillion-dollar pension fund—a river of cash that quietly financed Las Vegas casinos, construction rackets, and mob-fronted businesses.

For years, everyone prospered. Until Washington noticed.

Convicted of bribery, fraud, and jury tampering, Hoffa was sent to federal prison in 1967. President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence five years later, on the condition that he stay away from union activity until 1980. Hoffa ignored it. He wanted his throne back.

That decision sealed his fate.

A Meeting He Would Never Leave

On July 30, 1975, Hoffa drove his maroon Mercury to the Machus Red Fox restaurant in suburban Detroit.

He was supposed to meet two men: Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamster boss and Genovese-family captain, and Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone, a Detroit mob power broker. Both denied arranging the meeting. Both had reasons to want him gone.

At 2:15 p.m., Hoffa called his wife from a pay phone, irritated that no one had shown up. He said he’d been “stood up” and would be home soon.

Minutes later, he vanished.

Witnesses saw nothing. His car remained in the parking lot. The most famous disappearance in American history had just begun.

The House on the Hill

For decades, FBI agents, reporters, and mob insiders have traded theories like currency. Detroit investigator Scott Burnstein traced Hoffa’s final steps to a property two miles north of the Red Fox—a modest home known in mob circles as the house on the hill.

According to Burnstein’s research, Hoffa was picked up there by Billy Giacalone, Tony Jack’s brother, a low-profile figure the feds weren’t watching. Hoffa trusted him. Billy allegedly told Hoffa the meeting had been moved for “security reasons.”

He believed it—and walked into a death trap.

Inside that house, the meeting turned into an execution. Hoffa’s threats to expose the mob’s grip on union finances had become intolerable. He knew too much and refused to stay quiet. Within minutes, he was dead.

What followed was a cleanup worthy of a thriller: a body erased, a legend born.

Burial, Fire, or Water?

Over fifty years, the disposal theories have multiplied like ghosts. Some swore he was buried beneath Giants Stadium in New Jersey, poetic justice beneath a football field. When the stadium was demolished in 2010—nothing.

Others said he was entombed in a Detroit warehouse foundation, sealed in concrete, or fed through an industrial meat grinder at a mob-owned sausage company. A few whispered of acid vats and crematorium fires.

Every shovel of dirt turned up the same thing: air.

The FBI has dug up horse farms, driveways, even landfills beneath the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey. Each time, the media swarmed. Each time, the ground gave up nothing.

“Wet and Deep”

Then came Michael Franzese.

The former mob captain—once dubbed the Yuppie Don—now speaks openly about his past to universities, churches, and millions of podcast listeners. His words carry the weight of someone who’s lived inside the codes he describes.

When asked about Hoffa, Franzese doesn’t hedge.

Two words, he says, describe where Hoffa rests: “Wet and deep.”

Not under a stadium. Not in a furnace. “He’s somewhere wet and deep,” Franzese repeats in interviews. “And the man who shot him—he’s still alive.”

That claim shatters everything investigators assumed. If true, the shooter isn’t some long-dead hitman. He’s a living witness, sitting quietly in the American prison system, carrying the secret that’s eluded the FBI for half a century.

The Man Who Knows

Franzese’s information, he insists, comes straight from mob channels that still exist. As the son of legendary underboss John “Sonny” Franzese, Michael occupied rarefied air in organized crime—close enough to hear whispers that never reached police wiretaps.

“The order came from New York,” he says. “Detroit handled the setup, but the green light was from the top.”

According to him, someone connected to the Hoffa hit confided in him years ago—and he recorded the conversation.
There are tapes, Franzese confirms, containing firsthand details of Hoffa’s murder and disposal.

He’s never released them.

The Tapes No One Has Heard

The existence of those recordings—unverified but repeatedly acknowledged by Franzese—has become the new nucleus of the Hoffa mystery.
He says they feature a man involved in or present during the killing describing exactly what happened: who was there, how it unfolded, and what they did with the body.

So why not hand them to the FBI?

Franzese offers guarded reasons. Even after decades out of the mob, some codes remain unbroken. The person on those tapes, or his family, could still be in danger. “The mob’s reach is long,” he warns. “And memories are longer.”

Another explanation: the tapes might not provide the precision law enforcement needs. They confirm the what—a mob-ordered execution—but not the where. “Wet and deep” is powerful imagery, not a GPS coordinate. Without a location, prosecutors have nothing to dig for, literally or legally.

Confessions and Pretenders

If Franzese’s claim sounds familiar, it’s because others have come before him.

Frank Sheeran, the Irish-American hitman whose story inspired Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman, claimed he shot Hoffa in a Detroit house and that the body was cremated. Investigators found no physical evidence, and timeline discrepancies undermined his confession.
Richard “Kuklinski” the Iceman, a contract killer with a flair for spectacle, said he transported Hoffa’s corpse in a drum and burned it in New Jersey. No proof.

Mob historians dismiss both as self-serving fabrications. Without a body, anyone can claim the hit—and no one can disprove it.

Franzese is different. He never sought fame from the Hoffa story. He already has it. And unlike Sheeran or Kuklinski, he was inside the hierarchy that authorized such operations.

The Detroit Connection

Meanwhile, researcher Scott Burnstein points toward Anthony “Tony Palazzolo”, a Detroit mob soldier who died in 2019, as a likely shooter.
Informants once claimed Palazzolo boasted of feeding Hoffa’s remains through an industrial sausage grinder—an image so grotesque it made headlines. Yet no evidence ever surfaced. Palazzolo went to his grave uncharged and unrepentant.

Franzese has never confirmed Palazzolo’s name publicly. But privately, his description of the shooter’s role—how the hit advanced a soldier’s standing, how it was executed “fast and final”—fits what Burnstein uncovered. The only contradiction: Franzese insists the gunman still lives.

If that’s true, somewhere behind prison walls sits the last man to see Jimmy Hoffa alive.

The Limits of Truth

The legal reality is cruelly simple.

Knowing and proving are two different things. A prosecutor needs a body, a weapon, or physical corroboration. Recordings of mob talk—no matter how convincing—rarely hold up in court. Defense lawyers shred them as hearsay or invention.

The FBI, despite thousands of pages of files, has never secured that proof. They likely know who ordered Hoffa’s death and who carried it out. They just can’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. After fifty years, evidence decays, witnesses die, and memories turn to myth.

Franzese’s revelation may be the closest the public ever gets to closure—truth without justice.

The Shadow That Won’t Die

Legally, Hoffa was declared dead in 1982, seven years after he vanished. But in America’s imagination, he never left.

His story sits at the intersection of labor history, organized crime, and the national fascination with unsolved mysteries. The Red Fox restaurant is gone; the “house on the hill” has new owners; Central Sanitation, long suspected of burning the body, was bulldozed decades ago. Yet the question endures, retold in documentaries, podcasts, and barroom debates.

Even the mob that killed him has mostly vanished, dismantled by RICO prosecutions and changing times. But Hoffa’s ghost still walks—because he represents something more than a missing man. He represents the space between what we know and what we can prove.

Franzese’s Final Word

In lectures and interviews, Michael Franzese no longer sounds like a gangster. He sounds like a man haunted by the secrets he survived.
“People think the mob was glamorous,” he says. “It wasn’t. It was deadly business. Hoffa thought he could out-muscle it. Nobody does.”

When pressed about whether he’ll ever release the tapes, he pauses. “Maybe one day,” he says softly. “When the time’s right.”

Until then, the mystery lives on—floating somewhere wet and deep, beyond the reach of divers and detectives alike.