(WWJ) The big reveal at an event held Wednesday night: It was a Detroit mobster who killed former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa.
Supposedly.
Former federal prosecutor Richard Convertino and author Scott Burnstein said, during a July 23 forum at Macomb Community College, that mobster Anthony Palazzolo was the person who murdered Hoffa.
Convertino said Palazzolo was heard on a wire saying he killed Hoffa and put his body in a meat grinder at the Detroit Sausage Company, which burned down years ago.
Convertino said that information was turned over to the FBI.
Palazzolo died in 2019.
Speaking with WWJ Newsradio 950's Dan Jenkins prior to the ticketed event — billed as “Hoffa Mystery Solved: 50 years later" — Burnstein said the FBI knows exactly what happened.
"It's information that they're not releasing," Burnstein said. "And, you know, frankly I would hope that they would hold a press conference on the fifth year anniversary, July 30th of this month, and kinda lay out to everybody what they know and why they know it, and kind of give everybody the lay of the land. But, I sense they're not gonna do that."
Burnstein said that's why he and Convertino took it upon themselves to share the information with the public.
"We wanna, you know, wrap this up, give people answers they've been looking for for 50 years, put a big bow on it, and kind of finally put this thing to bed," Burnstein said.
Burnstein stressed that, at least in his mind, this is the definitive answer, not just another theory.
"I'll give the credit in terms of pointing the finger at who the killer was to my partner in this endeavor, Richard Convertino, retired federal prosecutor, former mob buster. He stumbled across this back in 1993, in the prosecution of the guy that the FBI now believes was the killer. And he was prosecuting him back in '93 and got him on a wiretap, pretty much admitting to his role in it," Burnstein told Jenkins.
"He was a name that hadn't really been considered a suspect in the years before that. Richard brought that information to the FBI back in '93. It was kind of dismissed," Burnstein said.
However, 20 years later in 2013, Burnstein said the FBI came to the conclusion that what Convertino said was indeed what happened.
"So, Rick really solved this back in '93 in terms of who the proverbial trigger man was, in terms of where the body is, and where he was taken and where he was killed," Burnstein said.
Federal authorities have long believed Hoffa, the longtime president of the Teamsters union, was killed by mobsters in Metro Detroit because he was trying to regain power in the Union, which he had lost while serving a prison sentence for jury tampering.
Hoffa disappeared in July 1975 from the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, where he was supposed to meet with two mobsters.
The FBI says the Hoffa investigation is still active.
Calls to the FBI by WWJ for comment about the event at MCC were not returned.