Hoffa Outgunned

Did Tony Pro move faster?

The FBI and the Department of Justice have long felt certain that they know who killed former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa in 1975, as well as why he was slain. But they have never been able to collect enough evidence that would stand up in court. Nonetheless, the Justice Department last week permitted one of its informers, a self-confessed Mafia hitman, to present his version of the motive for Hoffa's murder. Testifying behind a screen that obscured his features, the man, who now calls himself Charles Allen, told a Senate subcommittee investigating labor racketeering that Hoffa was killed so that he could not carry out a plot to kill his own successor as Teamsters president, Frank Fitzsimmons.

"What happened was that Jimmy was going to try to get back in office," Allen said. Convicted of jury tampering in 1967, Hoffa had been in the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa., with Allen, who was serving a ten-year sentence for bank robbery. Allen claimed that Hoffa had asked him to kill Fitzsimmons because the new Teamsters president would not step aside and let Hoffa regain control of the union after being released from prison. Insisted Allen: "I was supposed to kill Frank Fitzsimmons right here in the Teamsters' parking lot [in Washington]."

In the summer of 1975, Hoffa telephoned Allen and told him--according to an FBI report gained from the informant--that "the time for the murder was very near and that Allen must be prepared to carry out the assignment on a moment's notice." That order never came, Allen told the subcommittee, because Anthony ("Tony Pro") Provenzano, a Mafioso and former Teamsters vice president from New Jersey, heard about the plot. Allen claimed that Hoffa had intended to get other gangsters to kill Provenzano and thus "put everybody in line in the Teamsters."

But, charged Allen, Tony Pro struck first.

Said Allen: "Tony had Jimmy killed. I was told that Jimmy was ground up in pieces, shipped to Florida and dumped in a swamp."

Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975, from a restaurant in suburban Detroit, where he apparently had expected to arrange a meeting with Provenzano. Tony Pro is now back in prison. He was convicted in 1978 of ordering the murder of a former official of a New Jersey Teamsters local. Fitzsimmons died of cancer last year. His successor as Teamsters president, Roy L. Williams, has been indicted for conspiracy to commit bribery, and is expected to stand trial in Chicago this fall.

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