FORTY-SEVEN YEARS OF FECKLESS DIGGING:

Jimmy Hoffa disappeared 47 years ago tomorrow. He was last seen in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox, a restaurant in the Detroit suburbs, at around 2:45 p.m. on July 30, 1975. And he was last heard from, on a call from a nearby pay phone, around 3:30 p.m. Very soon after that call, Hoffa vanished.

There are lots of good reasons to think the mob murdered Hoffa. But there is not a speck of real evidence about how it did so, or what happened to Hoffa’s body. The unexplained vanishing of the iconic labor leader has over the decades stimulated the imaginations of dozens of people who have confessed to the crime or claimed to know what happened to Hoffa’s body. It has also led to a lot of feckless digging in locations around the country in search of Hoffa’s remains.

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But the tips, and confessions, never stopped coming. Some of the more notorious examples:

• Charles Allen, a Hoffa associate, told a Senate committee in 1982 that Provenzano associates “ground up [Hoffa] in little pieces” that were “shipped to Florida and thrown into a swamp.”

• Donald “Tony the Greek” Frankos claimed to have been part of a Hoffa hit team that dismembered the corpse and buried it in cement at Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

• Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran claimed to have murdered Hoffa in Detroit. (The cops found no evidence to support Sheeran’s claim at the home where the murder supposedly occurred. For my debunking of Sheeran’s claim, see here and here.)

The latter’s story’s resulted in one of the longest and most excruciating films Martin Scorsese has ever made: Painting Houses: The Irishman Arrives on Netflix.