Jimmy Hoffa's body was crushed at a New Jersey junkyard

The argument

This account of Hoffa's disappearance rests on a single source: a claim made by the mafia assassin Richard Kuklinski during a conversation with Philip Carlo, author of The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer. In Kuklinski's telling, he murdered Jimmy Hoffa with a hunting knife, then drove back to New Jersey with Hoffa's body in the trunk of the car. The body was never removed. The car was taken to a junkyard, crushed with Hoffa still in the trunk, and sold on for scrap metal. What makes the account notable to those who credit it is not its drama but the disposal method it describes. The central difficulty in the Hoffa case has always been the absence of remains, which constrains every theory of what happened to him. A car crusher resolves that difficulty in a way few other scenarios do. The body is not buried somewhere that could later be searched, nor left anywhere it might be found by accident; it is compacted inside a vehicle and then dispersed into the scrap metal supply, at which point there is no longer a site to excavate or an object to recover. The evidence does not need to be concealed, because it ceases to exist in recoverable form. The account also fits the setting it describes, since a junkyard is a place where a car can be destroyed without anyone needing an explanation for it. On this account, then, Hoffa was never buried at all, and no search of any particular location would succeed. His remains went into a dump or junkyard, which is where proponents of this position hold he is.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Many people find this theory to be unlikely and believe Kuklinski to be unreliable, as well as a fantasist. Former FBI agent and crime expert Robert Garrity has opposed this claim, deeming it as " the most embarrassing one to date" Also, during an HBO interview conducted prior to the release of Carlo's book, Kuklinski claimed to have no knowledge of what happened to Hoffa, and to have only heard rumors, the inconsistency in Kuklinski's accounts cause many people to not believe in his involvement.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The claim rests entirely on Kuklinski's own account, given to an author writing a book about him, with no corroborating physical evidence, witness or record; and on the counter's account he told an interviewer before publication that he knew only rumours about Hoffa. [Rejecting P2] Taken at face value the account also describes a car crushed and sold for scrap decades ago, which would leave nothing to identify or test — so the premise supports the position only for anyone who has already accepted the confession.