Jimmy Hoffa's body was taken to a toxic waste dump in New Jersey

The argument

Among the accounts placing Jimmy Hoffa's remains in a dump or junkyard is one attributed to Phillip "Brother" Moscato, described as a mobster in New York's Genovese crime family. Before his death, Moscato told an investigative reporter, in an interview the reporter recorded, that Hoffa's body had been sealed in a 55-gallon drum and placed at a toxic waste dump under the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City. What gives the claim its force, on this view, is Moscato's own position. He was a co-owner of that dump, so he is presented not as a rumour-carrier repeating gossip but as someone with direct control over the site where the disposal is said to have happened. The account also supplies an answer to the obvious objection, which is that nothing has ever been recovered there. Moscato said the FBI had searched the grounds decades earlier without result. Rather than treat that null result as disconfirming, the account absorbs it: other mafia sources told the same reporter that the drum lay buried beneath fifteen to thirty further drums of toxic waste. If so, any search would have had to work down through a mass of hazardous material to reach it, and finding nothing is what one would expect whether or not the body is there. That second move is also what makes the claim difficult to test. It rests on the recorded word of a single participant, now dead, corroborated only by unnamed sources drawn from the same milieu, and it explains away the one piece of evidence — the unsuccessful search — that might otherwise count against it. No remains have been recovered, and the account remains unverified. It is offered as a reason for placing Hoffa in a dump or junkyard rather than as established fact.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Many people, including other people with Mafia ties argue that this theory is improbable. James Buccelatto, a senior lecturer in criminology at Wayne State University, has often opposed this theory, stating that "The idea that he was transported to New Jersey and buried somewhere, it just doesn't make sense for logistical reasons, the Mafia guys are going to want to get rid of the body as soon as possible."

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Moscato's account is a single deathbed claim by a participant in organised crime, relayed to a reporter with no physical corroboration — the drum, the remains and the burial all rest on his word alone. [Rejecting P2] A search that found nothing counts against the site, not for it; treating a negative result as consistent with the claim leaves nothing that could disconfirm it. [Rejecting P3] The logistics work against the account. As criminologist James Buccellato argues, moving a body from Michigan to New Jersey and layering it beneath dozens of other drums maximises the time, distance and number of people involved, when the incentive is to dispose of a body as quickly and as close to hand as possible.