Jimmy Hoffa’s Daughter Found the Clue Everyone Missed – HT
July 30th, 1975, 2:30 in the afternoon. The parking lot of the Mackis Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. Jimmy Hawa stood by a pay phone in a blue golf shirt, sweating through the Detroit summer, glaring at his watch. He’d called his wife 20 minutes earlier. He said the words that would haunt the FBI for 50 years.
Where the hell is Tony Jackaloney? I’m being stood up. Then a maroon Mercury pulled up. Hawa got in the back seat. He was never seen alive again. No body, no grave, no murder weapon, just an empty car, a pair of reading glasses on the dashboard, and a silence that swallowed a man who controlled 1.7 million Teamsters. Now, here’s what every documentary tells you.
Hawa got whacked because he wouldn’t shut up about taking back the Union. They tell you it was Tony Pro from Jersey. They tell you it was the Detroit boys. They tell you Russell Buffalino, the quiet little man from Pittston, Pennsylvania, gave the nod. And Martin Scorsesei made a three and a half hour movie about it. Beautiful film.
Dairo Pacino Peshi won nothing at the Oscars. But here’s the thing nobody talks about. Scorsese cut out the part of the story that actually got Hawa killed. This is the story of the Pittston War. The bodies pulled from the Suscuana River in 1975. The Detroit families squeezing the Pennsylvania families.
And the one thing Russell Buffalino feared more than any rat, more than any FBI wire, more than Jimmy Hawer’s mouth, a 37year-old woman in St. Louis named Barbara Hoffer’s daughter. And the lawyer she was about to put in a federal courtroom with subpoenas that would have ended 10 Kosanostra families in a single afternoon.
This is the massacre the Irishman cut out. You have to understand the geography of power in 1975 to understand why Hawtha had to die. Most people think the mafia was a New York operation. Five families, Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, that’s Hollywood. That’s not how the money moved. The money moved through trucks. And the trucks moved through Pennsylvania.
specifically a stretch of Interstate 81 that ran from Scranton South through Wilsbury through Pittston down into Harrisburg. That stretch carried 60% of the East Coast freight in the mid70s. Garment trucks out of New York, steel out of Pittsburgh, coal out of West Virginia, cigarettes out of North Carolina.
Every load passed through Boufalino territory, and every load paid a tax. Russell Boufalino, 72 years old in 1975, 5’4, he wore cardigan sweaters. He drove a Chrysler. He owned a drapery shop on Main Street in Kingston, Pennsylvania called Medicalico Industries. To the neighbors, he was just a quiet old Italian man who liked Espresso and Sinatra Records.
To the FBI, he was something else. A 1957 memo from Jay Edgar Hoover called Bufalino quote one of the most ruthless and powerful leaders of the mafia in the United States end quote. He sat on the commission. He had a vote on every made man in America. And he had a partner in Detroit named Anthony Gia Coloney who was about to start a war with him over a pile of cash that didn’t belong to either of them.
The cash belonged to the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. $1 billion in 1975 money. about 6 billion in today’s currency. And Jimmy Hoffa had built it. From the time he took over the union in 57, Hawa used that pension fund as the mafia’s private bank. He loaned the money to Las Vegas casinos at low interest. He took kickbacks.
He let Mufalino’s people skim. He let the Detroit boys skim. He let the Chicago outfit skim. Everyone got fed. Everyone stayed quiet. Then in ‘ 67, Hoffa went to federal prison for jury tampering and pension fraud 13 years. And while he was inside, something happened. The crews kept skimming. But now they didn’t have to share with Huffa.
Frank Fitz Simmons took over as Teamsters’s president. Fitz Simmons was a stoogge. Bufalino owned him. Jackalone owned him. The skim went from a steady drip to an open faucet. By 1973, the Detroit family was pulling almost $2 million a year out of pension loans. The Pittston family was pulling close to that.
And Hawa, watching from his cell at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, was making one promise to anyone who would listen. The minute he got out, he was taking the Union back. The minute he took the Union back, the faucet got shut. Richard Nixon let Hawa out in December 1971, commuted the sentence. There was a condition attached.
Hawa couldn’t run for union office until 1980. Hawa called the condition unconstitutional and started organizing immediately. He filed a lawsuit. He started giving speeches. He started naming names. By the spring of 75, he was telling reporters and federal investigators that the mafia had stolen the pension fund and he could prove it.
He had ledgers. He had names of shell companies. He had records of cash payoffs going back 15 years. That’s the version Hollywood gives you. Hawa’s loudmouth got him killed. But the real fuse was burning in Pennsylvania. In April 1974, Russell Buffalino had a problem named Jack Pereizy. Pesi ran a trucking outfit out of Pittston that hauled garment loads to New York.
He’d been kicking up to Buffalino for 20 years. But in 73, Paresi started dealing directly with Detroit. He cut Balolino out of a $40,000 a month scheme. $40,000 in 73 money. Half a million a year disappearing from Russell’s table. Balolino sent a message. Pereizy was found in the trunk of a Buick on River Street in Pittston with two bullets in the back of his head.
The message wasn’t subtle. Detroit sent a message back. On August 12th, 1974, two Buffalino soldiers named Casper Gementoto and Frankie Candra disappeared from a coffee shop in Wilks Baret. 3 weeks later, a fisherman pulled Geomet out of the Saskuana River near Falls Township. He’d been wired to a cinder block. The block had broken loose. Cyendra never came up.
He’s still down there. Some say his bones are buried under the silt where the river bends past Pittston Junction. The accounts vary on this. What’s documented is that the Pennsylvania State Police pulled four bodies out of that stretch of the Saskuana between June 74 and June 75. All of them connected to the trucking war.
All of them unsolved. This is the war Scorsesei cut out. The Detroit Pittston War. Two of the most powerful Kosanostra families in America. Both partners with Hafa. Both feeding off the same pension fund. Both squeezing each other to death over highway roots and union locals. And in the middle of it stood a 62year-old man fresh out of federal prison who was telling everyone who would listen that he was going to clean it all up.
Hawa wasn’t just a loose mouth. He was a witness. Here’s where it gets interesting. Because in March 1975, 4 months before Hawa disappeared, his daughter Barbara made a phone call that nobody talks about. Barbara Crrener, born April 8th, 1938, married to Robert Crrener, lived in St. Louis. She wasn’t a lawyer yet. She would become one.
She would become a judge. But in 75, she was a 37year-old housewife who knew things. She’d grown up at her father’s kitchen table. She’d heard the names. She’d watched the briefcases. She knew where her father kept his ledgers. And she had hired a lawyer. The lawyer’s name has been redacted in most of the public records, but the work he did is documented in the foyer filings Barbara Crer pursued for the next 30 years.
He was a former federal prosecutor out of Detroit. He’d worked the Teamsters beat. He knew the pension fund inside out. And in the spring of 75, Hoffa hired him to do one thing, prepare a civil suit against the Teamstster’s Central States Pension Fund. The suit would name Frank Fitz Simmons.
It would name Alan Dorfman, the Chicago middleman who handled the loans. It would attach exhibit lists, and those exhibit lists would require subpoenas, bank records, loan documents, canceled checks, names of cash recipients going back to 1960. Russell Buffalolino’s name would have been on those subpoenas. Tony Jacalone’s name would have been on those subpoenas.
Tony Provenzano’s name, Carlos Marello in New Orleans, Santo Trafocante in Florida, Sam Gianana’s leftover crew in Chicago, the Genevese family, the Lucesi family, 10 Kosanostra families, one civil discovery process, one federal courthouse in Detroit. You have to understand something about how the mafia survived for 60 years.
The omea, the code of silence, the thing that kept them out of prison wasn’t muscle. It was paper. The mafia had no paper trail. Cash deals, verbal agreements, nothing written down, nothing signed. The FBI could wire a clubhouse for 10 years and get nothing because nothing was ever said in plain English. Hoff’s lawsuit was going to create paper.
It was going to force the pension fund to produce loan documents. It was going to force banks to produce wire records. It was going to force the teamsters to produce internal memos. And under federal civil discovery rules, anything those documents pointed to became admissible. The lawyer Hawa had hired wasn’t trying to win the lawsuit.
He was trying to use the subpoena power of a federal civil court to bypass the fifth amendment protections of a criminal investigation. This is the part that terrified Russell Buffalino. A criminal subpoena you can fight. You take the fifth. You hire a lawyer. The grand jury is secret. A civil subpoena attached to a Hawa lawsuit becomes public record.
Everything Buffalolino had hidden for 40 years could be pulled into the sunlight by one filing in one federal courthouse. And Buffalolino knew about it. How did he know? Because Frank Fitz Simmons told him. Fitz Simmons had been served with a litigation hold notice in late June 1975. Standard procedure.
Hoff’s lawyer was preparing to file. Fitz Simmons called Detroit. Detroit called Pittston. The decision was made within 72 hours. Hawa had to disappear before the lawsuit was filed. Now, let’s talk about the day. July 30th, 1975. Hawa woke up at 6:00 a.m. in Lake Orion, Michigan. He had coffee with his wife, Josephine.
He told her he was meeting Tony Jacalone and Tony Provenzano at the Mackus Red Fox at 2 p.m. to settle their differences. He told her if he wasn’t home by 4:00, something was wrong. He left the house at 12:45. He stopped at his friend Lewis Lento’s airport limo service in Pontiac. He told Lento the same thing. 2:00 p.m. meeting at the Red Fox. He left there at 1:50.
He arrived at the Red Fox parking lot at 2:05. Witnesses saw him pacing. He went inside, called Josephine from the pay phone at 2:15. The famous quote, “Where the hell is Tony Jaloon?” He went back outside. At 2:45, the maroon Mercury marquee pulled up. The car belonged to Joey Jackaloney, Tony Jack’s son.
In the car were three or four men. The FBI later identified them as Salvatore Brigalio, Tommy Andreda, Steven Andreda, and Charles O’Brien. O’Brien was Ha’s foster son. Huffa had raised him. O’Brien was now working for Tony Pro. Hawa got in the back seat. The car drove south on Telegraph Road. It turned east. It went to a house on Beaverland Street in Detroit, owned by a man named Carlos Marlo.
According to the FBI’s 1976 Hoffix memo, declassified in 2017, Hawa was killed inside that house within 90 minutes of getting in the car. The body was wrapped in plastic. It was loaded into a 55gallon oil drum. The drum was driven to a sanitation company in Ham Tremik called Central Sanitation Services. The company was owned by a Boufalino associate.
The drum was incinerated at a temperature of 2,000° F for 6 hours. There was nothing left. The murder took less than 3 hours from pickup to ash. This is the part Scorsesei got mostly right. Frank Sheran, the Irishman, claimed in his deathbed confession that he was the trigger man. The FBI does not believe him.
The Hoffex memo named Salvatoreé Brigulio as the most likely shooter. Brigalio was killed in March 1978 outside an Italian restaurant on Malbury Street in Manhattan. Three bullets to the face. Nobody charged, but Scorsesei left out everything that came after. 6 days after Hawa disappeared, the FBI raided Central Sanitation Services. They found a 55gallon drum that had been recently incinerated.
They found microscopic blood traces. They could not match the DNA. DNA technology in 1975 was not what it became. The case went cold. But the lawsuit was the real story. 8 days after Hawa disappeared, his lawyer in Detroit received an anonymous phone call. The voice on the other end said two words, “Drop it.” The lawyer dropped it.
He withdrew from the case. He moved to Arizona. He never spoke about the Ha file again. The civil suit was never filed. 10 Kosanostra families exhaled at the same time. That’s the part Scorsesei cut out. Hawa wasn’t killed because he was running for union president. He was killed because his lawyer was three weeks away from filing a civil action that would have created admissible federal court records linking pension fund loans to organized crime payoffs in 10 cities.
The murder wasn’t about silencing a mouth. It was about killing a paper trail before it was born. Now, Barbara Barbara Cranser didn’t go away. That’s what Buffalino missed. The lawyer she’d hired alongside her father had gone silent, but she had her own copies of everything. She had the draft complaint.
She had the exhibit lists. She had the names. She kept them in a safe deposit box in St. Louis. In 1976, she enrolled in law school at St. Louis University. She was 38 years old, raising three kids, and she went to night classes for four years. She graduated in 1980. She passed the bar. She became a federal labor lawyer. Then in 1987, she filed her own foyer request against the Department of Justice for the entire Hawa file. 14,000 documents.
The Justice Department refused. She sued. She fought them for 6 years. In 1993, the Washington Post reported that the DOJ had finally produced what was called the Vaughn Index, a court-ordered inventory of every document the government held on her father. She kept fighting. In 2006, the New York Post called her hunt for her father a quote labor of love end quote.
She was 68 years old by then. She’d become a judge. St. Louis County, Missouri Associate Circuit Court. She never stopped. Russell Buffalino died on February 25th, 1994 in a nursing home in Kingston, Pennsylvania. He was 90 years old. He’d done two short prison stretches, but never for the Huffa hit. Tony Gia Cololon died in 2001, indicted, but never convicted.
Tony Provenano died in prison in 1988, but for a different murder. The Detroit Pittston War ended quietly. The Saskuana kept its bodies, but here’s what nobody saw coming. In 2022, the FBI declassified an additional set of Hawa files. Among them were memos from August 1975, one week after Hawa disappeared. The memos referenced an active civil litigation file held by an attorney in Michigan, scheduled for filing on August 15th, 1975.
The memos noted that the attorney had withdrawn from the case on August 7th and that the file had been destroyed. The FBI memo writer added a handwritten note in the margin. Three words. Why now? Why now? Indeed. Because the lawsuit was the trigger. Not the mouth. Not the union election. Not the loans to Vegas.
The trigger was a civil complaint ready for filing that would have used federal subpoena power to crack open 40 years of Kosanostra paper. The mafia could survive informants. They had survived Joe Velace. They would survive Sammy Graano. They could not survive a paper trail. So they killed the trigger man. They burned him in a sanitation drum.
They threatened his lawyer. They thought they were done. They forgot about the daughter. What this story reveals about the American mafia is something Hollywood has never been willing to film. The mob didn’t fall because of RICO. It didn’t fall because of wires. It fell because women like Barbara Crrener kept files in safe deposit boxes for 50 years and refused to let the men who killed their fathers die in peace.
The Boufalino family is a footnote now. William Big Billy Dalia, who took over after Russell, went to prison in 2008 for money laundering. The northeastern Pennsylvania family is essentially gone. The Detroit family has maybe 20 made men left. The trucking corridor that ran the Saskuana money is policed by the Teamster’s own internal review board, court ordered after the 1989 federal consent decree.
The consent decree was the lawsuit Hawa never got to file. It took 14 years. It took the murder of a man whose body has never been found. It took the silent persistence of a daughter who became a judge. But the paper trail Russell Buffalino killed Jimmy Hawa to prevent eventually got created anyway by federal prosecutors using the playbook that Hawa’s lawyer had drawn up in 1975.
The mafia wins individual battles. They lose long wars to women with file cabinets. There’s a reason Scorsesei cut this part out. It doesn’t fit the romance. The Irishman is a film about old men remembering. It’s allergic. It’s gorgeous. It ends with Frank Sheran in a wheelchair asking a priest to leave the door open. Beautiful.
Useless because the truth of why Hawa died isn’t in the wheelchair. It’s in a safe deposit box in St. Lewis in the hands of a woman who was 37 years old when her father vanished and who spent the next half century making sure his ghost kept walking through every federal courthouse in America. Russell Buffalino feared one thing more than the FBI, more than the commission, more than the Detroit war.
He feared paper and he was right to fear it because paper outlives everyone. Paper doesn’t take the fifth. Paper doesn’t get whacked in a parking lot. Paper sits in a vault for 30 years and waits. Jimmy Hoffa’s daughter became the paper. That’s the story the Irishman cut out.
That’s the massacre that actually got Hawa killed. Not a war of bullets, a war of subpoenas. And in that war, Russell Buffalino lost the only thing the mafia ever truly cared about, the silence. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment below. Should we cover the full Balino family next or the bodies still in the Saskuana?