Where's Jimmy?
May 31, 2006
I was worried for a time that the FBI just might find the remains of Jimmy Hoffa tucked away on a horse farm north of the Motor City. The world would seem less enchanted were that so.
When Hoffa disappeared in July 1975 few harbored doubt that the Teamsters' boss had been rubbed out by organized crime. His missing body hovered over the labor movement almost like a ghost: Where's Jimmy? was both a question and something akin to a warning. Then came the jokes. Where's Jimmy? Find a construction site and speculate. My favorite location is the Meadowlands. Several years ago I attended my first and only Giants game. I wondered if I were sitting in Hoffa's lap.
So now that FBI has called off the search for Hoffa, and concluded that he is not, in fact, sleeping with the horse dung in Milford, Michigan, I can breathe a sigh of relief. Hoffa is gone. An unsolved mystery in an age where long-winded and prosaic answers exist for most of life's more interesting questions.
Ghost, goblins, demons -- vanished amid the claims of unremitting reason. Even God has become prosaic and tedious in the hands of religious fundamentalists. What a world. Organized crime alone able to yield enduring mystery in world grown stale and flat.