Rest in peace
As the story goes, former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa has attended every event at Giants Stadium since 1976, buried in a final resting place somewhere under the west end zone.
As former New York Giants punter Sean Landeta once joked, “It gives a whole new meaning to kicking into the coffin corner.”
If Hoffa’s body is there, it’s going to end up buried even deeper this spring when the stadium is demolished.
What happened to Hoffa after he was kidnapped outside a Detroit eatery is one of the enduring mysteries of the 20th century. The stadium burial rumor was set in motion more than 20 years ago by a self-described mob hit man named Donald “Tony The Greek” Frankos during an interview with Playboy magazine.
Whether there ever was any veracity to Frankos’ claims, the story grew legs during the next 20 years and provided fallback fodder for headline writers and sports columnists.
The west end zone became the “Jimmy Hoffa Memorial End Zone.” Teams didn’t just beat the Giants or Jets, they “Jimmy Hoffa-ed” them. Authors and cable TV sleuths searched the site and found nothing.
Not that there weren’t other bodies unearthed during the stadium’s construction of Giants Stadium 34 years ago. Retired FBI agent Jim Kossler recalled how contractors would call the county prosecutor’s office every time they dug up a corpse, but eventually decided it disrupted the work too much.
“After about the fifth one, they stopped,” he said.
A spokesman for the FBI’s Newark office said the bureau has no plans to oversee the demolition of Section 107.
Once the demolition is completed, the 13-foot bowl in the ground where the field now sits will be filled in with concrete and asphalt and turned into a parking lot — perhaps finally burying one part of the Hoffa mystery.
PARTING SHOT
“If he’s down there, he’s going to be down there deeper.”
— Frank Gramicizia
The vice president of the demolition company Gramercy on Jimmy Hoffa, who, according to urban legend, was murdered, cut up and buried somewhere under the west end zone of Giants Stadium. Gramercy is demolishing the stadium this spring.
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