Overview

• James P. Hoffa publicly urged President Trump to lift extensive redactions in more than fifty years of case files seeking long-denied transparency
• The FBI Detroit Field Office issued a fresh appeal on July 31 for anyone with credible leads to come forward in the half-century-old investigation
• Decades of searches from Michigan farms to a New Jersey landfill have failed to recover Hoffa’s remains and no one has ever been charged
• Investigators have narrowed prime suspects to Detroit Mafia figures Vito “Billy Jack” Giacalone and Anthony “Tony Pal” Palazzolo but the case remains officially open
• Thousands of pages of FBI memos and reports have been released through FOIA battles, yet a vast amount of material remains heavily redacted, frustrating the quest for closure