Oakland Township, Mich –– On Monday morning, almost as quickly as a snap of the finger, a circus broke out at a corner of rural Oakland Township, north of Detroit.
There were no elephants and dancing bears. But there were FBI agents, sheriff’s deputies, farm equipment and lots of TV cameras and reporters, curious neighbors and gawking motorists, some who stopped to snap a photo.
The FBI was digging for James R. Hoffa.
It wasn’t a huge surprise, in some ways.
Ex-Detroit mobster Tony Zerilli had come forward and spoken to the media several months ago, saying Hoffa is buried on property at a property near the corner of Buell and Adams Road. The site once belonged to Detroit’s top mobster Jack Tocco. The FBI was interested.
Zerilli, in a transcript of a partial book offered for sale on his website HoffaFound.com, said mobsters drove Hoffa to the property on July 30, 1975, bound and gagged him, then took a shovel and “cracked Hoffa over the head with it.” A gravesite already had been dug in a barn.
“They threw him in the hole, buried him alive,” Zerilli wrote. “He wasn’t shot, he wasn’t stabbed, nothing like that. A cement slab of some sort was placed on top of the dirt to make certain he was going to be discovered. And that was it. End of story.”
Anthony Zerilli’s partial manuscript — just 21 pages — is being peddled online for $5 as a download or $8 mailed.
Zerilli was at the excavation site for a while Monday morning, but took off. His attorney, David Chasnick, said he may have been a little intimidated by the crowd.
Chasnick gave journalists copies of Zerilli’s 21-page manuscript of his developing book on the disappearance. Zerilli, 85, is broke and has said he wants to make money on all of this.
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