With Labor Day on the horizon, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the ‘urban legends’ which surround the July 30, 1975 disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa as the byproduct of possible influence operations. While there is generally strong agreement that the mob was responsible for Hoffa’s vanishing, there are also many conspiracy theories which have linked Hoffa posthumously to both the John F. Kennedy (JFK) and Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) assassinations.
Taking the knowledge that certain aspects of conspiracy which surround the JFK assassination narrative as presented in films like Oliver Stone’s JFK are the result of Soviet disinformation operations, here we will look at the apparent origins of the Hoffa narratives and how they might follow similar contours. In the end, the most popular conceptions of Hoffa as we know him today seem linked to Trotskyites and other radical writers. Notably, the narratives have most strongly emerged from a network of writers who are very close to Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt.
