Jimmy Hoffa—Tony Provenzano

Jimmy Hoffa and Tony Provenzano’s relationship turned from union alliance into personal and political enmity, then briefly returned to the possibility of negotiation just before Hoffa disappeared. Their conflict joined a concrete grievance over pension money to the larger struggle over control of the Teamsters; its final attempted meeting, arranged through Anthony Giacalone, became part of the book’s account of the suspicions surrounding Hoffa’s disappearance.

From ally to opponent

Provenzano had once been a Hoffa man. By the time Hoffa was trying to regain influence over the union, however, Provenzano had become a leader of the Teamsters faction opposed to that effort. The shift was more than a falling-out between two individuals: Provenzano’s position gave him a role in the organized opposition to Hoffa’s return, while their former association made the rupture especially charged.

The book traces their bad blood to prison. Hoffa and Provenzano nearly came to blows in a dining hall after Hoffa refused to help Provenzano get around federal law to obtain his pension. The disparity sharpened the grievance: Provenzano was seeking $1.2 million while going to prison, whereas Hoffa received his own $1.7 million pension despite also being imprisoned. In the memoir’s telling, the dispute was therefore not only about the rules governing pension access. Hoffa’s refusal, beside the contrast with his own benefit, gave Provenzano a specific cause for resentment that endured after both men were released.

Threats and the rules of retaliation

A couple of years after their releases, the two men met at a Teamsters convention in Miami to try to settle the dispute. The meeting did not produce reconciliation. Provenzano threatened to rip Hoffa’s guts out with his bare hands and to kill his grandchildren. The threatened violence made the conflict intimate as well as organizational: Hoffa’s family was drawn into the language of the feud.

Hoffa later told Frank Sheeran that he would ask Russell Bufalino for permission for Sheeran to take care of Provenzano. The account emphasizes that this was not a decision Hoffa could simply carry out on his own: Provenzano was a made man and a captain in the New York Genovese crime family, so approval from Bufalino was required. Sheeran says he heard nothing further and treated Hoffa’s remark as a possibly fleeting expression of anger. He understood that an actual assignment would ordinarily be communicated when the time came, sometimes only about a day in advance. The episode thus presents violence as governed by hierarchy and authorization, even within a personal feud.

Provenzano’s reputation in Sheeran’s account helps explain why the threat did not seem abstract. Sheeran describes him as someone who could have a person killed over a local union election, recounting a murder carried out by Salvatore Briguglio and K.O. Konigsberg after a fellow candidate drew more votes. The account also says that testimony from an informant led to Provenzano receiving a life sentence for that killing, and that he died in prison. These details are Sheeran’s retrospective characterization, not proof that Provenzano’s later conduct toward Hoffa followed the same pattern; they establish the violent setting through which the memoir frames their hostility.

A last proposed settlement

Despite the threats, Hoffa eventually told Sheeran that he had a meeting set with Provenzano for Wednesday afternoon. Sheeran questioned the reference, and Hoffa confirmed that he meant the same man. Hoffa said he had little to lose by making one final attempt to settle the dispute before Sheeran came out to the lake on Saturday. Sheeran urged him to take a weapon, calling it a precaution. Hoffa rejected the need for one: Anthony Giacalone had arranged the meeting, and it was to take place at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant, a public place.

The choice of intermediary carried its own complication. Anthony Giacalone was close to Hoffa and his family, but his wife was Provenzano’s first cousin. Sheeran considered Giacalone trustworthy and understood why Hoffa would rely on him; the family connection also placed the arrangement across the divide between the two men. The memoir notes that Giacalone had reportedly tried for a long time to arrange another sit-down after the disastrous Miami encounter, but that Hoffa had rejected the idea before abruptly agreeing to meet. The sudden change makes the proposed settlement feel less like the natural end of a feud than a consequential break in its pattern.

Sheeran later speculates that Hoffa might have been setting Provenzano up, expecting him to behave provocatively while Giacalone watched Hoffa try to be reasonable. In that possible reading, Hoffa would have been able to tell Bufalino at the lake that he had exhausted peaceful options and that Provenzano had to be dealt with. But Sheeran presents this as hindsight and conjecture, not as a confirmed plan. The meeting’s significance in the narrative lies partly in that uncertainty: it could represent a genuine last attempt at peace, or a maneuver in a conflict whose rules and consequences were controlled by others.

Disappearance and the widening suspicion

The prologue gives the relationship a stark retrospective frame. In a cottage by a lake, members of Hoffa’s family found a yellow pad beside his phone bearing the penciled words “Russ & Frank.” The book identifies the two men as Hoffa’s close friends and staunch allies, with Sheeran treated as family through his loyalty during Hoffa’s legal and political ordeals. To the family, the note mattered because someone close enough to be trusted might also have been able to approach a cautious man who knew he had dangerous enemies. The book consequently names Sheeran and Bufalino as leading suspects in the disappearance; the note itself does not establish what either man did.

Five days after Hoffa disappeared, the FBI noted a meeting at the Vesuvio Restaurant attended by Provenzano, Bufalino, Sheeran, Salvatore Briguglio, and Anthony Salerno. Sheeran’s account describes the meeting as a report to Salerno about how Hoffa’s disappearance had been carried out and whether loose ends remained, while also saying that New York had not sanctioned the action and had left the participants on their own. This is the narrator’s account of the meeting and its purpose, not an independently demonstrated confession by Provenzano. Its placement nevertheless ties the old feud to the aftermath of the disappearance: Provenzano, once Hoffa’s ally and later his bitter opponent, appears in the same reported gathering as the men surrounding the book’s account of the suspected killing.

The FBI’s HOFFEX memo identified Provenzano among seven men it initially focused on; the investigation’s suspect list expanded to nine with the addition of Anthony Giacalone and Chuckie O’Brien. That listing establishes that investigators considered Provenzano a suspect, not that his role was proved. The relationship’s ending therefore remains unresolved in evidentiary terms. The narrative moves from union partnership, through a pension dispute and explicit threats, to a meeting that might have been reconciliation and then to the disappearance that made every prior alliance and enmity newly suspect.