DEA Informants Told Feds Genovese Mob Hit Man “Red Hot” Gentile Was Triggerman In Famed Detroit Hoffa Hit

Genovese mob hit man Enrico (Red Hot) Gentile shot Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa to death, according to informant-intelligence debriefings by a DEA-FBI task force convened in the 2000s to look at cold cases decades after Hoffa vanished from a suburban Detroit restaurant parking lot almost a half-century ago. Gentile was given to Northeast Pennsylvania mafia don Russell Bufalino by Genovese mob street boss Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno and Bufalino in turn dispatched “Red Hot” to Detroit and instructed him to report to Detroit mob street boss Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone for duty on the hit, per these sources. Hoffa’s remains were never recovered.

Gentile died in 2003 at the age of 68. Per his DEA file, he was an often-utilized enforcer and well-known drug trafficker in the Genovese mob’s East Harlem crew of the 1970s and 1980s. The iconic Hoffa homicide probe is active today and current investigators don’t put much weight in the Red Hot-being-the-gunman theory and don’t think Gentile was the triggerman in the world-famous murder.

Giacalone has always been the No. 1 suspect in the still-unsolved kidnapping and homicide. He died of kidney failure in 2002 under indictment in a federal racketeering case unrelated to the long-gestating Hoffa investigation. The order to kill Hoffa allegedly came from the Commission, the American mafia’s governing body in New York, per federal informants. Bufalino and Salerno were considered suspects in the Hoffa investigation, too, believed to have had signed off on the top-priority gangland assassination.

Jimmy Hoffa, 59, went missing on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 on his way to a sit down with Giacalone and New Jersey mob skipper Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano at the Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan to discuss Hoffa’s desire to reclaim the Teamsters presidency following a prison stint for fraud to the dismay of the same organized crime figures that put him in power years earlier. Rumors were rapidly circulating that Hoffa had become a confidential informant for the FBI and Hoffa himself was doing television, radio and print-media interviews threating members of the mafia with retribution and promising to cleanse the Teamsters of mob influence if brought back into power in the union in the upcoming election.

Just three days after Hoffa’s disappearance, Bufalino, Tony Pro and a cavalcade of LCN luminaries from around the country descended on Detroit for the wedding of Bufalino’s niece. Fourt-eight hours following the Bufalino nuptials in Motown, Detroit mob capos Pete (Bozzy) Vitale and Jimmy (The Goon) Quasarano traveled to the Big Apple to meet with Fat Tony Salerno and other Genovese mob leaders in Manhattan, per FBI surveillance logs. Informants in New York and Detroit told the FBI that the meetings between Salerno & Co, and the Detroit skippers was held so the Detroiters could fill in Genovese brass on how the Hoffa hit went down; the first meeting took place on August 6, 1975 at Salerno’s Palma Boys Social Club in East Harlem and the second meeting was a dinner affair at Vesuvio in Little Italy.

According to the FBI’s modern-day version of events, Bozzy Vitale’s protege and then-driver Anthony (Tony Pal) Palazzolo pulled the trigger in Hoffa’s slaying. Palazzolo lost a bout with stomach cancer in the winter of 2019 at the age of 75, having risen from crew boss to capo to consigliere in the Detroit mob in the years subsequent to his crucial role in the Hoffa murder conspiracy.

Enrico Gentile would not have enough time to be in two places at almost once even if he had a private plane in the Harlem Village area around plus he had a meeting in south Brooklyn roughly two to three hours after the Hoffa hit. If he did pull this off then he would be the luckiest hitman in history to have all factors favoring him. Seen in Harlem Village around 10 to 11am, and later had a meeting in South Brooklyn from 5pm or 6pm till around 8pm or later that night, and another meeting later on in the Bronx that night. Gentile was not made until Vincent Gigante was boss of the Genovese family.