Looking For Jimmy

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Sat, 20 May 2006 13:58:12 -0400

[R.A. Lucas] Looking For Jimmy

 

 

 

Looking For Jimmy

by R.A. Lucas

 

19 May 2006

 

I love Americans. They are such a quirky people. Quaint, almost. If it

wasn't for the personal arsenal in almost every household, you could

probably grow to admire them. With time, anyway. It's too bad they

have this impossible belief in their Rightful Place in the World. For

example, look at how they define national security. Recent history has

proven that if some egghead in Washington doesn't like the events

taking place within the sacred borders of some distant sovereign

nation, they simply have to declare it a threat to US National

Security and then they can act with what many believe is some

God-given right to be Bully to the World. You have to love them for

being so crazy to think they're that important.

 

On the positive side you have The Search for Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was

killed by President Nixon. Well, not directly. But Weird Richard

pardoned the ex-union boss and once he was sprung from prison Jimmy

wanted to his old job back. His old job was running the Teamsters

Union. He ran it like he was King and the union was his personal

fiefdom. His side deals with the mob, better known by some Italian

acronym which means Men With No Necks, were legendary and his

buddy-buddy relationship with organized crime which lead to some

jury-tampering and fraud is what landed him in jail. Since a lot of

Nixon's henchmen ended up in jail I suppose it makes sense that Hoffa,

who grew up through the union and saw how the mob ruled using The

Rub-out Method of Management, would get a free pass from the most

important person in the world. Most Americans actually believe that

job description to be true. God, couldn't you just squeeze them?

They're so cute!

 

About 30 years ago, Jimmy got bumped off. Erased. He sleeps with the

fishes. He is a Late Labor leader. And so began one of the

longest-running manhunts in the history of American law enforcement.

It is now 30 years later and the trusted FBI is digging up a farmer's

field in hopes of finding.... what? There's not much left after 30

years and even less if Jimmy was dumped without the benefit of

embalming. Unlike Elvis there have been no Jimmy Hoffa sightings. Not

to my knowledge anyway. Much like Elvis, Jimmy has reached some mythic

stage of post-life fame and commands more press now than he did when

he was alive.

 

I guess we all love a mystery and Looking for Jimmy is now in its 30th

season. Some think his body was dumped into the concrete for one of

the footings for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Others believe he was

buried in one of the end zone's at Giant's Stadium in East Rutherford,

New Jersey. People who saw the movie, Hoffa, which starred Jack

Nicholson, believe he was in the trunk of a car destined to be

compacted in one of those metal-crunching machines junk yards use.

Those blocks of old cars get melted down and end up being recycled

into all kinds of things. Some think it would be a fitting end if

Jimmy ended up being part of a bumper on some tractor-trailer being

driven by a Teamster. Still others are convinced his body was dumped

in Lake Huron or Lake Erie or Lake St. Clair. Still others believe

bits of him ended up in all three bodies of water. According to one

source some $250,000 will be spent this time trying to determine what

happened to the very late Mr. Hoffa in July of 1975. Someone somewhere

has got to be banging their head against the wall in some office in

Washington trying to figure out why it's important to know where some

ex-con's body may have been misplaced. So far this is like watching

Geraldo Rivera look for Al Capone. What's the fascination with old

dead guys? I suppose it helps a bit when you know that Jimmy Hoffa's

middle name was Riddle.

 

Here's what I want to know. If the free world's largest police force

can't find one dead fat guy after 30 years of looking, what makes

anyone believe they can help find Osama bin Laden? I know it may be

the CIA's job, but under the Homeland Security concept all these

different branches of the National Paranoia Administration are

supposed to be working together and so I figure the FBI has got to be

in on the search. Which may explain why bin Laden hasn't been caught.

Don't you think when someone says that they're using " all of their

resources " to fight terrorism that looking for Jimmy might be moved

from the back burner to a shelf in another room?

 

You just have to love our southern neighbors for this sort of stuff.

Looking at antics like this just makes me want to slip over the

border, undetected, and give someone a great big hug.

 

 

 

Ralph Lucas, who has written as R.A.Lucas since the start of his

career, is a fully hyphenated communicator. He is a

writer-director-producer in the world of television and video

production and he once was a writer-producer-announcer-executive in

radio. It was in radio that be began writing and broadcasting a daily

editorial. A few years after he left radio the World Wide Web came

along and with email it was inevitable that someone would ask, What do

you think about....? For a few years he would write a short piece and

email it to a small circle of friends. It evolved into The Friday File.

 

 

 

Ralph Lucas

Screenarts Incorporated

181 Carlaw Avenue - Suite 304

Toronto, Ontario, M4M 2S1

416.225.2911 FAX: 416.225.2914

http://www.screenarts.com

http://www.northernstars.ca