Sorry, I was going to try to just bang out the rest of the notes described in the previous post, but this news from yesterday warrants a post. Yesterday, in a shocking announcement, the FBI declared it found no evidence of the remains of Jimmy Hoffa during a search under a New Jersey Bridge. Hoffa went missing in 1975 after a lunch at the Machus Red Fox in Bloomfield Township with some good old boys in good old Oakland County. His body was never found.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/no-sign-jimmy-hoffa-new-jersey-bridge-fbi-says-rcna39451
An FBI spokesperson said “While we do not currently anticipate any additional activity at the site, the FBI will continue to pursue any viable lead in our efforts to locate Mr. Hoffa.” I won’t even waste your time with the litany of news articles and links covering the various massive digs and other investigative manpower spent in this case since 1975. I’m guessing if his death was at the hands of the mob, it was a much more humane and quick death than those suffered by the kids in the OCCK case.
Also, Dan Moldea, a journalist who has written extensively about the Hoffa saga, said he was personally briefed by the FBI in a video conference call Thursday.
We will pursue any viable lead. We brief journalists on the case. Never fucking heard that once in the OCCK case.
I’m sure there is some explanation for why the FBI is the lead agency in the Hoffa case. Organized crime involvement, political-type figure, who knows. I am more interested in how L. Brooks Patterson, who was Oakland County prosecutor when Hoffa disappeared in 1975 and when four preteen kids went missing and were found dead in 1976 and 1977, managed to offload these massive and still unsolved cases on to the FBI (Hoffa) and the MSP (OCCK). I can picture him wiping his hands and breathing a sigh of relief. He could go back to welfare fraud cases, making trouble for his enemies, and getting press by making outrageous statements instead of reporting real prosecutorial success.
The FBI clearly has no interest in solving that case. They only follow terrible leads. It is just a funding campaign for them. I’ve never heard of crime family Using dead bodies as some symbolic trophy or requesting very specific burial places. His remains had to have been destroyed in Michigan. If he just came up missing and they knew his wife and his family were going to call the police why in the world would they wanna travel all the way back to New Jersey with a dead man in the back of their car that makes no sense. They wanted him dead. If there was any thing out of the ordinary I would have suspected maybe photographs or something that confirmed his death. Either way they didnt care about his body or where it ended up. I have a hard time believing that the FBI doesn’t know what happened by now. It’s just sad that it seems like every law and forcement agency in this country happens To have some form of corruption.
When I was in high school in 1981, an FBI agent came to the school as one of many people for a career day. I wasn’t at that particular session, but friends of mine told me that the agent had answered a question about the Hoffa case. According to him, the case had long since been solved, but it would never be closed. The agent claimed it was a free ticket to investigate the Mafia–agents could always claim to be investigating the Hoffa case while nosing around for other information.
It has occurred to me that something similar might have happened with the OCCK case. Assuming the police knew that the primary perpetrators were either dead or in prison for life already, rather than giving the family and the public closure, they 1) continued to cover up the original coverup; and 2) used the case as an opening to investigate pedophile rings.
Of course, even the agent’s explanation to the kids may have been a subterfuge; it might just be coverups all the way down.
Keith, interesting observations. I can buy the FBI agent’s spiel at a high school career day when addressing Hoffa and the issue of the mob. That was actually a decent answer, even if it was well-worn and subterfuge. That could even help explain why the FBI never misses a chance to “do a dig” in the Hoffa case. Either way, they arguably use the case to investigate other crimes and that is somewhat defensible.
I don’t believe the same could be said in the OCCK case. Law enforcement (including and most especially the prosecutor’s office) certainly took the covering up the coverup mission very seriously. But no way they used the case as an opening to investigate pedophile rings or anything remotely related. This can be objectively proven because despite the platitudes spewed by the Bham PD chief and other members of the “task force” in 1977 and 1978–“Boy, howdy, have we sure scared off the pedophiles with all of our questioning!”–the FIRST prosecution of any of these freaks from that era was in 2006 by WAYNE COUNTY, when they went after Richard Lawson and Ted Lamborgine. Oakland County didn’t touch this stuff because apparently it never happened in their county.
No way L. Brooks Patterson or any of his successors (especially since LBP had his hand on the tiller as county exec for the rest of his life) would dare pull back the curtain on all the Oakland County suits and arty types who were raping kids when they weren’t looking at child porn or having sex with prostitutes.
They did not use the OCCK case for a goddamn thing except to take up file cabinet space so they could claim the case was still “open” and therefore “no comment.”
Subjectively, judging from the number of men and women who have contacted me over the past 15 years to tell me the police in Oakland County and the MSP BLEW THEM OR THEIR PARENTS OFF when they tried to report near-miss abductions or criminal sexual assault of a minor, tells me they didn’t go near sex crimes against kids, let alone a pedophile ring populated with men from Oakland County. How would that look after LBP never missed a chance to tout how amazing Shangri-La was north of that nasty 8 Mile Road??? We have the best schools and the prettiest parks your kids can get abducted walking to/from! Don’t leave your Oakland County lakefront home when you get home from the office; we have kid runners standing by to bring you children to have sex with! No need to cross 8 Mile. Leave the driving to us.
Their track record is utterly shameful.
I agree with you that a handful of police/prosecutors knew the OCCK perps were “taken care of,” but they could not risk opening the lid on any of it by using the OCCK case as a pretext for any other investigations. And it worked really well until the summer of 2006 when private polygrapher Larry Wasser screwed the pooch for all of them. They are still winning–nobody can apparently prove a damn thing. But luck runs out and when it does, the truth will out.
Fair enough. I’m reading The Snow Killings now and having my eyes sadly opened. I grew up in Ferndale and am one year younger than Mark Stebbins, so I was as close to the middle of this as anyone who was not directly involved. Finding myself deeply grateful that none of this crap ever happened to me. Kudos to you and your family for your dogged persistence and willingness to go public with all of this.
I don’t know why they continually try to chase down Hoffa when that time and money could be spent so much better elsewhere. Maybe the FBI could loan some money to Oakland County to have a functioning tip line for the OCCK case.
What’s amazing to me is so much of this comes down to politics. Think about if a decent person was actually in a position of power back in the 70s (or now). SO MANY pedophile rings could have been broken up, you’d think that would be great for someone’s career. But the scales must have tipped in favor of money when it came to LBP. Once he decided to pat Busch on the head with such a light sentence (and probably others), there was no turning back. That’s one reason I also think Busch was heavily involved – LBP knew that it would destroy him if it got out that he basically was responsible for Tim’s death. (If Busch wasn’t involved, its possible that maybe the case could have moved forward…)
Brooks is dead, but I would love for Jessica Cooper to be brought up on Obstruction of Justice charges.