Jimmy Hoffa was born James Riddle Hoffa in Brazil, Indiana. His father, a coal miner, died when Jimmy was just seven years old. Jimmy Hoffa left school in Detroit, Michigan, and at the age of 17 began work as a warehouseman for the Kroger Company, where he helped organize a strike.
By 1933 Jimmy Hoffa was the business agent for Teamster Local 299 in Detroit, and in the early 1940s he formed and led the Michigan Conference of Teamsters. In 1952 he was elected an international vice president of the Teamsters Union, and in 1957 he became international president.
Jimmy Hoffa earned a reputation among his peers as a tough and effective bargainer. In 1964 he negotiated the union's first national contract with trucking companies. Under his leadership the Teamsters Union membership grew to more than two million.
Beginning in 1957, Jimmy Hoffa was the subject of many government investigations and prosecutions which ultimately led to his imprisonment in 1967. Although he was sentenced to 13 years in the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, he refused to resign as president of the Teamsters and retained the support of most union members. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren would later call the conviction an "affront to the quality and fairness of federal law enforcement."
United States President Richard M. Nixon commuted Jimmy Hoffa's sentence and he left prison on December 24, 1971.
In July of 1975 Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. He was last seen at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and was declared legally dead in 1982.
There was a memorial service for Hoffa on July 31, 1995, 20 years after his disappearance, some 2000 people attended. Hoffa would have been 82 at the time of the memorial service.