Not Yah Lin *Charlie* Trie's restaurant, but maybe a name or two here will ring a bell....
The Jimmy Hoffa investigation
'This disappearance has me hurting, too'
O'Brien also says he wants answers just as much as Hoffa family
By Shannon Colavecchio / Palm Beach Post
Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien, shown in 1991,
remains a key figure in Jimmy Hoffa's 1975
disappearance. He denied again Saturday
playing any role in Hoffa's presumed death.
BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Twenty-six years after the man who raised him vanished, Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien insists he wants the answers to union boss Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance just as much as Hoffa's mourning children.
Speaking publicly for the first time since the FBI interviewed him last month, the 66-year-old O'Brien said he understands the Hoffa family's grief, but not their suspicions that he bears responsibility for Hoffa's July 30, 1975, disappearance.
"This disappearance has me hurting, too," said O'Brien, an Irish Italian who came to know Hoffa as a father, having been raised by the powerful Teamster leader since his early childhood.
"I loved this man more than anything. My thought has always been that this could be solved, and I agree with Jimmy (Hoffa's son and Teamsters president) that they deserve closure."
Federal officials say they might decide whether to prosecute someone in connection with the Hoffa case by December 2003.
FBI agents have long suspected the car was used in the disappearance, but until now had no proof.
Investigators believe Hoffa, then 62, was picked up outside the restaurant and killed. His body never has been found, despite authorities' years of investigating.
The result has been a sort of national fascination about Hoffa's disappearance and presumed death, one that has spawned movies and books speculating about what happened, and why.
Hoffa's family has long maintained that O'Brien is one of the few people who could have convinced Hoffa to get into the car.
O'Brien said Saturday that he was in the process of moving to Florida with his new wife, Brenda, at the time of Hoffa's vanishing.
"I'd just married a girl from the South and she didn't want to live in Detroit, so I took the new job," O'Brien said.
He said he had been transferred to a construction job within the Teamsters' Southern Conference and he was in Detroit that day only to clean out his office.
"Then I was asked to go deliver this huge salmon, you should have seen it, it was 60 pounds!" he recalled. "But I didn't even have a car there anymore, so I had to borrow one."
His most recent recollection of events don't exactly match reports of what he told the FBI soon after Hoffa vanished. He said then that he borrowed a car belonging to Joe Giacalone, son of mob boss Anthony Giacalone, because his own Lincoln Continental had been repossessed; that he was staying with friends near the restaurant where Hoffa was last seen; and that the salmon weighed 40 pounds, not 60.
Saturday, he insisted his car was not repossessed: "It was in Memphis."
For years, media accounts and FBI sources have portrayed O'Brien as a gambling man who struggled to overcome debt and an increasingly troubled relationship with Hoffa in the months leading up to the disappearance. FBI reports dating back to 1975 also indicate that O'Brien gives conflicting accounts of the days surrounding Hoffa's disappearance.
Saturday, he denied newspaper reports that he dropped out of sight for the five days after Hoffa vanished: "I was moving! I wasn't running away from anything."