Giacomo “Black Jack” Tocco, long tied to the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance and the reputed head of the Detroit Mafia for more than three decades, died of natural causes Monday night at the age of 87, according to Bagnasco & Calcaterra Funeral Home in Sterling Heights.
Tocco owned the Hazel Park Raceway for more than four decades. A northern Oakland County property he once owned was searched by the FBI last summer for the remains of the slain labor union leader.
Tocco was tagged a suspect in the famed disappearance and murder of Hoffa in July 1975, believed by federal investigators to have likely taken part in the planning of the high-profile mob hit, which remains unsolved.
Based on a tip from his first cousin and deposed underboss, the second in command, Anthony “Tony Z” Zerilli, the FBI dug up a piece of farmland Tocco once owned at Adams and Buell roads in Oakland Township in June 2013 looking for Hoffa, but they found nothing.
Zerilli, 86, was in prison at the time Hoffa vanished 39 years ago. He told investigators that he was informed by his then-underlings in the crime family that Hoffa was ushered to Tocco’s property, bludgeoned to death with a shovel and buried there, according to interviews with Zerilli to New York media.
The feuding Tocco and Zerilli co-owned the Hazel Park Raceway and were indicted together in a wide-reaching federal racketeering case in the late 1990s, convicted of overseeing the Motor City underworld in tandem. They were forced to sell their racetrack as a result.
Prior to his passing, Tocco was considered the most-tenured mob don in the United States, having taken power in 1979 at a ceremony the FBI photographed. He ruled unchallenged until his death, said Erick Straus, former head U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan in the United States Department of Justice. Straus spent two decades investigating Tocco.
Tocco grew up and lived his entire life in Grosse Pointe, where he was an active and beloved member of the community, known to donate hefty sums of money to charity and the Catholic Church.
He graduated from the University of Detroit-Mercy in 1949. In addition to his foray into local gangland activity, Tocco was a successful entrepreneur, owning a number of prosperous businesses across the state of Michigan.
Far from a knuckle-dragging thug and not a fan of the limelight, he bucked traditional mobster stereotypes.
“Jack was very low-profile, highly intelligent and business savvy and really the opposite of what people would view as a typical gangster, the kind you see in movies and on television,” retired FBI agent Mike Carone said. “I think that’s why he was able to stay under the radar for such a long time and avoid a lot of the pitfalls of being a mob boss, such as violence and long prison sentences. He was one of the last of a dying era.”
His 1998 racketeering conviction was the lone felony on his record, resulting in two years in federal prison. Zerilli did five years because of the bust and the pair fell out in the aftermath of the arrests, eventually resulting in Zerilli going to the FBI in December 2012 and implicating Tocco in the Hoffa case.
Born into mob royalty, Tocco’s and Zerilli’s dads were Detroit mafia’s founding fathers, William “Black Bill” Tocco and Joseph “Joe Uno” Zerilli. The younger Tocco and Zerilli received the Hazel Park Raceway on 10 Mile and Dequindre roads as a joint graduation present from college.
