On this day in 2011 the Lucchese Crime Family associate Tony the Greek, better known as Donald Frankos died at the age of 73 in Dannemora. Frankos claimed to have taken part in the murder of Jimmy Hoffa, along with John Sulliva and Jimmy Coonan.

Hoffa was said to have been shot in the head, and then was dismembered and left in a meat locker before being transported to an oil drum and buried under the Giants Stadium.

On this day in 2011, Donald Frankos — known in the criminal underworld by the chilling moniker "Tony the Greek" — died at the age of 73 inside the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, a maximum-security institution so forbidding it earned the nickname "Little Siberia." Frankos had spent the better part of his adult life behind bars, and it was there, in the twilight of his years, that he finally met his end, taking with him secrets that investigators had long hoped to prise from him.

Frankos operated as an associate of the Lucchese Crime Family, one of New York's formidable Five Families whose roots stretched back to the era of Lucky Luciano and the formation of the American Mafia's national commission in the early 1930s. Though never a made man himself, Frankos cultivated a fearsome reputation as a contract killer, a figure who moved through the criminal underworld with calculated menace. He was convicted of two murders and spent decades incarcerated, yet it was a claim he made from behind prison walls that would define his notorious legacy.

Frankos alleged that he had played a direct role in one of the most enduring mysteries in American criminal history — the disappearance of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa vanished on 30th July 1975 outside a restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, and was declared legally dead in 1982. According to Frankos, he participated in Hoffa's murder alongside associates John Sullivan and Jimmy Coonan, the latter being the feared leader of the Westies, the violent Irish-American gang from Hell's Kitchen that maintained a bloody working relationship with the Gambino Crime Family. Frankos described a grim fate for the labour leader — shot in the head, dismembered, and stored in a meat locker before his remains were transported to an oil drum and buried beneath what would become Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Investigators never conclusively confirmed Frankos's account, and the stadium itself was demolished in 2010, with searches of the site failing to yield any human remains. Sceptics questioned the reliability of a convicted killer seeking notoriety, and the truth of Hoffa's fate remains officially unsolved to this day.

Donald Frankos may have been a peripheral figure compared to the bosses and capos who commanded the headlines, but his claim to have silenced one of America's most powerful labour figures ensured his name would never be entirely forgotten. The Hoffa mystery endures as one of organised crime's most tantalising unsolved chapters, and Frankos remains inextricably woven into its darkest threads.