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Provenzano later shooed the newsmen away. "You're embarrassing me in front of everyone in the neighborhood. You guys out on the lawn make me look like a mobster. I'm not. I'm just a truck driver." Provenzano consented, however, to give a photographer a guided tour of his house. A Doberman pinscher snarled behind a door ("He could take your arm off," advised Tony Pro), but the rest of the house was peaceful. There was a big swimming pool out in back, a pool table in one room, and a handcarved teak bust that the host volunteered was worth $250,000. In the living room hung an original oil portrait of Provenzano's mother, which he said he had commissioned "to honor her." Noting that the photographer was sweating as he left, Tony Pro remarked with a laugh: "Hey, you think you weren't gonna get out of here alive or something?"
Strange Twist. That same day the Hoffa story took another strange twist with the emergence of Charles ("Chuckie") O'Brien, 41, Hoffa's foster son, who had disappeared the day after the former union leader dropped out of sight. Authorities were told that O'Brien, a $45,000-a-year Teamster organizer, had been seen in the vicinity of the Red Fox on the day Hoffa vanished. O'Brien stoutly insisted that he had not been in the area. But he readily admitted that he was there the following morning by what he claimed was a bizarre coincidence. He said he was often picked up at the site by a Teamster official and driven to work—a claim that checked out.
As the investigation went on, O'Brien appeared to be a prime suspect despite the fact that he was known in the past to have been fiercely loyal to Hoffa, who had taken him into his family when he was three. The boy's father had just died—O'Brien claims he was killed on a picket line—and the Hoffas were very friendly with the mother, who was working as a union organizer. (She later remarried and started a new life.) Hoffa never formally adopted O'Brien, although he once took out the necessary papers to do so, but the chubby Teamster official had always regarded Hoffa as his father—"the only father I've ever had."
Go-Go Girl. Still, authorities learned that O'Brien had had his differences with Hoffa within the past year. O'Brien admits quarreling with Hoffa in November when he wanted to run against David E. Johnson, a Hoffa stalwart, for the presidency of Detroit's powerful Local 299. Last month O'Brien married a go-go girl, a match that did not receive the full blessing of Hoffa, who has his puritanical side. Law officials were also interested in learning much more about reports that O'Brien was heavily in debt—perhaps by as much as $100,000—after investing in a movie that bombed.
It also turned out that Hoffa's family considers O'Brien to be a turncoat, claiming that he made a separate peace with Fitzsimmons. The Teamster president gave O'Brien a highly paid job as an organizer for the southern conference of the union. Authorities noted that O'Brien was very close to Giacalone, whom he calls "Uncle Tony." In the past, O'Brien had often driven Hoffa to meet Giacalone, or vice versa.