NEW search for Jimmy Hoffa, slow Digging...
MILFORD TOWNSHIP, Michigan (Reuters) - FBI teams on Thursday 25 May, 2006 sifted by hand through dirt from a chest-deep hole in the ground in an intense search for the body of labor leader Jimmy Hoffa three decades after his disappearance.
Wearing Evidence Response Team T-shirts and hard hats, FBI agents directed a work crew that used heavy equipment to rip up the concrete floor of a horse farm barn demolished a day earlier.
Investigators then worked by hand to sort through soil under the foundation of the barn and could be seen photographing and videotaping potential evidence around a hole marked off with yellow crime scene tape.
Orange work cones marked what had been the perimeter of the barn on the Hidden Dreams Farm near Detroit.
The investigation was triggered by a tip from Donovan Wells, 75, a federal prisoner serving time for marijuana trafficking who lived on the farm at the time of Hoffa's disappearance.
A former lawyer said Wells offered the information to the FBI 30 years ago. Now, he has offered it again in hopes of securing a reduced sentence.
The farm was previously owned by Hoffa associate Rolland McMaster. It is about 20 miles 32 km from where the legendary Teamsters union boss disappeared on July 30, 1975.
No trace of Hoffa has ever been found, and no one has been charged in the case.
Wells, who has reportedly passed a polygraph test, told his lawyers that he saw men burying what appeared to be a body with a backhoe on the farm a day after Hoffa vanished.
Hoffa was last seen outside a Detroit-area restaurant where he was to meet New Jersey Teamsters' boss Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, a member of the Genovese crime family, and a local Mafia captain, Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone. He had called his wife to say no one else had shown up for the meeting.
He disappeared just as he was to embark on a campaign to get reelected to his post as president of the Teamsters sparked a nationwide investigation.
Hoffa was declared dead in 1982, and numerous books about his life have pinned his disappearance on mobsters who murdered him because they did not want him interfering with their close ties to the union.
By Rebecca Cook
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