FBI Chases 'Best Lead' In Hoffa Search

The Judge · #1 05-19-2006, 03:06 PM

(CBS/AP) In one of the most intensive searches for Jimmy Hoffa in decades, the FBI summoned archaeologists and anthropologists and brought in heavy equipment to scour a horse farm Thursday for the body of the former Teamsters boss who vanished in 1975.

Executing the search warrant for "the human remains of James Riddle Hoffa" is expected to take a couple weeks and involve extensive digging at a horse farm where organized crime figures used to meet.

Detroit FBI agent Dan Roberts said in a briefing Thursday that agents have found "nothing significant" while searching the Hidden Dreams Farm so far.

The search warrant is based on "one of numerous leads received through the years" since Hoffa was last seen leaving the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Mich., which is about 20 miles from the farm, on July 30, 1975, reports CBS News' Beverley Lumpkin.

Hoffa was to meet with a New Jersey Teamsters boss and a Detroit Mafia captain, and investigators have longed suspected the two had Hoffa killed to prevent him from regaining the union control after he served time in federal prison for jury tampering.

"This is the best lead I've seen come across on the Hoffa investigation," Daniel Roberts, special agent in charge of the Detroit FBI field office, said outside the farm.

Law enforcement officials say several months ago a jailed informant offered detailed information that Hoffa was buried on the farm — near a large barn, in fact, which agents say they will likely dismantle and move, CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart reports. The prisoner's information was checked "several ways" officials said, including polygraph tests.

Hoffa had been aggressively investigated in the 1960s for corruption by then-attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He was sent to prison in 1967 for looting the pension fund of a long-haul truckers' union and jury-tampering. President Richard M. Nixon commuted his sentence in 1971.

Asked if they were looking for Hoffa's remains, FBI Agent Dawn Clenney said, "Could be," and declined to comment further on the agents' presence.

County records indicate that at the time of Hoffa's disappearance, the property now known as Hidden Dreams Farm was owned by Rolland McMaster, a longtime Teamsters official. McMaster's lawyer, Mayer Morganroth, said he doubted the FBI would find anything.

"That farm was looked at with a fine-toothed comb in the '70s, when Hoffa was missing," Morganroth said. "There's nothing there."

Morganroth said McMaster was in Indiana on union business at the time of Hoffa's disappearance. He said that to his knowledge he was never a suspect.

But authorities led cadaver dogs across the property, and the FBI also called in anthropologists and archaeologists from Michigan State University to assist.

"We do not leave any lead uncovered," Roberts said, declining to provide details. "This is probably a fairly credible lead. You can gather that from the number of people out here."

For years, there have been rumors in the surrounding neighborhood that Hoffa had been killed and buried there at the order of mobsters and others who didn't want Hoffa to regain power over the Teamsters. Deb Koskovich said she heard the rumor about Hoffa's body two decades ago from a neighbor when she moved next door.