FBI ends search for Hoffa's body at Michigan farm

DETROIT - The FBI is calling off its search for the body of Jimmy Hoffa on a Michigan horse farm, the agency said today after failing to recover anything that might help solve the 31-year-old mystery of the Teamsters leader's disappearance.

In an exhaustive two week search, the FBI tore down a barn and excavated several sites on the Hidden Dreams Farm near Detroit looking for a makeshift grave said by prison inmate to contain Hoffa's remains.

The agency said it planned to brief reporters later on what it called "the conclusion of the execution of a federal search warrant in connection with the ongoing investigation into the disappearance of James Riddle Hoffa."

Using cadaver dogs, ground-piercing radar, archaeologists and dozens of agents, the FBI acted on a tip from a prisoner who had lived on the farm at the time of Hoffa's disappearance. Hoffa vanished from outside a restaurant some 32km from the farm on July 30, 1975 after he showed up to meet a New Jersey Teamsters' boss and a local Mafia captain.

Authorities have long suspected Hoffa, who was declared dead in 1982, was murdered by mobsters who did not want him to interfere with their influence over the truckers union.

The FBI has not revealed the cost of the search or said how many agents were involved. But last week it defended itself against criticism that it was a waste of taxpayers' money, saying it was acting on the most credible information it had had in years on Hoffa's disappearance.

The search was triggered by a tip from Donovan Wells, 75, who is serving a 10-year drug trafficking sentence. Seeking to shorten his prison term, Wells told his lawyers he saw men burying what appeared to be a body with a backhoe on the farm the day after Hoffa vanished.

Previous leads on Hoffa's whereabouts have prompted other fruitless searches, including one under the turf at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. No trace of Hoffa has ever been found and no one has been charged in the case.

- REUTERS