FBI teams last night continued to dig in Michigan for the body of Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa three decades after his disappearance.
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 on the Hidden Dreams Farm near Detroit.
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.
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 and lies 30 kilometres from where the Teamsters union boss disappeared on July 30th, 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 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.
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.