Legend of Hoffa's death lives on in new FBI search

The FBI dug up farmland outside Detroit yesterday in a search for the remains of the legendary trade union boss Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared more than 30 years ago.

Hoffa, the all-powerful leader of the Teamsters truck drivers' union, went missing on the afternoon of July 30 1975. He was last seen outside the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he had been due to meet two mafia figures.

Since his disappearance at the age of 62, there have been numerous searches and rumours surrounding the whereabouts of his remains. One theory has it that he is buried under the pitch of the New York Giants American football stadium in New Jersey. Another places him under the New Jersey Turnpike motorway. Still another says that he is in a landfill under the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey, another motorway, while some believe his body can be found in a Pennsylvania coal mine.

Such is the grip of Hoffa's disappearance on US popular culture that one conspiracy theory argues that his is the body inside Elvis Presley's coffin.

This week's search is the result of what the FBI said was information received several years ago that had been verified more recently. According to an FBI statement, the information indicated that the farm was used as a meeting place for organised crime, and that there had been a high level of activity there on the day Hoffa disappeared.

About a dozen agents dug a hole in the ground at the horse farm in Milford, about 20 miles from the restaurant where Hoffa was last seen.

"It has kind of been a long ordeal - 30 years," said an FBI spokesman, adding" "We would just like to put it to bed, so to speak."

At the time of his disappearance the FBI speculated that Hoffa had been killed by an organised crime gang to prevent him regaining control of the Teamsters union. He had been convicted of attempting to bribe a grand juror and sentenced to 15 years' prison in 1967.

But the then president, Richard Nixon, commuted Hoffa's sentence in 1971 on condition that he did not participate in union activities. Hoffa, who had united truck drivers across the country in one union, tried to have this conviction overturned. His aim, investigators speculated, was to regain control of the union's affairs from organised crime.

On the day of his disappearance, Hoffa had been due to meet Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone, a Detroit mafia a leader, and Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, from New Jersey. In recent years several mob figures have said they killed Hoffa. In 2003 the FBI searched a house in Bloomfield where a mafia hitman, Frank Sheeran, claimed that Hoffa had been killed. The search was inconclusive.

In a book due to be published this summer, another mafia hitman, Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski, claims that he was part of a group of five people who drugged and killed Hoffa.

Hoffa - who was played by Jack Nicholson in the eponymous film - was the subject of aggressive investigation by the attorney general Robert Kennedy, the brother of the former president John Kennedy. Both Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson were convinced that Hoffa, a Republican sympathiser, was taking money from the union.

Hoffa's son James is currently president of the Teamsters.

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