Hoffa: Prisoner 'tipped off FBI 30 years ago'

The informant said to have spurred the search for union boss Jimmy Hoffa’s remains on a Michigan farm is an ailing prisoner who, his former lawyer claims, first told the FBI about the location 30 years ago.

In a telephone interview with The Associated Press, Joseph Fabrizio said that in 1976 his client, Donovan Wells, “claimed to have some definite information - whether it was helpful or not, I have no way of knowing”.

Wells “knew everybody with the Teamsters, and I’m pretty sure they knew him”, said Fabrizio.

But a government investigator familiar with the FBI’s digging operation in Milford Township, about 30 miles north west of Detroit, said Wells was not nearly as forthcoming in 1976 as he has been recently and that his story has “evolved” with additional detail.

Interest in Wells’ tip was heightened after the 75-year-old inmate passed a lie detector exam. Authorities think he believes the story he is telling, the investigator says.

The investigator spoke anonymously because some of the information he was relating comes from records that have been sealed by a government judge. Among them is an FBI affidavit detailing the basis for the search warrant used to dig up the ground on the horse farm, now known as Hidden Dreams Farm.

Wells, who once lived on the property, was well acquainted with the owner, former Teamsters union official Rolland McMaster, who also owned the property when Hoffa disappeared in 1975, Fabrizio said.

A lawyer for McMaster, Mayer Morganroth, said the farm was searched in the 1970s and nothing was found. He confirmed that FBI agents visited the 93-year-old retired Teamster this week, and Morganroth said most of their conversation related to his farm.

Wells is mentioned in a 1978 book on the Hoffa disappearance by author Dan Moldea. The book focuses heavily on McMaster and his long-standing relationship with Hoffa, which wound up with a falling out shortly after Hoffa went to prison in 1967 for jury tampering and fraud.

Fabrizio said Wells owned a trucking company and was never a Teamsters official.

He said the information Wells offered the government during plea negotiations in 1976 involved heavy machinery and suspicious activity on the farm around the time of Hoffa’s disappearance on July 30, 1975.

Wells pleaded guilty in August 1976 in federal court in Detroit and was sentenced to a year in federal custody in a case involving “theft from interstate shipment”, according to court records.

In 2003 he admitted conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute marijuana. On January 15 2004, he was sentenced to 120 months in prison.

Wells is in custody at the Federal Medical Centre in Lexington, Kentucky, and his projected release date is December 27, 2012.

Meanwhile, agents searching the farm for the third day were bringing in dogs trained to find human remains, demolition experts, archaeologists and anthropologists – and suggested investigators might remove one of the three barns.

But an expert said unless they had a precise location, their task could be arduous.

“It is extremely difficult to find buried bodies,” said William Bass, professor emeritus of forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee and an expert on human decomposition.

“I hope they find him, but the experience I’ve had is people will tell you there’s a body out there, but trying to find it is like a needle in a haystack.”