Prosecutor: FBI Gives Up Search for Hoffa on Detroit Horse Farm

MILFORD TOWNSHIP, Mich. – The FBI is wrapping up its search of a suburban Detroit horse farm after finding no trace of former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa's remains after two weeks, a local prosecutor said Tuesday.

Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca told The Associated Press he was informed by Bloomfield Township police that the search was ending without any remains found at the Hidden Dreams Farm in Milford Township.

The FBI issued a statement saying it would hold a news conference outside the farm "regarding the conclusion of the execution of the search warrant" later Tuesday.

A man who answered the phone at the FBI's Detroit office but would not identify himself said the search was ending Tuesday. FBI spokeswoman Dawn Clenney did not immediately return a call from the AP seeking comment.

Hoffa disappeared in July 1975 from a Detroit-area restaurant about 20 miles from Hidden Dreams Farm, land once owned by Hoffa associate Rolland McMaster.

McMaster's attorney, Mayer Morganroth, said he was not surprised that the search was wrapping up with the mystery still unsolved.

"We never expected that anything was there," he said, adding that the FBI likely felt pressured to respond to the tip, lest it seem as if it was not trying to solve the case.

Morganroth has said that his 93-year-old client was in Indiana on union business at the time Hoffa disappeared and that, to his knowledge, McMaster was never a suspect. The two men Hoffa was to meet the day he disappeared, a New Jersey Teamsters boss and a Detroit Mafia captain, are both dead.

On Monday, a congressman said it was time to set some spending limits on the search for Hoffa's remains.

"The FBI might be better off establishing a budget and some kind of timeline, because what new information do they have now, 31 years later?" U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich., asked.

The FBI hasn't revealed the cost of the search.

When agents arrived at the farm earlier this month, based on what Detroit agent-in-charge Daniel Roberts called a credible tip, Roberts said he expected the search for the former Teamsters' boss' body to take a couple of weeks and involve more than 40 FBI personnel, along with demolition experts, archaeologists and anthropologists.

The FBI defended its efforts in a statement last week, saying: "The expenditure of funds has always been necessary in each and every case the FBI works, and this one is no exception."

Robert Combs, who owns an electrical contracting firm that has done work for the FBI at the farm, said agents told him Tuesday morning that the digging had ended. He said he was at the farm that morning to deliver a proposal to do electrical work on a new barn to replace one the FBI destroyed in the search.

"They just didn't find anything, and they're just winding her down," Combs said.