The police walking slowly through the cornfield were paying little attention to the rustling crop that surrounded them. Their heads were down, their eyes focused sharply on the tilled earth of the field 100 miles southwest of Detroit. Gradually, as they worked their way up and down the rows, a thick layer of dust settled on their polished black boots. For six long, hot hours, the men doggedly checked out the report they had received by phone. Finally, they gave up and went away, convinced that wherever he was, Jimmy Hoffa—the man of the streets and highways—did not lie buried beneath the alien corn.
As the week wore on, both the police and the Hoffa family were ready to try almost anything to find the former Teamster boss who had so suddenly vanished on July 30. At week's end an FBI laboratory technician was analyzing some stains found in a car belonging to the family of reported Mafia Leader Anthony ("Tony Jack") Giacalone; there was some fear that the spots might be Hoffa's blood. Other efforts included the hypnotizing of people who had talked to Hoffa shortly before he disappeared, in the hope of coaxing some leads from their memories of the recent conversations. Within Hoffa's family, which posted a $200,000 reward for his return, a bitter feud developed as one member sharply accused another of knowing more about the affair than he was saying.
Lucrative Deals. To make matters worse, anonymous phone calls threatened Hoffa's relatives. The general tone, said one federal source, was "You saw what happened to him—you're next." Interpreted very broadly, the calls constituted acts of extortion, a federal crime, and that was enough to allow the FBI to plunge into the case. With hundreds of agents joining squads of state and local policemen already working on the mystery, the hunt for clues turned up a new rogues' gallery of underworld figures who were said to have had an interest in getting Hoffa out of the way. Conducting its own manhunt, the Hoffa family went so far as to ask Mickey Cohen, the former Los Angeles mobster, to make some inquiries among his old contacts. "I hope to God it's different," Cohen said, "but it looks bad right now."
It does. Hoffa may have been kidnaped or have simply disappeared for dark reasons of his own, but TIME has learned that federal authorities believe the cocky, stubby union leader has been murdered. The suspected reason: to prevent him from disrupting the lucrative deals between the Mafia and the Teamsters that had developed since 1967, when Hoffa was imprisoned for jury tampering, fraud and conspiracy. Under the benign leadership of Frank Fitzsimmons, Hoffa's hand-picked successor as president, powerful local Teamster chiefs allowed the Mob to wheel and deal with the union's $1.3 billion pension fund. Gangsters from Chicago and Cleveland arranged loans from the fund for clients who were less than impeccable credit risks, then harvested illegal kickbacks. Nor did the Teamsters protest when mobsters took over control of a number of Las Vegas casino-hotels built with multimillion-dollar loans from the union's gigantic pension fund.