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| Jimmy Hoffa search finds no sign of ex-Teamsters leader in Detroit suburb - CBS News Posted: 19 Jun 2013 08:52 AM PDT Updated at 11:31 a.m. ET OAKLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. The excavation of a rural field in suburban Detroit has failed to turn up the remains of former Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa, the FBI announced Wednesday, adding another unsuccessful chapter to a nearly 40-year-old mystery. Authorities stopped the dig after just a few hours on the third day. "We did not uncover any evidence relevant to the investigation on James Hoffa," said Robert Foley, head of the FBI in Detroit. "I am very confident of our result here after two-days-plus of diligent effort," he said. "As of this point, we'll be closing down the excavation operation." Authorities have pursued multiple leads as to Hoffa's whereabouts since his disappearance in 1975. He was last seen outside an Oakland County restaurant where he was to meet with a New Jersey Teamsters boss and a Detroit Mafia captain. The latest tip about Hoffa's remains came from reputed Mafia captain Tony Zerilli, who, through his lawyer, said Hoffa was buried beneath a concrete slab in a barn in Oakland Township, north of Detroit. According to Zerilli, Hoffa was the victim of a hit ordered by a mob boss who was worried that Hoffa would cut off his access to union funds, CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano reported on "CBS This Morning" Wednesday. Today, the barn is gone, but FBI agents on Monday starting poring over the field where it used to stand. On Tuesday, authorities used a backhoe to dig and move dirt around in the section of land. Authorities also called in forensic anthropologists from Michigan State University and cadaver dogs from the Michigan State Police. "Certainly, we're disappointed" in the results, Foley told reporters Wednesday. He said about 40 agents were involved in an operation that covered about an acre. The FBI has not put a cost on the search, but Foley said it's more important to solve a case. "With any investigation we consider cost-benefits analysis," he said. "The FBI and its partners are no corporations. We do not have a profit margin as a bottom line." Hoffa's rise in the Teamsters, his 1964 conviction for jury tampering and his presumed murder are Detroit's link to a time when organized crime, public corruption and mob hits held the nation's attention. Over the years, authorities have received various tips, leading the FBI to possible burial sites near and far. In 2003, a backyard swimming pool was dug up 90 miles northwest of Detroit. Seven years ago, a tip from an ailing federal inmate led to a two-week search and excavation at a horse farm in the same region. Last year, soil samples were taken from under the concrete floor of a backyard shed north of the city. And detectives even pulled up floorboards at a Detroit house in 2004. No evidence of Hoffa was found. Other theories have suggested he was entombed in concrete at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, ground up and thrown in a Florida swamp or obliterated in a mob-owned fat-rendering plant. Zerilli, now 85, was in prison for organized crime when Hoffa disappeared. But he told New York TV station WNBC in January that he was informed about Hoffa's whereabouts after his release. His attorney, David Chasnick, said Zerilli is "intimately involved" with people who know where the body is buried. Details are in a manuscript Zerilli is selling online. In his 22-page manuscript, Zerilli wrote, "A cement slab of some sort was placed on top of the dirt to make certain he was not going to be discovered. And that was it. End of story." Zerilli, who was reportedly once the number two in command of Detroit's mafia, said the mythical tales of Hoffa's demise were just that. In the manuscript, which he is selling online for $4.99, Zerilli wrote: "In the movies, people drive around with bodies in a trunk and put them in meat grinders and incinerators, bury them in stadiums, put them through wood chippers and so on and so forth. Those things just don't happen in real life." |
| Obama defends intelligence tactics in wary Berlin - Reuters Posted: 19 Jun 2013 09:12 AM PDT  BERLIN | (Reuters) - President Barack Obama defended U.S. anti-terrorism tactics on a visit to Berlin on Wednesday, telling wary Germans Washington was not spying on the emails of ordinary citizens and promising to step up efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. On the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, Obama made his first presidential visit to the German capital, a favored destination of U.S. leaders during the Cold War. He held talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel and gave a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in which he unveiled a proposal for new talks with Russia on slashing nuclear arms arsenals. Obama, who attracted a crowd of 200,000 adoring fans when he last passed through in 2008 during his first campaign for the presidency, remains popular in Germany. But revelations before the trip of a covert U.S. Internet surveillance program, code-named Prism, caused outrage in a country where memories of the eavesdropping East German Stasi secret police are still fresh. Merkel said at a joint news conference that also touched on Afghanistan, Syria and the global economy, that the two leaders had held "long and intensive" talks on the spying issue, noting that some questions still needed to be cleared up. Obama tried to reassure his host, who as a pastor's daughter growing up in the communist East experienced the Stasi first-hand. "This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens or anybody else," Obama said. "This is not a situation where we simply go into the Internet and start searching any way we want. This is a circumscribed system directed at us being able to protect our people and all of it is done under the oversight of the courts." In a message which seemed designed for her domestic audience, Merkel told Obama that balance was essential in government monitoring of Internet communications. "I made clear that although we do see the need for gathering information, the topic of proportionality is always an important one and the free democratic order is based on people feeling safe," said the 58-year-old chancellor. Obama countered that the U.S. had thwarted at least 50 threats because of its monitoring program, including planned attacks in Germany. "So lives have been saved and the encroachment on privacy has been strictly limited," he said. A poll last week showed 82 percent of Germans approve of Obama, but the magic of 2008, when he was feted like a rock star, has faded amid concerns about his anti-terrorist tactics. COMMON VALUES In his speech to 4,000 invited guests at the Brandenburg Gate, Obama harked back to Kennedy by stressing what he called common values of openness and tolerance. "We can be a little more informal among friends," he joked as he took off his jacket in the sweltering sun on the Pariser Platz square, just east of the Gate that once stood alongside the Berlin Wall dividing the communist East from the capitalist West of the city. Earlier, at the news conference, he touched on tensions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai over U.S. plans to begin talks with the Taliban to try to seek a negotiated peace after 12 years of war, acknowledging "huge mistrust" between the Western-backed government in Kabul and its arch-foes. "We do think that ultimately we're going to need to see Afghans talking to Afghans about how they can move forward and end the cycle of violence there so they can start actually building their country," Obama said. On Syria, Obama said reports that the United States was ready to "go all in" to war in the country were exaggerated. He reiterated his view that President Bashar al-Assad's government had used chemical weapons, while acknowledging that Russia was skeptical on this point. Obama declined to give specifics on new military aid Washington plans to provide to Syrian rebels. Obama arrived in Germany after a two-day summit with Group of Eight leaders in Northern Ireland where he and other leaders clashed with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Syria. Despite these divisions, he said he would engage with Moscow on reducing deployed nuclear weapons by up to a third from previously agreed levels. "I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures," Obama said. In 2008, Merkel refused to allow Obama, then a senator from Illinois, to speak at the Brandenburg Gate because he was not yet president. Despite this awkward start, the Democrat has forged a pragmatic relationship with the conservative Merkel, who may be hoping for a political boost out of the visit months before a German election. DRONES In a nod to criticism, Obama defended his failure to close the Guantanamo Bay prison on Cuba that his predecessor George W. Bush opened after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. He also reassured Germans that the U.S. military was not using German bases to launch unmanned drone attacks. For Obama, who grew up in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, Europe has sometimes seemed an after-thought. The signature foreign policy initiative of his first term was his "pivot" to Asia. But analysts say plans to create a free-trade zone between the United States and European Union are a sign that he is focusing more on Europe. "The Obama administration has found it harder than expected to work with emerging powers and has fallen back to a more traditional reliance on European allies," said Charles Kupchan, professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. "Washington doesn't have better options. And when it comes to who to engage in Europe, Germany grows stronger and stronger." (Additional reporting by Stephen Brown, Roberta Rampton, Annika Breidthardt, Alexandra Hudson, Michelle Martin; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Ralph Boulton) |
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