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FBI to hand Hoffa case to county prosecutor

DETROIT (CNN) -- The FBI's Detroit office, which for the past 26 years has investigated the disappearance of former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, is preparing to give a local prosecutor the information he needs to consider bringing charges in the case, an FBI spokeswoman said Friday.

But, said special agent Dawn Clenney, the FBI is not washing its hands of the perplexing case.

"We are going to prepare a prosecutors report and give it to the Oakland County Prosecutors' Office in the event they might want to bring charges," she said. The FBI hopes to have the report completed "within the next couple of months," she said.

"This does not mean we have closed our case on Jimmy Hoffa," Clenney said. "We still have an ongoing, pending case on Jimmy Hoffa. If at some point in the future, we have information that warrants charges, we will file charges."

Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca could not be reached for immediate comment.

Thursday, the FBI released hundreds of pages from its Hoffa file to Detroit news organizations in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. On the same day, the agency turned over additional files, sought by the news organizations, to U.S. District Judge Victoria A. Roberts to determine if any of that material should be released to the public.

Hoffa was last seen on July 30, 1975, at Machus Red Fox restaurant in suburban Detroit. He was there ostensibly to meet with reputed Detroit Mafia street enforcer Anthony Giacalone, who died earlier this year of kidney failure at age 82, and Anthony Provenzano, chief of a Teamsters local in New Jersey who died several years ago after being convicted in another murder case.

Hoffa believed Giacalone had set up the meeting to help settle a feud between Hoffa and Provenzano.

Neither man showed up for the meeting, and both said a meeting had not been scheduled. The FBI said at the time that the disappearance could have been linked to Hoffa's efforts to regain power in the Teamsters and its effect on the mob's control of the union's pension funds.

The last significant development in the case came last September when the FBI found DNA evidence linking Hoffa to a car that police had suspected -- but couldn't prove -- was used in Hoffa's disappearance.

Hoffa was 62 at the time of his disappearance and had been released early from a prison by President Richard Nixon on condition that he not seek high union office. He had served time for mail fraud at the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, penitentiary, where Provenzano also had been an inmate.

Hoffa was the father of James P. Hoffa, currently the general president of the Teamsters.