Before its June 2022 debacle while looking for Jimmy Hoffa, the FBI also dug in the wrong place in May 2006
The story behind the FBI's search of Rolland McMaster's farm in Wixom, Michigan
NOTE: This column is based on updated published and unpublished excerpts from my body of work. . . .
A cursory comment about FBI excavations in the Hoffa case
Over the past 50 years, I have watched the FBI and its important work on the Jimmy Hoffa murder case—up close and personal. Since his disappearance in July 1975, I have shadowed and sourced the bureau’s investigations and every public excavation, many of which were chronicled in my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, and in the 2020 3rd edition of my memoir, Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer.
Although to date, none of those digs have been successful, all of them were legitimate, possessing the necessary timelines and casts of characters to make them credible.
The FBI targeted the farm formerly owned by Rolland McMaster
On May 17, 2006, the FBI executed a search warrant at an 85-acre farm in Wixom, Michigan, about 35 miles northwest of Detroit. FBI agents were digging at a specific location and actually looking for the body of Jimmy Hoffa. An FBI spokesman told reporters that investigators were pursuing “evidence of criminal activity that may have occurred under previous ownership.”
The previous owner was my long-time nemesis, Rolland McMaster, whom I began investigating for his alleged role in the murder seven days after Hoffa vanished.
Don Wells, FBI witness
The FBI search was based on information supplied by Donovan Wells, who was serving a ten-year sentence in a Lexington, Kentucky, federal prison in the wake of his conviction for smuggling marijuana. After his recent falling out with McMaster, the 75-year-old Wells had decided to flip and turn state’s evidence. McMaster had threatened to kill him.
When I heard that Don Wells was the informant, I was thrilled—especially since I had interviewed him thirty years earlier, writing about him and his associates in The Hoffa Wars, saying:
Wells lived with McMaster at his . . . Wixom farm and was a partner of McMaster’s brother-in-law, Stanton Barr, in a trucking company called Spot Leasing. Wells also owned a Time-D.C., Inc., terminal in suburban Detroit, and Jim Shaw worked for him [in April 1975] . . . .
Soon afterward, Shaw, through McMaster, got a job with the Detroit steel division of Gateway Transportation Company, which was headed by Stanton Barr. Shaw’s former employer says he worked at Gateway “for the next several months.”
In November 1975, a federal witness, Ralph Picardo, told the FBI that Hoffa was murdered in Detroit, stuffed into a 55-gallon oil drum, and shipped, via a Gateway Transportation truck, to his final resting place.
Notably, in December 1975, a federal agent told me that the joint alibi for McMaster and Barr on the afternoon of Hoffa’s disappearance was that they were together, meeting with Gateway executives in Gary, Indiana.
I alleged then, and still do so now, that Jim Shaw drove the Gateway truck that carried the oil drum containing Hoffa’s remains.[1]
Inexplicably, after fourteen days, the entire Wixom excavation came to a screeching halt.
Completely stunned by this decision, I called my law-enforcement sources in Detroit who simply told me that the revelations about the high cost of the dig had forced its shutdown. In effect, it was a political decision made in Washington, D.C.
Micheline Maynard of the New York Times published a news story—which included an extraordinary admission from the FBI’s “Judith M. Chilen, an assistant special agent, [who] said she was convinced that Mr. Hoffa's body had been buried on the farm, and there was ‘no indication that it has been moved.’" (Emphasis added)
My 2009 interview with Don Wells
After his release from prison, I visited Wells and his wife, Monica, at their home in Walled Lake, Michigan, on August 14, 2009. I needed to know what really happened during the 2006 excavation.
It was the first time I had seen him since I interviewed him in 1976.
Going back to rumors that circulated during the 2006 excavation, I asked Wells about the reported moment—as then told by his former attorney—in which Wells was looking out of a window with McMaster on the night of Hoffa’s disappearance. Watching what appeared to be a rolled-up carpet lowered into a hole—which had just been dug by a nearby backhoe—McMaster supposedly said to Wells, “That’s Jimmy going down.”
Wells’s response to me? . . . “That never happened.”
What he did witness—and the information about which he took and passed an FBI polygraph test—had happened the night before Hoffa’s murder.
Tony Provenzano: “It’s going to be a great day tomorrow!”
On Tuesday evening, July 29, 1975, Wells was at Carl’s Chop House in downtown Detroit, having dinner with McMaster and Stanton Barr of Gateway.[2]
Wells explained: “We usually met there to talk. We were all in business together. We owned property, along with trucking and trailer companies.
“Suddenly, Tony Provenzano comes up and starts banging on the table: ‘It’s going to be a great day tomorrow! A great day tomorrow! Right, Mac?’ And he slapped Mac on the back. Mac says, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’
“Then, Mac and Tony Pro walked back towards the bar.
“And I asked Stan, ‘What the hell is going on? What does he mean, it‘s going be a great day tomorrow?’
“And Stan said: ‘Well, Provenzano and Hoffa are going to make up. They’re going to bury the hatchet tomorrow.’” Wells alleged that Barr had told him that Tony Giacalone and Chuck O’Brien, Hoffa’s reputed “foster son,” were making the arrangements.
Wells continued: “A few minutes later, Mac and Provenzano came back. And Provenzano stood between Mac and Stan, and he said, ‘I’ve got my brother back there.’”
Wells looked at Provenzano’s table and saw Tony Giacalone who was sitting with two people he did not recognize. Wells also alleged that O’Brien was at the table.
Wells continued, “Before Provenzano returned to his group, he said to Mac and Stan, ‘Do you guys know where you’re going to be tomorrow?”
“Mac said, ‘Yeah, we’re all straight on that.’”
After Provenzano left the table, Wells said to Barr, “Stan, we’re supposed to have a meeting with the credit company tomorrow.”
Barr replied: “We’re going to have to forget about that. I have to go to Chicago tomorrow with Mac.”
Wells did not see McMaster again for a day and a half.
Meantime, McMaster and Barr changed their plans on the morning of July 30. In lieu of flying to Chicago, they drove to Gary, Indiana, a four-hour trip each way. At the moment that Hoffa disappeared, McMaster and Barr were clearly out of town, meeting with Gateway Transportation officials in Gary, according to both of their statements to the FBI.
Three fast cars
What made this story even more significant was that Wells’s wife, Monica, had been alone at the farm while McMaster and Barr were out of town on the afternoon that Hoffa disappeared.
Monica, standing in the kitchen and looking out of a window, told me:
During the mid-afternoon, I saw three dark-colored cars . . . on Pontiac Trail at a high rate of speed. They turned onto the path next to the house and drove straight back to the area where a hole had been dug. I once asked Mac what the hole was for. He said that he was going to build a barn there. But he never did.
Monica confirmed that “the hole was to the right of the path, just across some railroad tracks that ran across the back of the property.”
She explained that the cars that sped onto the property “surprised me. I was at the kitchen sink, and they came by very fast. Usually, when people came there, they would make an appointment with Mac. It was very strange.”
After twenty or thirty minutes, the three cars sped off the property the same way they had entered.
The farm was located exactly 15.36 miles from the Red Fox restaurant where Hoffa was last seen.
Monica added that McMaster did not come back to the farm that night, noting that he had gone to his other home on Wildbrook Drive in Southfield—which was a mere five-minute drive or just 2.74 miles from the Red Fox.
During the evening of July 30, Monica told her husband about the speeding cars when he came home. Wells simply thought that the drivers were looking at some structures near the tree line at the back of the farm.
At that time, they knew nothing about Hoffa’s disappearance, which was not reported until the following day.
Monica continued: “The next time I saw McMaster [on July 31], I said, ‘Mac, something strange happened. Three cars went up the road very fast, and they went straight back.
“He just said that the people in the cars were looking at horses. . . .
“But there were no horses where the cars went. The horses were in the barn to the left of the house.”
During their conversation, Monica asked, “Mac, did you know that Mr. Hoffa is missing?”
She said that McMaster became very quiet and then replied, “’Young-un’—which is what he called me—‘our brother, Jimmy, has met his demise.’”
The pre-dug hole
While in prison in 2006, Wells also told the FBI about that pre-dug hole at McMaster’s farm—near the end of a long dirt path, which ran off Pontiac Trail, past the main farm house, and up against the tree line at the back of the farm.
According to Wells, McMaster had dug that hole several weeks before Hoffa vanished.
But, instead of bringing Wells to the farm to assist with the search, the FBI had Wells draw a diagram for the FBI, indicating the location of the hole. As much as fifteen feet deep, the hole was on the side of the dirt path and beyond a set of railroad tracks that ran through McMaster’s farm.
The first thing I requested from Wells was a copy of the diagram he had given the FBI. To my surprise, it was poorly drawn and confusing.
Our return to the farm
During our interview, Monica showed me an exhibit she had put together on a large poster board for my visit, displaying numerous photographs of McMaster’s farm as it appeared during the mid-1970s. She pointed out where she was standing in the farmhouse when the three cars came roaring by on the afternoon of Hoffa’s disappearance. Also, she had a picture of the path they traveled, which led to the tree line.
At that point during our interview, I suggested that we drive to the farm and try to reconstruct what they had seen. Both of them were concerned about the new owner of the property, who was angered by the chaos that resulted from the FBI’s 2006 excavation.
Telling them not to worry, I grabbed the photo display that Monica had prepared, and we went outside to Wells’s car.
When we arrived at what was once the front of McMaster’s Wixom farm on Pontiac Trail, we saw that the main house was rubble. And grass and dirt now covered most of the path that the three fast cars had traveled on the afternoon of Hoffa’s disappearance.
Overall, everything on the farm had been subdivided and reconfigured.
The landmark railroad tracks were on the other side of a tall fence—which was the property of the new owner of what was once McMaster’s farm—the area that had been searched by the FBI in 2006.
At my request, Wells then drove us to the front entrance of the property, where “No Trespassing” and “No Admittance” signs were prominently displayed. Ignoring all of these warnings, I told Wells to drive down the winding driveway to the main house.
Just outside the garage, we saw a man in gray overalls, working on the engine of a pickup truck.
I grabbed the picture exhibit Monica had prepared and walked up to the mechanic, leaving Don and Monica in the car behind me. After I introduced myself, I asked the man where I could find the owner.
To my surprise, he said that he was the owner. His name was Ron Lusk.
At first, Lusk appeared a little annoyed that three uninvited strangers had just driven onto his property. However, when I showed him Monica’s exhibit, which depicted his farm as it looked during the mid 1970s, he could not have been more accommodating.
I motioned to Don and Monica to join us and introduced them to Lusk, saying that they had once lived on his property. Welcoming the couple, Lusk immediately started asking them questions about the photographs.
I asked Lusk if we could see the site where the FBI had torn down and then rebuilt the barn in its effort to look for Jimmy Hoffa.
“Sure,” Lusk replied, telling us to drive to another parking area and adding: “The government really did build us a nice new barn. . . . It was like a carnival around here.”
The intersection of the dirt road and the railroad tracks
Returning to the car with Monica and me, Don Wells drove down the narrow road alongside the new red barn which loomed large on the right. We pulled into the parking lot at the end of this structure, which was perpendicular to two older red barns where farmhands were attending to several horses.
As we stepped out of the car, we saw a tall man in a cowboy hat and a red shirt. I went up to him, introduced the three of us, and asked, “Where are the railroad tracks that ran along this property?”
The man named Doug, who turned out to be the farm’s manager, pointed to the area near a tall fence—the same fence that we had earlier seen from the other side.
As I walked towards the fence, I stepped onto a dirt road. I looked back at Don and Monica, asking, “Is this the path that started on Pontiac Trail, the one on which Monica saw the three fast cars that day?”
Don and Monica came over to where I was standing and looked around the area. Then, for a further perspective, we walked towards the tall fence.
They confirmed that we were on the dirt road that ran alongside McMaster’s farmhouse.
About ten yards from our side of the fence was another long path that was littered with discarded railroad ties.
“Jesus, Don,” I said, now standing where the two paths intersected. “Is this where the railroad tracks were?”
Both Don and Monica came over, along with Doug and Ron Lusk who joined us.
All four of them agreed that we were standing at the intersection of the abandoned railroad tracks and the road that had once run from Pontiac Trail to the back of the farm near the tree line.
Pulling Don and Monica off to the side, I asked privately, “Okay now, where was that pre-dug hole?”
Both Don and Monica agreed that it was above the railroad tracks and to the right of the dirt road.
When we walked just a few yards to that location, it was nothing more than a fenced-in pasture, occupied at that moment by two horses.
However, the site of the 2006 FBI dig was above the railroad tracks and about twenty to thirty yards to the left of the dirt road—the site of the new red barn built by the FBI.
In other words, based on Wells’s badly flawed diagram, the FBI dug in the wrong place, a mistake they would repeat in June 2022.
Had the FBI brought Wells to the site in 2006—and me in 2022—these critical and unnecessary errors would have not happened.
Finale
Regardless, the big untold story here is that Don Wells—who passed an FBI polygraph test—witnessed Rolland McMaster and Tony Provenzano together at a restaurant in Detroit on July 29, 1975, the night before Hoffa disappeared. Wells heard a portion of their conversation which was clearly about Provenzano’s scheduled 2:00 P.M. sitdown with Hoffa on July 30, as well as the need for McMaster and his brother-in-law, Stanton Barr, who headed the steel division of Gateway Transportation, to have established alibis for that same afternoon when Hoffa was last seen.
ENDNOTES
1. Along with Larry McHenry, Jim Shaw was the FBI’s top suspect for the bombing of Dick Fitzsimmons’s union car on July 10, 1975, twenty days before Hoffa disappeared.
McHenry and Shaw were both dead by the time of the 2006 search.
2. During the search, McMaster, 92, was alive, living on his farm on Clyde Road in Fenton, Michigan. Stan Barr, who lived on another farm on Clyde Road, was McMaster’s neighbor, as well as his brother-in-law and the former head of the steel division at Gateway Transportation.
Married to his third wife, the former Marilyn A. Turner, at the time of his death, Rolland McMaster was divorced from Elaine Mastaw, his second wife. (He divorced his first wife, Yvonne, in 1961.)
Stanton Barr was married to Elaine Mastaw’s sister, Terry, for 54 years. Terry Barr died on November 12, 2012. Stan Barr died on November 13, 2019.
McMaster died on October 25, 2007.
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