Before the accident, there was a time when the Gotti family and the Favara family would visit each other, and the children, including Scott Favara and John Gotti Jr., would play together in the backyard lots adjacent to their homes in Howard Beach, Queens.

Victoria Gotti, the wife of John Gotti Sr., the onetime Gambino crime chief, would often chat with Janet Favara, the wife of a Long Island furniture manager, John Favara.

The cordiality ended March 18, 1980. John Favara was driving home from work and for an instant was blinded by a beam of sunlight. His car fatally injured another of the mobster’s sons, Frank, 12, who had flashed out onto the street on a borrowed mini-scooter.

The body of John Favara has been missing since a few months later.

Now a team of federal agents and backhoe operators, aided by trained dogs, is digging and sifting through a desolate stretch of land on the Brooklyn-Queens border for the remains of Favara and the bodies of two gangsters. Or maybe more.

As the claws of the heavy machinery churn up empty chunks of soil and cement from the alleged Gambino dumping ground known as “the Hole,” the painful memories of a missing father, who is believed to have been shot and beaten to death for the fatal accident, have also resurfaced for the Favara family.

“This is like rubbing salt all over the wounds,” one member of the Favara family said. This person would speak only if promised anonymity, because talking about the death of John Favara is taboo among his relatives.

“It happened so long ago,” this person said, “that all of us would prefer to forget – for good.”

The last time Favara was reported seen was by people outside a Long Island diner, near the Castro Convertible warehouse where he worked.

Investigators at the time reportedly believed his corpse had been stuffed in a wooden barrel filled with cement and sunk into the Atlantic Ocean.

His wife quickly sold their Howard Beach home and moved to an undisclosed location. Two years later, looking to put an end to the episode, she had her husband pronounced legally dead.

Janet Favara died in 2001, at age 70, after suffering for two decades from health problems and a troubled mind, the family member said.

Scott Favara, 42, is married and works different jobs in Bellmore, Long Island. He could not be reached for comment. Since the grisly accounts of his father’s death were first reported in newspapers, Mr. Favara has refused to watch television programs and movies that contain excessive violence, the family member said.

The recent tip about John Favara’s remains surfaced in the trial of a convicted Bonanno family boss, Joseph Massino, who had a working relationship with John Gotti and the Gambino family.

The backhoes continued to dig yesterday from dawn to dusk and will probably continue to do so for weeks to come, according to a spokesman for the FBI.

Outside federal court yesterday, where John Gotti Jr. is charged with three attempted murders – not Favara’s – his lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman spoke of the search. Mr. Lichtman said the FBI’s continuing search for Favara’s lost remains, and the remains of others, was an “effort to heap dirt on the Gotti name.”