"I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa

by Charles Brandt

More often than not, the first rule in a successful interrogation is to have faith that the subject truly wants to confess, even when he is denying and lying. This was the case with Frank Sheeran. The second rule is to keep the subject talking, and that was never a problem with the Irishman either. Let the words flow and the truth finds its own way out.

Sadly, as we say, gone to Australia — down under.

I wasn’t made with a finger. My father used the real thing to get my mother pregnant.

The first words Jimmy ever spoke to me were, “I heard you paint houses.” The paint is the blood that supposedly gets on the wall or the floor when you shoot somebody. I told Jimmy, “I do my own carpentry work, too.” That refers to making coffins and means you get rid of the bodies yourself.

Before he got taken care of, Giancana had been very big in certain circles and very big in the media. Momo had spread out from Chicago and moved into Dallas. Jack Ruby was a part of Momo’s outfit. Momo had casinos in Havana. Momo opened a casino with Frank Sinatra in Lake Tahoe. He dated one of the singing McGuire sisters, the ones who sang on Arthur Godfrey. He shared a mistress with John F. Kennedy, Judith Campbell. This was while JFK was president and he and his brother Bobby were using the White House for their own motel room. Momo helped get JFK elected. Only Kennedy then stabbed Momo in the back. He paid him back by letting Bobby go after everybody.

Time magazine brought out that Russell Bufalino and Sam “Momo” Giancana had worked on behalf of the CIA in 1961 in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and in 1962 in a plot to kill Castro.

The U.S. Senate had subpoenaed Giancana to testify about the CIA hiring the mob to assassinate Castro. Four days before his appearance Giancana was taken care of in his kitchen in the back of the head and then under the chin six times, Sicilian style, to signify he was careless with his mouth. It looked like it was done by some old friend that was close enough to him to be frying sausages in olive oil with him. Russell often said to me: “When in doubt have no doubt.”

Russ and Jimmy both went by time. You didn’t show time, you didn’t show respect. Jimmy would give you fifteen minutes. After that you lost your appointment. No matter how big you were or thought you were.

If anybody was serious, I’d hear about it the day they wanted me to do it. That’s the way it’s done. You get about a day’s notice when they want you to take care of a matter.

Whenever I got into Detroit I would call the man out of respect.

I heard that Sam “Momo” Giancana had to send Jack Ruby to Cuba to spread some green stamps around to get Trafficante out of jail and out of Cuba.

Before that they used to call me “Cheech,” which is short for Frank in Italian — Francesco.

That’s not the way it works. The wrong look in my eyes and my house gets painted.

I don’t care how tough you are or how tough you think you are, if they want you you’re theirs. It’s usually your best friend that walks up to you talking about a football bet and you’re gone. Like Giancana got it frying eggs and sausages in olive oil with an old friend he trusted.

My mother was about 5’10’’ and never weighed less than 200 pounds. She ate a quart of ice cream every day. I used to go down to the ice-cream parlor for her every night. You would bring your own bowl and they would give you so many dips of ice cream. They knew to expect me.

Getting a new outfit for Easter was big in the Catholic neighborhoods I grew up in.

If you died on your way to confession before you could tell the priest what you had done wrong you would burn in hell for all eternity. If you died on your way home from confession after confessing your sins you would go straight to heaven.

My father used to bet on me a lot in the speakeasies. We’d be in a new section of Philadelphia where they didn’t know us too well yet and he’d go in a speakeasy and bet somebody that he had a ten-year-old kid who could lick any fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy. He’d bet some kid’s father a quarter for beer, and us kids would have to fight it out in front of all the grown men. If I won, which was almost always the case, he’d toss me a dime. If I lost he’d cuff me hard on the back of the head.

When I was a kid a lot of our activities were supplied by the church. This was way before television. Very few people had radios and the movies cost precious money. So people came and watched the church events or participated in them.

Sure enough, when he came through the door he calmly said, “What do you want to do, eat first or eat after I kick your ass?” I said, “I’ll eat first.” I knew I wouldn’t feel like eating dinner afterward. I got it pretty good that night, but at least I got some food in me.

As big a city as it was and as close as it was to New York City, Philadelphia had a small-town feel to it. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had blue laws that didn’t allow bars to be open on Sunday. No stores were open. It was the day of worship. Even later on when night baseball came in, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Philadelphia Athletics could play baseball at Shibe Park on Sunday only while there was daylight. They weren’t allowed to turn on the stadium lights on Sunday. Many a Sunday game was called on account of darkness. You never picked up a paper and read about Prohibition gangland killings or any of that stuff that went on in New York, just a couple of hours away on the Pennsylvania Railroad. So the carnival coming to Philadelphia was very big entertainment.

No matter what they say, the Depression didn’t end until the war came.

I had been to the Little Egypt University and the Neptune of the Nile Graduate School, and it was my duty to the young maidens of the City of Brotherly Love not to let all that good education go to waste.

They say the average number of days of actual combat for a veteran is around eighty. By the time the war was over the Army told me I had 411 combat days, which entitled me to $20 extra pay a month.

The Combat Report states: “The 45th paid heavily for maintaining our American heritage: 21,899 battle casualties.” Considering that a fully staffed division has 15,000 members, Sheeran saw replacements march in and be carried out on a daily basis. The report asserts a record of “511 days of combat” for the division itself; that is, 511 days of shooting and being shot at on the front lines.

Private Frank Sheeran, with 411 combat days, experienced more than 80 percent of the division’s total “days of combat.” Sheeran was conditioned for the rest of his life by the experience of killing and maiming day after day, and wondering when he would be next.

One day a Southern sergeant addressed the recruits and said he could lick any one of us and if anybody thought otherwise they should step forward now. I took a giant step forward, and he had me digging latrines for five days. It was just a trick to get us to respect his rank and rank in general. They were getting us ready for a war.

All in all I had fifty days lost under AWOL — absent without official leave — mostly spent drinking red wine and chasing Italian, French, and German women.

We were then told that our Division probably would see more combat than any other American division, and he wanted us to be known to the Germans as the “Killer Division.”

Everybody hated snipers. Both sides hated snipers, and if you captured one it was okay to kill him on the spot.

Salerno is a town just below Naples on the western coast of Italy. In September 1943, we jumped off landing craft into the Mediterranean with German shells exploding all around us. Salerno was the worst of the three invasion landings I made. Those of us who made it ashore had the goal of getting about 1,000 yards up to secure the beachhead. Each soldier had a shovel on his pack, and we began digging in. No matter how tired you are, when you hear enemy artillery, you dig with a passion.

There was a monastery on top of Monte Cassino that the Germans used as an observation post so they could see our every move. It was an ancient monastery, and certain factions didn’t want it bombed. When they finally did bomb it, they made the whole situation worse because now the Germans could get protection from the rubble.

You’d take your chances and come out at night to relieve yourself or empty your helmet of your body waste if you couldn’t hold it in during the day and you had to go in your helmet. You ate K-rations out of a can. They couldn’t get any cooked food to you.

You played cards and you talked about what you were going to do after the war. And most of all, you prayed. I don’t care who you were or who you thought you were, you prayed. I said more Hail Marys and more Our Fathers than I could count. You promised to sin no more if only you got out of this alive. You swore to give up women and wine and cursing and anything you ever did that you could use to offer up in your prayers.

Rome was what they called an open city, which meant neither side would bomb it,

We were issued chocolate bars and tins of cheese and chopped eggs in a can. That’s all it took. The people had nothing so you can’t judge them on morals. Fraternizing with the local women was against regulations, but what were they going to do, send us to a combat unit?

Running up out of the surf on to the beach at St. Tropez I thought I was shot. I looked down and saw red all over my uniform. I hollered for the medic and Lieutenant Kavota from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, came running over to me and shouted, “You son of a bitch, that’s wine. You ain’t shot. Get up and get going. They shot your canteen.”

You wonder why would anyone bother to dig their own graves, but then I guess you cling to some hope that maybe the people with the guns would change their mind, or maybe your own people would come along while you were digging, or maybe if you cooperated and dug your own grave you’d get a good clean hit without any brutality or suffering.

Somewhere overseas I had tightened up inside, and I never loosened up again. You get used to death. You get used to killing. Sure, you go out and have fun, but even that has an edge.

I did a lot of wine drinking overseas. I used the wine over there the way the jeeps used gasoline. And I kept it up when I got back home. Both of my wives complained about my drinking. I often said that when they put me in jail in 1981 it was not the FBI’s intent, but they saved my life. They only have seven days in a week, and by the time I went to jail I was drinking eight.

Football helped a little, too. I played tackle and guard for Shanahan’s. My old pal Yank Quinn was the quarterback. They had leather football helmets in those days, but with my oversized head I couldn’t get comfortable in one. So I played with a woolen cap on my head, not for bravado or anything, but it’s the only thing I could get to fit my big head. There’s no doubt if I was born later on in better times I would have loved to try out to be a professional football player.

I got taken down to Moko, which was our name for the city jail at Tenth and Moyamensing. In those days they’d keep you informally for a while and let you go without any legal proceedings. They didn’t work you over or anything, unless you asked for it. They picked their shots. When they thought I had enough punishment they released me.

They thought I was what they used to call shanty Irish, and I guess they thought they were what they used to call lace-curtain Irish.

Dusty came to the house, which was a little unusual in 1948 in Philadelphia. The Phillies were the last major league team to get a black player.

I don’t know if you’ve ever knocked anybody out, but the best place to hit them is where the jaw meets the ear. If you catch them right they fall forward.

In 1957 the mob came out of the closet. It came out unwillingly, but out it came. Before 1957 reasonable men could differ over whether an organized network of gangsters existed in America. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had assured America that no such organization existed, and he deployed the FBI’s greatest resources to investigate suspected Communists. But as a result of the publicity foisted on the mob in 1957, even Hoover came on board. The organization was dubbed “La Cosa Nostra,” meaning “this thing of ours,” a term heard on government wiretaps.

The police in Apalachin were suspicious of all the mob activity in the area and raided the house in which the meeting was being held. This was before the U.S. Supreme Court changed all the laws on search and seizure. Fifty-eight of the most powerful mobsters in America were seized and hauled in by the police. Another fifty or so got away running through the woods.

Bufalino was identified by the Pennsylvania Organized Crime Commission as a silent partner of the largest supplier of ammunition to the United States government, Medico Industries. Russell Bufalino had secret interests in Las Vegas casinos and not-so secret connections to the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, whom Fidel Castro toppled in 1959. With Batista’s blessings Bufalino had owned a racetrack and a major casino near Havana. Bufalino lost a great deal of money and property, including the racetrack and the casino, when Castro booted the mob off the island.

Senator Frank Church’s committee concluded that Bufalino was part of a bizarre conspiracy to assassinate Castro with poison pills just before the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was to take place.

Frank Sheeran calls Philadelphia “the city of rats.”