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

by Charles Brandt

It’s easy to look into the Mafia mind and see the motive upon motive people like Carlos Marcello had for killing JFK. The disrespect RFK showed the bosses at the McClellan Committee hearings in the years before JFK was elected president drew first blood. When RFK took over the Justice Department in 1961, there had been thirty-five organized crime convictions in the year before. In 1963 there were 288 and rising swiftly. Among those 288 convictions in 1963 was “the highest paid labor boss in America,” the Genovese capo Tony Provenzano, who went down for extortion, selling labor peace to trucking companies. It cost Provenzano his pension and led to a mortal rift with Hoffa. Thanks to RFK all the bosses were being targeted by the FBI, the IRS, immigration, the Labor Department, and state and local police. RFK exposed the Mafia in his book The Enemy Within (Harper, 1960). New laws were being proposed. Genovese soldier Joe Valachi was paraded before the TV cameras in 1963, a couple of months before “Dallas,” for the sole purpose of exposing the Mafia’s secrets to the light of day. To the bosses’ way of thinking, their survival was at stake. They had no choice but to kill JFK.