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

by Charles Brandt

Frank Sheeran said that of all the alleged crime bosses he ever met, the mannerisms and style of the Marlon Brando portrayal in The Godfather most nearly resembled Russell Bufalino.

When you went to church for confession on Saturday you knew which priest’s line to get on. You wanted to go to the fairest one that didn’t give you a hard time;

During the war, you learned to take whatever you want, whatever you could get away with taking, not that there was much over there worth taking. Still, you took wine and women and if you needed a car you took it, too — stuff like that. After the war, it just seemed natural to take what you could take wherever you could take it. There was only so much blood you could sell for $10 a pint.

The judge threw the case out and said that if he owned stock in Food Fair he would sell it. Food Fair then made an offer to me through my lawyer that if I would resign they would give me $25,000. I told them I couldn’t afford the cut in pay.

Wednesday night was the night that you went out with your wives, that way nobody was seen out with his cumare, his mistress, whatever you want to call it. Everybody knew not to be out with their cumare on Wednesday night. It was like an unwritten rule. Mary and I would have a pleasant evening on many a Wednesday with Russ and Carrie.

In the end when he lost his last appeal and had packed his bags and had his tickets, I recommended a lawyer to him who went through the Italian government, spread a little lira, and got it so the Italian government refused to take Russell, and that was that. America had to keep him.

I didn’t know anything about “made men” back then. That’s a special status in the alleged mob where you go through a ceremony and after that you are then untouchable. Nobody can whack you without approval. You get extra respect wherever you go. You are part of the “in” crowd, the inner circle. It only applies to Italians. Later on I got so close to Russell that I was higher up than a made man.

Looking back on that twenty-four-hour period between the time I met with Angelo and Russell and the time I met with Angelo again, after that particular matter with Whispers on the sidewalk, it got easier and easier not to go home anymore. Or it got harder and harder to go home. Either way, I stopped going home.

However, in the first two years following World War II, years in which Frank Sheeran looked for steady work and got married, there were a combined total of 8,000 strikes in 48 states. That’s more than 160 separate strikes per year per state, and many individual strikes were nationwide.

The vast majority of Americans would have known him by the sound of his voice alone. From 1955 until 1965 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as Elvis. From 1965 until 1975 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as the Beatles.

Jimmy Hoffa’s first notoriety in union work was as the leader of a successful strike by the “Strawberry Boys.” He became identified with it. In 1932 the nineteen-year-old Jimmy Hoffa was working as a truck loader and unloader of fresh fruits and vegetables on the platform dock of the Kroger Food Company in Detroit for 32Ά an hour. Twenty cents of that pay was in credit redeemable for groceries at Kroger food stores. But the men only got that 32Ά when there was work to do. They had to report at 4:30 p.m. for a twelve-hour shift and weren’t permitted to leave the platform. When there were no trucks to load or unload, the workers sat around without pay. On one immortal hot spring afternoon, a load of fresh strawberries arrived from Florida, and the career of the most famous labor leader in American history was launched. Hoffa gave a signal, and the men who would come to be known as the Strawberry Boys refused to move the Florida strawberries into refrigerator cars until their union was recognized and their demands for better working conditions were met. Their demands included a four-hour-per-day guarantee of hourly pay per twelve-hour shift for the platform workers. Fearing the loss of the crates of strawberries in the heat of the day, Kroger folded and acceded to young Jimmy Hoffa’s demands and gave the new one-company union a one-year charter.

In 1932 thousands of veterans, tired of broken promises, marched on Washington and refused to leave the Mall until their promised bonuses, not due until 1945, were granted by Congress now when they needed them most. President Herbert Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to evict the Bonus Marchers by force, and MacArthur, astride a white horse, led an assault of troops, tanks, and tear gas against the veterans without giving them a chance to leave quietly. The U.S. Army opened fire on its own unarmed former soldiers, killing two and wounding several others, all veterans of a bloody world war that had ended fourteen years earlier, a so-called War to Save Democracy.

In May 1956, Victor Riesel, an investigative reporter for the daily New York Journal American, featured anti-Hoffa Teamsters on his daily radio show. Riesel had been crusading against the criminal element in labor unions. The night of the radio broadcast, Riesel stepped out of the famous Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway near Times Square and was approached on the sidewalk by a goon who threw a cup of acid in his face. Riesel was blinded by the acid’s effect on his eyes. It soon became obvious that the attack had been ordered by Hoffa ally and labor racketeer John Dioguardi, aka Johnny Dio. Dio was charged with ordering the vicious crime, but when the acid thrower was found dead, and other witnesses got the message and refused to cooperate, the charges were dropped.

As a result of his aggressive work on the committee, Bobby Kennedy was to become Jimmy Hoffa’s mortal enemy.

Bobby Kennedy called Jimmy Hoffa “the most powerful man in the country next to the president.”

There are simply no public figures today who so challenge the elite business and government establishment and so champion the working class as Jimmy Hoffa did almost daily and with arrogance.

Hoffa’s “resistance” consisted of close alliances with the most powerful godfathers of the newly uncovered, secret tangled web of Apalachin gangsters who had carved America into twenty-four territories of organized crime and who ran their organizations (called families) with a military structure. They were “bosses,” the godfathers who were the equivalent of generals; “underbosses” and “consiglieres,” who were the equivalent of top brass; “capos,” who were the equivalent of captains; and “soldiers,” who, as soldiers, followed the orders from upstairs. In addition, there were associates like Frank Sheeran who had whatever status they earned, but who were not permitted an official rank in the Italian families’ military structure.

In an introduction he wrote to a 1972 book written about Hoffa by Bobby Kennedy’s chief aide, Walter Sheridan, Budd Schulberg explained why the two studios abandoned the project: “A labor tough walked right into the office of the new head of [Twentieth Century Fox] to warn him that if the picture was ever made [Teamster] drivers would refuse to deliver the prints to the theaters. And if they got there by any other means, stink bombs would drive out the audiences.”

If you kept a piece around the car or the house it was best to have a brand-new piece, one that was never fired. That way it could never be linked to anything. You never would know with an old piece whether somebody else used it in something that you didn’t even do. So I recommend a brand-new piece out of the box.

I had this one guy who I made a loan to who I thought was avoiding me. I couldn’t find him anywhere. No vig, no nothing. One night one of the guys came into the Friendly and told me they had seen this guy I was looking for over at Harry “The Hunchback” Riccobene’s bar called the Yesteryear Lounge. When I caught up with him playing cards in Harry’s bar, the guy told me his mother died and the funeral set him back the money he was saving to give me. I felt bad for the guy, and I went to the Friendly and told Skinny Razor I found the guy at Harry’s. Skinny said, “Did you get any of your money?” I said, “Not yet,” and Skinny said, “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. His mother died.” So I said, “Yeah, poor guy. I guess you heard.” Skinny Razor said, “His fucking mother’s been dying over and over again for ten years.”

As I learned the ropes I learned that for many good and sound reasons the bosses and the captains sent a guy to whack you who was your friend. The obvious factor was that the shooter could get close to you in a lonely spot. A less obvious factor is that if any evidence is found against the shooter, if he is your friend, there are many innocent explanations on how it got there in your house or in your car or on your body.

Because we were Catholic, Mary and I hadn’t gotten a divorce, but we were separated and I lived whatever life I wanted to live.

Russell said something in Sicilian about stormy weather conditions that roughly translates into “You never can tell how things are going to work out. The weather’s in God’s hands.”

“I got that friend I told you about. He’s sitting here with me. He’s a good union man. I want him to meet his president. See what you think of him.” Russell turned his head and said to me, “Say hello to Jimmy Hoffa.” Then Russ handed me the phone. I reached for the phone and I thought, can you imagine this? Jimmy Hoffa calling to talk to me? “Hello,” I said. “Glad to meet you.” Jimmy Hoffa didn’t even say hello. He got right to the point. The next thing I heard were the first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to me. “I heard you paint houses,” Jimmy said. “Y-Y-Yeah, and I d-do my own carpentry work, too.” I was embarrassed because I was stammering. “That’s what I wanted to hear. I understand you’re a brother of mine.” “That’s right.” I was keeping my sentences short and my words few. “Local 107. Since 1947.” “Our friend speaks very highly of you.” “Thank you.” “He’s not an easy man to please.” “I do my best,” I said.

The Teamsters pension fund organized by Hoffa almost immediately became a source of loans to the national crime syndicate known to the public as La Cosa Nostra. With its own private bank, this crime monopoly grew and flourished. Teamsters-funded ventures, especially the construction of casinos in Havana and Las Vegas, were dreams come true for the godfather entrepreneurs. The sky was the limit and more was anticipated. At the time of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975 Atlantic City was about to open up to legalized gambling.

Jimmy liked to control his environment. He didn’t drink, so no one took a drink in his presence. He didn’t smoke, so nobody lit up around him. Sometimes he’d get all riled up. He’d get impatient and he’d do things that would remind you of a kid scratching chicken pox. You couldn’t tell him he was going to end up with pockmarks. You couldn’t say a word. You just listened.

When a reporter asked Bobby Kennedy what he would do if Hoffa were acquitted, Bobby Kennedy, who said he had “never considered that possibility” with such an “air-tight case,” remarked, “I’ll jump off the Capitol.”

Edward Bennett Williams sent a wrapped box with a ribbon around it to Bobby Kennedy. Inside was a toy parachute for Kennedy’s jump from the Capitol Building.

I heard him call Bobby a spoiled brat to his face in an elevator and start after him. I held Jimmy back. Many a time Jimmy said to me they got the wrong brother. But he hated brother Jack, too. Jimmy said they were young millionaires who had never done a day’s work.

Notwithstanding J. Edgar Hoover’s protestations to the contrary, there appeared to be a national crime syndicate that operated like a separate country and whose capital appeared to be New York City.

After the wiretap trial everybody was saying they didn’t make a parachute big enough to save Bobby Kennedy’s ass when he jumped off the Capitol.

known for his ability with candy, not the kind you eat, the kind you use to blow things up with — dynamite.

For some reason there were a lot of lesbians who were working as cabbies at that time in Detroit. They liked to be treated like men, and you had to respect that or you wouldn’t get a signature.

They taught me that the word union means something. Everybody’s got to be united in the same direction or there is no progress for the worker. A union is only as strong as its weakest member. Once there is dissension the employer senses it and takes advantage of it. Once you allow dissension and rebel factions to exist you are on the way to losing your union. You can have only one boss. You can have helpers, but you can’t have nine guys trying to run a local. If you did, the employer would make side deals and split the union. The employer would illegally fire the strongest union men and get away with it while the union was split in half.

Anytime you read in the paper about a masked gunman, rest assured the gunman had no mask on. If there are any eyewitnesses on the street, they always say the gunman had a mask on, so everybody on the shooter’s side of the thing knows the eyewitnesses didn’t see a thing and the eyewitnesses don’t have to worry about a thing.

I knew that they used “cowboys” sometimes and then took care of the “cowboys” when the matter was completed. The “cowboys” were expendable. Russell had told me how Carlos Marcello liked to send to Sicily for war orphans with no families. They would get smuggled in from Canada, like through Windsor, right across the water from Detroit. The Sicilian war orphans would think they had to take care of a matter and then they could stay in America and maybe they’d be given a pizza parlor or something. They would go paint a house and then they would get in the getaway car and be taken somewhere and their house would get painted and nobody back in Sicily would miss them. Because they were orphans and had no family there would be no vendettas, which are very popular things in Sicily.

If you can’t make money in Chicago you can’t make money anywhere. They leave the bodies right on the sidewalk. If your dog was with you, your dog goes, too.

Glimco was having a problem with a freight hauler that was resisting the union and wouldn’t rehire a shop steward they had fired. It made Joey Glimco look bad to his men, and he wanted me to take care of the matter. I told him nobody needed to paint anybody’s house. I told him to give me a case of Coca-Cola that used to come in those old-fashioned bottles. I said give me one of your men and we’ll handle it. I got on a bridge just down the street from the freight company. When a truck would pull out and drive down to go under the bridge, the man and I dropped bottles of Coke down on the truck. It sounded like bombs going off, and trucks were crashing into the bridge abutment without knowing what was happening. Finally, the drivers refused to take trucks out of the yard, and the freight company came around and rehired the shop steward, but he didn’t get his back pay. Maybe I should have used two cases of Coke.

Once in a while Giancana would have a guy with him named Jack Ruby from Dallas. I met Jack Ruby a few times. I know Jimmy’s kid met him, too, at the Edgewater. Ruby was with Giancana and he was with Red Dorfman. One time we all went out to eat and Ruby had a blond with him that he brought up from Dallas for Giancana. There is no doubt whatsoever that Jimmy Hoffa didn’t just meet Jack Ruby, he knew Jack Ruby, and not just from Giancana, but from Red Dorfman, too.

The Kennedy old man had made his money alongside the Italians as a bootlegger during Prohibition. He brought in whiskey through Canada and distributed it to the Italians. The old man kept his contacts with the Italians over the years as he branched out into more legitimate things, like financing movie stars like Gloria Swanson who he was having affairs with.

Now the History Channel makes no bones about it; one of the reasons Kennedy won that election was because Sam Giancana fixed Illinois for him with phony ballots from people who were dead, names taken off gravestones.

I heard a rumor that Sam Giancana had to send Jack Ruby to Cuba to spread some money around to get Santo out.

Only in the movies or comic books do people say they want you to go and hit somebody. All they ever say is that they want you to go straighten a matter out. They say they want you to do whatever you’ve got to do to straighten a matter out. When you get there the people there have it all set up and you just do whatever you have to do, and then you’d go back to whoever sent you to give your report in case there was anything more they had to order to be done.

Later that same year John F. Kennedy was elected president by a thin margin. The first thing he did was appoint his brother attorney general of the United States. This put Bobby in charge of the Justice Department, all of the United States attorneys, and of the FBI and the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. And the first thing Bobby Kennedy did was turn against the very men who helped elect his brother. For the first time in American history an attorney general committed his office to the eradication of organized crime.

Al Smith was the one that made the saying, “I’d rather be right than president.” Only at that time segments of the country were concerned that being a Catholic, Al Smith would take his orders from the pope. They say that’s why the man lost the election.

If he had a drink in him Sinatra was an asshole. He’d put on a gorilla suit when he got drunk. He’d go to fight some guy knowing somebody would stop it. He was a bad drinker.

Jimmy asked me to go deep-sea fishing with him once and I told him, “I don’t go anywhere I can’t walk back from.”

Russell told me during Prohibition old man Kennedy made a dollar on every bottle of scotch that came into the country. He told me the old man controlled the president, and he was supposed to get the president to help them in Cuba and help get the McClellan hearings stopped and get the government off everybody’s back. Looking back now, I’ve got to think the old man told President Kennedy to go ahead on this Cuba matter to pay off Sam Giancana for helping him in the election. Cuba would be a way to show respect for what was done for them; to give the envelope. Kennedy would look like he was helping the people get back their casinos and racetracks and other businesses they had down there. They had everything — shrimp boats and legitimate businesses.

Russell took good care of the poor people in his area; they got food at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and really whenever they needed it, and they all got coal in the winter.

They used to say the alleged mob only whacked their own. Maybe they figured Castro was a lot like them. In his way, he was a boss. Castro had a crew and he had a territory, and he violated his territory and he came into their territory and took over their valuable property and kicked them out. No boss is supposed to get away with that.