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

by Charles Brandt

At the onset of the 1975 hearings, in a shocking move, the CIA admitted to the Church Committee the mob’s involvement and assistance in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the existence of the mob-CIA plot to kill Castro. This plot was called Operation Mongoose.

Jimmy said the line: “I may have faults, but being wrong ain’t one of them.”

Cabbies usually have something else going on for themselves on the side. Pushing a couple of girls or making deliveries of one kind or another. Hustling customers for after-hours joints or for certain restaurants. Some of them even hustled jewelry in those days. They don’t want to make waves with their bosses because their bosses look the other way on a lot of stuff they do. A lot of them are transient, anyway.

The big thing that summer was hijacking cabs that had the rebel’s sign on them or a Seafarers sign. If a rebel cabbie left his cab at a stand and went in for coffee he’d come out and find his cab gone. It had been hot-wired, or maybe he had left the keys in it. The cab would be driven down to Lake Michigan right past the cop car by the lake. You’d get out and let the car coast into the lake and sink into the water so the cabbie couldn’t drive it. That way you’d cut the rebels’ revenue and cost them money. Then your backup car would drive you out past the cop, and you’d hand the cop a paper bag with money in it. The bag was just so nobody could see the five $20 bills or whatever. You’d tell the cop the cab’s brakes had failed or that it had run out of gas, and he’d laugh and you’d drive on out looking for another one to put in the lake.

There was a day we were battling the Voice that I got arrested twenty-six times in a twenty-four hour period. I’d get taken into Moko, post bail, and go back out to a picket line and get involved in another donnybrook with the Voice people.

He was accused with the late Bert Brennan of grabbing “two plus two” — which is slang for $200,000.

Still, every night for as long as I knew him, when his day was done, whether it was at eleven p.m. or at one a.m. that his day was done, he went to sleep. And the second Jimmy Hoffa’s head hit the pillow he was sound asleep like somebody hit him with a sap. He was better than Russell at that. Without an alarm clock he was up at five. You didn’t get a chance to stay home and lick your wounds too much around Jimmy Hoffa.

Shortly thereafter at a private Washington dinner party, President John F. Kennedy leaked to journalist Ben Bradlee that Jimmy Hoffa was plotting to kill his brother Bobby. President Kennedy likely thought that leaking the story to the respected and influential Ben Bradlee, and having it published, might be a deterrent to Hoffa actually carrying out the threat. Ben Bradlee was to gain fame as the editor of the Washington Post who helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon during Watergate with the help of “Deep Throat.” In his personal journal, Bradlee wrote that night that “the President was obviously serious.” In his autobiography Bradlee said that when he approached Bobby Kennedy to confirm the assassination threat, Bobby begged him not to print the story, because it would scare off potential witnesses in the organized crime trials Bobby was then supervising. At that time, Bobby Kennedy was spearheading the biggest drive against organized crime the nation had ever known. Bradlee killed the story.

You see, you’ve got to keep in mind that when Bobby Kennedy came in as attorney general, the FBI was still basically ignoring so-called organized crime.

Jury selection began in Test Fleet on the second day of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

An insurance broker in the panel reported to Judge Miller that a neighbor of his had met with him over the weekend and offered him $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills to vote for acquittal should he be accepted on the jury. Hoffa’s selection of the insurance broker made sense, because insurance men — being in a business that is ultra-suspicious about being ripped off and victimized by criminal fraud — are ordinarily considered death to criminal defense attorneys. They are normally struck before they get a chance to warm the seat. Surely, the government wouldn’t strike the insurance man from the jury if he were selected from the panel.

Jimmy said, “You always run away from a man with a knife and toward a man with a gun.”

But if you go toward the man with a gun who cannot be startled, the closer you get the more you improve his aim. Most of the time you don’t see the knife until you’re cut with it. The best thing is to be a choirboy.

Jimmy knew that nuts were used from time to time by certain people for certain matters. That same year of his Nashville trial Sam Giancana’s friend Frank Sinatra had The Manchurian Candidate in all the theaters. It was a big movie out about the Communists using a nut to kill somebody running for president.

That’s the problem with using a nut. They’re not accurate enough. Nuts can cause a lot of suffering. Like the nut who shot George Wallace and left the man paralyzed. Or the nut that shot Reagan and his press secretary, Brady.

And Hoffa addressed the legal proceedings in Nashville: “Something is happening in this country by the name of Bobby Kennedy. One man has assigned an elite squad of twenty-three deputy attorneys general to work his dictates on me.”

I grabbed some college kids and gave them $50 each to use all the public toilets and keep the elevators busy. Then I put laxatives in one of the coffee urns. Those of us on the union’s team who drank coffee took our coffee from the other urn. Management was split about 50-50 on urn selection. Half of the people from management took coffee from the doctored urn. Pretty soon one guy ran into the one bathroom in the negotiating room and wouldn’t come out. The other few guys went nuts running around the hotel looking for a toilet that wasn’t being used. They all stayed out of the negotiations after that to rest up and change their clothes. I had thinned out the herd. It was easier to negotiate against a smaller group. Even with all the pressure on Jimmy, I never saw him laugh so hard as when we got back to our room.

A few months later, on Tuesday July 23, 1963, four months before President Kennedy was assassinated, Ragano claims to have been meeting with Hoffa about the new indictments that had recently been handed down in May and June. Hoffa was beside himself with rage. According to Ragano he was told by Jimmy Hoffa: “Something has to be done. The time has come for your friend and Carlos to get rid of them, kill that son-of-a-bitch John Kennedy. This has got to be done. Be sure to tell them what I said. No more fucking around. We’re running out of time — something has to be done.”

Carlos used to have a sign in his office that said that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

Vito Genovese had a citizen thrown off a roof so he could marry the guy’s wife, which he then went and did.

Carlos Marcello didn’t allow anybody from any of the other families to so much as visit New Orleans, not even for Mardi Gras, without first getting his approval. Carlos Marcello was one boss that took no chances. The man ran a tight ship.

Among the telephone calls a bereaved Bobby Kennedy made about those he suspected of involvement in his brother’s murder was one to Walter Sheridan. Bobby Kennedy asked Walter Sheridan to check out the possible involvement of Jimmy Hoffa.

Even before Ruby whacked Oswald it crossed my mind whether it had anything to do with that matter at Monte’s. I don’t have to tell you there was nobody you could ask about something like that.

As early as December 9, 1963 — a mere seventeen days after his brother’s assassination — Robert Kennedy spoke briefly about the possibility of mob involvement to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Two years after the Warren Commission released its 1964 report, Bobby Kennedy told his brother Jack’s former White House aide Richard Goodwin, “I never thought it was the Cubans. If anyone was involved it was organized crime. But there is nothing I can do about it. Not now.”

Bobby Kennedy certainly knew that, in the absence of a mob war, bosses did not ever eliminate another boss’s underboss. It would bring major retaliation. To effect a desired change in policy, mob bosses have traditionally eliminated — and still eliminate — bosses, not underbosses. On an international scale it is called regime change. To the Italian bosses it is merely a matter of following the old Sicilian maxim that to kill a dog you don’t cut off its tail, you cut off its head. On the painful day his brother was shot to death in Dallas, Robert Kennedy was in Washington presiding over a two-day organized crime meeting of the federal attorneys on his staff. They had arrived from United States attorneys offices from all over the country to assemble at the Department of Justice for this pivotal meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to work out the details of the next phase of the attorney general’s campaign against organized crime. It was during a lunch break in the second day of meetings that Robert Kennedy heard the devastating news from Dallas.

As Hundley expressed it, “The minute that bullet hit Jack Kennedy’s head, it was all over. Right then. The organized crime program just stopped.”

In 1961 Giancana repeated the message to his crew. William “Action” Jackson was a 300-pound loan shark who worked for Giancana. Jackson was suspected of being a government informer. He was taken to a meatpacking plant and hung on a six-inch steel meat hook and tortured for two days. Jackson was systemically beaten, cut, burned, shot in the knee, and shocked with a cattle prod until he died. Photographs were taken of Jackson. All the men who worked for Giancana in his vast criminal empire, ranging from Chicago to Las Vegas to Dallas to Hollywood to Phoenix, were required to view the photographs.

After Dallas, however, Bobby Kennedy’s power source was unplugged.

I know I got reimbursed whenever I beat a rap, but I paid my own bills when I lost. Or I should say, somebody would hold a benefit and I’d get envelopes. I did collect a fair amount of private money to help out with my legal fees and expenses on those two cases I did lose. But in the end you’re still short when you lose.

Jimmy claimed he had tapes of Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe having sex. Johnny Roselli and Giancana had Marilyn Monroe’s house bugged. He never played me the tapes, but I got the impression that he planned on having them played, maybe during the congressional hearings if they ever had them.

Bobby Kennedy’s campaign against organized crime, and especially the methodology he devised — gathering intelligence, focusing on targets, making deals with informants, employing sophisticated electronic surveillance, and insisting on the pooling of information by disparate and often competitive government agencies — set the stage for every action the federal government has taken against organized crime since. Today no one questions the existence of organized crime or the commitment of the federal government and the FBI to its eradication. Today, thanks to Bobby Kennedy, organized crime is hardly thought of as a local police problem. The head may have been cut off, but the dog never died. The damage done by Bobby Kennedy to the power of organized crime and to mobster Teamsters was irreversible.

Nine days after Justice Potter Stewart’s opinion the justice received a letter from an old college chum on behalf of Jimmy Hoffa. The letter was from William Loeb, the owner and publisher of New Hamphire’s influential Manchester Union Leader. Loeb informed his friend Justice Stewart that an unnamed high government official had assured him that Bobby Kennedy had used illegal wiretaps in his zeal to get Hoffa. An important fact Loeb had left out of the letter was that he had been promised a huge loan from the Teamsters pension fund, a loan he subsequently received. Had it been proved that Hoffa’s attorneys put Loeb up to writing this letter they would have faced ethics proceedings, but the matter was not pursued.

Everybody downtown knew I was going to Teamsters headquarters in Washington to collect Jimmy’s donation for the lawyers for Sullivan and them. When I got back to Philly, Big Bobby Marino asked me for the money. Bobby told me he’d give it to the lawyers for me. I asked him if he thought I was made with a finger. Thirteen years later I got indicted for having Big Bobby whacked, but the jury found me not guilty.

A dry spot is a place where money is hidden. It’s like a safe house that you lay low in for a while that nobody knows about. Only it’s for hiding money. A safe house is like a civilian house on a normal street that’s not connected to anybody. A dry spot could be temporary, until the money is picked up. The Market Inn was the place for that. It was a dry spot and it was a drop spot. You’d drop the package of money off there with the maitre d’ until the party picked it up. The maitre d’ didn’t have to know what was in the package. It was safe until somebody came for it.

Before we picked a jury, the judge put me on the stand and asked me how many times the Commonwealth asked for a postponement of the trial, and I told him “sixty-eight.” Then the judge asked me how many times I asked for a continuance and I said “none,” and he called it a disgrace and said a motion was in order.

The prison rules allowed for a total of three hours of visitation a month from a list of nonlawyers. The visitation list was restricted to family members. Inmates were permitted no phone privileges in those days. Letters were permitted to be written to only seven people from a list of relatives and lawyers. All letters in and out were screened. No union officer was permitted to visit or write to Jimmy Hoffa. There was no limitation on visitation from lawyers working on active cases. Hoffa’s son was a lawyer for the union and so was not restricted to the family member list; he could see his father as often as once a week.

I’d pull on my shirt and the kid would know that was a signal to go to the buck house so Jimmy and I could get a little business done. The guard would look the other way. They made out all right at Christmas, those guards. I think every day was Christmas for some of them in the old days. I saw it tighten up quite a bit over the years when I went to school in the eighties and nineties. I think it was on account of the publicity and the new type of inmate, especially the drug dealers like the Jamaicans and those Cubans that Castro had kicked out.

I already had put the seventy-five-gallon gas tank in the trunk, so that if the Feds followed me they’d have to stop for gas and I could just hit a switch and go to the extra tank and keep on cruising.

You don’t want to have to take a leak if you’re trying to outrun a couple of cop cars.

If you’re taking care of a matter outdoors, right on the street, your driver has to be parked right there waiting for you, and he can see what it is. Sometimes you need him to be standing out there right on the sidewalk to dispose of the piece or to scare the witnesses, but indoors, like inside doing a house, you want to work alone. That way, at the worst, you can always claim self-defense. My whole time with the people, I never trusted anybody enough that I would take care of a matter with another person in the room. A driver only knows as much as he knows, and that’s good for everybody, including the driver himself. A guy’s facing the electric chair and he’s liable to break down and weaken. If you do it yourself you can only rat on yourself.

The rats always load up their résumés so the government treats them with more respect. The government loves a rat that gives them a chance to solve the big ones, even if the rat was just a low-life drug dealer who wouldn’t know a big one from his left nut.

When his opponent Joe Biden asked if he could speak to the membership I took it to the executive board and got their feelings about it and nobody opposed it, so I said sure. Biden was on the County Council and he was a Democrat and the County Council had some very good people on it for labor. Joe Biden was a young kid compared to Boggs. He came and gave his spiel and he turned out to be a very good talker. He gave a really good pro-labor speech to the rank and file at that membership meeting. He took questions from the floor and handled himself like somebody many years older. He said his door would always be open to the Teamsters.

Any time you see the words “Unfair to Labor” on a picket line that’s an informational picket line. You can’t put on your signs that you’re on strike because you’re not a recognized union yet, and that would violate the rules of the National Labor Relations Board.

There have been things written about this incident and I am always mentioned in them. They say that this maneuver is what got Senator Joe Biden elected. Especially the Republicans say that if those newspaper inserts from the Boggs side got delivered inside the newspapers it would have made Joe Biden look very bad. The Boggs ads coming as they almost did that last week there would have been no time for Biden to repair the damage. I have no way of knowing if Joe Biden knew if that picket line thing was done on purpose on his behalf. If he did know he never let on to me.

Following Hoffa’s announcement of the legal challenge and his plans to run in 1976, Frank Sheeran gave his friend and mentor a colorful endorsement,, “I’ll be a Hoffa man ‘til the day they pat my face with a shovel and steal my cufflinks.”

I visited Jimmy at Lake Orion right after he had that problem in Miami at a private meeting with Tony Pro. At that meeting in Miami Jimmy wanted to get Pro’s support in 1976. Instead what he got was a threat from Pro that he’d kidnap Jimmy’s granddaughter and rip Jimmy’s guts out with his bare hands. In Miami after the meeting Jimmy told me he was going to ask Russell to let me do what I had to do against Tony Pro. This time he didn’t say anything about being my driver on the thing. Jimmy was serious now. Jimmy and Pro hated each other and they were both capable of doing to each other what they said they were going to do. It was a matter of who got off first.

There is an old maxim that young lawyers learn: “If you can’t beat them on the law, beat them on the facts.”

Agnew had resigned when it was discovered that, even as vice president, he had continued to be on the payroll of crooked public works contractors in Maryland, where he had been governor.

In his book The Teamsters, Steven Brill makes the point that by 1974 the Central States Pension Fund of the Teamsters Union had more than $1 billion dollars loaned out for commercial real-estate ventures, including casinos. This was only 20 percent less than was loaned out by the financial powerhouse, Chase Manhattan Bank. “In short,” said Brill, “the mob had control of one of the nation’s major financial institutions and one of the very largest private sources of real-estate investment capital in the world.”