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October 13 - October 18, 2019
Russell Bufalino had gotten religion at Springfield prison hospital, preparing himself for the next life,
Some people put together an organization called HOFFA, for How Old Friends Feel Active.
As crazy as it sounds, Jimmy kept saying in public that he was going to expose the alleged mob connections that Fitz had. Jimmy said he was going to expose everything once he got back in office and got his hands on the records. It sounded like Jimmy was going to forfeit some of these loans and take over some of the casinos the way Castro did.
Russell had bet me that I was going to louse up my speech. I ended my speech by saying, “Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I know I don’t deserve all of this tonight, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either. See, Russ, I didn’t mess up my speech.” Russell waved to me and everybody laughed.
“There are people higher up than me that feel that you are demonstrating a failure to show appreciation,” and then he said so softly that I had to read his lips, “for Dallas.”
I didn’t know how serious it was for Jimmy until Jimmy and I were getting ready to leave. Russell took me aside and said, “Some people have a serious problem with your friend. Talk to your friend. Tell him what it is.”
“You’re dreaming, my friend. If they could take out the president, they could take out the president of the Teamsters.”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg, the tip of the iceberg. Let me tell you — Dallas, did you hear that word tonight? Remember that package you took to Baltimore? I didn’t know it then, but it turns out it was high-powered rifles for the Kennedy hit in Dallas. The stupid bastards lost their own rifles in the trunk of a Thunderbird that crashed when their driver got drunk. That pilot for Carlos was involved in delivering the replacements that you brought down. Those fuckers used both of us on that deal. We were patsies. What do you think of that? They had fake cops and real cops involved in
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The whole thing was built around the wedding. Bill Bufalino’s daughter was getting married on Friday, August 1, 1975. That was two days after Jimmy disappeared. People would be coming in from all the families around the country. There would be over 500 people there. Russell and I and our wives and Russell’s sister-in-law would be driving in a straight line that went through Pennsylvania, most of the way through Ohio, and then a right turn north to Detroit, Michigan.
You didn’t need a flight plan to land in those days and they kept no records.
One of them was a Ford with the keys sitting on the floor mat just like Russell said. It was plain and gray and a little dusty. You would never expect to find a flashy car that would attract attention in a situation like this. It was a loaner. Cars would be taken off lots and the owners would never know about it. Hotels were good. Long-term parking at airports was good. An inside man could make himself a nice note here and there providing loaners for cash customers.
You kiss somebody in a car and you never get the smell out of the interior. It becomes a corpse car. All the body chemicals and body waste gets released into a small space. The death smell stays in the car. A car is not like a house in that respect. A house doesn’t retain the death odor.
People like chiropractors would know when people would be out of town so that burglars could unload their houses. Might even be that somebody in the Detroit outfit had a chiropractor who treated an old lady who lived there alone. They would know she wouldn’t be home, and they would know her eyes were so shot she would never notice anybody had been there when she did get home, much less smell anything. The house is still there.
He used to make himself bigger than he was, but he had to look between his legs to find his balls.
Seeing me there, Jimmy instantly would believe Russell Bufalino was already in Detroit sitting around a kitchen table at a house waiting. My friend Russell wanting to be there would explain the sudden last-minute change in plans in Jimmy’s mind. Russell Bufalino was not the man to conduct a sit-down in a public place he didn’t know like the Red Fox. Russell Bufalino was old school. He was a very private person. He’d only meet you in public in places he knew and trusted. Russell Bufalino was the final bait to lure Jimmy into the car. If there was going to be any violence, anything unnatural,
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Even as a kid there was never any fight in Chuckie. He couldn’t fight to keep his hands warm.
They were there as cleaners to pick up the linoleum they had put down in the vestibule and to do any clean-up that might be necessary and to remove any jewelry and take Jimmy’s body in a bag to be cremated.
The planners had timed the operation in Detroit to take an hour from start to finish.
Homicide detectives were all over the place. They try to be nonchalant but they can’t help themselves; they peek.
He stopped and took his time so he wouldn’t stammer and he said, “If it was up to me, the next time I see you and your friend is the next snowstorm in Detroit.” I knew what he meant. In the old days when there was a lot of coal in use, we threw ashes under the wheels to give the tires traction in a snowstorm.
Peggy looked up at me when I walked in and saw something she didn’t like. Maybe I looked hard instead of worried. Maybe she thought I should have stayed in Detroit to work on finding Jimmy. Peggy asked me to leave the house and she said to me, “I don’t even want to know a person like you.” That was twenty-eight years ago and she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. I haven’t seen Peggy or talked to her since that day, August 3, 1975. She has a good job and lives outside of Philly. My daughter Peggy disappeared from my life that day.
Today the FBI is quite satisfied that by now they have punished the guilty parties. The former assistant director of criminal investigations for the FBI, Oliver Rendell, said, “Even if it’s never solved, I can assure you that those responsible have not gotten off scot-free.”
Russell Bufalino, by then seventy-nine years old, was handed a fifteen-year sentence. While in prison he had a severe stroke and was transferred to Springfield prison hospital where he turned to religion; he died at the age of ninety in a nursing home under the FBI’s watchful eye.
They watch the federal buildings. If they see you go into a federal building and you don’t report it to somebody, you’ve got a problem. Sometimes I think they have people inside the federal buildings, like secretaries, but I never was told exactly how it worked. All I was told by Russell was that if I ever went into a federal building, even to answer a subpoena, I had better tell somebody in the family as soon as possible. You’re not going there for tea.
Most certainly the eyewitness knew enough to put hoods on the gunmen, so no one would have any doubt about him. Besides, eyewitness identification has been proven by statute as very erratic.
From my experience on both sides of this issue, I know that when a suspect asks for a deal, the prosecution asks him for an offer of proof, an outline of what the suspect has to offer. The things the suspect will be able to tell the authorities must be on the table before the authorities are in a position to know whether the information is worth offering a deal to obtain.
In March 2002 the FBI, while keeping its sixteen-thousand-page file close to its vest, released fourteen hundred pages of it to the Free Press. In the final sentence in its article concerning these pages the newspaper made the observation that, “the documents suggest that the FBI’s most significant leads ran out in 1978.” That was the year Sal Briguglio was silenced.
The article said Sheeran was “a man noted for using his hands so well he did not need to carry a gun…a man so large police once found it impossible to handcuff his hands behind his back.”
In 1977 they took me in front of another grand jury. This one was in Syracuse. The FBI gave me advice that it was time for me to be a rat. The federal judge gave me limited immunity, so I had to answer questions at the grand jury.
Like with John Francis, nobody blamed Lou Cordi for talking while he was dying and under medication, making his peace.
About a year later I was standing in the Cherry Hill Inn in Jersey getting ready to leave after having a few drinks, when my driver, Charlie Allen, leaned over and asked me, “Did you kill Jimmy Hoffa?” I said, “You rat, motherfucker,” and the FBI came out of the walls to surround Allen to protect him. The restaurant was crawling with agents who had been listening in on Allen’s wire. They thought I was going to whack him on the spot. Whenever anybody says, “Did you…?” it’s time to pick up your check and leave.
The way they got me in the first place is that they caught Charlie Allen operating a methamphetamine lab in New Jersey. Naturally, Allen didn’t want Angelo or Russell to know he was moving meth. Naturally, Allen didn’t want to go to jail forever on the meth lab, and naturally, Allen knew the feds would do anything to get me because of the Hoffa case. The feds ended up giving Allen two years in jail. But then the State of Louisiana got him for life for baby-rape of his stepdaughter.
Blanketing a guy is a message to let him know how vulnerable he is. It startles a guy and by the time he gets the blanket off him the guy who threw it is long gone.
After that conviction I told the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 15, 1981, that “the only man who was perfect got nailed to the cross.”
Every so often the FBI would show up and call me out in the middle of the night. That’s the time snitches get called out when they think everybody else is asleep. The FBI waits for you in a separate building far away from the inmate population. To get from your block to where the FBI waits you have to walk outside a quarter of a mile. They have a yellow rope for you to hold on to to keep the wind from blowing you down. The wind chill goes right through a normal person. If you have arthritis and you’re walking real slow it’s an experience.
There was an old guy from Boston who was in for doing the Brinks job around 1950. In its day it was the biggest heist ever pulled. They put millions on the table. It took about seven years to solve, but they got them. They had a list of suspects right away, like they did with us. For seven years they just kept hauling them down for questioning, banging away until finally one of them broke and brought them all down.
That night I was entranced by the story of John’s escape from the Viet Cong. He bore long scars all across his torso. The Viet Cong liked to slice a prisoner’s skin because a certain type of fly would lay its eggs in the open wound. John would find maggots oozing out of his body years later.
It has been my experience that when an adult who has developed a conscience in his childhood wants to get something off his chest the route to confession is usually a circuitous one with many fits and starts, with roadblocks and red herrings and hints and glimpses of the truth. Often the person drops a hint and wants the questioner to figure it out.
Even though the letter was not at all central to the book and could be removed easily, and even though the editor assigned to the book had no doubt that Sheeran had killed Hoffa, the publisher decided to cancel the book.
In any event, the existence of a realtor could explain more than just the key. It could explain why the planners felt comfortable letting people park in the driveway. If it were a rental unit or if it were listed for sale it would be normal for strangers to park in the driveway and walk into the house.
And so in prison Frank Sheeran was a hardened, deadlier version of the rebellious schoolboy who planted the Limburger cheese in the radiator and who broke the jaw of the principal with one knockout punch. As he said often and repeated on the last videotape, “I gave it eighty-three years of hell and I kicked a few asses; that’s what I did.”
“[C]onfession is one of the necessities of life, like food and shelter. It helps eliminate psychological waste from the brain.”
The chills I got as a young prosecutor when the truth would lead to more truth, snowflake by snowflake until it became an avalanche.
The house had belonged to a now-deceased woman who bought it in 1925 and sold it in 1978, three years after Hoffa’s disappearance. Her son told the reporter that his mother moved out several months prior to the murder and let a single man, whom neighbors described as “mysterious,” rent a room in the house. Are there dots that connect “real estater” John Francis to an unsuspecting “real estater” in Michigan to that “mysterious” boarder?
While individual agents are top notch, as an institution the FBI sometimes behaves more like an armed public relations agency than a public service agency.
They got permission from the current owners of the house where Sheeran confessed he shot Hoffa to allow forensic lab specialists to spray Luminol, a chemical agent that detects evidence of blood, iron oxide, on the house’s floorboards. The boards tested positive, revealing eight tiny indications of blood in a trail that exactly matched Sheeran’s confession. The blood trailed from the vestibule down the hallway that leads to the kitchen.
On February 15, 2005, Chief Jeffrey Werner announced that the FBI lab found human male blood on the flooring, but that the DNA in the blood did not match Hoffa’s. At the press conference Gorcyca made it clear that while this did not corroborate Sheeran’s confession, it did not refute it either.
Here we already had the fact that in 1999, Sheeran confessed to me that he lured Hoffa into the rear passenger seat of the maroon Mercury — even though Hoffa always insisted on the front “shotgun” seat. The driver of the car, Hoffa’s foster son, Chuckie O’Brien, denied Hoffa was in that car and passed a lie detector test. On September 7, 2001, the FBI announced that a hair recovered from the headrest of the rear passenger’s-side seat and saved all these years recently had been DNA-tested and was indeed Hoffa’s hair. Sheeran’s confession and that piece of important forensic corroboration would
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It seemed to me that Luparelli was providing disinformation to the FBI and to the public. Perhaps he had some personal motive or personal gain to sell this story to the authorities — maybe he owed a lot of money he couldn’t pay and needed to get off the street. Likely on orders, Luparelli was shifting the blame away from the mob bosses who ordered and sanctioned the hit in case Gallo’s crew was thinking about a vendetta against the Genovese family, too, rather than just against their own family, the Colombos, with whom the Gallo crew was already feuding.
Down south, Carlos Marcello ran such a tight territorial ship that he would not permit a mobster from another family to visit New Orleans without his express approval, much less allow him to paint a house there.
