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October 13 - October 18, 2019
In any event, not one of the three Italians was arrested for Gallo’s killing on Luparelli’s information, because his statement was never corroborated in a single detail. In fact, “Benny” and “Cisco” were never identified further.
Gallo always gave her what she called “the eyelock.” And she demonstrated it. She said he stared directly into her eyes whenever he talked to her about the travails of owning a restaurant, and it was hard to get away from him or his gaze.
Sheeran had done a lot of drinking and became bloated after he was forced to kill Hoffa in 1975,
Although the identification was made many years after the fact, she was a budding journalist who had an opportunity to see the killer and to form a mental image of him before he became a threat with a gun in his hand. Eyewitnesses confronted with a gun often remember only the gun.
“Jimmy Hoffa was one of only two people my father cared anything about. Russell Bufalino was the other one. Killing Jimmy Hoffa tortured my father the rest of his life. There was so much guilt and suffering my father lived with after the disappearance. He drank and drank. At times he couldn’t walk. I was always afraid to face that he did it. He would never admit it until you came along. The FBI spent almost thirty years torturing my father and scrutinizing his every move in order to get him to confess.
Eight months prior in 2008, Variety had trumpeted on its front page that Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro had made a deal with Paramount for a feature film of I Heard You Paint Houses.
“The creep showed up with a lawyer,” Coffey said, referring to Jerry Orbach. “He wouldn’t let me ask him a single question.” “Orbach,” I said, “I learned at a book signing, went to high school in Bufalino territory. Anybody who ever lived in northeast PA knows enough to keep his mouth shut.”
Coffey explained that he had a law enforcement purpose when he allowed the story of a trio of Italian gunmen to circulate. Coffey used the bogus story as an integrity test. It would filter out phony tips. He’d hang up on an informant looking to sell “information” about three Italian gunmen because Coffey knew the shooter was a large lone gunman and he wasn’t Italian.
I’ll never forget a young salesman named Arnold Schuster who spotted Willie Sutton, a wanted bank robber, on a Brooklyn street and ran to get a cop and claimed the reward. Mafia boss Albert “The Mad Hatter” Anastasia, famous for being killed in a hotel barber’s chair in 1957, was the godfather of what would come to be called the Gambino family. Willie Sutton had no relationship with the Mafia. But Anastasia was “not happy with” Arnold for taking credit on TV. He had Arnold shot to death in front of his house as a lesson for the youngsters of New York, including me.
As if he hadn’t heard me and with a voice as icy cold as his glare, in a monotone through clenched teeth he embarked on a monologue clearly written for him by a jailhouse lawyer. Every sentence began with: “I want you to sue…” Like a cop who gets a broadcast of two men fighting on a corner and takes his time getting there so the men can wear themselves out, I let him drone on about all those he wanted us to sue. When he seemed done, I said: “Frank, are you finished?” “Yeah,” he grunted. “I’m finished.” “I wish you could hear yourself talk. Then you’d know you weren’t making any sense at all.”
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At one point Frank told us that his daughter had a cat that liked to jump on his lap while he was watching football. So he bought a squirt gun. He imitated how he would shoot the cat with a spray of water, and his imitation gave me chills. I felt the chills again in Detroit in 2002 when he imitated shooting my rental Cadillac floorboard with a “P-I-E-C-E piece.”
After publication it was announced in the Delaware news that the realistic novel had prompted a letter to me from President Ronald Reagan commending The Right to Remain Silent for its “forthright stand on improving the protection of law-abiding citizens.” Frank had seen this article about the Irish American president liking my book.
A latent desire to confess to a person in authority was a concept I had been taught very early in my former law enforcement career by a seasoned Wilmington PD homicide detective, the late Charlie Burke. “How do you get so many confessions?” I asked Burkie. “They want to tell you, Choll,” Burkie answered. I thought he was kidding. This was after he’d gotten a murder confession out of the burglar Randolph Dickerson. Randolph had used a screwdriver he’d jimmied a window with to stab to death the old woman who lived alone and supplemented her Social Security by selling Bibles. The Bible saleslady
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conscience, as ministered to by religions, 12-step programs, and psychiatrists, and as dramatized by artists like Shakespeare, is an element of human nature.
Rule number one, you want your subject alone. Frank let me into his well-cared-for two-bedroom apartment, which smelled faintly medicinal, and said: “This is my lawyer, Charlie Brandt. This is my other lawyer, Jimmy Lynch, ‘The Catholic.’ ” Jimmy Lynch, The Catholic, reached out his hand and said: “Hiya Cholly, howya doin’.” I felt a return of hope hearing his nickname. Catholics make a sacrament out of confession.
At speaking engagements, people ask me if I ever was fearful during my time with Frank. “Once,” I say, “when we walked into the Mona Lisa restaurant and the lock on the door snapped behind us.” That loud crack got my heart’s attention. Later Frank would confide that he’d experienced that scary snap of a restaurant door locking behind him when he reported to Angelo Bruno at the Villa di Roma to answer for the plot to torch a laundry for Whispers.
We already had made a deal to share the “profits” of a very unprofitable book that would tell his “side of this thing,” a book that would whitewash him. Frank had assured me that Russell had given him approval to do the book “as long as it don’t hurt nobody.”
That long night alone with Frank took some ups and downs, but finally Frank uttered his first words that amounted to an admission of guilty knowledge about Jimmy Hoffa: “People don’t think the FBI knows what the fuck they’re doing; the FBI knows what the fuck they’re doing.”
Bob Garrity, the FBI Hoffa case agent during the heart of the investigation, had written the memo a few weeks after Hoffa’s disappearance. I was privileged to meet Bob Garrity in 2005, fourteen years after Frank’s Mona Lisa trial, when Bob bought my paperback at a book signing. He asked me to make it out to “Bob Garrity.” “How do I know that name?” I looked up. “I was the Hoffa case agent. I read the hardback twice.” In the Hoffex memo, which formed the basis for the other books written on the Hoffa murder, Garrity had put together an accurate list of suspects, including Sheeran and Bufalino.
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To a man, all the suspects listed in the Garrity Hoffex memo pushed what I call the Miranda mute button on the remote. They each refused to allow the FBI to ask any questions. Bob Garrity and the FBI, using informants, knew whodunit, but had no way to penetrate the stone wall of silence to learn who done what. And so the Bureau mercilessly pursued those on the list for whatever else, however unrelated, they could get on them.
In Vino Veritas, in wine there is truth.
That night in 1991 in his living room, in an intimate atmosphere with no tape recorder in my hand and taking no notes, I helped Frank open up to describe the Hoffa murder as taking place in a “loaner” house in Detroit; to admit that a gun was used; to admit that he was present at that house in Detroit during the killing; that he was there on orders from Russell; that he had flown there on a private plane; and that the body was cremated by the Andretta brothers serving as “cleaners.” Frank admitted that he was there as a member of the murder conspiracy. This made him as guilty of murder as if
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When he finally confided that it was a gun, I could sense strongly that he wanted to tell me he had pulled the trigger of that gun, and I was confident that he’d tell me eventually. But I had to be careful and take it slow. He was, after all, a dangerous man, and we hardly knew each other.
Deliberate silence has its role in certain aspects of interrogation. I successfully used a long silent ride back to the police station in the dark in a car full of homicide detectives I’d discreetly told not to utter a single word, to keep perfectly silent in the presence of the young man in handcuffs sitting next to me, to let him stew while he used his knees to wipe his tears. I used this silent treatment to scare an easy confession out of this non-shooter accomplice we had just seized from his girlfriend’s apartment in the serious wounding of a patrol cop in the head by a .22 rifle in a
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As I used to lecture cops: EFW. Every F’ing Word counts. Listen.
As I looked at him that evening in 1991, I decided another question was in order just to keep him alert. Based on the final scene of the obscure movie that I’d seen at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City decades earlier called Blast of Silence, and sensing a lull, a literal blast of silence, just to keep him talking as the evening was coming to a close I very “innocently” asked Frank why so many people were actively involved: “…Tony Provenzano, you, Russell, Tommy Andretta, Steve Andretta, Sal Briguglio, Chuckie O’Brien, Tony Giacalone.” “That way,” Frank said, “if you go bad you only know what
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“I never read any books on the JFK assassination,” I continued casually. He was riveted, his eyes no longer sad, now wide. “But it always seemed to me from the second I saw Ruby shoot Oswald on TV that it was Jack Ruby’s job…” He got grayer and harder as I spoke. “…to get rid of Oswald. When that went haywire on the street, Ruby had to finish the job. There’s a lot worse than facing a judge for murder.” His massive forearm muscles bulged on the arms of his gray La-Z-Boy. “If Ruby didn’t shoot Oswald” — I switched to loud and aggressive — “he’d be tortured to death, his family, too. Tortured to
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In 2012 in a Charlie Rose interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his father, RFK Sr., believed the Mafia had killed his brother John in Dallas and that he also believed it. RFK Jr. said that RFK Sr. judged the Warren Commission Report to be a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship…He publicly supported the Warren Commission Report, but privately he was dismissive of it.” RFK Jr. explained: “He was a very meticulous attorney. He had gone over reports himself. He was an expert at examining issues and searching for the truth.” Charlie Rose asked whether RFK Sr. had “some sense of guilt because he thought
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Jack Ruby knew so many gangsters personally that in 1959 the FBI unsuccessfully tried to recruit Ruby as a paid confidential informant.
Of course, I still have a copy of the 1991 memo, titled “They Wouldn’t Dare.” The title came from Jimmy Hoffa’s words to Frank in response to Frank warning Jimmy that Russell said to tell Jimmy “what it is.” “They wouldn’t dare” in that context were the words Frank believed got Hoffa killed. The words became the title of chapter 1 of the book.
I vividly remember the moment this technique paid off and Frank admitted to pulling the trigger. He called my cell phone as I walked out of Cristina’s restaurant in Ketchum, Idaho, after lunch in October 2000, almost two years after our new round of interviews had begun. “That matter we’ve been talking about…” Frank said. “Sure.” “That matter, you could say that I did it.” “I could say anything, Frank, as long as it’s the truth. Did you do it? Are you telling me you did it?” “Right.” “Are you telling me you shot Hoffa?” “Right. Yeah.” “Good for you, Frank. You knew I knew it, anyway, but it’s
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The family explained that Aunt Martha’s house is just inside the city limits. As a Detroit schoolteacher, Martha had to use it as her official Detroit residence, while she actually lived in a country home outside the city. The family told us that Martha Sellers had as a student in her classroom the incomparable heavyweight champ Joe Louis, the same “Brown Bomber” who helped earn Bobby Kennedy a parachute jump from the Capitol Building.
These generous people referred us to a lawyer friend of the family who had considered buying the house in the 1970s. I spoke to him by phone. The lawyer recalled that the house had a hardware-store For Rent sign in one of the windows for years, including 1975. So it was, indeed, a rental in 1975, making it easier for strangers to come and go unnoticed by the neighbors. The lawyer knew it was 1975 because that was the year he’d returned to live in Detroit and seriously considered buying the house.
the cellar of the house had an incinerator with very powerful roaring gas jets. It had an opening big enough to put the body of a man in it. As a kid he had burned garbage for his aunt. It was still in use in 1975, but a few years later these home incinerators were banned as a source of air pollution. Bob and I checked out the cellar and found the incinerator’s sealed-off chimney, but the incinerator had been removed.
Frank was supposed to be alive when the book came out. Frank chose suicide by self-starvation, not uncommon in nursing homes.
I learned how breathtakingly easy it was in Michigan in 1975 to legally cremate a body without any paper trail. All that was needed was something called a “transit permit,” and in practice it really wasn’t needed. These were slips of paper the size of a dollar bill. There were no duplicates, just an original. It would be supplied to a driver by a funeral director, who typically kept a pad of them in his desk drawer. They would get filed nowhere. They would not be given to the crematorium. It was simply a licensed funeral director giving any driver who possessed a “transit permit” permission to
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When the hardback edition of I Heard You Paint Houses first came out in 2004, Ed Barnes, a Fox News producer and former organized crime investigator for the state of New York, a man who for over twenty years kept two files from his Strike Force days, one labeled Frank Sheeran and the other labeled Russell Bufalino, and who gave me my first copy of the Hoffex memo, flew to Las Vegas. Ed Barnes waited all day in the desert sun in front of Tommy Andretta’s orange-roofed white suburban house. When 6’6” Andretta arrived home, Barnes tried to hand him the book and to ask him questions, but Andretta
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Wanda Ruddy, the wife of Al Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather, was in the audience. Wanda introduced herself and told me: “Russell Bufalino had final script approval of The Godfather.”
At another talk in Bufalino country a man came up to me and said, “When I was young I was a wild kid. Russell came to my father’s furniture store and said: ‘Everyone likes to shop in your store, but your son is acting wild. If you can’t control him, nobody’s going to want to shop here anymore.’ My father sat on me all through high school. I was never out of his sight until I matured, and now I have my own business.” “What business is that?” I asked. “I own my own funeral parlor.”
Although I couldn’t use it because Carrie Bufalino was still alive, Frank told me that while Russell had planned the Hoffa hit to be over in an hour from Hoffa’s pickup to his cremation, it had been Fat Tony Salerno who presided over the murder. And although Salerno gave lip service to being neutral between Hoffa and Tony Provenzano, it was in Salerno’s best interest to eliminate Hoffa. Salerno’s Genovese family dominated the hit, providing four men for the plot: Provenzano, Sal Briguglio, and the two Andretta brothers.
Frank and I frequently visited a Philly capo, a made man I’ll call Carmine, at his private social club, members only or bring a search warrant. The single obvious illegal activity going on in the club was gambling. It was a “card casino,” three or four poker games always in progress, with the house supplying a dealer and getting a cut of every pot, with Carmine’s men watching to ensure the house got every bit of its money. The first time Frank and I sat at Carmine’s bar in his social club, Carmine’s thick refrigerator box of an underboss, a guy who appeared to be about forty years old, came
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At a book signing near Baltimore, a man familiar with the area told me that the airstrip Frank and I couldn’t find had been up the road where there is now a shopping mall with a Gap and an auto dealership. That was the airstrip where Frank had delivered a duffel bag filled with high-powered rifles to a Genovese man shortly before “Dallas.” It was great to verify that we had been in the right vicinity after nearly forty years had elapsed since Frank’s 1963 delivery.
While Frank told me he had suspicions in 1963 because of Jack Ruby’s role, Frank wasn’t told about a Mafia conspiracy to kill JFK until that night at Broadway Eddie’s in 1974. Frank had an impeccable source in Russell Bufalino, who was a serious man speaking in a serious way about the most serious of matters when he warned Jimmy Hoffa in front of Frank: “There are people higher up than me that feel that you are demonstrating a failure to show appreciation” — and then in a hushed tone — “for ‘Dallas.’ ” Russell Bufalino was doubly serious later that night when he assured Frank that Jimmy was
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These official reports recount a three-day jailhouse incident in 1989 that implicated Louisiana boss Carlos Marcello as having a role in “Dallas.” The three-day incident was significant enough to cause the FBI within a week to reopen for nearly a year the Bureau’s long-closed JFK investigation.
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
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Although Kaiser made no reference to Sheeran or to this book, with Kaiser’s account of these newly released FBI reports quoting Marcello, even in a semi-delusional state, about “a meeting he had just held with Provenzano in New York” in the context of what Marcello identified as a “we” conspiracy — “we’ll fix him in Dallas…we are going to get that Kennedy in Dallas” — the already highly corroborated Frank Sheeran gets validation from these hidden FBI reports.
As Frank Sheeran and so many others taught me in their Mafia graduate school, as a permanent member of the Commission it would be impossible for members of the Genovese family to be involved in something as big as “Dallas” without the rest of the Commission’s approval. An example is the Commission’s close vote not to kill then–U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani in the mid-1980s.
