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

by Charles Brandt

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.

put, Jimmy Hoffa believed that the “ends” of improving the lot of working Americans, with his union leading the way, justified whatever “means” were used to accomplish

Just to be on the safe side I got rid of that .38. 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.

They asked me if I had anything I wanted to get off my chest and I told them, “I got nothing to get off my chest because I didn’t do anything.” They asked me to take a lie detector test, and I reminded them that I wasn’t made with a finger, and I told them very respectfully that I thought they should take a lie detector test themselves on whether they ever had occasion to help themselves to some loot they recovered, which went on a lot in those days.

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.

By this time I was a major part of the culture, and as a friend of both Russell and Angelo I had a great deal of respect. I know some of it went to my head. 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.

One summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day the place had forty-four waitresses, and I had sex with thirty-nine of them.

Just a lot of drinking and a lot of ego. Both of them will kill you.

In one way it was good that I wasn’t cooped up all the time in one humdrum routine, but a lot of it was like the army, where you hurry up and wait, a lot of boredom in between the combat.

With Hoffa’s blessings the Cadillac car carrier then terminated its leases with the independent Teamsters haulers, put many of them out of business, and gave hauling business to Test Fleet. This arrangement helped Josephine Poszywak, aka Mrs. Hoffa, and Alice Johnson, aka Mrs. Brennan, make $155,000 in dividends over ten years, without doing a single minute’s work for the Test Fleet company. Hoffa and Brennan had also invested in a Florida land development deal called Sun

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.

Bill was about 5′8″ and was 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.

I was used to getting put on landing craft and now I was moving up in the world, invading Chicago on a plane. I was in Chicago maybe an hour. They supplied me the piece and they had one guy right there to take it from me after the thing and get in one car with it and drive away. His only job was to break the piece down and destroy it. They had other guys sitting in crash cars to pull out in front of cops who might go after the car I got in. The car I got in was supposed to take me back to the airport.

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.

Sam and Bill and I would cut a hole in a watermelon and fill it with rum so Jimmy didn’t know we were drinking.

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.

Sam Giancana was going to help John F. Kennedy against Nixon and so were Giancana’s buddy Frank Sinatra and practically all of Hollywood. Giancana said he was going to fix the election in Illinois so Kennedy would win that state. Jimmy couldn’t believe his ears. Jimmy tried to talk him out of it. Jimmy told him nobody could control Bobby because he was mental. Jimmy said people went to the old man during the McClellan Committee hearings and he couldn’t do anything about either one of his millionaire kids.

He told Bobby that in honor of all the bad things Bobby Kennedy had done to Jimmy Hoffa, his Puerto Rican local was going to put flowers on the grave of Lee Harvey Oswald and maintain them and keep them fresh.

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. It was like a report you might make in combat after you got back from a night patrol. Then you’d go home.

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.

Toward that end, Bobby Kennedy formed a squad of lawyers and investigators within the Justice Department, and he put in charge of that squad his old right-hand man during the McClellan Committee hearings, Walter Sheridan. Bobby Kennedy chose the members of the squad himself. He gave the squad a very limited job to do and gave the squad a very subtle name: “The Get Hoffa Squad.” Everything, and I mean everything, came as a result of that.

I used to drive to Hollywood, Florida, with Russell for meetings at Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Lounge quite a bit. Once in a while we’d fly if there was some emergency, but most of the time I drove us down. Joe Sonken was with Russell’s family. Everybody went to the Gold Coast for meetings. All the different people from all over the country met at the Gold Coast. They had the best stone crabs in Florida. Russell would meet there with Santo Trafficante from Florida and Carlos Marcello from New Orleans many times over the course of a year. I met Trafficante’s lawyer there, Frank Ragano. They loaned Frank Ragano to Jimmy to help him out with the trials he ended up having on account of Bobby and the Get Hoffa Squad. I met Carlos Marcello’s pilot there, too, a guy named Dave Ferrie. They later said he was gay, but if he was he didn’t make a pass at me. He still had his hair when I met him. They say he went a little nutty later on and carried a makeup kit around with him. You could tell he hated Castro with a passion, and he was very close to the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida. One morning a couple of weeks after the meeting at the Gold Coast where I met Dave Ferrie, I was back in Philly at the local and I got a call from Jimmy Hoffa, who told me to go check on that thing we talked about. That meant I should go to the pay phone I used to use and to wait for a phone call. I got over to the pay phone and when it rang I heard Jimmy’s voice, say “Is that you?” I told him, “Yeah.” He sai...

bribe an IRS agent. Phil gave me a truck and I got ahold of a young guy named Jack Flynn to drive with me. (Jack died young sitting in his car of a heart attack when I was back in school on a parole violation in 1995. I made a call and got his girlfriend a union death benefit.) We drove the Milestone Hauling truck to Baltimore and pulled into the Campbell plant. I’ve been down there lately to find it and it’s got a new name, Bonsal. It’s more built up, with a few more buildings, but the old stone buildings are still there. In 1961 when we drove in it had a little landing strip. The landing strip had a small plane on it, and Carlos Marcello’s pilot who I had just met at the Gold Coast, Dave Ferrie, got out of the plane and came over to my rig and directed us to back up next to some army trucks. We backed up and all of a sudden this gang of soldiers came out of a building and began unloading military uniforms and weapons and ammunition from their army trucks and loading it all onto our truck. Dave Ferrie told me that the war materiel being loaded was from the Maryland National Guard. He gave me paperwork on the load in case we got stopped. He told me to take it to the dog track in Orange Grove, Florida, outside of Jacksonville. He said I’d be met there by a guy with big ears named Hunt. We drove straight down old Route 13. I used to drive coffee down to Florida for Food Fair and haul back oranges. I used to like to stop for those Lums chili dogs. You didn’t get them in the N...

and I flew back to Philly. Hunt later turned up on TV as the one in charge of the Watergate burglars, E. Howard Hunt, but at that time he was connected to the CIA somehow. Hunt also got some kind of operation on his ears, because the next time I saw him his ears were closer to his head. I drove up to Kingston to give Russell a report on the matter, and he told me that something was going to be happening in Cuba and that’s why Jimmy called me to drive the truck down to Florida. He told me that Jimmy Hoffa was keeping an open mind about the Kennedys. Jimmy was cooperating in this out of respect for Sam Giancana and out of respect for Russell, and because it would be good for everybody’s sake to take back Cuba from the Communists. Even if it would turn out to be good for the Kennedys. Then the next thing I heard on television that April was that President Kennedy had loused up the Bay of Pigs invasion against Castro. At the last minute Kennedy decided not to send American air cover for the infantry in the amphibious landing. I would have thought John F. Kennedy would have known better than that from having been in the war. You cannot have a landing invasion force without air suppor...

One morning, a few days to a week before November 22, 1963, I got a call from Jimmy to go to the pay phone. When I got there the only thing Jimmy said to me was, “Go see your friend.” I drove up to Russell’s and when he answered the door all he told me to do was, “Go see our friends in Brooklyn. They’ve got something for you to take to Baltimore.” That was not like Russell. He was setting the tone for whatever this was. I turned around and drove to Monte’s Restaurant in Brooklyn. It was a hangout for the Genovese people. It’s the oldest Italian restaurant in New York City. It’s in South Brooklyn, not far from the Gowanus Canal. Excellent food. To the left of the restaurant they have their own parking lot. I parked and went in and stood at the bar. Tony Pro got up from his table and went to the back and returned with a duffel bag. He handed it to me and told me, “Go down to Campbell’s Cement in Baltimore where you went that time with the truck. Our friend’s pilot will be there. He’s waiting for this.” You didn’t have to spend all that time in combat to know you had a duffel bag with three rifles in it. I knew it was rifles, but I had no idea what it was. When I got there, Carlos’s pilot, Dave Ferrie, was there with another guy I knew from Monte’s who was with Genovese. He’s gone now, but he has a nice family. There’s no reason to bring his name into it. He said, “How’s your friend?” I said, “He’s doing good.” He said, “You got something for us?” With the tone Russell had se...

Then, darkly relevant to the day’s heartrending and solemn funeral, Jimmy Hoffa gloated to the Nashville television audience and said, “Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.”

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.” At the time Bobby Kennedy made these statements to former White House officials who were his friends, he knew more about the inner game of organized crime than any “outsider” in the country. 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.

This total of an unlucky thirteen years of sentences to be spent in a federal jail for Jimmy Hoffa was followed a week later, on August 25, 1964, by the news of Bobby Kennedy’s resignation as attorney general and his announcement that he was running for the U.S. Senate from New York.

when criminal rights were being created where none had previously existed.

They left it for me at the Market Inn. That was a dry spot. A dry spot is a place where money is hidden.

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.

Charlie Allen is the one the FBI wired and used to set me up in the late seventies when they were trying to get everybody on their little list for something so they could squeeze us for information on Jimmy’s disappearance. They made a deal with Allen to

That was the same D.A. that was arresting everybody for the JFK assassination. Sometimes a friendly D.A. acts like a bird dog to flush rats out of the weeds. When the rat surfaces to cooperate with the D.A., then the people know what to do. I don’t know about that D.A.

After a while of spending every night after lockdown in a small cell with nothing to do but think about it, Jimmy knew in his gut he was getting double-crossed by Fitz. Then Jimmy started hating Fitz. But he couldn’t let on to Fitz, because he still needed his help to get out.

assume that his lawyers understood that all parole boards everywhere look with disfavor on any inmate who protests his innocence. As far as a parole board is concerned, the matter of guilt has already been established by a jury, and an inmate who continues to protest his innocence is one who has not been rehabilitated by his prison experience and who is not exhibiting remorse for his misdeeds.

put the bag in the backseat of my big Lincoln. 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.

On May 28, 1971, Audie Murphy was killed in a small plane crash while viewing the location of a business deal he was involved in with the Hoffa forces. Whatever help Jimmy Hoffa expected from Audie Murphy in dealing with Ed Partin went down with Murphy’s plane.

The controversy started when Jimmy got out and went to Detroit and they handed him the final papers signed by Nixon and we all got a good lesson when we saw in plain English that the final double-cross was in. Jimmy couldn’t run until 1980. He would miss the 1976 election. If he had stayed in and did all his time he’d have been out in 1975 in plenty of time for the 1976 convention. This was before Watergate, so who knew the thieves

Jimmy Hoffa had had enough experience by now that he did not trust that Richard Nixon’s administration would play fair with his parole if he provoked them by going after Fitzsimmons. Jimmy Hoffa was not going to provoke them.

When he was ready, Jimmy Hoffa’s plan of attack would be centered on a constitutional challenge to the condition to his pardon. His civil-rights attorneys would argue that the president exceeded his authority by adding a condition to the pardon. Under the Constitution a president has the power to pardon or not pardon, but he has no power, express or implied, to pardon in such a way that his pardon could later be rescinded and the recipient returned to jail.

Furthermore, this particular restriction added a punishment of not being allowed to manage a union. Hoffa had had no such restriction even while in jail. Although the rules of the jail made it difficult to do, it was not forbidden. This new punishment had not been given to Hoffa at the time of his two sentencings, and the president did not have the power to increase a punishment handed down by a sentencing judge.

Shortly after Colson resigned from the White House, and before he went to jail, he returned to private practice. Frank Fitzsimmons took the lucrative IBT legal contract away from Edward Bennett Williams and gave it to Charles Colson, thereby ensuring Colson of a $100,000-a-year retainer, minimum.

While he was in Lewisburg he got close with Carmine “The Cigar” Galante, from Queens, the boss of the Bonnano crime family. Galante was very rough. He took no prisoners. Jimmy thought the only problem

When he said he’d be the driver, he took the serious part out of the subject. After he said that, I thought he was puffing, just letting off steam. You don’t use a driver that’s got a face as well known as Milton Berle’s.

could get with a .22. You certainly didn’t want a silencer, which mostly only goes with a .22. You wanted to do some noisy stray shooting all over the place to send the witnesses for cover. But not the kind of noise that a .45 makes, which you could hear in a patrol car blocks away. So you wouldn’t use a couple of .45s, even though a .45 has first-class stopping power. Besides, a .45 is not accurate beyond twenty-five feet.

street. A couple of days before the July convention in 1971, where I put Jimmy’s picture inside the convention center, Crazy Joey Gallo got a nut from Harlem to kiss the Colombo family boss, Joe Colombo.

No doubt Gallo had approval to kiss a boss like Colombo, but not that way, in front of his family. I guess that’s why they called the man Crazy Joey.

A driver only knows as much as he knows, and that’s good for everybody, including the driver himself.

There’s a spot like that in the Schuylkill River in Philly; if they ever send divers in they’ll be able to arm a small country. Later on, I