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

by Charles Brandt

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.