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

by Charles Brandt

The first words Jimmy ever spoke to me were, “I heard you paint houses.” The paint is the blood that supposedly gets on the wall or the floor when you shoot somebody. I told Jimmy, “I do my own carpentry work, too.” That refers to making coffins and means you get rid of the bodies yourself.

Running up out of the surf on to the beach at St. Tropez I thought I was shot. I looked down and saw red all over my uniform. I hollered for the medic and Lieutenant Kavota from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, came running over to me and shouted, “You son of a bitch, that’s wine. You ain’t shot. Get up and get going. They shot your canteen.”

You see, another thing I didn’t know is that the kangaroo defends itself with its tail. It has an eight-foot tail that comes whipping up behind you when you knock the kangaroo down. And the harder I hit him, the harder and faster his tail came up behind me. I never saw that tail come whipping up behind me, and I never paid attention to the boxing glove on the tail. He had an eight-foot reach I didn’t know about.

Frank Sheeran said that of all the alleged crime bosses he ever met, the mannerisms and style of the Marlon Brando portrayal in The Godfather most nearly resembled Russell Bufalino.

in the first two years following World War II, years in which Frank Sheeran looked for steady work and got married, there were a combined total of 8,000 strikes in 48 states. That’s more than 160 separate strikes per year per state, and many individual strikes were nationwide.

Today Jimmy Hoffa is famous mostly because he was the victim of the most infamous disappearance in American history. Yet during a twenty-year period there wasn’t an American alive who wouldn’t have recognized Jimmy Hoffa immediately, the way Tony Soprano is recognized today. The vast majority of Americans would have known him by the sound of his voice alone. From 1955 until 1965 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as Elvis. From 1965 until 1975 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as the Beatles.

These hearings came to be known as the McClellan Committee hearings, named after the Arkansas senator, John L. McClellan, who presided over them. Future presidential candidates Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts were members of the committee. The committee’s chief counsel and principal interrogator was the future president’s younger brother and the nation’s future attorney general, Bobby Kennedy. As a result of his aggressive work on the committee, Bobby Kennedy was to become Jimmy Hoffa’s mortal enemy.

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.

As I learned the ropes I learned that for many good and sound reasons the bosses and 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.

They taught me that the word union means something. Everybody’s got to be united in the same direction or there is no progress for the worker. A union is only as strong as its weakest member. Once there is dissension the employer senses it and takes advantage of it. Once you allow dissension and rebel factions to exist you are on the way to losing your union. You can have only one boss. You can have helpers, but you can’t have nine guys trying to run a local. If you did, the employer would make side deals and split the union. The employer would illegally fire the strongest union men and get away with it while the union was split in half.

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.

It was only a couple of years after Apalachin let everybody know there was such a thing as this La Cosa Nostra. And here they were talking about whether the Chicago outfit should or should not fix a presidential election.

Now the History Channel makes no bones about it; one of the reasons Kennedy won that election was because Sam Giancana fixed Illinois for him with phony ballots from people who were dead, names taken off gravestones.

Frank Chavez was a definite troublemaker. He was very hotheaded. He’s the one who sent Bobby Kennedy a letter from his local in Puerto Rico the day John F. Kennedy got assassinated. 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.

Shaking down businesses is an easy thing to do if you run a local. You get paid under the table by the employer so much a month for making sure there is labor peace. If you don’t get paid there always seems to be one problem after another for the employer. The poor union worker is just a pawn in this.

While at the same time Bobby Kennedy had grand juries meeting in thirteen states trying to build criminal cases against him. 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.

Bobby Kennedy had been traveling around the country personally, like a general going to his troops, urging his department to focus on organized crime. He made a list of organized crime targets for the FBI and Justice Department to concentrate on. He expanded that list continually. He went to Congress and got laws passed to make it easier for the FBI to bug these targets and to use wiretaps in court. He got laws passed allowing him to more freely give immunity to cooperating witnesses.

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.

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.

For the next three years of his campaign against organized crime, Kennedy was the attorney general, the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, the man to whom FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported. Bobby Kennedy drew up a list of gangsters to target, targeted them, and jailed them. Bobby Kennedy greatly expanded the use of informants and wiretapping. On an almost daily basis he taught America and the federal government, and especially FBI Director Hoover, about the existence of organized crime, about the need to rid the country of organized criminals, and how to use the enormous, heretofore dormant power of the federal government to do that.

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.

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.

Sometimes you actually would go to the bathroom first as long as you didn’t have to pass the person to get there. It gives you a chance to make sure nobody’s tailing you. It gives you a chance to look the thing over. It gives you a chance to make sure there’s nobody in the bathroom you have to be concerned about. It also gives you a chance to go to the bathroom. You don’t want to have to take a leak if you’re trying to outrun a couple of cop cars.

in mid-June 2004, I had received an unsolicited letter from Professor Arthur Sloane, author of Hoffa, a biography I’d relied on for information about Hoffa and the Teamsters. Although this 1991 work offers a different theory on the Hoffa disappearance, Sloane wrote after reading Sheeran’s confession: “I’m fully convinced — now — that Sheeran was in fact the man who did the deed. And I’m impressed too by the book’s readability and by its factual accuracy in all areas on which I am qualified to pass judgment.” When I called to thank him he said to me: “You have solved the Hoffa mystery.”

Frank was never angrier with me than when I pressed him on his 411 combat days. “I wouldn’t even talk about it to my jury in my RICO trial to save my ass from jail. Emmett wanted me to. I’m going to talk about it to you so you can sell books?”

Working on both sides of criminal law I came to appreciate, as many have for millennia, that conscience, as ministered to by religions, 12-step programs, and psychiatrists, and as dramatized by artists like Shakespeare, is an element of human nature. Alcohol and drugs can anesthetize it, but it lies beneath the skin, waiting to be skillfully brought to the surface. However, even when a murderer displays a desire to confess, it’s the heart and soul that want to confess. Meanwhile, every cell in the body doesn’t want to. That’s because it’s the body that will end up in jail or strapped to a gurney. There are often at the same time these opposing pulls at work inside a mind full of guilty knowledge.

“Russell Bufalino had final script approval of The Godfather.”

This total Mafia domination of his union is what Hoffa had feared if he didn’t personally take back the presidency in the 1976 election. And it’s why the Genovese family wouldn’t let Hoffa take it back. They came to own the Teamsters under Frank Fitzsimmons and they were planning on keeping it for a long time.

Supervised by Lin DeVecchio, the FBI’s roundup of the Commission bosses on hundred-year sentences obliterated the Commission for all time. Now that the godfathers were proven to be answerable to the law, no man of any substance wanted to wear the FBI target that came with being a boss, much less a Commission boss. First the insubstantial dregs like John Gotti rose to the top, and soon there was no top. With no secret murderous government to enforce its laws, the Mafia began a descent into anarchy and disintegration.

when Carlos Marcello showed up at immigration for his routine check-in as required by law on April 4, 1961, the portly 5’2” senior citizen was placed in handcuffs and kidnapped by RFK. He was deposited by a border patrol plane in Guatemala with no luggage and only pocket money. There he had to fend for himself and sneak back into America. RFK justified his dirty trick in that to avoid deportation to Italy, Carlos Marcello had procured from the Guatemalan government a false Guatemalan birth certificate. RFK took Marcello up on that by dumping him in Guatemala.