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

by Charles Brandt

The more I learned from both this report and Frank himself, the clearer it seemed to me that it was during his prolonged and unremitting combat duty that Frank Sheeran learned to kill in cold blood.

Not all people are affected the same way by the same events. We are each our own fingerprints and the sum of our own life’s experiences.

And most of all, you prayed. I don’t care who you were or who you thought you were, you prayed.

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.

This is not the same Whispers they blew up when they bombed his car around the same time. This is the other Whispers.

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.

Edward Bennett Williams sent a wrapped box with a ribbon around it to Bobby Kennedy. Inside was a toy parachute for Kennedy’s jump from the Capitol Building.

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.

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.

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.

At the onset of the 1975 hearings, in a shocking move, the CIA admitted to the Church Committee the mob’s involvement and assistance in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the existence of the mob-CIA plot to kill Castro. This plot was called Operation Mongoose.

“I may have faults, but being wrong ain’t one of them.”

But as hard as he tried he still couldn’t do a whole lot more than a thousand important things at the same time.

Carlos used to have a sign in his office that said that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

I chatted with Barney Baker. He was 6’6’’ and weighed about 350. He was a heavy eater. Believe it or not he boxed as a middleweight. He was supposed to have had something to do with getting Joe Louis to that trial in Washington. Jimmy liked him. He sold ties. He had a lot of neckties for sale all the time. Barney had a lot of balls. He’d be available to help. He was a good muscle man. He got investigated in the Warren Report thing because they traced some calls between him and Jack Ruby a few days before the Dallas matter.

The idea was that Bobby Kennedy had violated Jimmy Hoffa’s constitutional rights with illegal wiretapping and surveillance and by planting Partin in their rooms at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville.

Jimmy claimed he had tapes of Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe having sex. Johnny Roselli and Giancana had Marilyn Monroe’s house bugged. He never played me the tapes, but I got the impression that he planned on having them played, maybe during the congressional hearings if they ever had them.

Plus tourists might not know how to be good witnesses, and they might not have sense enough to tell the cops that there were eight midgets about three feet tall and they all had masks on.

At that meeting in Miami Jimmy wanted to get Pro’s support in 1976. Instead what he got was a threat from Pro that he’d kidnap Jimmy’s granddaughter and rip Jimmy’s guts out with his bare hands.

“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.”

“You’re dreaming, my friend. If they could take out the president, they could take out the president of the Teamsters.”

One Sunday I was heading to the bocce court and I saw Russell being wheeled to the chapel by one of the attendants. I said, “Where are you going, McGee?” “To church,” Russell said. “To church?” I laughed. “Don’t laugh, my friend. When you get to be my age you’ll realize there’s something more than this.” Those words stayed with me all these years.

Jack Ruby knew so many gangsters personally that in 1959 the FBI unsuccessfully tried to recruit Ruby as a paid confidential informant.