"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (14 page)

I started picking up jobs out of the union hall. You’d work your turn for companies where their driver was out sick. You shaped up like the longshoremen in
On the Waterfront.
Some days you worked, some days you didn’t, and all the time you’re hoping to pick up a steady job. I still had the ballroom jobs. But I lost my Food Fair routes, and without my routes it was hard to push money for Skinny Razor and sell lottery tickets for Joey McGreal.

Being out of work meant I had more time on my hands to hang around downtown and try to earn a buck here or there. My Italian Food Fair buddies would brag about how I could bench press 400 pounds and how I would do reps of straight presses of 275 without jerking when we worked out at the gym. One day a numbers writer named Eddie Rece came up to me and wanted to know if I wanted to earn some money. He wanted me to take care of a little matter for him. He gave me a few bucks to go see a guy in Jersey who was messing around with the girlfriend of one of his relatives. He gave me a gun to show the guy, but he told me not to use it, just to show it. That’s the way it was in those days. You showed a gun. Now they don’t show you the gun, they just shoot you with it. In those days they wanted their money today. Now they want their money yesterday. Half of them today are doing drugs themselves, and it makes them impulsive. It distorts their thinking. More than half of them. Some of the bosses, too.

I went over to Jersey and talked to the guy. I told him not to be cutting somebody else’s grass, to cut his own grass in his own yard. I told him this one’s spoken for. I told him to go get his own trim—which is what we called it in those days, getting trim. I told him to look for your trim elsewhere. Right off I could tell Romeo wanted no trouble from me, so I never even bothered to show him the gun. He knew what it was.

That little errand for Eddie Rece turned out all right and that led to more errands for people. Maybe some guy owed one of the men downtown some money and I’d go collect it. One time Skinny Razor told me to go to Atlantic City and bring back a guy who was late paying his vig on a loan. I went and got the guy. This one I had to show the gun to in order to get him into my car. He was peeing in his pants by the time we got to the Friendly Lounge. Skinny Razor took a look at him and told him to come back with his money. The guy asked Skinny how he was going to get back to Atlantic City to get his money, and Skinny told him to take a bus.

No doubt I was getting a reputation for being efficient, but also for being somebody you could trust. Quitting the job at Food Fair to save that guy from jail kept being brought up by people as proof that I was a stand-up guy. They started calling me “Cheech,” which is short for Frank in Italian—Francesco. They started inviting me into the Messina Club at Tenth and Tasker, which is a members-only joint where you get the best sausage and peppers you ever ate. You’d play cards there; just hang out without the public citizens being at the next table. It’s still there, and it still has the best sausage and peppers in all of South Philly.

A couple of times when I ran into Russell on a Wednesday he’d tell me to go home and get my wife. Then he and his wife, Carrie, would meet us at the Villa d’Roma for dinner. Wednesday night was the night that you went out with your wives, that way nobody was seen out with his
cumare,
his mistress, whatever you want to call it. Everybody knew not to be out with their
cumare
on Wednesday night. It was like an unwritten rule. Mary and I would have a pleasant evening on many a Wednesday with Russ and Carrie.

Automatically I started going downtown if there was no work out of the union hall. It was comfortable down there. I always had a glass of red wine in my hand. I started staying out later and later and sometimes not going home at all. On Sunday nights I’d go to the Latin Quarter, a fancy night club in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where I’d see everybody that hung out downtown during the week. Frank Sinatra would play there, all the big stars would. I’d bring Mary once in a while, but it wasn’t her kind of crowd, and a baby sitter was a luxury we couldn’t afford too often with me out of work. Mary was lighting candles that I’d get a steady job. I began sleeping late on Sundays after Saturday night at the Nixon Ballroom with Dusty, and Mary would go by herself to mass and the kids would go to their mass.

Once in a while Russell would call me from upstate and ask me to drive up and take him someplace. He had business all over, from Endicott to Buffalo in New York; from Scranton to Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania; and in north Jersey and New York City. He seemed to know where I was during the day when he would call me to come up and get him. I enjoyed his company, and I never asked him for a dime. He knew he was doing me good by my being seen with him. I didn’t know how good until one day in November 1957. He asked me to drive him to a small town across the border in upstate New York called Apalachin. He told me that when he got done in Apalachin he was going to Erie, Pennsylvania, and then to Buffalo and that he had a ride lined up to Erie and Buffalo and back again to his home in Kingston. So I took him to this house in Apalachin and dropped him off. I didn’t see anything unusual.

The next day this meeting at Apalachin is the biggest thing to ever happen to Italian gangsters in America. All of a sudden they had arrested about fifty gangsters from every part of the country, and one of them was my new friend Russell Bufalino. It was front page every day for days. It was the hottest thing on television. There really was a Mafia, and it covered the whole country. All these individual gangsters had their own territory. Now I understood why Russell would ask me to drive him to different places and wait for him in the car while he did a little business in somebody’s house or in a bar or a restaurant. They did all their business in person and in cash, not over the phone or with banks. Russell Bufalino was as big as Al Capone had been, maybe bigger. I couldn’t get over it.

I read every article. Some of these guys wore silk suits, some others dressed plain like Russell. But they were all powerful men with big criminal records you could brag about, not just fighting with cops after a brawl that started on a trolley, not lifting a little meat from Food Fair. These partners of Russell Bufalino and Angelo Bruno were involved in every type of crime from murder and prostitution to drugs and hijacking. Loan sharking and gambling were described as big business for these men. So was labor racketeering. Russell had not been coming to Philly just for prosciutto bread and sweet and hot sausage from Roselli’s, not even extra-hot sausage. He had business interests with Angelo Bruno, their own kind of business.

And Russell Bufalino was one of the biggest bosses in their business, and I was his friend. I was seen with him. I drank wine with him. I knew his wife. He knew my wife. He always asked about my kids. I talked Italian with him. I brought him prosciutto bread and sausages. He gave me gallons of homemade red wine. We would dunk the prosciutto bread in the wine. I drove him places. I even drove him to that meeting in Apalachin.

But after all this hit the paper I didn’t see him downtown anymore for a while and he didn’t call me to drive him anywhere. I figured he was avoiding publicity. Then I read where they were trying to deport him because he was forty days old when he arrived in America from Sicily. The deportation proceedings and appeals would last for fifteen years, but they were always hanging over Russell’s head. In the end when he lost his last appeal and had packed his bags and had his tickets, I recommended a lawyer to him who went through the Italian government, spread a little lira, and got it so the Italian government refused to take Russell, and that was that. America had to keep him. Russell was very grateful for my recommendation on that deportation thing, but when I first read about it in the paper, who could have imagined I would have worked my way that far up the ladder to be helping save Russell Bufalino from deportation.

Another thing is that downtown people were saying that it looked like Russell was the boss who had called the Apalachin meeting to prevent a gang war over the whacking of the New York waterfront boss Albert Anastasia in a barber’s chair the month before. Russell Bufalino, the mechanic who started my horse for me at a truck stop in Endicott, New York, was getting bigger and bigger every day in my eyes. And I’ve got to say, if you’ve ever met a movie star or somebody famous, there was an element of that. Although he hated it, Russell was a tremendous celebrity, and anybody who was seen with him downtown or wherever had some of that status rub off on them.

Then one day this guy, Whispers DiTullio, came over to my table at the Bocce Club and bought me a glass of wine. I had seen him around, but I didn’t know him too well. He had the same last name as Skinny Razor, but they were not related. I knew he pushed money for Skinny Razor, but way bigger money than me and my friends pushed. He pushed money to restaurants and legitimate businesses, not just to waitresses at White Tower joints. Whispers told me to meet him at the Melrose Diner. So I went around there. You wouldn’t expect to see any people from downtown at the Melrose Diner. It’s more for the crowd grabbing a bite to eat before they go to a Phillies game. You get a nice piece of apple pie there with hot vanilla syrup on it. Whispers sat down and asked me if I could use ten grand. I told him to keep talking.
”

 
chapter ten
 

All the Way Downtown

“
Whispers was one of these short Italian guys in his early thirties that you’d see all around South Philly, just trying to get by with one hustle or another. This is not the same Whispers they blew up when they bombed his car around the same time. This is the other Whispers. I didn’t know the one they blew up; I just heard about it.

I didn’t know anything about “made men” back then. That’s a special status in the alleged mob where you go through a ceremony and after that you are then untouchable. Nobody can whack you without approval. You get extra respect wherever you go. You are part of the “in” crowd, the inner circle. It only applies to Italians. Later on I got so close to Russell that I was higher up than a made man. Russell even said that to me. He said, “Nobody can ever touch you because you are with me.” I can still feel him gripping my cheek with that strong grip of his and telling me, “You should have been an Italian.”

If I had known about made men then I would have known that Whispers was nowhere near a made man. He hung around downtown and did whatever he had to do. He knew everybody, and he had more experience downtown than I did. Sunday nights he would sit with Skinny Razor and his wife at the Latin Casino. By now, after Apalachin, I already knew that Skinny Razor was Angelo’s underboss. That meant Skinny Razor from the Friendly Lounge was the number two man in Philly.

Having the same last name, I’m quite sure Whispers wanted people to think that he was up there with John “Skinny Razor” DiTullio. He wanted to increase his status and look like a made man.

The only thing is that Whispers had the worst breath known to man or beast. He suffered from halitosis so bad you’d think he was growing garlic in his belly. No amount of chewing gum or mints did him any good. So he was only allowed to whisper when he talked to people. Nobody wanted a full dose of Whispers’s breath when he opened his mouth. Of course, out of respect and knowing his proper place in things, he wouldn’t have done much talking anyway when he sat with Skinny Razor and his wife at the Latin.

After we had a little something to eat, which wasn’t an easy thing to do sitting across from him, Whispers and I left the Melrose and took a walk around the block. Whispers explained to me that he had pushed a lot of money to a linen supply house, more money than he had ever loaned out before. It was his big stake, and it was turning into a big mistake.