"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (2 page)

On September 7, 2001, more than twenty-six years after the mystery began, a family member who had been at the cottage by the lake sharing that terrifying time with his mother and his sister held a press conference. Hoffa’s son, Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, had just had his hopes raised by a new development in his father’s disappearance. The FBI revealed that a DNA test done on a strand of hair proved that Jimmy Hoffa had been inside a car long suspected of being used in the crime. Fox News’s senior correspondent Eric Shawn asked James if his father could have been lured into that car by several of the other well-known suspects. James shook his head in response to each man on the list and at the end said, “No, my father didn’t know these people.” When Shawn asked if Frank Sheeran could have lured his father into the car, James nodded his head and said, “Yes, my father would have gotten into a car with him.”

In closing his press conference, James expressed to the media his wish that the case would be solved by a “deathbed confession.” At the time he made this request, Frank Sheeran was the only man among the original suspects who was still living and sufficiently aged to give a “deathbed confession.” The press conference took place four days before the tragic events of September 11, 2001. James P.’s scheduled appearance on
Larry King Live
for the next week was canceled.

A month later, and with the Hoffa story crowded off the front page, Jimmy’s only daughter, Judge Barbara Crancer, telephoned Frank Sheeran from her chambers in St. Louis. Judge Crancer, in the manner of her legendary father, got to the point pretty quickly and made a personal appeal to Sheeran to provide her family closure by telling what he knew about her father’s disappearance. “Do the right thing,” she said to him. Following his attorney’s advice, Sheeran revealed nothing and respectfully referred Barbara to his counsel.

This wasn’t the first time Judge Barbara Crancer had written or called the Irishman with the aim of unlocking the secrets in his soul. On March 6, 1995, Barbara had written Frank: “It is my personal belief that there are many people who called themselves loyal friends who know what happened to James R. Hoffa, who did it and why. The fact that not one of them has ever told his family—even under a vow of secrecy—is painful to me. I believe you are one of those people.”

On October 25, 2001, a week after Barbara’s telephone call, Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, then in his eighties and using a walker to get around, heard a knock on the patio door of his ground-floor apartment. It was two young FBI agents. They were friendly, relaxed, and very respectful to this man nearing the end of his life. They were hoping he had softened with age, perhaps even repented. They were looking for that “deathbed confession.” They said they were too young to remember the case, but they had read thousands of pages of the file. They were up front about the recent phone call Sheeran had received from Barbara, telling him straight out they had discussed the call with her. As he had done repeatedly since July 30, 1975, the day Jimmy disappeared, Sheeran sadly directed the FBI agents to his lawyer, the former district attorney of Philadelphia, F. Emmett Fitzpatrick, Esq.

Failing to persuade Sheeran to cooperate and give a “deathbed confession,” the FBI announced on April 2, 2002, that it had turned over its complete, 16,000-page file to the Michigan district attorney and had released 1,330 pages of that file to the media and to Jimmy Hoffa’s two children. There would be no federal charges. Finally, after nearly twenty-seven years, the FBI had given up.

On September 3, 2002, almost a year to the day after James P.’s press conference, the State of Michigan gave up too and closed its file, expressing “continued condolences” to the Hoffa children.

In announcing his decision at a press conference Michigan District Attorney David Gorcyca was quoted as saying: “Unfortunately, this has the markings of a great ‘whodunit’ novel without the final chapter.”

“I Heard You Paint Houses”
is a “whodunit,” but it is not a novel. It is a history based on one-on-one interviews of Frank Sheeran, most of which were tape-recorded. I conducted the first interview in 1991 at Sheeran’s apartment, shortly after my partner and I were able to secure Sheeran’s premature release from jail on medical grounds. Immediately after that 1991 session Sheeran had second thoughts about the interrogative nature of the interview process and terminated it. He had admitted far more than he was happy with. I told him to get back in touch with me if he changed his mind and was willing to submit to my questioning.

In 1999 Sheeran’s daughters arranged a private audience for their aging and physically disabled father with Monsignor Heldufor of St. Dorothy’s Church in Philadelphia. Sheeran met with the monsignor, who granted Sheeran absolution for his sins so that he could be buried in a Catholic cemetery. Frank Sheeran said to me: “I believe there is something after we die. If I got a shot at it, I don’t want to lose that shot. I don’t want to close the door.”

Following his audience with the monsignor, Sheeran contacted me, and at Sheeran’s request I attended a meeting at his lawyer’s office. At the meeting Sheeran agreed to submit to my questioning, and the interviews began again and continued for four years. I brought to the interview process my experiences as a former homicide and death penalty prosecutor, a lecturer on cross-examination, a student of interrogation, and the author of several articles on the U.S. Supreme Court’s exclusionary rule regarding confessions. “You’re worse than any cop I ever had to deal with,” Sheeran said to me once.

I spent countless hours just hanging around with the Irishman, meeting alleged mob figures, driving to Detroit to locate the scene of the Hoffa disappearance, driving to Baltimore to find the scene of two underworld deliveries made by Sheeran, meeting with Sheeran’s lawyer, and meeting his family and friends, intimately getting to know the man behind the story. I spent countless hours on the phone and in person, prodding and picking away at the storehouse of material that formed the basis of this book.

More often than not, the first rule in a successful interrogation is to have faith that the subject truly wants to confess, even when he is denying and lying. This was the case with Frank Sheeran. The second rule is to keep the subject talking, and that was never a problem with the Irishman either. Let the words flow and the truth finds its own way out.

Some part of Frank Sheeran had been wanting to get this story off his chest for a long time. In 1978 there had been a controversy about whether Sheeran had confessed over the phone, perhaps while he was under the influence of alcohol, to Steven Brill, author of
The Teamsters
. The FBI believed Sheeran had confessed to Brill and pressured Brill for the tape. Dan Moldea, author of
The Hoffa Wars,
wrote in an article that over breakfast at a hotel, Brill told Moldea he possessed a tape-recorded confession from Sheeran. But Brill, perhaps wisely to keep from becoming a witness in need of protection, denied it publicly in the
New York Times.

Accordingly, throughout most of the arduous interview process, an effort was made to protect and preserve Sheeran’s rights, so that his words would not constitute a legally admissible confession in a court of law.

As the book was written, Frank Sheeran read and approved each chapter. He then re-read and approved the entire manuscript.

On December 14, 2003, Frank Sheeran died. Six weeks earlier, during his final illness, he gave me a final recorded interview from his hospital bed. He told me that he had made his confession and received communion from a visiting priest. Deliberately omitting the use of any protective legal language, Frank Sheeran faced a video camera for his “moment of truth.” He held up a copy of
“I Heard You Paint Houses”
and stood behind all the material in the book you are about to read, including his role in what happened to Jimmy Hoffa on July 30, 1975.

The following day, a week or so before he lost his strength and stamina, Frank Sheeran asked me to pray with him, to say the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary with him, which we did together.

Ultimately, Frank Sheeran’s words are admissible in the court of public opinion and so to be judged by you, the reader, as part of the history of the past century.

The thread of this story is Frank Sheeran’s unique and fascinating life. The witty Irishman was raised a devout Catholic and was a tough child of the Great Depression; a combat-hardened hero of World War II; a high-ranking official in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; a man alleged by Rudy Giuliani in a Civil RICO suit to be “acting in concert with” La Cosa Nostra’s ruling commission—one of only two non-Italians on Guiliani’s list of twenty-six top mob figures, which included the sitting bosses of the Bonnano, Genovese, Colombo, Luchese, Chicago, and Milwaukee families as well as various underbosses; a convicted felon, mob enforcer, and legendary stand-up guy; and a father of four daughters and a beloved grandfather.

Because of all that was positive in Frank Sheeran’s complex life, including his military service and his love for his children and grandchildren, as a pallbearer I helped to carry the Irishman’s green coffin draped with an American flag to his final resting place.

Here is the final chapter of the Hoffa tragedy, a crime that has hurt and haunted everyone connected with it, including those who carried it out, but a crime that has especially hurt and haunted the family of Jimmy Hoffa in their effort to lay to rest their father’s fate.

Author’s Note:
The portions of this book in Frank Sheeran’s voice, derived from hundreds of hours of interviews, are indicated by quote marks. Some sections and some chapters written by me add critical detail and background information.

 
chapter one
 

“They Wouldn’t Dare”

“
I asked my boss, Russell “McGee” Bufalino, to let me call Jimmy at his cottage by the lake. I was on a peace mission. All I was trying to do at that particular time was keep this thing from happening to Jimmy.

I reached out for Jimmy on Sunday afternoon, July 27, 1975. Jimmy was gone by Wednesday, July 30. Sadly, as we say, gone to Australia—down under. I will miss my friend until the day I join him.

I was at my own apartment in Philly using my own phone when I made the long-distance call to Jimmy’s cottage at Lake Orion near Detroit. If I had been in on the thing on Sunday I would have used a pay phone, not my own phone. You don’t survive as long as I did by making calls about important matters from your own phone. I wasn’t made with a finger. My father used the real thing to get my mother pregnant.

While I was in my kitchen standing by my rotary wall phone getting ready to dial the number I knew by heart, I gave some consideration to just how I was going to approach Jimmy. I learned during my years of union negotiations that it always was best to review things in your mind first before you opened your mouth. And besides that, this call was not going to be an easy one.

When he got out of jail on a presidential pardon by Nixon in 1971, and he began fighting to reclaim the presidency of the Teamsters, Jimmy became very hard to talk to. Sometimes you see that with guys when they first get out. Jimmy became reckless with his tongue—on the radio, in the papers, on television. Every time he opened his mouth he said something about how he was going to expose the mob and get the mob out of the union. He even said he was going to keep the mob from using the pension fund. I can’t imagine certain people liked hearing that their golden goose would be killed if he got back in. All this coming from Jimmy was hypocritical to say the least, considering Jimmy was the one who brought the so-called mob into the union and the pension fund in the first place. Jimmy brought me into the union through Russell. With very good reason I was concerned for my friend more than a little bit.