"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (25 page)

Mary was a very good woman and a very good Catholic. I felt bad about the divorce, but she said herself it never would have worked out with us. Mary was the kind of woman you couldn’t tell certain off-color jokes to. I feel very sad when one of my daughters comes back crying from visiting Mary today in the state nursing home where they have to keep her because of her Alzheimer’s.

That same year we had all the problems in Chicago with Abata, things started to heat up in Philly at Local 107. A rebel faction was formed and called itself the Voice, which was short for the Voice of Teamsters Local 107. They were trying to do what Abata had done in Chicago, and Jimmy suspected that Paul Hall and the AFL-CIO was behind the Voice rebels, too.

Paul Hall brought a muscle crew into Philadelphia and had them bunking at the International Seafarers Union hall at Oregon Avenue and Fourth Street. Jimmy sent me back to Philly with a few of the Chicago crew. I went around to their hall to figure out how we could get inside. They kept the front door locked with a pretty good lock. I crouched behind the hedge they used to have on the sidewalk that bordered the street, and I looked in like a Peeping Tom. The wall on Fourth Street was plate glass and you could see rows of bunk beds set up inside in what was probably their lounge.

I left and borrowed a panel truck from the lot at 107 and filled it with eight or nine guys. I gave each one a white hat and told them, “Don’t lose your hat, or I won’t know which side you’re on.” I told one guy it was his job to drive the truck away and that the rest of us would get away on foot. At 6:30 in the morning I drove down Fourth Street and made a right turn into the bushes on the sidewalk that bordered the street. I drove the truck up the curb and up over the hedge and right between the two trees that are still standing today, and crashed it through the plate glass window. The glass went flying. The muscle that belonged to Hall were still sleeping, and we started swinging at them as they got out of their bunks. Just our fists. They were caught with their pants down, and they were groggy from sleep and they didn’t have a chance. Cops came from all over the place. The truck made it out of there okay, and the rest of us scrambled and got away.

The Seafarers thing was just a message job. We weren’t trying to seriously hurt anybody. We had the magistrate standing by to take our bail money if we got caught, but nobody got arrested on that one. There was a day we were battling the Voice that I got arrested twenty-six times in a twenty-four hour period. I’d get taken into Moko, post bail, and go back out to a picket line and get involved in another donnybrook with the Voice people.

At 107 we still had organizing drives, grievances, and other regular union work. One time I tried to organize the Horn and Hardart Restaurant chain in Philly. We had already organized the Linton Restaurants, and they were complaining that they were at a disadvantage because their competition, Horn and Hardart, didn’t have to pay their help union wages and benefits. So, we kept trying to get the Horn and Hardart workers to sign cards, but we couldn’t get anywhere with them. A lot of them were suburban housewives and they were just against unions. One day I walked into the Horn and Hardart with string tied around both of my pant cuffs. I held the ends of the string in my hands and walked across the floor of the restaurant. I got about halfway across and pulled the strings and released a herd of white mice out of each pant leg. My granddaughter Brittany wrote it up in junior high school like this: “They ran through this woman’s spaghetti and she screamed and up the waitress’s legs and she screamed and she dropped her tray. He was laughing so hard that he forgot to run away and he was caught.” Yes, I told Brittany and her little brother Jake that I got caught and that I told the people at Horn and Hardart that I was very sorry for what I had done and that I would never do it again.

Jimmy Hoffa was more than a little bit concerned about Philly. He started keeping me there more and more. Two other rebel groups sprung up. The rebels couldn’t even agree among themselves. Joey McGreal started a rebel group, but it wasn’t legitimate. It didn’t have a name, or if it did I never knew what it was. It was just some of his muscle guys trying to take over from Raymond Cohen so they could do the same stealing Cohen was doing. 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. McGreal wanted this business for himself. When Jimmy Hoffa gave me my own local in 1966 in Wilmington, Delaware, the employers all had respect for me because I never shook a one of them down. The Betterment Committee was another rebel faction. It was a less radical group than the Voice and they were not muscle guys, more intelligent. Tempers in the City of Brotherly Love were flaring between us and Paul Hall and his shenanigans and the different rebel groups and Raymond Cohen at the top.

The Voice forced an election for 107. So to get support we held a rally at a big hall we rented and brought Jimmy Hoffa in to speak to the membership and give them some idea of all the good things he was doing for them. When Jimmy got there, the cops wanted to bring him in the back way so he could go right on stage and not walk down the aisles with all the Voice people at the rally holding up signs with wooden posts that they could have used as clubs.

Jimmy would have none of that back door nonsense. He told the cops: “Hoffa don’t use the back door. And I don’t want no cops escorting me down the aisle of my own membership. All I need is the Irishman.” I walked down that aisle with Jimmy and there wasn’t a single loud outburst along either side of the aisle. There were boos further back in the crowd of people, but nothing aggressive along the aisle where it would have been obvious. Jimmy was a hell of a speaker. Besides his speaking ability, Jimmy was telling them the truth; on the level he was doing a lot of good things for them and he needed solidarity to accomplish those goals and then everybody would be better off. Not everybody agreed with his positions, but a lot of them that came in to that rally against him left there respecting him. We won that election, not by much, maybe a few hundred votes, but we won. The Voice didn’t go away, but it slowed them down. After that humbling experience of almost losing and needing Jimmy to save him, Raymond Cohen was a little easier to deal with, a little more gracious.

The most impressive thing about Jimmy’s speech that day was that he was already under indictment in Nashville, Tennessee, for a Taft-Hartley criminal law violation on account of the Test Fleet car hauling company that Jimmy and Bert Brennan had set up in their wives’ names. He was accused with the late Bert Brennan of grabbing “two plus two”—which is slang for $200,000. Yet when he spoke to our 107 membership in Philly he didn’t look like he had a care in the world. Jimmy Hoffa had nerves of steel and balls of iron. But as hard as he tried he still couldn’t do a whole lot more than a thousand important things at the same time.

Jimmy was something to behold at that period of time. He was involved in Teamsters beefs all over the country, mostly against rebels. At the same time he was trying to establish the first Master Freight Agreement that the Teamsters had been trying to get for twenty-five years, and he saw the trucking companies taking advantage of the rebel situations to fight the Master Freight Agreement. 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. You didn’t get a chance to stay home and lick your wounds too much around Jimmy Hoffa.
”

 
chapter seventeen
 

Nothing More Than a Mockery

One night in the summer of 1962 an enraged Jimmy Hoffa asked a burly Teamsters official if he knew anything about plastic explosives. The two men were alone in Hoffa’s office at “the marble palace,” Teamsters headquarters in Washington, D.C., looking out the window. Hoffa then told the official that he knew where to get a silencer for a gun. According to the man, Hoffa said, “I’ve got to do something about that son of a bitch Bobby Kennedy. He’s got to go.” Hoffa then described how easy it would be to kill Bobby Kennedy, because he takes no personal safety precautions, has no security detail, not even at his home, and he often travels alone in a convertible.

The official Hoffa was speaking to was Edward Grady Partin. He was president of Teamsters Local 5 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was out on bail on a kidnapping charge stemming from a family custody squabble involving a trucker in his local. Partin was also under indictment for diverting $1,659 in union funds to his personal use. Partin was a big tough-looking man with an extensive criminal record as a youth. Hoffa misjudged the man and thought that because he was big and tough and had a criminal record and was out on bail and was from Louisiana, the home state of Carlos Marcello, the man must have been a guy who paints houses. But Hoffa never asked him that question before he made his comments that were part threat and part invitation for Partin to do the job. Partin explained, “Hoffa always just assumed that since I was from Louisiana, I was in Marcello’s hip pocket.”

Partin reported the comments to the Get Hoffa Squad headed by Walter Sheridan. “It was an incredible story,” Sheridan wrote in his book. After hearing it, Sheridan asked the FBI to administer a lie detector test to Partin, and Partin passed emphatically. Sheridan reported to Bobby Kennedy these threats on the attorney general’s life.

Shortly thereafter at a private Washington dinner party, President John F. Kennedy leaked to journalist Ben Bradlee that Jimmy Hoffa was plotting to kill his brother Bobby. President Kennedy likely thought that leaking the story to the respected and influential Ben Bradlee, and having it published, might be a deterrent to Hoffa actually carrying out the threat. Ben Bradlee was to gain fame as the editor of the
Washington Post
who helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon during Watergate with the help of “Deep Throat.” In his personal journal, Bradlee wrote that night that “the President was obviously serious.” In his autobiography Bradlee said that when he approached Bobby Kennedy to confirm the assassination threat, Bobby begged him not to print the story, because it would scare off potential witnesses in the organized crime trials Bobby was then supervising. At that time, Bobby Kennedy was spearheading the biggest drive against organized crime the nation had ever known. Bradlee killed the story.

The trial against Jimmy Hoffa in the Test Fleet case for violating the Taft-Hartley labor racketeering law was scheduled for October 22,1962. The Get Hoffa Squad later denied violating Hoffa’s constitutional rights by encouraging Edward Grady Partin to go to that trial and become a member of Jimmy Hoffa’s entourage. Whatever his motivation, Partin went to Nashville and served as a guard at the door to Hoffa’s suite. However, Walter Sheridan did admit that they provided Partin with a recording device to tape any calls he had with Hoffa. Sheridan admitted that he instructed Partin that when he got to Nashville he was to be on the lookout for attempts to bribe any of the jurors.

Bobby Kennedy had already engineered three prior jury trials against Jimmy Hoffa and had yet to convict him of anything. Jury tampering was suspected in those trials. The Test Fleet charge against Hoffa was a misdemeanor. Jury tampering, if discovered, would raise the stakes to a felony.