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

by Charles Brandt

  Looking at the cover of the book he said, “I think the title sucks.” I said, “But they’re the first words that Jimmy ever spoke to you, right?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted and dropped that topic.

  While he was looking at a photo of Sal Briguglio I mentioned that we would be following our plan to urge the FBI to release their file so that whatever Sally Bugs had told them would corroborate the book. I said the photo was taken “[b]efore you took care of him. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Did that picture of Sally Bugs stir up anything in you?” I asked.

  “No, not really,” he said. “Water under the dam.”

  I told him that if he got well enough Eric Shawn wanted to take us for lunch at Monte’s Restaurant in Brooklyn where he had picked up “the package.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “the package, yeah—for the—for Dallas.” Later we returned to the topic of lunch at Monte’s, and I said that when we go, “We’ll see where you picked up those rifles.”

  He said: “…[Y]ou’re right, and have a little angel spaghetti with oil and garlic.” I told him that I’d like to see him dipping his Italian bread into his red wine. “You got a picture of that,” he said.

  I mentioned the place where he made drops “for the politicians.” I asked: “What was the name of that place?”

  He promptly replied, “The Market Inn” and said, “See, my memory’s there, Charles.”

  The most significant moment for me came when he revealed something brand new. It began when we were looking at a photo of the house in Detroit, and he said: “They’re supposed to be the original people. They were there originally…But they never testif—” He followed that with mumbling and said, “They wasn’t involved.” Whenever he was being extra careful with his words and making some of them inaudible I knew it was a topic I would likely return to. When I mentioned in the form of a question that the house was a loaner like the car, he ignored the question twice and then said, “Well, I don’t have to worry about being indicted.” Based on my experience with him it seemed to me that his response might be an indication that he was mulling over whether to tell me something new.

  A little later I pointed out the photo of the house in Detroit “where Jimmy died—got hit.” He volunteered a comment that sounded like there was a “guy” involved in the house that I had not known about. It was a mumbled and swallowed comment that seemed to stop in mid-sentence. Later I had the tape analyzed by an audio expert; it sounded to him like “…that’s the house that the guy did his letters to.” The audio problem was compounded by the fact that Sheeran’s fifty-year-old full dentures no longer fit because of his dramatic weight loss. Immediately after making the comment Sheeran said, “I’m only going by what you got in the book, so—” He had made dismissive comments like this before when there was something additional that he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell me. Unless he knew that the “guy” was dead he would not want to reveal his identity.

  At the time it sounded to me that the “guy” had “lent” them the house, but today I don’t hear an “n” on the CD that the audio expert made for me.

  At any rate, after some short chitchat about his friend John calling to see how he was and a brief cell phone call from my stepson, I followed up.

  “All right. But that house was on loan, huh?” I said.

  “Yeah. The people that owned it…” he paused.

  “They didn’t know anything about it,” I said, which is something he had told me years earlier and that was already in the book.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The people that owned it, yeah. There was a real estater —” This brand-new revelation of the existence of some kind of real-estate broker or agent was followed by a lengthy pause during which I said nothing. Then he said, “They lived there at the time.” “Uh huh,” I said.

  “And they were never. They were never—never questioned.”

  “But they didn’t know anything about it, did they?” I said.

  “No, of course not,” he said with an exagerrated emphasis that made me think that the “real estater” did know something. But this was not the time for me to press and cross-examine. We had an agreement, and he had lived up to it.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I, I, I only said—what you got printed that’s the story.” And with that comment I knew there was more to it, and that it was going to be difficult for me to let it drop entirely.

  “I understand,” I said. “I’m not questioning you anymore. I’m just curious. When you said the real estate—”

  “Uh-huh,” he said attentively.

  “The real-estate broker. I—You hadn’t told me that. So,” I laughed. “That’s okay. No problem….”

  “Yeah,” he took his glasses off.

  “All right,” I said as Sheeran turned, gave the camera a hard look, and began smoothing his hair. I knew that was my cue to turn it off, and I did. What comes next is from an audio recording.

  In a short while my curiosity had the better of me. Even though my heart wasn’t entirely in it, I couldn’t resist. I had to make one last respectful try at the “real estater.”

  “Now,” I said. “You got my interest about this realtor that you mentioned.”

  “About the what?” he said.

  “The realtor that you mentioned on the house in Detroit. You’d never mentioned that to me before.”

  “What’s that?”

  I sensed he was having a problem with my use of the word “realtor.” I should have stuck closer to his terminology. I knew better. I said, “The real—the real-estate guy on the house in Detroit. You said there was a real-estate guy involved. You don’t want to talk about that, huh?”

  He mumbled and swallowed a few words that I strained to hear, but could not. And then he made up his mind and said clearly, “No. Well, you got enough, Charles.”

  “I got enough,” I said.

  “Be satisfied, Charles.”

  “I’m satisfied.”

  “You got enough. Don’t be probing.”

  Indeed, I had more than enough. But there’s nothing like the whole truth. If I had somehow known that in a few days Frank Sheeran would take such a dramatic turn for the worse I might have pursued it. It’s lost now, unless the FBI file has a reference to it, and the FBI releases its file.

  It seems likely to me that the house was a rental unit in 1975, because of the advanced age of the owner, a single woman who bought the house in 1925. Perhaps a realtor acted as her rental agent and had a key. Perhaps a realtor was simply the elderly woman’s friend and had a key. Perhaps the house had a For Sale sign. In any event, the existence of a realtor could explain more than just the key. It could explain why the planners felt comfortable letting people park in the driveway. If it were a rental unit or if it were listed for sale it would be normal for strangers to park in the driveway and walk into the house.

  Frank Sheeran died six weeks after that interview. During that time my wife and I drove the three hours from our home to visit him at least once a week, and I visited him alone a couple more times a week. His head was bent and he barely looked up, but he smiled broadly when he heard our voices. He would allow me to feed him a little bit of Italian water ice and would sip water from a straw my wife held for him, but basically he had shut down. He refused to eat. I last saw him on December 6, 2003. My stepson, Tripp, and I had visited, and I told him that I was going to Idaho and I would see him after the New Year. His last mumbled words to me were, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I got the call from his daughter Dolores the night he died, December 14, 2003. It was the day U.S. soldiers captured Saddam Hussein. When I heard about Saddam’s capture my first thought was, “I wonder what Frank thinks of this.” He was always on top of the news. When the Columbine story broke and the police were waiting outside the school as the killers continued to shoot inside, Frank said to me, “What are those cops waiting for? They would tell six of us to take a tank and we’d go
take the tank.” That was the soldier talking. When influential Delaware lawyer Tom Capano got sentenced to death for murdering his girlfriend and dumping her body at sea when she tried to break off their romance, Sheeran said: “You don’t kill somebody over something like that. They don’t want you any more, you just leave.” That was the expert on the subject. When our embassies in Africa were blown up in the late nineties and a man named Osama bin Laden was suspected of being behind it, I said, “They should take that guy out. I’m sure he did it.” Now the mob legend spoke, “If he didn’t do it, he thought about doing it.” And that was plenty good enough.

  Obituaries in both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News made mention of the fact that Frank Sheeran had long been a suspect in the Hoffa disappearance.

  I flew back for the funeral and at the viewing a man I had seen bending over the casket to kiss Frank’s forehead came up to me. He said he knew I was writing Frank’s book. His daughter had been Frank’s housekeeper, and she used to see us working together, sitting in the sun on Frank’s patio. He said that he had been Frank’s cellmate in Sandstone. “Can you imagine the little bit of room I had in a small cell with that big guy?”

  “He had it rough at Sandstone,” I said, meaning the effect the cold had on his arthritis.

  “He brought it on himself. He took no crap from anybody. He never could keep his mouth shut. One time he told me some guy who worked in the laundry wouldn’t give him a hat. He told me to get the guy to come over to the wall, and he’d let go of his canes and balance himself against the wall and punch the guy and knock him out. I told him, ‘Here, let me punch him for you.’ I ended up getting five months in the hole for that punch. I never should have been in jail in the first place. Even Frank said that. They wanted Angelo’s underboss, his New Jersey underboss, and they had to have a conspiracy so they threw me in to it. It’s not that I didn’t do anything. I tied the guy up and I worked him over, but he deserved it. Still you don’t get fifteen years for that.”

  “They loaded up on Frank, too,” I said, “because they were trying to squeeze him on the Hoffa case.”

  “Yeah. There was a book that came out called The Teamsters. I’d be in the upper bunk reading it, and Frank would be down below. I’d say something like ‘What are you doing carting the body to New Jersey, couldn’t you get rid of it in Detroit?’ It would get him going, ‘What are you saying up there?’”

  And so in prison Frank Sheeran was a hardened, deadlier version of the rebellious schoolboy who planted the Limburger cheese in the radiator and who broke the jaw of the principal with one knockout punch. As he said often and repeated on the last videotape, “I gave it eighty-three years of hell and I kicked a few asses; that’s what I did.”

  In that last videotape I reminded him of the time when, in my presence, he had responded to a media representative who asked him if he felt his life had been exciting that his life had not been exciting, but had been “exacting.” He had expressed remorse for parts of his life and told the man that after he did something he wondered if he “did the right thing or not.” Although it’s not on the video, he actually ended his conversation with the man by saying, “If I did all the things they allege I did and I had to do them over again I would not do them.”

  After reminding him about that conversation I said, “Well, you’re at peace now, Frank, and that’s the important thing.”

  In his bed he was looking at a photograph of himself taken with Jimmy Hoffa on Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night.

  “Time goes back a lifetime, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes it does,” I said.

  “Who could—who could—who could forsee—Who could forsee then in this picture that you and I would be talking here today?”

  epilogue

  “The real estater…” Those three little words had given me chills when I videotaped the big Irishman for the last time. The taping was a formality, an affirmation, analogous to putting a signature on the confession that already existed on audiotape. I did not anticipate that still more confession would spill out during the session. But then as the character Sarah said in The Right to Remain Silent, my novel based on interrogations I had conducted that solved major crimes: “[C]onfession is one of the necessities of life, like food and shelter. It helps eliminate psychological waste from the brain.”

  When I tried to get more details about “the real estater” out of Sheeran he cut me off. No probing allowed. Sheeran’s caginess was due to his deeply held beliefs. He confessed in order to relieve his guilt and save his soul, but he never wanted anyone to call him a rat. Sheeran said the word “rat” with such contempt in the ordinary course of conversation that my partner, Bart Dalton, and I adapted it for use in our law practice.

  While Sheeran hated rats and would not be one himself, he bore no malice toward John “The Redhead” Francis who, dying of cancer and not wanting to die in jail, implicated himself and Sheeran in the killing of Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio and Joseph “Crazy Joey” Gallo. Because Francis had already implicated himself, Sheeran would only confirm Francis’s involvement. But it would take a lot of skill and hard work to get Sheeran to implicate even a dead man in anything the man was not already at least suspected of doing. Sheeran often spoke of someone’s family, including his own daughters, needing his protection from bad publicity. Sheeran told me: “You got enough, Charles…. Be satisfied, Charles…. You got enough. Don’t be probing.”

  The next day we prayed together, and then he stopped eating. A man who “painted houses” and determined the life expectancy of more than two dozen other men—not counting those he killed in combat—determined his own. And so the “real estater” would remain nothing more than an intriguing slip of the tongue.

  Until one day in fall 2004, when I spoke by phone to retired New York City Police Department detective Joe Coffey, the man who solved the Son of Sam and Vatican Connection crimes, along with countless other high-profile cases, and who co-wrote The Coffey Files. A mutual friend, the mystery writer and retired NYPD detective Ed Dee, put us together. While knowledgeable about the mob, Coffey had never heard of John Francis. He said he would check him out with a mob confidant he still had in the former Bufalino family. I couldn’t tell Coffey much about John Francis that wasn’t already in “I Heard You Paint Houses,” so I sent him a copy.

  I called Joe in February 2005. He hadn’t read the book.

  “But,” Joe said. “I did look into that real estate guy. Like you told me, he was very close to Russell Bufalino.”

  “What real estate guy?”

  “What’s-his-name, the driver. He wasn’t merely a driver. He was big in his own right. He had a commercial real estate license. He was independently wealthy from it. He was very close to Bufalino and to Sheeran. He might have driven for Bufalino, but he wasn’t really a driver per se.”

  “John Francis? The Redhead?”

  “John Francis. That’s it. Very big in real estate. Independently wealthy.”

  Chills. The chills I got as a young prosecutor when the truth would lead to more truth, snowflake by snowflake until it became an avalanche.

  In 1972, on orders from Bufalino, Francis drove when Sheeran killed Gallo. In 1978, again on orders from Bufalino, Francis fired, too, when Sheeran shot Briguglio. Does there exist any possibility that this member of that very tight trio of Bufalino, Sheeran, and Francis was left out of some role in the 1975 Hoffa hit? I suppose there’s a possibility. But one thing we now do know is that John Francis was a “real estater,” and not a fly-by-nighter, but an independently wealthy commercial “real estater,” the kind of man who must have had connections far and wide.

  After the first edition of “I Heard You Paint Houses” was published in 2004, a Detroit newspaper reporter tracked down the son of the owner of the house in which Sheeran shot Hoffa. The house had belonged to a now-deceased woman who bought it in 1925 and sold it in 1978, three years after Hoffa’s disappearance. Her son told the reporter t
hat his mother moved out several months prior to the murder and let a single man, whom neighbors described as “mysterious,” rent a room in the house. Are there dots that connect “real estater” John Francis to an unsuspecting “real estater” in Michigan to that “mysterious” boarder?

  It would be helpful to read the FBI file to see what, if anything, it says about John Francis’s possible role in Hoffa’s disappearance. In 2005 I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the file on Francis and the others, including Sheeran, the Andretta brothers, Briguglio, and Chuckie O’Brien. If possible, I also wanted to corroborate Briguglio’s role as a confidential FBI informant. But I anticipate as little success with my FOIA request as the Hoffa family and the Detroit newspapers had with theirs. While individual agents are top notch, as an institution the FBI sometimes behaves more like an armed public relations agency than a public service agency. The FBI would be too embarrassed to divulge that Briguglio was an informant and that they failed to protect him. As Kenneth Walton, who headed the Detroit FBI from 1985 to 1988 said about Hoffa, “I’m comfortable I know who did it, but it’s never going to be prosecuted because…we would have to divulge informants, confidential sources.”

  If I do end up getting any of the file, which could take years, the censor’s black ink will probably cover the FBI’s failure to protect its informant, and the file will not be worth the cost.

  However, if the FBI were to give relevant portions of its file to the Oakland County district attorney, David Gorcyca, there could be no black ink. He is the brother law enforcement officer to whom they turned over the Hoffa case on March 29, 2002, when they threw in the towel. It would be an insult if the FBI blackened his pages.

  Unfortunately, despite at least three requests by Gorcyca beginning in June 2004 for relevant portions of the file that deal with Sheeran, Briguglio, and the Andretta brothers, none of the requested portions of the FBI’s seventy-volume, sixteen-thousand-page file have been released to the DA. Gorcyca wrote me, “It is obvious on the local level something is seriously up with their reluctance to cooperate.” He spoke of “old stereotypes about the FBI,” and said he was “incensed.” But all he can do is ask. Since Oakland County has no standing grand jury, Gorcyca also asked the feds to convene a grand jury to call as witnesses the last living participants identified by Sheeran: Tommy Andretta and Chuckie O’Brien. That request was denied.