"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (37 page)

At Hoffa’s March 1971 parole board hearing he was represented by his lawyer-son James P. Hoffa and by attorney Morris Shenker. Hoffa had a deposition from Partin delivered to his attorneys. It was hot off the press, as Partin had just given it. This is the “twenty-nine-page confession” Hoffa spoke about in his autobiography. Hoffa’s legal team, however, overruled Hoffa and decided not to use it. One can only assume that his lawyers understood that all parole boards everywhere look with disfavor on any inmate who protests his innocence. As far as a parole board is concerned, the matter of guilt has already been established by a jury, and an inmate who continues to protest his innocence is one who has not been rehabilitated by his prison experience and who is not exhibiting remorse for his misdeeds. Such a parole applicant is viewed as incorrigible. Perhaps Hoffa’s own son had a better chance of making Hoffa accept sound legal advice than other lawyers had been able to.

In any event, Hoffa lost before the parole board and was told he could not reapply until June 1972. Hoffa would miss the July 1971 Teamsters Convention. If he ran, he would have to run from prison.

During the hearing the parole board appeared to focus negatively on the fact that Hoffa was still president of the Teamsters. Under their rules, a request for a rehearing based on new evidence could be made within ninety days. That left Hoffa with a very slight glimmer of hope that he might still have sufficient time to get paroled before the July convention. But how would Hoffa come up with new evidence? In the end would he have to run from jail? Or would he have to settle for the 1976 International Convention?

On April 7 Hoffa went on an unescorted four-day furlough to spend Easter with his wife, Jo, who was recovering at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco from a sudden heart attack. Hoffa stayed at the San Francisco Hilton, and in defiance of the rules of his four-day furlough held important meetings with Frank Fitzsimmons and other Teamsters officials and advisers, including his Local 299 stalwart and Strawberry Boy pal, Bobby Holmes. All that Hoffa did in the months that followed these San Francisco meetings had to have reflected what went on there.

 
chapter twenty-three
 

Nothing Comes Cheap

“
In May I got a call from John Francis that he had a present all wrapped up to bring to the party. John had become Russell’s driver. He was very good people. John and I became very close. John was my driver on a number of matters I took care of for Russell. John was very reliable. He had good timing. On certain matters you might get dropped off on a corner and go into a bar, and John would drive once around the block. You’d go to the bathroom and on the way out you’d kiss a certain party in the bar, and you’d come back out and there would be John.

John’s nickname was The Redhead. He was from Ireland. He had done hits over there with the IRA. John lived in a suburb of New York. The Redhead knew a lot of the Westies. They were a gang of Irish cowboys from the Hell’s Kitchen section on the west side of New York. Drugs got that outfit. And unnecessary violence. Those two go hand in hand. John had something to do with drugs once in a while just to pick up some money, but he kept it from Russell or he never would have been Russell’s driver.

I don’t know who recommended John to Russell in the first place. It had to be somebody out of New York. Russell had a lot of business in New York. For twenty-five years Russell kept a three-bedroom suite at the Consulate Hotel, and I would say he went to New York three times a week. He’d cook for us in his suite. I can hear him giving it to me now: “You shanty, Irishman, what do you know about cooking?” A lot of times he went to New York on jewelry business with the cat burglars. Russell used to carry around one of those jeweler’s lenses that he would use on his good eye. But Russell had all kinds of other businesses going on in New York. He had garment businesses like making parts for dresses and dresses themselves, trucking business, union deals, restaurants, you name it. His main hangout was the Vesuvio Restaurant on Forty-fifth Street in the theater district. Russ owned a silent piece of that and a piece of Johnny’s Restaurant across the street.

When I got the call from John Francis in May that he had a present for the party, I drove up to the Branding Iron Restaurant at 7600 Roosevelt Boulevard. John handed me a black suitcase. It must have weighed a hundred pounds. I’m not sure if this half-million I was taking down was Jimmy’s money he got from Allen Dorfman on the pension fund. It could have been points Dorfman was collecting for Jimmy while Jimmy was in school and putting aside for him on pension fund loans. Maybe the money came from Russ and Carlos and them out of the Vegas skim. That was not my business.

I put the bag in the backseat of my big Lincoln. I already had put the seventy-five-gallon gas tank in the trunk, so that if the Feds followed me they’d have to stop for gas and I could just hit a switch and go to the extra tank and keep on cruising.

I cruised on down to the Washington Hilton. It’s about 150 miles to Washington from Philly, a straight shot through Delaware and Maryland on I-95. I always had a CB radio going to warn me about Smokies that had radar set up. But with a package this size I didn’t bother with the speeding.

I got down there and parked and carried my own bag into the lobby. I didn’t need a bellhop for this. I sat in an easy chair they had in the lobby. After a little while John Mitchell walked in through the front door. He looked around and saw me sitting and sat down in the next chair over. He talked about the weather and asked me how the drive was. It was all chitchat so the thing wouldn’t look so obvious. He asked me if I was in the union and I told him I was president of Local 326 in Wilmington. (See, by that time I had won the 1970 election and got my local back. Having time to campaign and not being in jail I won by a three-to-one margin.) He asked me where in Wilmington and I told him our office was down by the train station. He wished me a safe drive back to the union hall. Then he said, “Nothing comes cheap.”

He stood up holding the suitcase. I said to him, “Don’t you want to go somewhere and count it?” He said, “If I had to count it, they wouldn’t have sent you.” He knew his business, that man.

I heard Mitchell was putting pressure on Partin, too. The Department of Justice was jamming Partin up on stuff. But I think this money was for the parole or the pardon, not Partin. Technically, the half a big one was for Nixon’s reelection.

What Jimmy didn’t know at that time, and what came out later, was that Sally Bugs brought a half a big one down from Tony Pro on behalf of Fitz. Russ didn’t even know about that. It was to get Jimmy out, too, only on a parole that had a restriction on it that would keep Jimmy from running for union office until his entire prison sentence expired in March 1980.

If he had to wait to run until 1980 Jimmy would have been away from running the union for thirteen years. In thirteen years Jimmy’s old supporters would have been replaced and by then he’d be sixty-seven anyway. Back then, the rank and file didn’t vote for International president or any of the other officers. The voting was done by the delegates to the convention in an open ballot. The delegates listened to their rank and file back home in their locals, but they listened mostly to Jimmy or whoever had put them in their positions. By 1980 Fitz could have eliminated a lot of Jimmy’s delegates and a lot of them would have retired anyway and Fitz would have put his own supporters in, like his son Richard Fitzsimmons, who was still with 299 in Detroit. Today the rank and file votes the officers in directly by secret ballot.

So Mitchell and Nixon were getting both ends on the thing.
”

On May 28, 1971, Audie Murphy was killed in a small plane crash while viewing the location of a business deal he was involved in with the Hoffa forces. Whatever help Jimmy Hoffa expected from Audie Murphy in dealing with Ed Partin went down with Murphy’s plane.

Six days after Murphy’s crash and a couple of weeks after Mitchell told Frank Sheeran that “nothing comes cheap,” Frank Fitzsimmons, accompanied by young James P. Hoffa, held a press conference at the Playboy Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach. Fitzsimmons announced that he had received a letter from Jimmy Hoffa stating that Jimmy was not a candidate for reelection and that Jimmy was endorsing his old friend from Local 299 in Detroit, the general vice president, Frank Fitzsimmons, for the office of president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Two weeks later on June 21, 1971, Fitzsimmons addressed the quarterly meeting of the executive board in Miami. Reporters were not permitted in the room, but strangely, Fitzsimmons had allowed newspaper photographers in. Fitzsimmons announced to the board that Jimmy Hoffa had resigned as president and had appointed him acting president until the upcoming convention. At that moment President Richard M. Nixon walked into the room and sat in a seat next to Fitzsimmons. The photographers snapped away.

Two days later, following the new game plan for dealing with the parole board, James P. Hoffa wrote the executive board a letter on June 23, 1971, telling the board that his client had resigned as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, president of Local 299 in Detroit, president of Joint Council 43, president of the Michigan Conference of Teamsters, and chairman of the Central States Conference of Teamsters. Based on this new evidence, James P. Hoffa requested a rehearing before the parole board. In his letter, James P. Hoffa pointed out that his father planned to spend his retirement living on his pension and doing some lecturing and teaching.

A preliminary hearing was held before the parole board on July 7, 1971. Based on the “new evidence” contained in the letter and presented at the preliminary hearing, the parole board granted a full rehearing to be held on August 20, 1971.

“
When I got to the July 1971 convention in Miami Beach I saw a nice big picture of Jimmy on the wall outside the convention center. I went inside and there was not a single picture of Jimmy anywhere to be found. It was like they do it in Russia. They take a guy and erase him. I grabbed a couple of guys and went back outside and took Jimmy’s picture down and brought it in and hung it inside. I hung it in as prominent a place as the picture of Fitz. What I wanted to do was to take Fitz’s picture down and put it outside and put Jimmy’s picture in the spot where Fitz had put his own picture, but you couldn’t do that. The hostilities were in the undercurrent stage. They hadn’t broken out in public yet and I wouldn’t do anything like that without Jimmy’s say-so.

Jimmy’s wife, Jo, spoke at that convention in July 1971. She gave everybody Jimmy’s best wishes and the place went wild. She got a standing ovation. That was a huge Hoffa crowd. Fitz was lucky he didn’t get booed.

The FBI tried to get into that convention as maintenance men, but I spotted them and turned them away. You knew you were right when they never returned with their boss to prove they were really maintenance.

I don’t know what I was thinking back then, but I didn’t know until now that Jimmy was still president when he went in back in 1967. I must have misunderstood what was going on. I thought Jimmy gave up the job and put Fitz in the job as acting president until he got out. I thought Fitz had both jobs—the vice president and the president. Fitz certainly acted like he was the president all that time whenever I had any dealings with the man. I thought he was the president when he sent me to Spring Garden Street on that shootout. Isn’t that something, the things you miss when you have a lot of maneuvering going on.
”