"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (47 page)

Tony Pro looked at me and said, “If it was up to me, you’d have gone, too.”

“That works both ways,” I said. “Everybody bleeds.”

Tony Pro also complained that I was telling people at the wedding that he was capable of killing Hoffa. Tony Pro and I then got up from the table. I waited where Charlie Allen was, and Tony Pro sat down with Sally Bugs while Russell talked to Fat Tony about the whole thing. Russell came out from the partitioned area and got me and left Tony Pro sitting behind. On the way back to where Fat Tony was Russell said to me, “Deny it.” I got back there and Fat Tony Salerno started off telling me he didn’t believe I would be thinking about kissing a made man for Jimmy Hoffa and that was it. Russell Bufalino once again had taken care of his Irishman. Then they got Tony Pro and told him there was nothing to it.

Then Tony Pro started complaining to them about some time that I made him look bad. There was a joint council convention banquet in Atlantic City a few months before Jimmy disappeared. It was Pro’s joint council. Fitz was supposed to be a speaker at the testimonial banquet, but Fitz canceled his visit. He wouldn’t come to Atlantic City because he was afraid of me. Pro was hot talking about it to Russell and Fat Tony. He never took his eyes off me the whole time. Pro said, “You made me look bad. I didn’t have the president. The president speaks at every joint council banquet everywhere in the country, except at mine. Fitz told me he heard you were going to give him a kiss for your friend Hoffa if he showed his face in Atlantic City.” I told Pro, “If I was going to kiss Fitz for anybody he’d be long gone. I’m not your pimp. I can’t straighten out your affairs. It’s not on me if Fitz is a pussy and has no confidence that you can’t protect him in Atlantic City with all your muscle.” Russell told us to shake hands at once. That was not an easy thing to do. But if I ever said no to Russell I wouldn’t be here now. We shook, but I hated Pro for the whole thing, all of it.

Then, like I was getting fire from all sides, Russell and I left the Vesuvio and began walking down Forty-fifth Street to Johnny’s place and we bump into Pete Vitale. He was coming the other way from Johnny’s, heading for his meeting with Fat Tony at the Vesuvio. Pete Vitale knew I didn’t care for him a little bit, and he always thought I was making fun of him when I talked because I stammer like him. Pete Vitale gave me a hard look. He stopped and took his time so he wouldn’t stammer and he said, “If it was up to me, the next time I see you and your friend is the next snowstorm in Detroit.”

I knew what he meant. In the old days when there was a lot of coal in use, we threw ashes under the wheels to give the tires traction in a snowstorm. I had to laugh, hearing this tough talk again. I made sure I talked fast and stammered. I told Pete Vitale, “L-L-Like I just told your midget friend. That works both ways. Everybody bleeds.”

Russell told us to knock it off.

We walked away and I said to Russell, thinking of Pete Vitale’s industrial incinerator in Detroit, “Like you said, ‘Dust to dust.’”

Then Russell whispered to me that he knew what I was thinking, but that Pete Vitale’s incinerator was too obvious. He said that it was the first place they’d look and it was. He said they cremated Jimmy at a funeral parlor in Detroit that the Detroit people were close to. During the investigation I read that the FBI checked out the Anthony Bagnasco funeral parlor in Grosse Pointe Shores, because the Detroit people used it. I don’t know if when Russell told me it was a funeral parlor he said that because he wanted to throw me off about Pete Vitale. He didn’t want to have to square another beef like he did with Tony Pro. He didn’t want me shooting my mouth off about Pete Vitale’s incinerator to Jimmy’s friends. Or it could have been that they took Jimmy to the funeral parlor. I don’t know if they had an inside man at the funeral parlor who took charge of Jimmy and got him to a crematorium—maybe put him in the same box with somebody else they were cremating. But I do know that this detail was none of my business and anybody who says they know more than this—except for the cleaner who is still alive—is making a sick joke.

The day before that Vesuvio meeting with Tony Pro I had had a worse meeting. I had stopped by my ex-wife Mary’s place in Philly to drop off some cash for her. When I walked into her kitchen my next-oldest daughter, Peggy, was there visiting her. Peggy was twenty-six. That was twenty-eight years ago.

Peggy and I had always been very close. When she was a little girl she used to like to go to dinner with me at the club. Then later on she used to like to go out to dinner with Russell and Carrie and me. Once a newspaper photographer took a picture of Russell going into a restaurant with Peggy in Bristol, Pennsylvania, but they had to cut Peggy out of the picture because she was a minor.

Peggy could read me like a book. Mary and Peggy were watching all the Hoffa disappearance news on the TV. Peggy looked up at me when I walked in and saw something she didn’t like. Maybe I looked hard instead of worried. Maybe she thought I should have stayed in Detroit to work on finding Jimmy. Peggy asked me to leave the house and she said to me, “I don’t even want to know a person like you.” That was twenty-eight years ago and she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. I haven’t seen Peggy or talked to her since that day, August 3, 1975. She has a good job and lives outside of Philly. My daughter Peggy disappeared from my life that day.
”

 
chapter thirty
 

“Those Responsible Have Not Gotten Off Scot-Free”

The FBI put 200 agents on the Hoffa disappearance and spent untold millions of dollars. Ultimately, seventy volumes of files were compiled containing more than 16,000 pages that came to be known as the HOFFEX file.

Early on, the FBI focused on a small group of people. Page three of a memo in the HOFFEX file identifies the following seven men: Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, age fifty-eight; Stephen Andretta, age forty-two; Thomas Andretta, age thirty-eight; Salvatore “Sal” Briguglio, age forty-five; Gabriel “Gabe” Briguglio, age thirty-six; Francis Joseph “Frank” Sheeran, age forty-three; and Russell Bufalino.

Add Tony Giacalone and Chuckie O’Brien to the list, and the FBI had a total of nine suspects.

As if they had dead certain inside information, the FBI proved relentless in their belief that this handful of known suspects on page three of the HOFFEX memo had abducted and killed Jimmy Hoffa. Wayne Davis, a former head of the FBI in Detroit, was quoted as saying, “We think we know who’s responsible and what happened.” Kenneth Walton, another former head of the FBI in Detroit, said, “I’m comfortable I know who did it.”

A federal grand jury was convened in Detroit six weeks after Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. All nine of these men appeared, and they were all represented by Bill Bufalino. They all took the Fifth. Frank Sheeran took the Fifth on every question he was asked, including whether the prosecutor’s yellow pen was yellow. After taking the Fifth, Stephen Andretta was given limited immunity and forced to testify. He refused to answer questions and did sixty-three days in jail for contempt of court before finally agreeing to answer the prosecutor’s questions. Stephen Andretta set a Detroit record by leaving the grand jury room more than one thousand times to consult with his lawyer, Bill Bufalino. Chuckie O’Brien was called and took the Fifth, and he, too, was represented by Bill Bufalino. When asked how he could represent these uncooperative men who were suspected of killing his former client, Bill Bufalino said that Jimmy Hoffa “would have wanted it that way.”

Today the FBI is quite satisfied that by now they have punished the guilty parties. The former assistant director of criminal investigations for the FBI, Oliver Rendell, said, “Even if it’s never solved, I can assure you that those responsible have not gotten off scot-free.” The current head of the Detroit FBI office, Special Agent John Bell, said with respect to the Hoffa suspects, “Remember, the government didn’t convict Al Capone for bootlegging. They convicted him of tax evasion.”

  In 1976, a year after Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, Tony Provenzano and Sal Briguglio were indicted for the 1961 murder of Local 560’s Secretary-Treasurer, Anthony “Three Fingers” Castellito, a man who had grown up with Tony Provenzano on New York’s Lower East Side. The murder had been ordered by Provenzano and had been committed by Sal Briguglio, a young hood named Salvatore Sinno, and an ex-boxer named K. O. Konigsberg. The day after the murder Tony Provenzano was in a wedding chapel in Florida marrying his second wife.

  The importance of the Hoffa case to the FBI was not lost on the prison inmates of America. Anyone who knew anything about anyone on the short list of nine suspects whose names appeared in the newspaper with regularity knew that the government would make terrific deals of leniency in exchange for information. As a direct result of the Hoffa investigation, Salvatore Sinno came forward to admit his role in the fifteen-year-old murder and to turn on his accomplices. Sinno said that Sal Briguglio had been rewarded with Castellito’s union job and that Konigsberg had been given $15,000. Tony Provenzano was convicted of Castellito’s murder in 1978 and sent to Attica. The
New York Times
quoted an FBI source as saying, “These are all direct spinoffs from our Hoffa investigation.” The
Times
then quoted O. Franklin Lowie, head of the FBI’s Detroit office: “I don’t care how long it goes. We’ll stay on it. If enough people get their toes stepped on, someone will say something. It’s still just a question of getting the break we need.” Although his toes had been stepped on for life Tony Provenzano said nothing and died in Attica ten years after his conviction at the age of 72.

  In 1976 Tony Giacalone was convicted of income tax fraud and served a ten-year sentence. Two months after that conviction the government released to the media embarrassing tapes from a bug in place from 1961–64 that revealed that while Jimmy Hoffa was helping Tony Giacalone bribe a judge with $10,000, Tony Jack was plotting with his brother Vito “Billy Jack” Giacalone and Chuckie O’Brien’s mother, Sally Paris, to get Josephine Hoffa drunk while her husband was out of town and steal Hoffa’s strong box full of cash from his Florida condo. The plot was foiled when Hoffa returned home unexpectedly and found the plotters in his house with his wife passed out. They all claimed they were looking after her. In 1996 Tony Giacalone was indicted for labor racketeering, but his poor health led to many trial postponements. Giacalone died in 2001 at the age of 82 with the trial on these racketeering charges still pending. The Reuters headline for Giacalone’s obituary read: “Reputed U.S. Mobster Takes Hoffa Secret to Grave.”

  In 1977 Russell Bufalino was convicted of extortion. A con man named Jack Napoli had obtained $25,000 worth of jewelry on credit from a New York jeweler affiliated with Russell Bufalino. To get the jewelry Napoli posed as a friend of Bufalino’s, although Bufalino had never heard of him. Bufalino held a meeting with Napoli at the Vesuvio. At the meeting, the seventy-three-year-old Bufalino threatened to strangle Napoli with his bare hands if Napoli failed to make good on the $25,000 he had stolen. As a direct result of the Hoffa investigation, Napoli had been wearing a wire.

  Bufalino went to jail for four years. When he got out in 1981, he met with two men and the three of them conspired to murder Napoli. Before the murder was to occur, one of those men, Jimmy “The Weasel” Frattiano, made a deal with the FBI and turned on Bufalino. Frattiano testified that at a meeting about Napoli in California, Bufalino said, “We want to clip him.” Russell Bufalino, by then seventy-nine years old, was handed a fifteen-year sentence. While in prison he had a severe stroke and was transferred to Springfield prison hospital where he turned to religion; he died at the age of ninety in a nursing home under the FBI’s watchful eye.

  The most the FBI could get on Chuckie O’Brien was receiving a car from a trucking company with whom his local had a contract, and falsifying a bank loan application. He served a ten-month sentence in 1978.

  Thomas Andretta and Stephen Andretta each served twenty-year sentences for a 1979 labor-racketeering conviction. For many years they had been squeezing cash out of one of the nation’s largest trucking companies in exchange for labor peace. Tony Provenzano was convicted with them but he was already serving enough time for ten men his age. One interesting side note is that the defense subpoenaed Steven Brill, author of
The Teamsters,
in an effort to learn what a turncoat witness against them had told Brill, but Brill had never interviewed that particular witness.

  Gabriel Briguglio served seven years for labor racketeering and extortion.

  Based on two cases brought by the Department of Labor and the FBI, in 1982 Frank Sheeran received sentences totaling thirty-two years.