"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (52 page)

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 that 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.