"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (54 page)

And then fortune brought me something special. Eric Shawn of Fox News called. Based on a tip from an old news hand at Fox he had learned about an eyewitness to the Gallo shooting. She was a respected journalist at the
New York Times
who wished to remain anonymous. He called her, and she admitted she had been there and witnessed the shooting. He said, “I understand three Italian types came in and started shooting.” She said, “No, it was a lone gunman.” He directed her attention to Capeci’s Web site and to a postage-stamp-size photo of Sheeran taken in the early seventies, around the time of the Gallo hit, the same photo that appears in this book. She said, “Oh my God, I’ve seen this man before. I have to get this book.” Shawn immediately walked from Fox News on Forty-seventh Street to the New York Times building on Forty-third and delivered a copy.

I told this story to Ted Feury, a friend of mine and retired CBS executive. Ted said, “I know her. She was the best grad student I ever had at Columbia. She’s a terrific gal, very bright, a great journalist, and as honest as they come. I’ll call her.”

The three of us had dinner at Elaine’s in New York. Although many people close to this eyewitness in her profession know of her involvement in “the matter,” she told us that she still wanted anonymity. The eyewitness drew a diagram of the scene for us, including where her table was in relation to the Gallo party, and said, “There were a lot of shots that night, and I heard those shots for a long time afterward.” She confirmed that it was, indeed, the work of a lone gunman, “and he wasn’t Italian, that’s for sure.” She described him as an Irish-looking man fitting Frank Sheeran’s general description and facial features, his distinctive height and build, and his approximate age at the time. She flipped through a collection of photos I had, including photos of other gangsters, and when she saw an enlarged version of the black-and-white photo of Sheeran taken around the time of the Gallo shooting, she said: “Like I told Eric Shawn on the phone, it’s been a long time, but I know this much. I’ve seen that man before.” In answer to my question she said, “No, not from a photo in the newspaper. I’ve seen him in the flesh before.” I showed her black-and-white photos of a younger Sheeran, and she said, “No, too young.” An older Sheeran, “No, too old.” Then she looked again at the photo of Sheeran taken around the time of the Gallo hit, and she said with palpable fear, “This picture gives me chills.”

The meeting at Elaine’s was more social than business. Ted and the eyewitness were regulars.

Elaine Kaufman sat at our table and told us that Gallo used to frequent her restaurant with the actor Jerry Orbach, who played Gallo in the movie
The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight,
and Orbach’s wife at the time, Marta. Marta had contracted to write Gallo’s biography. Elaine said that Gallo always gave her what she called “the eyelock.” And she demonstrated it. She said he stared directly into her eyes whenever he talked to her about the travails of owning a restaurant, and it was hard to get away from him or his gaze.

Like all restaurants, the lighting at Elaine’s is subdued. I wanted to formally interview the eyewitness alone and on tape, show her the still photos in better lighting and show her a video of Sheeran in color—“in the flesh.” I wanted to run by her the things I’d read that conflicted with Sheeran’s confession. Due to our mutually busy schedules nine months elapsed before I met with her at her New York–area home. I brought my photo collection and a video I’d made of Sheeran on September 13, 2000, when he was seventy-nine. Although he was twenty-seven years older than he’d been at Umberto’s, it was in color and it was Sheeran “in the flesh.”

“I was eighteen at the time,” the eyewitness said, “a freshman in college in Chicago. It was probably spring break. I was with my best friend. We were visiting one of her brothers and his wife. They lived near Gracie Mansion. We’d gone to the theater. I think we saw
Equus,
and then we probably drove around and did some sightseeing. None of us were drinking. We were underage, and my friend’s brother and his wife didn’t drink when they were out with us. We ended up at Umberto’s about twenty minutes before the shooting.

“No way were there only seven people there besides the Gallo party, if that’s what some book says. It was pretty crowded for that time of night, with people at maybe four or five tables and a couple of people sitting at the bar. Maybe people left after we got there and before it happened, that I don’t know. We came in the front door—the one on the corner of Hester and Mulberry. There were no tables to the left on the Hester Street side. They were all in front of you as you walked in—between the bar on the left and the Mulberry Street wall on the right. We were sitting toward the back. I was facing Hester Street. My best friend sat to my right. Her brother and his wife sat opposite us. They faced the back wall and the side door off Mulberry. I remember the Gallo party to our left because of the little girl, and because I thought that the girl’s mother was very pretty. Besides the little girl there were two or three women and two or three men. I don’t remember seeing the faces of the men.

“Our seafood had just arrived when I noticed a tall man walk in through the Mulberry Street door. I could see the door easily. The door was just off my left shoulder. He walked on a diagonal to the bar, walking right in front of me—the whole way in my direct line of vision. As he walked past me I remember being struck by him. I remember thinking he was distinctive—quite tall and a handsome man. He stopped at the bar not far, at all, from our table. I was looking down at my plate of food when I heard the first shot. I looked up, and that same man was standing there facing the Gallo table with his back to the bar. I can’t say I remember a gun in his hand, but he was definitely the one doing the shooting. There’s no doubt about that. He was calmly standing there while everybody else was ducking.

“The Gallo party didn’t know what hit them.

“It was Sheeran. That man is the same man in this photo. Even the video looks more like the way he looked that night—even though he’s much older in the video. Oh, it was him. I’m positive. In those news photos [circa 1980] you showed me he looks bloated and fat, but not in the video. In this photo he looks like a clown [a photo published in
Newsweek
in 1979.]”

I told her that Sheeran had done a lot of drinking and became bloated after he was forced to kill Hoffa in 1975, and she said, “That’s the year I came to New York to go to grad school in journalism at Columbia.”

She then went on with her account. “My friend’s brother yelled for us to get down. Other people were screaming to get down, too. Besides the gunshots the thing I remember most when I was down on the tile floor was the crashing of glass. We stayed on the floor until the shooting stopped. When the shooting stopped my friend’s brother yelled, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and we got up and ran out the Mulberry Street door. There were a lot of others shouting “Let’s get out of here,” too, and they ran away when we did.

“We ran up Mulberry. There was nobody on Mulberry firing at any getaway car, if that’s what the bodyguard claimed. Our car was parked near the police station. On the drive home we speculated about whether we had just been in a robbery or a mob hit. Nobody wanted to stereotype Little Italy, but we thought it was mob related. I don’t remember if we heard it on news radio on the way home, but we saw it in the papers the next day. It was pretty horrible. I think if my girlfriend and I had been there alone we might have gone back the next day, but her brother and his wife were very protective and didn’t want us involved in any way.”

This Gallo witness with a journalist’s memory and eye for detail told me that she had not read any of the stories that had cropped up over the years. She didn’t like thinking about it or talking about it. She had never heard about the “three Italians” until Eric Shawn had mentioned them. She said, “That’s ridiculous. There’s no way three Italians burst through that side door on Mulberry Street and started shooting. I’d have seen them come in. If there were three men we’d have been too scared to get up and run away. If we did get up we wouldn’t have run out that side door.”

I closed the session by asking her again how sure she was that Sheeran was the man she had seen that night. She said, “I’m positive. He’s definitely the man I saw that night.”

This positive eyewitness identification sealed it; if I were the prosecutor in this case, I would have just heard the cell door slam. Although the identification was made many years after the fact, she was a budding journalist who had an opportunity to see the killer and to form a mental image of him before he became a threat with a gun in his hand. Eyewitnesses confronted with a gun often remember only the gun.

As a result of her identification, I decided to buy as many books as I could find on Gallo. It’s been a while; many are used, out of print. Their versions of that night at Umberto’s often border on the silly. However, a 1976 book written by Pete “The Greek” Diapoulos, Gallo’s bodyguard, was more revealing.

In
The Sixth Family,
Diapoulos writes that Gallo’s birthday celebration began that night at the Copacabana, the famous New York nightclub. Don Rickles was the entertainer that night, and he paid his respects to Gallo. At the Copa, Gallo had an encounter with “an old timer, Russ Bufalino, a regular greaseball.” In Bufalino’s lapel Gallo spotted an Italian-American Civil Rights League button. True to Bufalino’s love of jewelry, this button had a diamond in it. Joe Colombo, Bufalino’s friend and fellow boss, the man Gallo ordered hit, had been in a coma for ten months. Gallo said to Bufalino, “Hey, what’re you doing with that? You really believe in that bullshit league?”

Diapoulos wrote:

You saw how Bufalino’s chin went, his back going very straight, turning away from us. Frank [Bufalino’s companion] with a very worried look, took Joey by the arm. “Joey, that’s nothing to talk about here. Let’s just have a few drinks.”

“Yeah, we’ll have a few drinks.”

“Joey, he’s a boss.”

“So he’s a boss. So am I a boss. That make him any better than me? We’re all equal. We’re all supposed to be brothers.” “Brothers” came out like it was anything but.

“Joey,” I said, “Let’s go to the table. Let’s not have a beef.”

Diapoulos identified Bufalino’s companion, the one “with a very worried look” who took Gallo by the arm, as a man named Frank. Diapoulos described how the “beef” got started: “Champagne was still being sent over. A wiseguy named Frank sent some. He was with an old-timer, Russ Bufalino, a regular greaseball, the boss of Erie, Pennsylvania.”

And Frank Sheeran, Russell Bufalino’s regular companion on their drives to New York, always described Gallo as “a fresh kid.” Frank had reason to know. Because this incident at the Copa reflected on Bufalino, it was the kind of detail Sheeran would have omitted in his confession to me.

Joseph D. Pistone, the real-life Donnie Brasco, told me that when he was working undercover for the FBI he used to hang out at the Vesuvio. There he met Bufalino and Sheeran. They came in every Thursday. The Vesuvio was a long walk or a short ride from the Copa. Gallo’s birthday party at the Copa began at 11
P.M
. on a Thursday night. By 5:20 on Friday morning Joey Gallo was dead.

Russell and Frank in New York City at the Copa the night Crazy Joey Gallo got “fresh” with the wrong people and had his house painted. Like Jimmy Hoffa’s, and all the other houses Frank Sheeran confessed to painting, the Gallo mystery is solved.

One of Frank Sheeran’s daughters, Dolores, told me after the release of
“I Heard You Paint Houses”
: “Jimmy Hoffa was one of only two people my father cared anything about. Russell Bufalino was the other one. Killing Jimmy Hoffa tortured my father the rest of his life. There was so much guilt and suffering my father lived with after the disappearance. He drank and drank. At times he couldn’t walk. I was always afraid to face that he did it. He would never admit it until you came along. The FBI spent almost thirty years torturing my father and scrutinizing his every move in order to get him to confess.

“Having him for a father was a nightmare. We couldn’t go to him with a problem because of our fear of the horrible things he would do to fix it for us. He thought he was protecting us with the way he handled things, but it was just the opposite. We didn’t get protected by him because we were too afraid to go to him for protection. A neighborhood man exposed himself to me and I couldn’t tell my father. My oldest sister never went with us when my father took us out, because she was afraid he wouldn’t bring us back home. We hated the headlines growing up. All of us girls suffer from it to this day. My sisters and I begged him not to write this book, but in the end we gave in. At least I did. He needed to get it off his chest. We had enough headlines about murders and violence, but I told him to tell you the truth. If my father had not told the truth to you no one would ever have known the real story.