The Irishman Paint Houses Quotes

If you could refresh my recollection on that matter I might be able to recall what you want me to recall, but at this particular time I do not recall the particulars of that particular matter.

Not all people are affected the same way by the same events. We are each our own fingerprints and the sum of our own life’s experiences.

impatient. I had to do things the Army’s way: hurry up and wait.

I’ll have an Irish banquet waiting for you — a bottle of Guinness and a bologna sandwich.

We finally drove the Germans back and we entered the Alsace-Lorraine region, which is part French and part German.

As a consequence there was no admissible evidence with which to bury Jimmy Hoffa, and the perjury indictment was dismissed.

they were by secret ballot, so the cabbies could sign just to get rid of you and then vote whichever way they wanted to, and you couldn’t do anything about it. I

Sam and Bill and I would cut a hole in a watermelon and fill it with rum so Jimmy didn’t know we were drinking. “Boy, you men sure like your watermelon,” Jimmy would say.

these years later and from stirring it up I started having dreams again about the combat, only the dreams were all mixed in with things I started doing for certain people after the war. I was discharged on October 24, 1945, a day before my twenty-fifth birthday, but only according to the calendar.

Russell Bufalino’s penetrating good eye stayed on mine. I moved back up in my seat. I couldn’t show anything in my face. I couldn’t say a word. That’s not the way it works. The wrong look in my eyes and my house gets painted. Jimmy

Russell turned his head and said to me, “Say hello to Jimmy Hoffa.” Then Russ handed me the phone. I reached for the phone and I thought, can you imagine this? Jimmy Hoffa calling to talk to me? “Hello,” I said. “Glad to meet you.” Jimmy Hoffa didn’t even say hello. He got right to the point. The next thing I heard were the first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to me. “I heard you paint houses,” Jimmy said.

Pushing money was a natural for me, because I was already pushing football lottery tickets in the White Tower hamburger joints on my route for an Irish muscle guy and ex-boxer named Joey McGreal, who was a Teamster organizer out of my Local 107.

It was a problem that needed squaring away and I squared it away for them. By now it seemed like it was something I was doing all my life. If you count my father sending me out to beat up other boys so he could win beer bets, maybe it was. Evidently

first heard the song “Tuxedo Junction” in 1941. I was an MP in Colorado, pulling guard duty at Lowry Field for the Army Air Corps. Most people think it was Glenn Miller who first made that song famous, but it was a black bandleader named Erskine Hawkins.

You know, Jimmy’s got records stashed away in case something unnatural happens to him.” “Your friend made one threat too many in his life,” Russell shrugged. “I’m only saying the nuclear fallout’s going to hit the fan when they find his body.” “There won’t be a body.

As hard as it is to believe today, people didn’t really know that there was a mob organization in those days.

That’s how it worked in theory, but in reality nearly everybody was in on the deal and got a little piece of the pie for looking the other way. Before

After the war, it just seemed natural to take what you could take wherever you could take it. There was only so much blood you could sell for $10 a pint. I

By coincidence I ran into my kid brother, Tom, on the dock in Le Havre, France, in October 1945.

I told him about the macaroni hanging out on the line like laundry to dry on Sunday in Catania. Sometimes he’d invite me to eat with him and we’d talk a little Italian.

No doubt I was getting a reputation for being efficient, but also for being somebody you could trust.

Nunz and Sammy were good people. I never cared for Pro himself. He’d kill you for nothing. One time he had a guy kissed for getting more votes than him.

Russ quit smoking on a bet with Jimmy Blue Eyes,

I put the coffee and Sambuca up to my nose. The licorice didn’t smell strong enough against the smell of the coffee so I added some Sambuca. I

My father, Tom Sheeran, would borrow a big old clumsy car with a running board.

You fat fuck,” I said and jumped up and decked him. I broke his jaw, and they expelled me permanently on the spot. Naturally,

with it.

and Russell told me that he comes down to Philly a lot to pick up prosciutto bread. That’s bread made with prosciutto and mozzarella baked in it. You

Then one day this guy, Whispers DiTullio, came over to my table at the Bocce Club and bought me a glass of wine.

I got a hold of Whispers and told him where to meet me later that night to talk about the thing. The next morning it was

At one point Hoffa told Bobby Kennedy regarding the tapes, “To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember.” There

When asked by Bobby Kennedy where he’d gotten $20,000 in cash to invest in a business venture, Hoffa replied, “From individuals.

Bobby Kennedy called Jimmy Hoffa “the most powerful man in the country next to the president.” Part

But what was it all about? Ego, that’s all. There was no love there. Just a lot of drinking and a lot of ego. Both of them will kill you. They

The best thing, and the most important thing the labor movement cannot do without, and must have and fight to keep, is solidarity.

Can you start tomorrow in Detroit?” “Sure.” “Come to Local 299 and report to Bill Isabel and Sam Portwine. They’re in charge of public relations for the International.” We

We hung up and I thought, boy, he’s a speaker. For a minute there, I thought it was Patton.

I flew to Detroit and reported to Local 299 on Trumbull Avenue. That was Jimmy’s home local. It was down the street from Tiger Stadium.

think they would have done to him

Russell said something in Sicilian about stormy weather conditions that roughly translates into “You never can tell how things are going to work out. The weather’s in God’s hands.” I

They say the average number of days of actual combat for a veteran is around eighty. By the time the war was over the Army told me I had 411 combat days, which entitled me to $20 extra

I was starting to get groggy from drinking all day, selling my blood, and getting whacked on the back of the head. I wasn’t looking too good to the girl in the third row, either. Between

Our goal was Munich in Bavaria in southern Germany, the town where Hitler had gotten his start in a beer hall. But on the way, we made a stop to liberate the concentration camp at Dachau.

There were only two things that mattered in his life: the union and his family. Believe it or not, as strong as he was for the union, his wife and his daughter and his son came first to him.

They supplied me the piece and they had one guy right there to take it from me after the thing and get in one car with it and drive away. His only job was to break the piece down and destroy it.

I went over to Jersey and talked to the guy. I told him not to be cutting somebody else’s grass, to cut his own grass in his own yard. I told him this one’s spoken for. I told him to go get his own trim — which is what we called it in those days, getting trim. I told him to look for your trim elsewhere.

(It was a car they said I got under the table. When they were trying to get the eight of us Hoffa suspects on anything they could, they used the car to send me to jail in 1981 on labor racketeering.) The

Russell had lost the thumb and index finger on his left hand when he was young. He moved the thumb he still had around like he was grinding something into the white tablecloth and said, “Dust to dust.” I

Russell had not been coming to Philly just for prosciutto bread and sweet and hot sausage from Roselli’s, not even extra-hot sausage. He had business interests with Angelo Bruno, their own kind of business. And

When a reporter asked Bobby Kennedy what he would do if Hoffa were acquitted, Bobby Kennedy, who said he had “never considered that possibility” with such an “air-tight case,” remarked, “I’ll jump off the Capitol.” In

Before a battle or a landing, you get a little nervous tension. Once the shooting starts it goes away. You don’t have time to think. You just do what you have to do. After the battle it sinks in. We took the Germans by

Bobby Kennedy chose the members of the squad himself. He gave the squad a very limited job to do and gave the squad a very subtle name: “The Get Hoffa Squad.” Everything, and I mean everything, came as a result of that.

Brennan. Brennan was president of his own Detroit Teamsters local and had an arrest record for violence that included four incidents of bombing company trucks and buildings. Brennan referred to Jimmy as his “brains.” Hoffa

In Alsace-Lorraine I saw Pope stick his leg out from behind a tree to get a million-dollar wound so he’d be sent home; only a heavy round came in and took his leg off. He survived and went home with one leg missing. Another

As I learned the ropes I learned that for many good and sound reasons the bosses and the captains sent a guy to whack you who was your friend. The obvious factor was that the shooter could get close to you in a lonely spot.

They started inviting me into the Messina Club at Tenth and Tasker, which is a members-only joint where you get the best sausage and peppers you ever ate. You’d play cards there; just hang out without the public citizens being at the next table. It’s still there, and it still has the best sausage and peppers in all of South Philly. A

Many a time Russ reached up and pinched my cheek and said, “You should’ve been Italian.” He’s the one named me “The Irishman.” Before that they used to call me “Cheech,” which is short for Frank in Italian — Francesco. After

Carlos Marcello and the war orphans did cross my mind during the drive, and I sat the whole way facing the driver. He was a little guy, and if he took his hand off the steering wheel I was going to take his head off for him.

When he got work my father worked as a steel worker, high up on tall buildings, walking on beams like those Mohawk Indians. It was dangerous work. People were always falling to their death. He worked on the building of the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia and on the few high-rise buildings they could afford to build in the Depression.

And under the contract, management couldn’t fire a Teamster unless they had certain grounds. They had none. Stealing was grounds only if they could prove it. Besides, I worked hard for them when I wasn’t stealing from them. But

Bill handed me an envelope. I handed it back to him. I told him, “I’ll do a friend a favor.” Russell had taught me well. Don’t cheapen yourself. “If you do a friend a favor,” Russell had said, “then sometimes he does you a favor.” Bill

In those days they wanted their money today. Now they want their money yesterday. Half of them today are doing drugs themselves, and it makes them impulsive. It distorts their thinking. More than half of them. Some of the bosses, too. I

If you were AWOL when your company was going back into combat you might as well keep going because your own officers would blow you away, and they didn’t even have to say it was the Germans. That’s desertion in the face of the enemy. While

Only in the movies or comic books do people say they want you to go and hit somebody. All they ever say is that they want you to go straighten a matter out. They say they want you to do whatever you’ve got to do to straighten a matter out.

Ten days after Hoffa took the oath of office in 1957, the AFL-CIO kicked out the Teamsters, saying that they could get back in only if they got rid of “this corrupt control” of the union by Jimmy Hoffa and his racketeer union officials. On

out-of-court settlement. I tried to be easygoing again like I was before I went in the war, but I couldn’t get the hang of it. It didn’t take much to provoke me. I’d just flare up. Drinking helped ease that a little. I hung around with my old

The Sicilian people were very friendly. Once we drove the Germans out I got to see Catania, where every house had homemade spaghetti drying on the clothesline. After the war Russell Bufalino liked the fact that I went right through his town. My

they wanted the guy left right there on the sidewalk as a message to those who needed to know the guy did not get away with whatever it was he had done. Anytime you read in the paper about a masked gunman, rest assured the gunman had no mask on.

The next day this meeting at Apalachin is the biggest thing to ever happen to Italian gangsters in America. All of a sudden they had arrested about fifty gangsters from every part of the country, and one of them was my new friend Russell Bufalino.

Charlie explained to me that an exploding shell is going to spread its shrapnel on an angle upward. You get down and stay down and let it sail over you. Otherwise it cuts you in half right across your chest. When we were kids I looked out for Diggsy,

The meeting had been called to settle down the potential problems that could have erupted in the wake of the October 1957 shooting of godfather Albert Anastasia in a barber’s chair with a hot towel over his face in New York’s Park-Sheraton Hotel. The

Wednesday night was the night that you went out with your wives, that way nobody was seen out with his cumare, his mistress, whatever you want to call it. Everybody knew not to be out with their cumare on Wednesday night. It was like an unwritten rule.

Jimmy liked to control his environment. He didn’t drink, so no one took a drink in his presence. He didn’t smoke, so nobody lit up around him. Sometimes he’d get all riled up. He’d get impatient and he’d do things that would remind you of a kid scratching chicken pox. You couldn’t tell him he was going to end up with pockmarks. You couldn’t say a word. You just listened. Jimmy

I went to work for the union around the time all this was going on, right after Jimmy got the president’s job. After the wiretap trial everybody was saying they didn’t make a parachute big enough to save Bobby Kennedy’s ass when he jumped off the Capitol.

When the bets were in Dusty would nod his head and I’d knock the guy out. I don’t know if you’ve ever knocked anybody out, but the best place to hit them is where the jaw meets the ear. If you catch them right they fall forward. They were always grabbing at my shirt on the way down and ripping it, so I had a deal with Nixon that I got a new white shirt every night as part of my pay.

The only thing is that Whispers had the worst breath known to man or beast. He suffered from halitosis so bad you’d think he was growing garlic in his belly. No amount of chewing gum or mints did him any good. So he was only allowed to whisper when he talked to people.

Mary liked to arrange picnics with the kids, and we’d take them to the Willow Grove Amusement Park. I wasn’t always running. When they were smaller I used to take them out. I was very close to Peggy, but she doesn’t talk to me any more, not since Jimmy disappeared. The

It was different in the sixties when I married my second wife, Irene, and I had my fourth daughter, Connie. By then I was with Hoffa and the Teamsters, and I had steady money coming in and I was older and home more. I wasn’t out maneuvering. I was already in position. Sometime

For better or for worse, meeting Russell Bufalino and being seen in his company put me deeper into the downtown culture than I ever would have gotten on my own. After the war, meeting Russell was the biggest thing that happened to me after my marriage and having my daughters. I

Jimmy looked at me and said, “I think you should stay in Chicago for a while.” And what a town that turned out to be. If you can’t make money in Chicago you can’t make money anywhere. They leave the bodies right on the sidewalk. If your dog was with you, your dog goes, too. They

All in one day I flew to Puerto Rico and took care of two matters. Then I flew to Chicago and took care of one matter. Then I flew to San Francisco and stopped at a bar for a couple of glasses of wine, because I knew I wouldn’t get anything to drink when I got to the Fairmont to meet up with Jimmy and give him the report. I walked into Jimmy’s hotel room at exactly 8:00 P.M. and he yelled at me for keeping him waiting.

During the dinner Bill said something to Jimmy I’ll never forget. He said, “I’ve never seen a man walk straight through a crowd of people like the Irishman does and never touch a single person. Everybody automatically parts out of the way. It’s like Moses parting the Red Sea.” Jimmy

What kind of a big shot has the nickname of Skinny Razor? John got the name Skinny Razor because he used to own a live chicken store and the Italian ladies would come and pick out a chicken they wanted from looking at the chickens in the cages all lined up. Then John would take out a straight razor and cut the chicken’s throat, and that was the chicken the Italian ladies would take home and pluck and cook for dinner. Skinny

I don’t care how tough you are or how tough you think you are, if they want you you’re theirs. It’s usually your best friend that walks up to you talking about a football bet and you’re gone. Like Giancana got it frying eggs and sausages in olive oil with an old friend he trusted. This

In that same year, Provenzano “buried his differences” with popular reform-minded Local 560 member Anthony “Three Fingers” Castellito by having him strangled to death and buried on a farm in upstate New York by K.O. Konigsberg, Salvatore Sinno, and Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio. Ten

held. This was before the U.S. Supreme Court changed all the laws on search and seizure. Fifty-eight of the most powerful mobsters in America were seized and hauled in by the police. Another fifty or so got away running through the woods. Also in 1957 the public was getting a close look at organized crime on TV every day during the televised sessions of the McClellan Committee Hearings on Organized Crime of the United States Senate.

That’s right, yeah. I told him I’d be in Detroit tomorrow. I better start driving right now.” “Don’t be in such a hurry,” Russ said, and handed me the envelope that he had placed on the table when he sat down. “Go ahead, open it.” In it was a plane ticket to Detroit and a pile of $100s. All

He had that smile on his round, craggy face you get when you squint at the sun. He had muscle deterioration in his face that gave him a lazy eye. If you didn’t know him you would think he was blinking or drinking. With his good eye he looked through his wide glasses into my blue eyes. Russell

Y-Y-Yeah, and I d-do my own carpentry work, too.” I was embarrassed because I was stammering. “That’s what I wanted to hear. I understand you’re a brother of mine.” “That’s right.” I was keeping my sentences short and my words few. “Local 107. Since 1947.” “Our friend speaks very highly of you.

You didn’t know who to trust, but you kept taking cabbies aside and persuading them to sign a card. For some reason there were a lot of lesbians who were working as cabbies at that time in Detroit. They liked to be treated like men, and you had to respect that or you wouldn’t get a signature. If

But back then we had to amuse ourselves, and fighting seemed to be all we had. Looking back, it was good for us. You got a lot out of your system. And you learned a lot. And then when our country needed soldiers we were in shape. We already had a mental toughness. I graduated from the eighth grade

I got a little carried away one day and sold my entire load of meat on my way to a delivery in Atlantic City. I put the seal on my lock after the whole load of meat was transferred to the guy. When I got to Atlantic City the seal was broken by the manager and there was no meat inside and I was mystified.

People in those days didn’t display affection like they do today. I’m still learning how to be affectionate to my grandchildren. I don’t ever remember getting a kiss from my mother. I never even saw her kiss my kid brother, or my kid sister, Margaret. Not that anyone meant to play favorites, but Tom was my father’s favorite and Peggy was my mother’s. I guess I was so big, and being the oldest, they expected me to be more grown up than the two younger ones.

One of my earliest childhood memories is getting birdshot picked out of my backside by my mother, Mary. My mother would say, “Tom, how come I’m always picking this stuff out of Francis’s behind?” My father, who always called her Mame, would say, “Because the boy doesn’t run fast enough, Mame.” I get my size

As Hoffa told Johnny Dio in one of those wiretapped conversations that he couldn’t remember: “… treat them right and you don’t have to worry.” Although others may have shared his zeal to improve the lives of American working men and women and their families, Jimmy Hoffa had the power to do something about it.

one time when we were at the Friendly Lounge they introduced me to Skinny Razor, and I got started doing it on my route. It was easy money, no muscle, strictly providing a service for people who had no credit. This was before credit cards when the people had nowhere to go for a couple of bucks between paychecks.

A couple of weeks later Russell told me that Joey Glimco was Giuseppe Primavera. He had been with Al Capone and was very big with the Chicago outfit. He had a big record, a couple of murder arrests. He took the Fifth on every question during the McClellan Committee hearings, including whether he knew Jimmy Hoffa.

they wanted the guy left right there on the sidewalk as a message to those who needed to know the guy did not get away with whatever it was he had done. Anytime you read in the paper about a masked gunman, rest assured the gunman had no mask on. If there are any eyewitnesses on the street, they always say the gunman had a mask on, so everybody on the shooter’s side of the thing knows the eyewitnesses didn’t see a thing and the eyewitnesses don’t have to worry about a thing. I

A couple of years after they both got out they had a sit-down at a Teamsters Convention in Miami to try to square the beef. Only Tony Pro threatened to rip Jimmy’s guts out with his bare hands and kill his grandchildren. At the time, Jimmy told me he was going to ask Russell for permission for me to take care of the little guy.

Running up out of the surf on to the beach at St. Tropez I thought I was shot. I looked down and saw red all over my uniform. I hollered for the medic and Lieutenant Kavota from Hazelton, Pennsylvania, came running over to me and shouted, “You son of a bitch, that’s wine. You ain’t shot. Get up and get going. They shot your canteen.

Giancana was taken care of in his kitchen in the back of the head and then under the chin six times, Sicilian style, to signify he was careless with his mouth. It looked like it was done by some old friend that was close enough to him to be frying sausages in olive oil with him. Russell often said to me: “When in doubt have no doubt.

Whispers was one of these short Italian guys in his early thirties that you’d see all around South Philly, just trying to get by with one hustle or another. This is not the same Whispers they blew up when they bombed his car around the same time. This is the other Whispers. I didn’t know the one they blew up; I just heard about it. I

Naturally, I knew what to expect when my father got home. I had a lot of time to think about it, but all I could think about was breaking the principal’s jaw with just one punch, a grown man. My father walked in the door steaming mad and threw the boxing gloves at me hard. I caught them, but this time I threw them back at him. I said, “You better take another look.” I was sixteen, almost seventeen, by then. “I won’t hit you,” I said. “You’re my father. But you better get yourself another punching bag.

Between the second and third rounds I asked my buddies what the hell was going on. “Who’s hitting me on the head?” They told me it’s the referee, that he doesn’t like Irishmen. I walked over and told the referee if he hits me on the back of the head one more time I’m going to knock him out. He said, “Get back in there and fight, rookie.” I

They say good girls like bad boys. Opposites attract. Mary loved me, but her family hated me. They thought I was what they used to call shanty Irish, and I guess they thought they were what they used to call lace-curtain Irish. Or maybe they saw something in me; that as hard as I was trying I was still too unpredictable for their Mary. Mary

Many a morning I found myself waking up in America and being surprised to find myself in a bed. I had been having nightmares all night long, and I didn’t know where I was. It would take me awhile to adjust, because I couldn’t believe I was in a bed. What was I doing in a bed? After the war I never slept more than three or four hours a night. In

I asked him about work, and he sent me to a guy and the guy asked me if I thought I could handle loading hindquarters. Three days a week I was going to the gym and hitting the heavy bag, the speed bag, lifting weights, and playing handball. Plus I was teaching dancing, so I picked up a hindquarter like it was a pork chop, and I got the job. The

Jimmy Hoffa once said to Frank Sheeran enthusiastically, “If you got it, Irish, a truck driver brought it to you. Don’t ever forget that. That’s the whole secret to what we do.” That “you got it” part covered food, clothing, medicine, building materials, fuel for home and industry, just about everything. Because a nationwide trucking strike could literally starve and shut down the nation, Bobby Kennedy called Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters “the most powerful institution in the country aside from the United States government.…

One afternoon a bunch of us went downtown to sell our blood for $10 a pint to get some more money to keep drinking shots and beer. On the way back we saw a sign for a carnival. It said that if you could last three rounds with a kangaroo you’d win $100. That was a better deal than the blood money we had just made. So off we went to the carnival. They

Now I understood why Russell would ask me to drive him to different places and wait for him in the car while he did a little business in somebody’s house or in a bar or a restaurant. They did all their business in person and in cash, not over the phone or with banks. Russell Bufalino was as big as Al Capone had been, maybe bigger. I couldn’t get over it. I

One night Jimmy wasn’t supposed to be coming home and I had a gallon of wine in the window cooling off. Jimmy came in while I was asleep and the noise of him coming in woke me up. When he got in bed he said, “What’s that in the window?” I said, “I think it’s the moon, Jimmy.” Sam and Bill said I got away with more shit with Jimmy than anybody else did. Jimmy

The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

Иногда можно верить всему, что читаешь.

Зачастую мне приходилось вновь и вновь убеждаться в верности золотого правила любого расследования: преступник стремится к признанию, даже если он все отрицает.

Eliciting information from Frank Sheeran about his combat experiences was the most difficult part of the interview process. It was two years before he could accept the fact that his combat experience was even worth discussing. And then it became painstaking and stressful for both a respectful questioner and his reluctant subject, with many stops and starts. To

Yet during a twenty-year period there wasn’t an American alive who wouldn’t have recognized Jimmy Hoffa immediately, the way Tony Soprano is recognized today. The vast majority of Americans would have known him by the sound of his voice alone. From 1955 until 1965 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as Elvis. From 1965 until 1975 Jimmy Hoffa was as famous as the Beatles. Jimmy

Russell had taken me with him to Cuba just when Castro was starting to kick everybody out and confiscate their casinos and racetracks and houses and bank accounts and everything else they owned in Cuba. I never saw Russell madder than on that trip to Cuba, and I wasn’t even on the last trip he made where he was even madder because his friend Santo Trafficante from Florida had been arrested by the Communists and was being held in jail. I heard a rumor that Sam Giancana had to send Jack Ruby to Cuba to spread some money around to get Santo out. Around

came out now with one eye on the kangaroo and one eye on the referee. I’m really steaming mad now, and I creamed that kangaroo. His tail hit me so hard my head ached for three days. I jumped off at the referee and decked him. The referee’s people jumped in the ring after me, and my pals jumped in after them. The cops had a hell of a time in that ring sorting things out. I

Red had a stepson named Allen Dorfman. Jimmy put Red and Allen in charge of union insurance policies, and then he put Allen as the man to see for a pension fund loan. Allen was a war hero in the Pacific. He was one tough Jew, a Marine. He was stand-up, too. Allen and Red took the Fifth a grand total of 135 times during one of those Congressional hearings they used to have.

To help me understand his combat days, Sheeran tracked down the 45th Infantry Division’s hardbound, 202-page official Combat Report, issued within months of World War II’s end. The more I learned from both this report and Frank himself, the clearer it seemed to me that it was during his prolonged and unremitting combat duty that Frank Sheeran learned to kill in cold blood. The

did a lot of wine drinking overseas. I used the wine over there the way the jeeps used gasoline. And I kept it up when I got back home. Both of my wives complained about my drinking. I often said that when they put me in jail in 1981 it was not the FBI’s intent, but they saved my life. They only have seven days in a week, and by the time I went to jail I was drinking eight. That

Whispers told me to meet him at the Melrose Diner. So I went around there. You wouldn’t expect to see any people from downtown at the Melrose Diner. It’s more for the crowd grabbing a bite to eat before they go to a Phillies game. You get a nice piece of apple pie there with hot vanilla syrup on it. Whispers sat down and asked me if I could use ten grand. I told him to keep talking.

A union is only as strong as its weakest member. Once there is dissension the employer senses it and takes advantage of it. Once you allow dissension and rebel factions to exist you are on the way to losing your union. You can have only one boss. You can have helpers, but you can’t have nine guys trying to run a local. If you did, the employer would make side deals and split the union.

Russell Bufalino had secret interests in Las Vegas casinos and not-so secret connections to the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, whom Fidel Castro toppled in 1959. With Batista’s blessings Bufalino had owned a racetrack and a major casino near Havana. Bufalino lost a great deal of money and property, including the racetrack and the casino, when Castro booted the mob off the island. Time

The Army gives you $100 a month for three months. The men who didn’t go seem to have all the good jobs and you just go back to where you came from and try to pick up where you left off. I went back to live with my parents in West Philly and back to Pearlstein’s to pick up where I left off as an apprentice. But I couldn’t handle being cooped up in a job after living outdoors all that time overseas.

The deportation proceedings and appeals would last for fifteen years, but they were always hanging over Russell’s head. In the end when he lost his last appeal and had packed his bags and had his tickets, I recommended a lawyer to him who went through the Italian government, spread a little lira, and got it so the Italian government refused to take Russell, and that was that. America had to keep him.

I already had my sights set on becoming an International organizer some day. That’s a position at the very top. You worked out of the national office. You traveled all over the country in that position, wherever they needed you. You could do a lot of favors that were legitimate and still help yourself. If that thing hadn’t happened to Jimmy at the end, I would have been an International organizer. In

Future presidential candidates Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts were members of the committee. The committee’s chief counsel and principal interrogator was the future president’s younger brother and the nation’s future attorney general, Bobby Kennedy. As a result of his aggressive work on the committee, Bobby Kennedy was to become Jimmy Hoffa’s mortal enemy. Johnny

Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it.

When the waiter came I ordered a glass of Chianti, and Bill kicked me under the table and shook his head “no.” I stuck to my guns and drank my wine, but I do know there was a little tension in Bill’s face after that at the table every time I lifted my glass. Bill and Sam stuck to ginger ale. Bill later told me that before the dinner he had been recommending me to Jimmy and he wanted me to make a good impression. During

Actually, my attention was on a pretty Irish girl sitting in the stands with the sweetest smile on her face. I was trying to show off for her. Her name was Mary Leddy, and I had seen her in the neighborhood, but I had never spoken to her. Pretty soon she was going to change her name to Mrs. Francis J. Sheeran, but she didn’t know that then sitting there in the third row, laughing along with the rest of the crowd. Between

You see, another thing I didn’t know is that the kangaroo defends itself with its tail. It has an eight-foot tail that comes whipping up behind you when you knock the kangaroo down. And the harder I hit him, the harder and faster his tail came up behind me. I never saw that tail come whipping up behind me, and I never paid attention to the boxing glove on the tail. He had an eight-foot reach I didn’t know about. Actually,

And on the other side of the ledger, unions like the Teamsters often employed their own muscle, their own reigns of terror, including bombings, arsons, beatings, and murders. The warfare and violence were not just between labor and management. It was often between rival unions vying for the same membership. Sadly, it was often violence directed at rank-and-file union members who urged democratic reform of their unions. The

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had blue laws that didn’t allow bars to be open on Sunday. No stores were open. It was the day of worship. Even later on when night baseball came in, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Philadelphia Athletics could play baseball at Shibe Park on Sunday only while there was daylight. They weren’t allowed to turn on the stadium lights on Sunday. Many a Sunday game was called on account of darkness.

From there we’d go over to the Friendly Lounge at Tenth and Washington, owned by a guy named John who went by the nickname of Skinny Razor. At first I didn’t know anything about John, but some of the guys from Food Fair pushed a little money on their routes for John. A waitress, say, at a diner would borrow $100 and pay back $12 a week for ten weeks. If she couldn’t afford the $12 one week she’d just pay $2, but she’d still owe the $12 for that week and it would get added on at the end. If it wasn’t paid on time the interest would keep piling up. The $2 part of the debt was called the “vig,” which is short for vigorish. It was the juice. My

I worked at Budd Manufacturing where they made auto body parts. It was a slave pit, a real butcher shop. They had no decent safety standards. Every so often somebody would lose a hand or a finger. People today forget how much good the unions did in getting decent working conditions. I didn’t feel like donating an arm to Budd so that’s another place I quit, but that job made an impression on me when I got into union work later. In

Jimmy did a lot of business with our friends, but he always did it on Jimmy Hoffa’s terms. That pension fund was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Jimmy was close with Red Dorfman out of the Chicago outfit. Red got the Waste Handlers Union in Chicago in 1939, when the president of that union got whacked. They say Red had Jack Ruby with him as the other officer in the union. That’s the same Jack Ruby who whacked Lee Harvey Oswald.

One cold night in December 1941 I won a dance contest jitterbugging to “Tuxedo Junction” at the Denver Dance Hall. The next thing I knew I was on a troop train at four in the morning heading for the West Coast to defend California. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I just turned twenty-one and I was 6′2″. Four years later when the war ended I got my discharge one day before I turned twenty-five; I was 6′ 4″. I had grown two inches.

In Detroit I was assigned to Bill Isabel and Sam Portwine. They worked as a team, doing public relations, but actually Sam looked to Bill as boss of the team. Bill was about 5′8″ and was known for his ability with candy, not the kind you eat, the kind you use to blow things up with — dynamite. Bill was proficient in bombing, and he always packed. Bill was born in Ireland, but he sounded American. He came up through the ranks as a trucker.

Hoffa and his Strawberry Boys’ victory in 1932 was a rare labor victory in those days. In that same year a group of World War I veterans and their plight came to symbolize the powerlessness of the working man in the Depression. In 1932 thousands of veterans, tired of broken promises, marched on Washington and refused to leave the Mall until their promised bonuses, not due until 1945, were granted by Congress now when they needed them most.

As Hoffa put it, “Nobody can describe the sit-down strikes, the riots, the fights that took place in the state of Michigan, particularly here in Detroit, unless they were a part of it.” And on another occasion he said, “My scalp was laid open sufficiently wide to require stitches no less than six times during the first year I was business agent of Local 299. I was beaten up by cops or strikebreakers at least two dozen times that year.” And

Riesel had been crusading against the criminal element in labor unions. The night of the radio broadcast, Riesel stepped out of the famous Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway near Times Square and was approached on the sidewalk by a goon who threw a cup of acid in his face. Riesel was blinded by the acid’s effect on his eyes. It soon became obvious that the attack had been ordered by Hoffa ally and labor racketeer John Dioguardi, aka Johnny Dio.

Thinking about what my brother said to me on the dock in Le Havre makes me wonder if he was looking into my soul. I knew something was different about me. I didn’t care anymore about things. I had been through practically the whole war; what could anybody do to me? Somewhere overseas I had tightened up inside, and I never loosened up again. You get used to death. You get used to killing. Sure, you go out and have fun, but even that has an edge.

Born on St. Valentine’s Day in 1913, Jimmy Hoffa was seven years older than Frank Sheeran. Yet both grew to manhood in the same Great Depression, a time when management normally held the upper hand and people struggled just to put food on the table. Jimmy Hoffa’s father, a coal miner, died when he was seven. His mother worked in an auto plant to support her children. Jimmy Hoffa quit school at age fourteen to go to work to help his mother. Hoffa

feel very bad about it now. I wasn’t an abusive father, but I started getting a little neglectful, and Mary was too good a woman, too easy on me. Then at some point, I just joined that other culture and I stopped coming home. But I brought cash over every single week. If I did good, Mary did good. I was a selfish bastard. I thought I was doing good by giving money, but I didn’t give the kids enough family time. I didn’t give my wife enough time.

(Yank was a good man who lived a good life. He never did anything wrong. He died before his time, while I was still in jail. They wouldn’t let me come home on a pass for his funeral. Not even for my brother’s or sister’s funerals. Yank managed O’Malley’s Restaurant on the West Chester Pike, and he wrote me in jail that he was going to throw a great big welcome home party for me when I got out, but poor Yank got a heart attack and it killed him.)

I think you’re born with the ability to hit. Rocky Marciano didn’t start boxing until after the war when he was already twenty-six, but he was a natural hitter. You need leverage, but a lot of your power comes from your forearm down into your wrist. There’s a snap to your punch that comes from your wrist to your fist, and that’s what knocks the other guy out. You can actually hear that snap; it sounds like a pistol shot when it’s working to perfection. Joe Louis had that famous six-inch punch. He’d knock a guy out with a punch that only traveled six inches. His power came from the snap. It’s like snapping a towel at somebody’s butt. There’s no power in your arms. Then

Rebel factions are like Nazi collaborators during the war, like they had in Norway and France,” Bill Isabel told me. “Jimmy Hoffa will never tolerate rebel factions. He’s worked too hard to build what we have. He’s the first one up in the morning and the last one in bed at night. Look at how much better off we all are today. The rebels didn’t give us shit. Jimmy won it all. The pension, the hospitalization covering your whole family every time you’re sick.

On the other hand, in his book, The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy wrote about his experiences and observations as chief counsel for the McClellan Committee hearings on organized crime and labor unions, saying: “We saw and questioned some of the nation’s most notorious gangsters and racketeers. But there was no group that better fits the prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than Jimmy Hoffa and some of his chief lieutenants in and out of the union.” Twentieth

Once in a while Giancana would have a guy with him named Jack Ruby from Dallas. I met Jack Ruby a few times. I know Jimmy’s kid met him, too, at the Edgewater. Ruby was with Giancana and he was with Red Dorfman. One time we all went out to eat and Ruby had a blond with him that he brought up from Dallas for Giancana. There is no doubt whatsoever that Jimmy Hoffa didn’t just meet Jack Ruby, he knew Jack Ruby, and not just from Giancana, but from Red Dorfman, too.

Live for all America to see in black and white as no newspaper could convey it were tough mobsters wearing diamond pinkie rings conferring quietly with their mob lawyers, then shifting in their chairs to face the senators and their counsel, Bobby Kennedy, and in gruff voices taking the Fifth Amendment as to every single question. Most of these questions were loaded with accusations of murder, torture, and other major criminal activity. The litany became a part of the culture of the fifties: “Senator, on advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer that question on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.” And, of course, the public took that answer as an admission of guilt. No

At the end of a workday I still had plenty of energy left to compete against Yank for the neighborhood girls. My secret weapon against Yank was my dancing. Most big men are clumsy and heavy-footed, but not me. I had a good sense of rhythm and I could move every part of my body. I had very fast hands, too, and good coordination. Swing music was sweeping the country and social dancing was all the rage. I went dancing six nights a week (never on a Sunday) to a different hall every night. That’s how you learned the dances. You learned by going dancing. They all had certain steps, unlike today where you just make it up as you go along. After the war, one of the jobs I had was a ballroom dance instructor. In

dinner. I would climb over the farmer’s fence and toss back to my father samples of the crop I was harvesting. It could be ears of corn or tomatoes or whatever was in season. That’s what you had to do to get by and put food on the table. But the farmers weren’t any too happy with our ideas about sharing in nature’s bounty. Some nights they’d be waiting for us with shotguns. Some farmer would chase me, and I’d jump over the fence and get hit in the butt with birdshot. One

In The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy asserted that after the trial, Joe Louis, who was out of work and deeply in debt at the time, was immediately given a well-paying job with a record company that got a $2 million Teamsters pension fund loan. Joe Louis then married the female black lawyer from California whom he had met at the trial. When Bobby Kennedy’s right-hand and chief investigator, the future author Walter Sheridan, tried to interview Joe Louis for the McClellan Committee about the record company job, the ex-champ refused to cooperate and said about Bobby Kennedy: “Tell him to go take a jump off the Empire State Building.” Still, Bobby Kennedy expected to have the last laugh by the end of 1957. Hoffa

Sheridan wrote in his 1972 book, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa: “He went about this by arranging for one of Beck’s own attorneys to feed information to Kennedy about Beck.” That simple sentence is a courageous one by Mr. Sheridan. Although Hoffa was still alive when the book came out and had literally just walked out of jail, Bobby Kennedy had been dead for four years. Had Kennedy been alive, and had anyone picked up on the implications of that sentence, an ethics probe would have been fully warranted.

All in one day I flew to Puerto Rico and took care of two matters. Then I flew to Chicago and took care of one matter. Then I flew to San Francisco and stopped at a bar for a couple of glasses of wine, because I knew I wouldn’t get anything to drink when I got to the Fairmont to meet up with Jimmy and give him the report. I walked into Jimmy’s hotel room at exactly 8:00 P.M. and he yelled at me for keeping him waiting. “I’m on time, Jimmy,” I said. “It’s 8:00.” “You couldn’t have been early,” Jimmy yelled.

We couldn’t afford our own place in the beginning, and so like most of our friends we lived with her parents to start off our married life. I wouldn’t advise that to anyone who could help it. The night of the wedding we had a reception at her parents’ house, and I had a few drinks in me and I announced that I was going to return all the wedding gifts to her side of the family. If they didn’t want me I didn’t want their gifts. I wouldn’t advise that either. I still had that hair-trigger from the war. According

Later that same year John F. Kennedy was elected president by a thin margin. The first thing he did was appoint his brother attorney general of the United States. This put Bobby in charge of the Justice Department, all of the United States attorneys, and of the FBI and the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. And the first thing Bobby Kennedy did was turn against the very men who helped elect his brother. For the first time in American history an attorney general committed his office to the eradication of organized crime. Toward

Jimmy never met Joe Louis before that trial, only the jury didn’t know that. But Jimmy was strong for civil rights. That part is true. The only thing is, every time he won a trial, he thought he could never lose. And have no doubt: he hated Bobby with a passion. I heard him call Bobby a spoiled brat to his face in an elevator and start after him. I held Jimmy back. Many a time Jimmy said to me they got the wrong brother. But he hated brother Jack, too. Jimmy said they were young millionaires who had never done a day’s work.

They supplied me the piece and they had one guy right there to take it from me after the thing and get in one car with it and drive away. His only job was to break the piece down and destroy it. They had other guys sitting in crash cars to pull out in front of cops who might go after the car I got in. The car I got in was supposed to take me back to the airport. I relaxed when I saw the airport coming up. I knew that they used “cowboys” sometimes and then took care of the “cowboys” when the matter was completed. The “cowboys” were expendable.

Giancana said he was going to fix the election in Illinois so Kennedy would win that state. Jimmy couldn’t believe his ears. Jimmy tried to talk him out of it. Jimmy told him nobody could control Bobby because he was mental. Jimmy said people went to the old man during the McClellan Committee hearings and he couldn’t do anything about either one of his millionaire kids. Giancana told Jimmy that Kennedy was going to help them get Castro out of Cuba so they could get their casinos back. Jimmy said that they were crazy to trust those Kennedy boys

Bobby Kennedy gave Cheasty a job with the committee at a salary of $5,000 a year. The FBI planted microphones and set up cameras. Cheasty notified Hoffa that he had an envelope with sensitive committee documents and wanted another cash installment in exchange for the envelope. The two men met near DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. Cheasty handed the envelope to Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa handed Cheasty $2,000 in cash. The exchange was photographed. The FBI moved in, catching Jimmy Hoffa red-handed with the documents. They arrested Jimmy Hoffa on the spot. When

He said, “You’re a little lax on that rake.” I tried to ignore him, and he said, “You hear what I said, boy?” I asked him who the hell did he think he was talking to. He said: “I’m talking to you, boy.” He said that if I didn’t put more effort into the job he’d stick the rake up my butt. I told him I’d do him one better and stick the rake down his throat. He was a big black guy, and he came at me. I tapped him and put him on the conveyor belt unconscious. I stuffed blueberries in his mouth. That took care of him. The cops had to take me out of there. After

I can’t remember any of us Sheeran kids ever having a toy of our own. One Christmas we got a pair of roller skates to share. They were metal skates, and you could adjust the size. We learned to go without. And if we wanted something we had to fend for ourselves. I had my first job when I was seven, helping a guy clean out the ashes from cellars. And if I managed to get some work cutting somebody’s grass for spending money and my father found out about it, he’d wait up the block until I got paid, and then he’d come down and take the big coins and leave me maybe a dime. We

The Teamsters pension fund organized by Hoffa almost immediately became a source of loans to the national crime syndicate known to the public as La Cosa Nostra. With its own private bank, this crime monopoly grew and flourished. Teamsters-funded ventures, especially the construction of casinos in Havana and Las Vegas, where dreams come true for the godfather entrepreneurs. The sky was the limit and more was anticipated. At the time of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975 Atlantic City was about to open up to legalized gambling. Jimmy’s cut was to get a finder’s fee off the books.

The next year, Kroger refused to negotiate a new contract, and Hoffa’s victory was short-lived. But on the strength of his stand with the Strawberry Boys, Jimmy Hoffa was recruited by Detroit’s Teamsters Local 299 as an organizer. Hoffa’s job was to encourage men to join the union and through solidarity and organization to better their lives and the lives of their families. Detroit was home to America’s auto industry. As the auto industry’s chief spokesman, Henry Ford’s position on the labor movement in general was that “labor unions are the worst thing that ever struck the earth.” In

Time magazine reported in June 1975, a week before the assassination of Sam “Momo” Giancana in Chicago and a month before the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa in Detroit, and during the time of the Church Committee Senate hearings on the CIA’s ties to organized crime, that Russell Bufalino’s help had been successfully recruited by the CIA in a mysterious CIA-gangland plot to kill Castro. Senator Frank Church’s committee concluded that Bufalino was part of a bizarre conspiracy to assassinate Castro with poison pills just before the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was to take place. Bufalino

I didn’t know anything about “made men” back then. That’s a special status in the alleged mob where you go through a ceremony and after that you are then untouchable. Nobody can whack you without approval. You get extra respect wherever you go. You are part of the “in” crowd, the inner circle. It only applies to Italians. Later on I got so close to Russell that I was higher up than a made man. Russell even said that to me. He said, “Nobody can ever touch you because you are with me.” I can still feel him gripping my cheek with that strong grip of his and telling me, “You should have been an Italian.” If

Glimco was having a problem with a freight hauler that was resisting the union and wouldn’t rehire a shop steward they had fired. It made Joey Glimco look bad to his men, and he wanted me to take care of the matter. I told him nobody needed to paint anybody’s house. I told him to give me a case of Coca-Cola that used to come in those old-fashioned bottles. I said give me one of your men and we’ll handle it. I got on a bridge just down the street from the freight company. When a truck would pull out and drive down to go under the bridge, the man and I dropped bottles of Coke down on the truck. It sounded like bombs going off, and trucks were crashing into the bridge abutment without knowing what was happening. Finally, the drivers refused to take trucks out of the yard, and the freight company came around and rehired the shop steward, but he didn’t get his back pay. Maybe I should have used two cases of Coke. I

they were talking about whether the Chicago outfit should or should not fix a presidential election. Growing up wherever you grew up you knew the local elections were fixed. You knew the local Philly elections or whatever were fixed, but this was something, and this high-level talk was all going on right in front of me. The Teamsters turned out to be the only union to back Nixon in the 1960 election. Now the History Channel makes no bones about it; one of the reasons Kennedy won that election was because Sam Giancana fixed Illinois for him with phony ballots from people who were dead, names taken off gravestones. I

One night the three of us were out on the town. Bill was driving us to an Italian restaurant. I had been on my new job just a few weeks. I was in the backseat and Bill was watching me in the rearview mirror. Bill said to me, “We heard from Jimmy that you paint houses.” I didn’t say anything. I just nodded my head “yes.” Okay, here it is, I thought. So much for getting away from the downtown culture and getting into a new line of work. “We got something in Chicago that needs to be straightened out. We got a friend there named Joey Glimco. He runs the cab local there, 777. He’s got the trucks on the waterfront, too. Ever heard of him?” I

Russell had told me how Carlos Marcello liked to send to Sicily for war orphans with no families. They would get smuggled in from Canada, like through Windsor, right across the water from Detroit. The Sicilian war orphans would think they had to take care of a matter and then they could stay in America and maybe they’d be given a pizza parlor or something. They would go paint a house and then they would get in the getaway car and be taken somewhere and their house would get painted and nobody back in Sicily would miss them. Because they were orphans and had no family there would be no vendettas, which are very popular things in Sicily. Carlos

You’d take cabbies aside and you’d explain the benefits of being organized, and you’d ask them to sign a union card. If you got 30 percent of the workers to sign, then the labor law entitled you to an election to see if the workers wanted the union or not. But Bill taught me that you would never ask for the election until you had better than 50 percent, because with less than that you were sure to lose. Bill also explained to me that if you did get the right to hold an election, another union could come in and try to take it from you. If they got 10 percent of the cards they could intervene in the election and maybe beat your union out after you did all the work.

Now a kangaroo has short arms, so I’m figuring I’ll knock his ass out. They put gloves on me and I start jabbing away at him, but what I didn’t know is that a kangaroo has a loose jaw so when you hit them it doesn’t go to their brain and knock them out. I’m only jabbing at him, because who wants to hurt a kangaroo? But when I couldn’t’ get anywhere with him with my jab I let loose with an overhand right, a real haymaker. Down the kangaroo goes and I feel this hard whack on the back of my head where my old man used to whack me. I shake it off and go back to jabbing the kangaroo who’s hopping all over the place, and I’m trying to figure out who the S.O.B. was who clipped me from behind. You

In February 1957, Hoffa contacted a New York lawyer named John Cye Cheasty. Cheasty had been in the Navy and the Secret Service. His law practice had a subspecialty in conducting investigations. Hoffa told Cheasty that the committee was hiring investigators. If Cheasty would take a job with the committee and report on its activities to Hoffa there was $24,000 in cash in the deal for Cheasty at the rate of $2,000 a month for a year. Hoffa gave Cheasty a down payment of $1,000 for his expenses in getting the job. However, in his impatience, Hoffa had not sufficiently checked Cheasty out. This was an honest New York investigator and a patriot. Cheasty reported the bribery scheme straightaway. Bobby

At the time of the Frank Sheeran job interview by long-distance phone call, Jimmy Hoffa was coming off a period full of accomplishment and notoriety. In the mid- to late fifties Jimmy Hoffa had bulldogged and bluffed his way through the McClellan Committee hearings. He had become president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. And he had survived several criminal indictments. More significantly for his future and that of his rank and file, in 1955 Jimmy Hoffa had created a pension fund whereby management made regular contributions toward the retirement of their Teamsters employees. Before the creation of the Central States Pension Fund, many truckers merely had their Social Security to fall back on when they retired.

In September 1957 the Ethics Committee of the AFL-CIO charged that Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa had used “their official union positions for personal profit.” The AFL-CIO further charged that Hoffa “had associated with, sponsored, and promoted the interests of notorious labor racketeers.” The response of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was to elect Jimmy Hoffa, while under indictment in two federal jurisdictions, to his first term as president. In those tight-reined days, the president was elected not by the rank and file, but by handpicked delegates to the International Convention held every five years. And just to be on the safe side, there were no secret ballots. In his acceptance speech Jimmy Hoffa said, “Let us bury our differences.” How

Jimmy Hoffa had two philosophies that guided his actions. One way or another he expressed them daily and often through word or deed. The first of these philosophies was “the ends,” the second was “the means.” The “ends” was his labor philosophy. Hoffa often said that his labor philosophy was simple: “The working man in America is being shortchanged every day in America.” The “means” was his second philosophy and can be summed up by a remark he made to Bobby Kennedy at a private party in which they found themselves together: “I do to others what they do to me, only worse.” Simply put, Jimmy Hoffa believed that the “ends” of improving the lot of working Americans, with his union leading the way, justified whatever “means” were used to accomplish it. His

Twentieth Century Fox commissioned a screenplay of Bobby Kennedy’s book. Budd Schulberg, the celebrated writer of On the Waterfront, wrote the screenplay, but the project was abandoned by the studio. Columbia Pictures then expressed interest in picking up the project but abandoned it as well. In an introduction he wrote to a 1972 book written about Hoffa by Bobby Kennedy’s chief aide, Walter Sheridan, Budd Schulberg explained why the two studios abandoned the project: “A labor tough walked right into the office of the new head of [Twentieth Century Fox] to warn him that if the picture was ever made [Teamster] drivers would refuse to deliver the prints to the theaters. And if they got there by any other means, stink bombs would drive out the audiences.” This

One of the very hot topics between Jimmy and Sam Giancana was Senator John F. Kennedy’s upcoming campaign for president. This was very controversial between them. Giancana had been promised by Kennedy’s old man that he could control Bobby and nobody had to worry about Bobby if Jack got in. The Kennedy old man had made his money alongside the Italians as a bootlegger during Prohibition. He brought in whiskey through Canada and distributed it to the Italians. The old man kept his contacts with the Italians over the years as he branched out into more legitimate things, like financing movie stars like Gloria Swanson who he was having affairs with. Sam Giancana was going to help John F. Kennedy against Nixon and so were Giancana’s buddy Frank Sinatra and practically all of Hollywood.

principal was on the stage singing and leading us in the old song “On the Road to Mandalay.” He would emphasize by winking after each line of the song like some vaudeville singer. Being so tall I stood out and he could look right at me. So every time he would wink I would imitate him and wink back at him. When we got done with the assembly he told me to wait in his office for him. I went and sat there in the chair in front of his desk. He was a pretty big man, my height, only he outweighed me. He walked into the office, came up behind me, and cuffed me hard on the back of the head just the way my father used to whenever I lost one of his beer bets for him. “You fat fuck,” I said and jumped up and decked him. I broke his jaw, and they expelled me permanently on the spot. Naturally,

I went around to four finance companies and borrowed a hundred bucks from each one so we could get married. Then when the collectors came around I persuaded them that they couldn’t find me. One of them that I convinced had my case taken over by his supervisor, who decided not to cooperate with my disappearance and showed up one night at Wagner’s looking for Frank Sheeran. He didn’t know it was me at the door. I said to follow me and I’d take him in to see Mr. Sheeran. He followed me into the bathroom and I gave him a shot to the body and a shot to the jaw and down he went. I didn’t give him the boot or anything. I just wanted to make sure he understood that Mr. Sheeran was too busy to see him that night or any other night. He got the message. Mary had a good job with the Philadelphia

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.

They had steam heat in the school. The heat came from radiators and we’d have to wait for them to warm up. I stuck the Limburger in the radiator. It heated up and got softer and softer and slowly stunk the whole room up. They called my father, who was the school janitor. He followed the smell and found the Limburger, and then some other kid ratted me out. My old man said he’d see me when he got home. When I got home and waited for him I knew that as soon as he got home he was going to get the boxing gloves out and toss them to me. Sure enough, when he came through the door he calmly said, “What do you want to do, eat first or eat after I kick your ass?” I said, “I’ll eat first.” I knew I wouldn’t feel like eating dinner afterward. I got it pretty good that night, but at least I got some food in me. I

Jimmy had a loyal supporter in Puerto Rico named Frank Chavez. But however, Frank Chavez was a definite troublemaker. He was very hotheaded. He’s the one who sent Bobby Kennedy a letter from his local in Puerto Rico the day John F. Kennedy got assassinated. He told Bobby that in honor of all the bad things Bobby Kennedy had done to Jimmy Hoffa, his Puerto Rican local was going to put flowers on the grave of Lee Harvey Oswald and maintain them and keep them fresh. That still has to make you cringe a little. Let the dead rest in peace. You honor the dead, especially that man. He was a war hero who saved his own men in that PT boat incident. Bobby was a son of a bitch, but the man had just lost his brother and he must have known it was all connected with him and that it was his own fault, besides. Frank

Hoffa and Brennan formed a trucking company called Test Fleet. The “brains” and his partner put that company in their wives’ maiden names. Test Fleet had only one contract. It was with a Cadillac car carrier that had been having union problems with its Teamsters union independent owner-operator car haulers. This group of Teamsters held an unsanctioned wildcat strike. Angered by this break of union solidarity, Jimmy Hoffa ordered them back to work. With Hoffa’s blessings the Cadillac car carrier then terminated its leases with the independent Teamsters haulers, put many of them out of business, and gave hauling business to Test Fleet. This arrangement helped Josephine Poszywak, aka Mrs. Hoffa, and Alice Johnson, aka Mrs. Brennan, make $155,000 in dividends over ten years, without doing a single minute’s work for the Test Fleet company. Hoffa

The jury hung at eleven to one. Promptly a new jury was impaneled. During the second trial a member of the jury came forward to report a bribe attempt. He was excused and replaced by an alternate. This jury found Jimmy Hoffa not guilty. A crushed Bobby Kennedy still had the perjury charge against Hoffa to fall back on. But not for long. The perjury indictment relied on wiretapped conversations between Johnny Dio and Jimmy Hoffa. The wiretap had been authorized pursuant to New York State law and was a valid search and seizure of the telephone conversation under existing New York law. Unfortunately for Bobby, this was the beginning of the age of the Warren Court’s expansion of its control over state and local police procedures. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such state-sanctioned wiretaps were unconstitutional and that any evidence obtained by the wiretaps or derived from them was “fruit of the poisonous tree.

Frank Sinatra behaved himself around Russell Bufalino. One night at the 500 Club in Atlantic City I heard Russell tell Sinatra: “Sit down or I’ll rip your tongue out and stick it up your ass.” If he had a drink in him Sinatra was an asshole. He’d put on a gorilla suit when he got drunk. He’d go to fight some guy knowing somebody would stop it. He was a bad drinker. Me, if I drink, I want to sing and dance. I guess he figured he was already a singer and a dancer.

The jury was composed of eight blacks and four whites. Hoffa and his attorney, the legendary Edward Bennett Williams, struck only white jurors in the selection process. Hoffa had a black female lawyer flown in from California to sit at counsel table. He arranged for a newspaper, The Afro-American, to run an ad praising Hoffa as a champion of the “Negro race.” The ad featured a photo of Hoffa’s black-and-white legal team. Hoffa then had the newspaper delivered to the home of each black juror. Finally, Hoffa’s Chicago underworld buddy Red Dorfman had the legendary boxing champion Joe Louis flown in from his Detroit home. Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Louis hugged in front of the jury as if they were old friends. Joe Louis stayed and watched a couple of days of testimony. When Cye Cheasty testified, Edward Bennett Williams asked him if he had ever officially investigated the NAACP. Cheasty denied he had, but the seed was planted. Hoffa was acquitted. Edward

Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it. • chapter eight • Russell Bufalino In 1957 the mob came out of the closet. It came out unwillingly, but out it came. Before 1957 reasonable men could differ over whether an organized network of gangsters existed in America. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had assured America that no such organization existed, and he deployed the FBI’s greatest resources to investigate suspected Communists. But as a result of the publicity foisted on the mob in 1957, even Hoover came on board. The organization was dubbed “La Cosa Nostra,” meaning “this thing of ours,” a term heard on government wiretaps. Ironically,

Jimmy Hoffa’s first notoriety in union work was as the leader of a successful strike by the “Strawberry Boys.” He became identified with it. In 1932 the nineteen-year-old Jimmy Hoffa was working as a truck loader and unloader of fresh fruits and vegetables on the platform dock of the Kroger Food Company in Detroit for 32¢ an hour. Twenty cents of that pay was in credit redeemable for groceries at Kroger food stores. But the men only got that 32¢ when there was work to do. They had to report at 4:30 P.M. for a twelve-hour shift and weren’t permitted to leave the platform. When there were no trucks to load or unload, the workers sat around without pay. On one immortal hot spring afternoon, a load of fresh strawberries arrived from Florida, and the career of the most famous labor leader in American history was launched. Hoffa gave a signal, and the men who would come to be known as the Strawberry Boys refused to move the Florida strawberries into refrigerator cars until their union was recognized and their demands for better working conditions were met.

Perhaps Bufalino’s closest friend was Philadelphia crime boss Angelo Bruno. Law enforcement referred to Bufalino as “the quiet Don Rosario”; Bruno was known as the “Docile Don” for his similar low-key approach to heading a major crime family. Like Bufalino’s family, the Bruno crime family was not permitted to deal in drugs. Because of his perceived old-fashioned ways Bruno was killed by greedy underlings in 1980. Bruno’s demise would lead to everlasting anarchy in his family. His successor, Philip “Chicken Man” Testa, was literally blown up a year after taking over. Testa’s successor, Nicodemus “Little Nicky” Scarfo, is now serving multiple life sentences for murder, having been betrayed by his own underboss and nephew. Little Nicky’s successor, John Stanfa, is serving five consecutive life sentences for murder. Frank Sheeran got a Christmas card every year from John Stanfa in his Leavenworth cell. John Stanfa’s successor, Ralph Natale, is the first boss to turn government informant and testify against his own men. Frank Sheeran calls Philadelphia “the city of rats.” On the other hand, Russell Bufalino lived a long life. He died of old age in a nursing home in 1994 at the age of ninety. He controlled his “family” until the day he died, and unlike Angelo Bruno’s Philadelphia family, not a sign of discord has been reported in the Bufalino family since his death. Frank

Many a morning I found myself waking up in America and being surprised to find myself in a bed. I had been having nightmares all night long, and I didn’t know where I was. It would take me awhile to adjust, because I couldn’t believe I was in a bed. What was I doing in a bed? After the war I never slept more than three or four hours a night. In those days you didn’t talk about stuff like that. There was no such thing as war syndrome, but you knew something was different. You tried not to remember anything from over there, but things came back to you. You had done every damn thing overseas, from killing in cold blood to destroying property to stealing whatever you wanted and to drinking as much wine and having as many women as you wanted. You lived every minute of every day in danger of your own life and limb. You couldn’t take chances. Many times you had a split second to decide to be judge, jury, and executioner. You had just two rules you had to obey. You had to be back in your outfit when you went back on the line. You had to obey a direct order in combat. Break one of those rules and you could be executed yourself, right on the spot even. Otherwise, you flaunted authority. You lost the moral skill you had built up in civilian life, and you replaced it with your own rules. You developed a hard covering, like being encased in lead. You were scared more than you’d ever been in your life. You did certain things, maybe against your will sometimes, but you did them, and if you stayed over there long enough you didn’t even think about them anymore. You did them like you might scratch your head if it itched. You

Family is not the only thing that matters. There are other things: Pachelbel’s Canon in D matters, and fresh-picked corn on the cob, and true friends, and the sound of the ocean, and the poems of William Carlos Williams, and the constellations in the sky, and random acts of kindness, and a garden on the day when all its flowers are at their peak. Fluffy pancakes matter and crisp clean sheets and the guitar riff in “Layla,” and the way clouds look when you are above them in an airplane. Preserving the coral reef matters, and the thirty-four paintings of Johannes Vermeer matter, and kissing matters. Whether or not you register for china, crystal, and silver does not matter. Whether or not you have a full set of Tiffany dessert forks on Thanksgiving does not matter. If you want to register for these things, by all means, go ahead. My Waterford pattern is Lismore, one of the oldest. I do remember one time when I had a harrowing day at the hospital, and Nick had a Rube Goldberg project due and needed my help, and Kevin was playing Quiet Riot at top decibel in his bedroom, and Margot was tying up the house phone, and you had been plunked by the babysitter in front of the TV for five hours, and I came home and took one of my Lismore goblets out of the cabinet. I wanted to smash it against the wall. But instead I filled it with cold white wine and for ten or so minutes I sat in the quiet of the formal living room all by myself and I drank the cold wine out of that beautiful glass crafted by some lovely Irishman, and I felt better. It was probably the wine, not the glass, but you get my meaning. I will remember the impressive heft of the glass in my hand, and the way the cut of the crystal caught the day’s last rays of sunlight, but I will not miss that glass the way I will miss the sound of the ocean, or the taste of fresh-picked corn.

But if something happened to Jack, Vice President Lyndon Johnson would become the president, and it was no secret that Lyndon hated Bobby. Lyndon, it was agreed, definitely would get rid of Bobby as attorney general. According to Frank Ragano’s recollection, Jimmy Hoffa said, “Damn right he would. He hates him as much as I do.

This maneuver is what got Senator Joe Biden elected,” Sheeran claimed in the 2004 deathbed biography, I Heard You Paint Houses—whose macabre title is a mob euphemism for the mess a hitman makes when he blows someone’s brains out. Martin Scorsese’s movie The Irishman was based on the book.