Paddy Whacked

by T. J. English

  Paddy must have been laughing all the way to the bank.

  Outside the courtroom, John Connolly talked a good game, but when called to testify before the Wolf Hearings, he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination a total of thirty-two times. At his trial in May 2002, he declined to take the stand in his own defense. He was found guilty of racketeering and obstruction of justice and given a ten-year sentence in federal prison.

  Afterward, U.S. Attorney Michael J. Sullivan said of Connolly, “He abused his authority and crossed the line from crime fighter to criminal…. Today’s verdict reveals John Connolly for what he became: a Winter Hill Gang operative masquerading as a law enforcement agent.”

  Old Bones and Shallow Graves

  In the wake of the Wolf Hearings, the rats abandoned the last sinking ship of the Irish Mob. Longtime associates of Bulger’s crew—Steve Flemmi (twenty-one murders), Cadillac Frank Salemme (twelve murders), and John Martorano (nineteen murders)—all cut deals with the government in exchange for testimony, as did numerous members of the Irish Mob, including Kevin Weeks, one of Bulger’s most visible lieutenants in Southie, who admitted to taking part in four murders and gave testimony concerning four others.

  Early in the year 2000, the bulky, curly-haired Weeks began to talk, leading investigators to a series of impromptu graves spread throughout the Boston area. The first was a gully alongside the Southeast Expressway in Dorchester, which contained three decomposed corpses. These three murder victims, killed between 1983 and 1985, had originally been buried in the basement of a home on East Third Street in Southie, but they had to be transferred when the house was sold in late 1985. One of the skeletons exhumed belonged to the twenty-six-year-old woman strangled to death by Whitey Bulger. Another skeleton had had its teeth ripped out before being killed, the result of a torture session, also courtesy of the South Boston mob boss.

  A few months later, another killing field was unearthed, this one just a mile or two from Bulger’s condo at 144 Quincy Shore Drive. The remains of Tommy King, the Southie hood who bested Whitey in a barroom brawl back in 1975 and got himself killed as a result, were unearthed, as were the remains of Debra Davis, another ex-girlfriend of Flemmi’s.

  Another grave was uncovered in September 2000. At Tenean Beach in Dorchester, investigators dug up a pile of bones that, through DNA testing, turned out to belong to Paulie McGonigle, an early member of the Mullin Gang who’d disappeared back in November 1975. Four days after he’d vanished, McGonigle’s station wagon was found in the waters off the docks of Charlestown. With Paulie’s wallet floating nearby, the cops always suspected that Bulger whacked the former Mullin gang member back during the final days of the Boston Gang Wars. Now they had the proof.

  It was as if, just below the surface of the city and surrounding area, lay generations of the dead—gangsters, dirty cops, business partners, girlfriends, and others who simply got in the way. Similar diggings in New Orleans, New York, Chicago, Kansas City, and elsewhere no doubt would have unearthed similar victims of the Irish Mob, buried beneath layers of landfill, blacktop, new buildings, train stations, streets, parks, and other examples of civic progress and urban gentrification. The building of these cities often involved aspects of the criminal underworld—construction rackets, corrupt city officials, dirty ward bosses, cops-on-the-take, and, of course, the Irish American gangster who occasionally graduated to the mobster level and became a hidden though immutable aspect of American capitalism in all its many permutations.

  By the end of the twentieth century, the Irish American mobsters were mostly all gone, victims of law enforcement, each other, assimilation, and the long inexorable flow of history. The ranks were thinned down to just a few organizations in New York and Boston—the Westies and Whitey Bulger—until even they went through their final stages of self-immolation.

  Whitey, of course, remains at large. Through the early years of the twenty-first century, sightings of the wily Irish mobster were numerous. He was known to have lived for a period with his longtime mistress, Catherine Greig, on a small island off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. Other sightings were reported in Fountain Valley, California; Galway, Ireland; the island of St. Vincent’s; and in London, where, it was reported, a man who had met Bulger years earlier at a gym and known him well bumped into Whitey on the street and said, “Hey, Jim, how you been?”

  Bulger looked startled. “You must have the wrong person,” he replied and disappeared into a crowd of pedestrians.

  After the tragedy of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent passage in the United States of the Patriot Act, which placed new and more stringent restrictions on the use of passports and other kinds of identification—as well as the beefed-up security at airports and train stations—it’s hard to imagination how a seventy-year-old man whose face has been plastered on every law enforcement Web site in America can make it on the run. But then again, Whitey Bulger spent nearly his entire adult life defying the odds.

  He was the last of the last, inheritor of a tradition that had once pretended to represent the rising of a people and inevitably degenerated over the generations into a bloody netherworld of treachery, deception, betrayal, wholesale murder, and dismemberment. To some, the story of the Irish American gangster is the stuff of legend, a tribute to the rebellious, defiant, tough-as-nails side of the Irish temperament. To others, the saga is shameful, a best-forgotten example of antisocial behavior at its most homicidal and a desperate survival mentality personified in the diabolical, sociopathic tendencies of Whitey Bulger and his ilk.

  Either way, the lives were lived, the bodies buried, and the history remains the same. Out there somewhere, Whitey exists as a living relic, or a ghostly reminder, that no criminal underworld in the history of the United States started as early or lasted as long as the Irish Mob.

  epilogue

  In July 2004, a book was released entitled “I Heard You Paint Houses,” an account of an Irish American gangster by the name of Francis “the Irishman” Sheeran. Sheeran had always been suspected by the FBI of being one of the last people to see ex-Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa alive before he vanished way back on July 30, 1975. Sheeran was a close personal friend of Hoffa’s, which meant, in the inverted moral universe of organized crime, that he was a likely suspect in the union official’s demise. As even an amateur disciple of the underworld would know, or should know, when they come to get you, the person enlisted to do the deed will most likely be your closest friend or most trusted associate.

  In the late 1990s, Sheeran was ready to come clean about his role in one of the great unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century. The motivating factor had been a meeting arranged by Sheeran’s two daughters between him and a Catholic monsignor. In ailing health and physically disabled, Sheeran listened as the monsignor granted absolution for his sins so that he could be buried in a Catholic cemetery, but the clergyman also hinted that the Irishman would never be at peace with God until he “did the right thing.” Sheeran told his family, “I believe there is something after we die. If I got a shot at it, I don’t want to lose that shot. I don’t want to close the door.” Following his audience with the monsignor, Sheeran contacted a writer and began to tell his story. A few months before the publication of his book, he passed away at the age of eighty-three.

  His deathbed confession was a doozy. Sheeran admitted to carrying out numerous acts of violence for Hoffa during his years as Teamster president and also doing contract hits for Russell Bufalino, a legendary Mafia boss. Equally close to both men, Sheeran was a professional bruiser who made his living enforcing the will of his bosses until they turned against one another, and he was forced to make a choice. It really wasn’t much of a decision. The Irishman agreed to carry out a murder contract against Hoffa, his longtime friend and mentor, because he knew that if he didn’t, he too would be whacked. Such was the nature of survival in the American underworld.

  The first time Frank Sheeran ever met Jimmy Hoffa, the legendary
Teamster boss looked Sheeran over from head to toe, all six foot three inches of brawn and toughness, and said, “I heard you paint houses.” In the mid-twentieth-century vernacular of the underworld, to paint a house meant to whack somebody—the “paint,” in this case, representing the blood of the victim. Sheeran had already done a fair number of paint jobs for the Italians, including the famous gangland murder of Joseph “Crazy Joey” Gallo, which went unsolved for decades. That hit took place at Umberto’s Clam House in New York’s Little Italy in April 1972. According to Sheeran, he carried it out with John “the Redhead” Francis, an Irish-born, New York–based “house painter” with whom he had done other contract jobs in the past.

  Although he was not directly affiliated with the Irish Mob, Sheeran represented a classic type of Irish American gangster: the freelance enforcer who went wherever the money was. Vincent Coll, Jack Diamond, Mad Dog Sullivan, Trigger Burke, and others had established a long and dubious tradition as Irish gunmen from hardscrabble and often impoverished backgrounds who circulated throughout the underworld. These were tough, cold-blooded men willing to undertake the impossible and dangerous jobs that others were either ill-equipped or too scared to take on. Coll, Diamond, and Burke all died prematurely via the dirt nap or the electric chair. Sheeran survived because he did most of his jobs under cover of either the Mafia or the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

  His upbringing was typical depression-era Irish American. In Darby, Pennsylvania, the small town outside of Philadelphia where Sheeran was born and raised, unemployment was near eighty percent. Sheeran’s father occasionally found work as a janitor at the Blessed Virgin Mary Church & School in Darby, but mostly he drank. Sometimes he’d drag his strapping son Frank into local saloons, where he staged impromptu smokers in which Frank fought local kids or even adults, with dad wagering on his son and keeping the winnings to pay the rent or buy beer.

  For guys like Frank Sheeran, minimally educated, relatively unskilled, born into a pre–Civil Rights America that was mean and pitiless, World War II was like a gift from the gods. Sheeran lied in order to enroll in the service underage. At seventeen, he was stationed for a while at Lowry Field in Colorado, where, because of his imposing physical stature, he served as an MP with the Army Air Corp. He then went off to Europe, where he spent the war as a rifleman in the 45th Infantry Division, otherwise known as the Thunderbird Division.

  The average number of combat days for a soldier in World War II was around 80. Before the war was over, the Irishman would log four hundred and eleven days in combat. Sheeran’s status as a war veteran reiterates the harsh truth that the Irish American underworld drew many of its toughest adherents from the ranks of the ex-military. In Sheeran’s case, the sheer number of his combat days were instrumental in establishing his ruthless proficiency as a killer. General George S. Patton himself gave the Thunderbird Division their marching orders. According to an officer of the division who was present during Patton’s June 1942 speech to the division, “[He told us] to kill and to continue to kill and that the more we killed the less we’d have to kill later…. He did say the more prisoners we took, the more men we would have to feed and not to fool around with prisoners. He said there was only one good German and that was a dead one.” The General’s position on civilian casualties was equally severe: “He said…if the people living in the cities persisted in staying in the vicinity of the battle and were enemy, we were to ruthlessly kill them and get them out of the way.”

  Among the many theaters of battle where Sheeran saw combat was Anzio, a bloody killing field in which U.S. soldiers were routinely ordered to exterminate prisoners and civilians. Wrote Sheeran, “When an officer would tell you to take a couple of German prisoners back behind the line and for you to ‘hurry back,’ you did what you had to do.” Following orders and killing people became the young soldier’s stock-in-trade.

  When he returned stateside, Sheeran became a bouncer, loan shark, hustler, and a ballroom dance instructor at Wagner’s Dance Hall in Philly. He fell in with a notoriously tough Teamster local, which eventually brought him into the realm of Russell Bufalino, a man described by Bobby Kennedy during the McClellan Hearings as “one of the most ruthless and powerful leaders of the Mafia in the United States.” According to Sheeran, Bufalino was tough enough to have once told Mafia acolyte Frank Sinatra at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, “Sit down Frank, or I’ll rip your tongue out and stick it up your ass.”

  The Mafia boss took a liking to Sheeran and was the first to call him “the Irishman.” Bufalino admired the way Sheeran carried himself, like a man who had killed before and would do it again if circumstances called for it and the price was right. When the mafiosi first introduced Sheeran to Jimmy Hoffa, he told the Teamster boss, “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.”

  Hoffa put the Irishman to work right away, flying him to Chicago to paint a house. Wrote Sheeran

  I was used to getting put on a landing craft and now I was moving up in the world, invading Chicago on a plane. I was in Chicago maybe an hour. 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.

  Sheeran did many other hits in the same manner, surreptitious killings in which he knew almost nothing about the intended target or whoever else was involved in the job. Clean. Professional. The way hits were meant to be carried out in the underworld.

  Although Sheeran was loyal to Hoffa on the friendship level (“I’ll be a Hoffa man ’til the day they pat my face with a shovel and steal my cufflinks,” he told his Teamster brothers on Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night in 1973), he was an equal opportunity hit man. He was the only person to win a Man of the Year award from an Upstate Pennsylvania chapter of the Italian American Civil Rights League as well as a Teamsters Man of the Year award in 1973, two years before he whacked Hoffa.

  By the time the order came down to take Jimmy out, Sheeran had to admit it was no big surprise. After serving fifty-eight months in prison for misappropriating $1.7 million in union pension funds and getting released early courtesy of a commutation from President Richard M. Nixon, Hoffa wanted his old job back. The mob had other ideas. Hoffa began to mouth off, threatening to tell where the bodies were buried. The legendary Teamster boss knew he was playing with fire, telling his friend the Irishman on numerous occasions, “Watch your ass…you could end up being fair game…. You’re too close to me—in some people’s eyes.”

  Sheeran got the order to take Hoffa out from his other best friend, Bufalino.

  “Your friend made one too many threats in his life,” said the mafioso.

  Responded Sheeran, “The nuclear fallout’s going to hit the fan when they find the body.”

  “There won’t be a body,” said Bufalino. “Dust to dust. That’s what it is.”

  Wrote Sheeran: “I moved around in my seat. I couldn’t show anything in my face. I couldn’t say a word…. The wrong look in my eyes and my house gets painted.”

  On Hoffa’s famous last day in 1975, the last thing he wrote on a notepad next to the phone in his home was “Russ and Frank.” Bufalino and Sheeran. Hoffa was off to meet with them and a handful of key mafiosi to square things away with the mob. Sheeran was there to make Hoffa feel safe and at ease.

  The Irishman and a couple others guys were supposed to pick Jimmy up in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant on Telegraph Road in Hoffa’s hometown of Detroit. They arrived late, which angered the Teamster boss. When they told Jimmy there had been a change in plans, that they were now going to convene their meeting at a nearby house in a placid Detroit neighborhood, Hoffa was his usual
profane self—“What the fuck…. Who the fuck…. How the fuck…”—but he went along with it partly because Sheeran was there.

  In two cars, they drove to the house on a quiet street. Sheeran escorted Hoffa up the front stairs to the house. He opened the door and led Hoffa inside. It was only when the Teamster boss got into the front hallway and saw that there were no Mafia men on the premises to greet him that he knew he’d been setup, although he still believed the Irishman was on his side. Sheeran recalls:

  He turned fast, still thinking we were together on the thing, that I was his backup. Jimmy bumped into me hard. If he saw the piece in my hand he had to think I had it out to protect him. He took a quick step to go around me and get to the door. He reached for the knob and Jimmy Hoffa got shot twice at a decent range—not too close or the paint splatters back at you—in the back of the head behind his right ear. My friend didn’t suffer.

  Frank Sheeran did some other hits in later years and was lucky to live to retirement. Like most Irish American gangsters, he was a man who had pursued his version of the American Dream with a wife, kids, and an extended family. He was a working-class hood who lived a working-class life, suppressing whatever misgivings or guilt he may have had about his violent deeds behind a mask of toughness. It was only in his golden years that the ghosts of the Irishman’s past began to haunt him. The year before his death, Sheeran told his coauthor that he’d started having nightmares that mixed incidents from the war with incidents from his life in the mob. He began to “see” these people when he was awake, haunting apparitions he sometimes called “chemical people,” because he believed they were partly a result of the chemical imbalance that was caused whenever he neglected to take his medicine. Once, when he was driving in a car with the author, he said, “There are two chemical people in the backseat. I know they’re not real, but what are they doing in the car?”