I have a small room in a nursing home. I keep my door open. I can’t stand to have a door closed.”
afterword
I heard Frank’s lawyer, Emmett Fitzpatrick, say to Frank at one of Frank’s birthday parties, “You’re a hell of a man with a telephone in your hand, Frank. What would you care if they sent you to prison. As long as they gave you a telephone in your cell, you’d be happy. You wouldn’t know you were in jail.”
During the years I spent on this project Frank Sheeran called me repeatedly throughout the day, practically every day, to talk about practically everything. He referred to nearly anyone he spoke about as being “good people.” He ended nearly every conversation by telling me, “Everything is copacetic.” I could always tell when he was having second thoughts about having admitted something—the number, the volume, and the nervous energy of his social calls increased. Occasionally, he would try to take back what he said. But his nerves would eventually settle down and he would be comfortable, even pleased, with having made the admission, with having told someone.
Frank got especially nervous as the day approached for our planned trip to Detroit to find the house where Jimmy Hoffa was hit.
In February 2002 I drove Frank to Detroit. At the time he was living by himself in an apartment in a Philadelphia suburb. He told me that he had just started having a lot of nightmares, mixing incidents in the war with incidents and people from his life in the mob. He began to “see” these people when he was awake, and he called them “chemical people,” because he believed they were from a chemical imbalance that would be fixed when he got his medicine checked. “There are two chemical people in the backseat. I know they’re not real, but what are they doing in the car?”
The drive west through Pennsylvania and Ohio into Michigan was a nightmare for me when he was awake. If he wasn’t talking about the “people” he was critical of my driving. At one point I said to him, “Frank, the only good thing about having you here in the car with me is that you’re not calling me on the telephone.” Fortunately, he laughed.
We took two days for the drive. At the motel the first night he made me keep the door open between our rooms. Ever since jail he didn’t want to be alone behind a closed door. The next day in the car he slept a lot and became much improved. I began to think that all he needed was some good restful sleep, which he rarely got alone in his apartment.
When I saw the Detroit skyline I nudged him awake. He took one look at the skyline and barked at me: “You got a piece?”
“A what?” I said.
“A piece,” he demanded.
“What do you mean a piece?”
“A P-I-E-C-E piece.” He made his hand into a gun and made as if to fire the gun into my floorboard.
“What would I be doing with a piece?”
“Lawyers have pieces. You’re allowed to have a permit.”
“I don’t have one,” I yelled back. “I’d be the last person you know to have one. What do you want a piece for?”
“Jimmy had friends here. They know I was on the other side of this thing.”
“Frank, what are you trying to do? Scare me? Nobody knows you’re here.”
He grunted, and I began to calculate the approximate ages of Jimmy’s former Detroit allies. As I settled down, I had the image of Jimmy’s “friends,” if any were still alive, in wheelchairs stalking us.
When we got to our motel I was relieved to see and meet Frank’s former fellow inmate and the man who was going to write the book in 1995 blaming the Hoffa hit on Nixon, John Zeitts. He had driven there from his home in Nebraska to visit Frank out of respect, and he would now spend the night in Frank’s room. He would change the bandage on Frank’s bedsore. At dinner that night at a steak house, Frank looked over at me and winked. “You got a piece?” he said and the two of them laughed. Frank told me that John had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam. That night I was entranced by the story of John’s escape from the Viet Cong. He bore long scars all across his torso. The Viet Cong liked to slice a prisoner’s skin because a certain type of fly would lay its eggs in the open wound. John would find maggots oozing out of his body years later.
That night alone in my motel room I wondered if I had waited too long to make this Detroit trip. I knew better than to rely on Sheeran’s help in finding the house. The next morning I asked John to help us, but he did not know there was a house. It was not part of anything in the fantasy version he had worked on with Frank in 1995. I had my notes with me and found the general directions that Frank had given during an editorial meeting we’d had with Fox News. Amazingly, they were almost as solid in 2002 as they had been in 1975. The only thing missing from my notes was a final left turn onto the street opposite a footbridge that was mentioned. It turned out that the footbridge was in a golf course on the right. It took a few passes before I saw the bridge at all, finally noticing it from a parallel road on the other side of the course, a road that was on higher ground and overlooked the links. I drove back around to the original road and saw the problem at once.
Over the years a chain-link fence had been built, and the fence made the bridge less noticeable than in the directions Sheeran had given me some time back. While we were stopped near that footbridge at a T intersection I got out of the car, looked down the street to my left, and spotted the rear of a house at the end of the block on the right that had the kind of backyard Sheeran had described. Of course, I thought, being on a golf course the footbridge could have had no significance to the directions except that it was at the bridge that a left turn had to be made. I made the turn and drove to the front of that house. The steely, tense look on Sheeran’s face told me at once that this was it. He studied it and confirmed that it was with a nod of his head and a grunt of “Yeah.” It was a very quiet street, a perfect house in a perfect street. The only thing that bothered me about the house was that it was brick and Sheeran had described a house with brown shingles. It wasn’t until after we returned home and I developed the photos I had taken that I realized that the top half of the house was all brown shingles on the rear and on the side of the house that you see as you approach it from the footbridge.
On the return trip east from Detroit it was evident that Sheeran had settled down. There were no “chemical people” and no complaints about my driving. We found the airport at Port Clinton, took some photos, and drove home in one day. Shortly after this trip I helped his daughters get him into an assisted living facility. I accompanied Frank and his daughter Dolores to a doctor who prescribed medication to control the “chemical people,” and I never heard about them again. I never again saw him in as distraught and nervous a condition as he was in heading in to Detroit without a “P-I-E-C-E piece.”
The next trip we took together was to find the company grounds in Baltimore where he had picked up a load of war matériel for the Bay of Pigs invasion and where he had delivered rifles just prior to the John F. Kennedy assassination. Before we went down to Baltimore he told me the name of the place was the Campbell Brickyard. He had a general idea where it was, but we couldn’t find it. Finally, I drove into the Bonsal Cement Plant to ask if anyone knew about the brickyard. As we entered there was something familiar about the plant to Sheeran. Inside the office I learned from a female employee that when her father had worked there Bonsal had been the Campbell Cement Company, but she didn’t know of any Campbell Brickyard. We drove around the grounds. Some new buildings had been erected. Sheeran pointed to an older structure and said, “That’s where the soldiers came out of to load the truck.” I took a picture and we returned to Philadelphia.
Some things did not go as smoothly as the trip to Baltimore.
It has been my experience that when an adult who has developed a conscience in his childhood wants to get something off his chest the route to confession is usually a circuitous one with many fits and starts, with roadblocks and red herrings and hints and glimpses of the truth. Often the person drops a hint and wants the questioner to figure it out. A good examp
le of such an interrogation is the notorious case of Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons in her car in a lake and blamed a “black carjacker.” For nine days Sheriff Howard Wells displayed the patience and skill of a superb interrogator who knows how to avoid pitfalls, maintain a rapport, and follow the hints until it is time to confront the truth.
There were certain things that Frank Sheeran expressed to me that I knew would interfere with the clearing of his conscience. He didn’t want the three daughters that still were in his life to think any worse of him than they already might. His deceased wife, Irene, had assured his youngest daughter that Frank didn’t have time to kill Hoffa, because Irene was convinced he was “with her.” Frank didn’t want Barbara Crancer to think he was some kind of ogre because he had called her mother two days after her father’s disappearance to express his concern. Frank didn’t want to offend Russell Bufalino’s widow, Carrie, or anyone else who might be alive. He didn’t want people that he had been involved with over the years to think he had gone soft in the end like John Francis and Lou Cordi. He said, “I lived my life a certain way. I don’t want people thinking I went the other way.” Another time he said, “Even though he’s dead, if I would say that about Russ, as close as we were, there are other people out there who know I know things about them.” In the interview, I kept the focus on the Hoffa case.
About two years into the interview process, after Sheeran had admitted to me that he was the shooter in the Hoffa case but about a year before going to Detroit to find the house, my agent scheduled a meeting at Emmett Fitzpatrick’s office with Eric Shawn, a senior correspondent with Fox News who was knowledgeable on mob matters, and his producer, Kendall Hagan. It was our intention to get Frank comfortable with one correspondent that he could trust. At the meeting, consistent with the protection of his rights, Sheeran was going to utter for the first time to anyone besides me the words: “I shot Jimmy Hoffa.”
Two nights before the meeting I arrived at Sheeran’s apartment to spend the night in his guest room. Without comment Sheeran handed me a typewritten letter purportedly signed by Jimmy Hoffa in 1974 following Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night. More than half of the letter contained things Sheeran had told me all along, starting with the 1991 aborted interviews. The rest contained things that more easily could be read to bolster the fantasy version of events that he had promoted with his friend John Zeitts. I assured Frank that at some point I would check the authenticity of this letter.
The meeting went well. When Shawn asked if he thought he could find the house, Sheeran gave us the directions and mentioned “the footbridge.” This was the first time he had ever revealed the directions to me. His deepened voice and hard demeanor was chilling when, for the first time ever, he stated publicly to someone other than me that he had shot Jimmy Hoffa two times in the back of the head. To everyone in the room it had the ring of truth. Fox News did some preliminary independent research and confirmed the historical value of Frank Sheeran’s account of the last ride of Jimmy Hoffa.
Soon thereafter, I contacted the renowned forensic lab of Dr. Henry Lee. They assured me they could determine the authenticity of Hoffa’s signature and could lift latent Hoffa prints from the letter. However, I would have to contact the FBI and obtain Hoffa’s prints and handwriting exemplars for them. At that time we had no publisher and the book had yet to be written. I did not want to alert the FBI and have the story leak out before there was a book in the stores. I decided to put the matter on a back burner. Later on when we got a publisher I explained all this and the publisher told me that, coincidentally, they had published Henry Lee’s book. I gave them my e-mail correspondence with Lee’s lab and hoped that because of the publisher’s relationship the lab would make the necessary requests of the FBI themselves. The publisher contacted the lab and sent them the letter. There was no need for exemplars or prints; when the letter was put under a special light it turned out to be a laughable forgery. The paper it was typed on was manufactured in 1994, not 1974. The signature was inked over a faint photocopy of an authentic Hoffa signature. Even though the letter was not at all central to the book and could be removed easily, and even though the editor assigned to the book had no doubt that Sheeran had killed Hoffa, the publisher decided to cancel the book. I was upset at Frank until my now former editor suggested that I got off easy, considering what Sheeran had done to some other friends in his life. He said, “If you can’t trust a man who murdered one of his best friends, who can you trust?” He asked me to be sure never to give Sheeran his phone number.
When the dust settled and I confronted him Sheeran conceded that the letter had given him insurance, a way out if he ever needed it. It was to him a loose thread he could unravel any time the heat got to be too much for him. If a grand jury were convened he could expose the letter and that would cancel out everything else in the book.
My agent, Frank Weimann, told Sheeran over the phone that if he wanted to get another publisher he would have to come clean and stand behind the book. Weimann sent Sheeran a hard copy of his e-mail to the former publisher, which said, among other things: “I am willing to stake my reputation on this book for many reasons, not the least of these is that ‘I Heard You Paint Houses’ is of historical significance. Frank Sheeran killed Jimmy Hoffa.”
In the aftermath of losing the book deal Frank’s generous and delightful girlfriend and constant companion, Elsie, sadly passed away following surgery. Her room had been across the hall from Frank’s at the assisted living facility where they met. On occasion I had taken the couple to dinner, and it was always a lot of fun. Frank teased her about her love of food. He claimed he had fork marks on his hand from the time he made the mistake of reaching over to taste her dish. Although his daughters and I never told Frank of Elsie’s passing, he learned it somehow. Around that time his health took a dramatic turn for the worse, and he was repeatedly hospitalized. He was in severe pain and became bedridden.
At the hospital he sensed that he was dying, and he expressed to me that he didn’t want to live the way he was living. In our conversation about doing a video to stand behind the book, as Weimann had suggested, he said: “All I want now asking [sic], Charles, is keep the pain at a minimum, keep me dry, and let the Man upstairs do what He wants to do. I can’t be livin’ like this.”
After speaking by phone with Emmett Fitzpatrick, Frank Sheeran decided to go on videotape and stand behind the material in the book, including what happened to Jimmy Hoffa on July 30, 1975.
Although I agreed to make it as easy on him as possible, he now publicly would be endorsing the truthfulness of that material. I said to him, “All you’re going to have to do is back up what the book says. That’s all. Will you be prepared to do that, do you think?” He answered, “I might as well.” As I left him that night he said in reference to his having received the visiting priest’s sacraments, “I’m at peace.” I said, “God bless you. You’ll be at peace standing behind the book.”
The next day he said that the FBI will “have me [sic] a hard time to question because they can’t make me travel anywhere.” Because of his health and medical needs he did not expect that any prosecutor would bother to indict him.
When I turned the video on he became hesitant and withdrawn. I told him: “You’re hesitating, right? I don’t want to do it if you’re hesitating.” He said, “No, I’m not hesitating.” I said, “If you’re heart’s not in it, forget about it.” He replied: “It’s something that you’ve got to work yourself into. I’m going to do it.” He asked for his mirror to check his appearance.
We discussed that he had given his confession and received communion the day before. He said, “And I had it last week, too.”
I said that he was now facing his “moment of truth.” I gave him the galley copy to hold up to the camera. And then, without any of our normal protective language, I got down to it and said: “I’m going to get it now, okay. Now, you read this book. The things that are in there about Jimmy and what happened to him are things tha
t you told me, isn’t that right?” Frank Sheeran said: “That’s right.” I said: “And you stand behind them?” He said: “I stand behind what’s written.”
I immediately asked him a question about what Jimmy Hoffa was like and that caused him to say that Jimmy, “…did not—what can I say—did not—You have to go into questions, then one question leads to another.—Let the book speak for itself.” I knew that he wouldn’t want to delve into details, especially about Jimmy Hoffa, but it was hard not to talk in some detail.
Unfortunately, the camera battery died, and it was awhile before I discovered it and plugged the camera in. Furthermore, to make him comfortable or at his request I stopped the tape from time to time and turned on an audio tape recorder. Still, ample material was recorded. In reviewing the recordings, both audio and video, there are a number of segments that are revealing of the man himself, some of his deeds, and the interview process.
At one point he asked me to be sure to specify in the book that whenever he was intimate with a woman other than his wife it was at a time that he was single. He said that to say otherwise “don’t serve no literary purpose…. That’s not going to win no Pulitzer Prize…. Make sure to note I was single.”
Looking at the cover of the book he said, “I think the title sucks.” I said, “But they’re the first words that Jimmy ever spoke to you, right?”
“Yeah,” he admitted and dropped that topic.
While he was looking at a photo of Sal Briguglio I mentioned that we would be following our plan to urge the FBI to release their file so that whatever Sally Bugs had told them would corroborate the book. I said the photo was taken “[b]efore you took care of him. You know what I mean?”
I Heard You Paint Houses Page 33