“No way were there only seven people there besides the Gallo party, if that’s what some book says. It was pretty crowded for that time of night, with people at maybe four or five tables and a couple of people sitting at the bar. Maybe people left after we got there and before it happened, that I don’t know. We came in the front door—the one on the corner of Hester and Mulberry. There were no tables to the left on the Hester Street side. They were all in front of you as you walked in—between the bar on the left and the Mulberry Street wall on the right. We were sitting toward the back. I was facing Hester Street. My best friend sat to my right. Her brother and his wife sat opposite us. They faced the back wall and the side door off Mulberry. I remember the Gallo party to our left because of the little girl, and because I thought that the girl’s mother was very pretty. Besides the little girl there were two or three women and two or three men. I don’t remember seeing the faces of the men.
“Our seafood had just arrived when I noticed a tall man walk in through the Mulberry Street door. I could see the door easily. The door was just off my left shoulder. He walked on a diagonal to the bar, walking right in front of me—the whole way in my direct line of vision. As he walked past me I remember being struck by him. I remember thinking he was distinctive—quite tall and a handsome man. He stopped at the bar not far, at all, from our table. I was looking down at my plate of food when I heard the first shot. I looked up, and that same man was standing there facing the Gallo table with his back to the bar. I can’t say I remember a gun in his hand, but he was definitely the one doing the shooting. There’s no doubt about that. He was calmly standing there while everybody else was ducking.
“The Gallo party didn’t know what hit them.
“It was Sheeran. That man is the same man in this photo. Even the video looks more like the way he looked that night—even though he’s much older in the video. Oh, it was him. I’m positive. In those news photos [circa 1980] you showed me he looks bloated and fat, but not in the video. In this photo he looks like a clown [a photo published in Newsweek in 1979.]”
I told her that Sheeran had done a lot of drinking and became bloated after he was forced to kill Hoffa in 1975, and she said, “That’s the year I came to New York to go to grad school in journalism at Columbia.”
She then went on with her account. “My friend’s brother yelled for us to get down. Other people were screaming to get down, too. Besides the gunshots the thing I remember most when I was down on the tile floor was the crashing of glass. We stayed on the floor until the shooting stopped. When the shooting stopped my friend’s brother yelled, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and we got up and ran out the Mulberry Street door. There were a lot of others shouting “Let’s get out of here,” too, and they ran away when we did.
“We ran up Mulberry. There was nobody on Mulberry firing at any getaway car, if that’s what the bodyguard claimed. Our car was parked near the police station. On the drive home we speculated about whether we had just been in a robbery or a mob hit. Nobody wanted to stereotype Little Italy, but we thought it was mob related. I don’t remember if we heard it on news radio on the way home, but we saw it in the papers the next day. It was pretty horrible. I think if my girlfriend and I had been there alone we might have gone back the next day, but her brother and his wife were very protective and didn’t want us involved in any way.”
This Gallo witness with a journalist’s memory and eye for detail told me that she had not read any of the stories that had cropped up over the years. She didn’t like thinking about it or talking about it. She had never heard about the “three Italians” until Eric Shawn had mentioned them. She said, “That’s ridiculous. There’s no way three Italians burst through that side door on Mulberry Street and started shooting. I’d have seen them come in. If there were three men we’d have been too scared to get up and run away. If we did get up we wouldn’t have run out that side door.”
I closed the session by asking her again how sure she was that Sheeran was the man she had seen that night. She said, “I’m positive. He’s definitely the man I saw that night.”
This positive eyewitness identification sealed it; if I were the prosecutor in this case, I would have just heard the cell door slam. Although the identification was made many years after the fact, she was a budding journalist who had an opportunity to see the killer and to form a mental image of him before he became a threat with a gun in his hand. Eyewitnesses confronted with a gun often remember only the gun.
As a result of her identification, I decided to buy as many books as I could find on Gallo. It’s been a while; many are used, out of print. Their versions of that night at Umberto’s often border on the silly. However, a 1976 book written by Pete “The Greek” Diapoulos, Gallo’s bodyguard, was more revealing.
In The Sixth Family, Diapoulos writes that Gallo’s birthday celebration began that night at the Copacabana, the famous New York nightclub. Don Rickles was the entertainer that night, and he paid his respects to Gallo. At the Copa, Gallo had an encounter with “an old timer, Russ Bufalino, a regular greaseball.” In Bufalino’s lapel Gallo spotted an Italian-American Civil Rights League button. True to Bufalino’s love of jewelry, this button had a diamond in it. Joe Colombo, Bufalino’s friend and fellow boss, the man Gallo ordered hit, had been in a coma for ten months. Gallo said to Bufalino, “Hey, what’re you doing with that? You really believe in that bullshit league?”
Diapoulos wrote:
You saw how Bufalino’s chin went, his back going very straight, turning away from us. Frank [Bufalino’s companion] with a very worried look, took Joey by the arm. “Joey, that’s nothing to talk about here. Let’s just have a few drinks.”
“Yeah, we’ll have a few drinks.”
“Joey, he’s a boss.”
“So he’s a boss. So am I a boss. That make him any better than me? We’re all equal. We’re all supposed to be brothers.” “Brothers” came out like it was anything but.
“Joey,” I said, “Let’s go to the table. Let’s not have a beef.”
Diapoulos identified Bufalino’s companion, the one “with a very worried look” who took Gallo by the arm, as a man named Frank. Diapoulos described how the “beef” got started: “Champagne was still being sent over. A wiseguy named Frank sent some. He was with an old-timer, Russ Bufalino, a regular greaseball, the boss of Erie, Pennsylvania.”
And Frank Sheeran, Russell Bufalino’s regular companion on their drives to New York, always described Gallo as “a fresh kid.” Frank had reason to know. Because this incident at the Copa reflected on Bufalino, it was the kind of detail Sheeran would have omitted in his confession to me.
Joseph D. Pistone, the real-life Donnie Brasco, told me that when he was working undercover for the FBI he used to hang out at the Vesuvio. There he met Bufalino and Sheeran. They came in every Thursday. The Vesuvio was a long walk or a short ride from the Copa. Gallo’s birthday party at the Copa began at 11 P.M. on a Thursday night. By 5:20 on Friday morning Joey Gallo was dead.
Russell and Frank in New York City at the Copa the night Crazy Joey Gallo got “fresh” with the wrong people and had his house painted. Like Jimmy Hoffa’s, and all the other houses Frank Sheeran confessed to painting, the Gallo mystery is solved.
One of Frank Sheeran’s daughters, Dolores, told me after the release of “I Heard You Paint Houses”: “Jimmy Hoffa was one of only two people my father cared anything about. Russell Bufalino was the other one. Killing Jimmy Hoffa tortured my father the rest of his life. There was so much guilt and suffering my father lived with after the disappearance. He drank and drank. At times he couldn’t walk. I was always afraid to face that he did it. He would never admit it until you came along. The FBI spent almost thirty years torturing my father and scrutinizing his every move in order to get him to confess.
“Having him for a father was a nightmare. We couldn’t go to him with a problem because of our fear of the horrible things he would do to fix it for us. He thought he was protecting us
with the way he handled things, but it was just the opposite. We didn’t get protected by him because we were too afraid to go to him for protection. A neighborhood man exposed himself to me and I couldn’t tell my father. My oldest sister never went with us when my father took us out, because she was afraid he wouldn’t bring us back home. We hated the headlines growing up. All of us girls suffer from it to this day. My sisters and I begged him not to write this book, but in the end we gave in. At least I did. He needed to get it off his chest. We had enough headlines about murders and violence, but I told him to tell you the truth. If my father had not told the truth to you no one would ever have known the real story.
“I feel like we’ve lived under this black cloud forever. I want it to be over. My father is finally at peace now. I would like the same for Jimmy’s family. My father killed his friend and regretted it till the day he died. In my heart I always had my suspicions and I did not want them confirmed. Now that I have been forced to acknowledge the life my father lived, I have had to come to terms with it and with all the conflicting emotions the truth has evoked.”
And only the truth has made it into this book.
New York City
March 2005
sources
Note: Direct quotes taken from news articles are all attributed in the text. In addition, as an aid to understanding certain issues and as an aid to the chronology of events I relied on other articles too numerous to cite here. The following newspapers’ coverage was particularly helpful: the Detroit Free Press, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Wilmington NewsJournal, the New York Times and the New York Post.
Bishop, Leo V., Frank J. Glasglow, and George A. Fisher. The Fighting Forty-fifth: The Combat Report of an Infantry Division. Baton Rouge, La.: Army & Navy Publishing Company, 1946.
Brill, Steven. The Teamsters. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
Capeci, Jerry. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Mob. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Alpha Books, 2005.
Capeci, Jerry. Jerry Capeci’s Gangland. New York: Alpha Books, 2003.
Coffey, Joseph J. and Jerry Schmetterer. The Coffey Files: One Cop’s War Against the Mob. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Cohen, Celia. Only in Delaware: Politics and Politcians in the First State. Newark, Delaware: Grapevine, 2002.
Davis, John H. Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. New York: Signet Books, 1989.
Dean, John W. III. Blind Ambition. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.
Diapoulos, Peter. The Sixth Family. New York: Dutton, 1976.
Giancana, Sam, and Chuck Giancana. Double Cross. New York: Warner Books, 1992.
Gilbert, Martin. The Second World War: A Complete History. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989.
Hirshon, Stanley P. General Patton: A Soldier’s Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Kennedy, Robert F. The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee’s Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa and Corrupt Labor Unions. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.
Kwitny, Jonathan. Vicious Circles: The Mafia’s Control of the American Marketplace, Food, Clothing, Transportation, Finance. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.
Leamer, Laurence. The Kennedy Men: 1901–1963 The Laws of the Father. New York: Perrenial, 2001.
Maas, Peter. The Valachi Papers. New York: Perrenial, 1968.
Mahoney, Richard D. Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999.
Moldea, Dan E. The Hoffa Wars: The Rise and Fall of Jimmy Hoffa. New York: Shpolsky Publishers, 1993.
Murphy, Bruce Allen. Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House, 2003.
Mustain, Gene, and Jerry Capeci. Murder Machine: A True Story of Madness and the Mafia. New York: Dutton, 1992.
Neff, James. Mobbed up: Jackie Presser’s High-Wire Life in the Teamsters, the Mafia, and the FBI. New York: Dell Publishing, 1989.
Pennsylvania Crime Commission. A Decade of Organized Crime: 1980 Report. St. Davids, Pa.: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1980.
Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assasination of JFK. New York: Anchor Books, 1993.
Regano, Frank, and Selwyn Raab. Mob Lawyer. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994.
Rule, Ann. The Stranger Beside Me. 20th Anniversary Edition. New York: Signet, 2000.
Russo, Gus. The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2001.
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. Robert Kennedy and His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978.
Sheridan, Walter. The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972.
Simone, Robert F. The Last Mouthpiece: The Man Who Dared to Defend the Mob. Philadelphia: Camino Books, 2001.
Sloane, Arthur A. Hoffa. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991.
Starr, Kenneth W. First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life. New York: Warner Books, 2002.
Thomas, Evan. Robert Kennedy: His Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
United States, Warren Commission. The Warren Commission Report: Report of President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Vise, David A. The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History. New York: Grove Press, 2002.
Zeller, Duke F. C. Devil’s Pact: Inside the World of the Teamsters Union. Secaucus, N.J.: Birch Lane Press, 1996.
Copyright © 2004, 2005 by Charles Brandt
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to: Steerforth Press L.C., 45 Lyme Road, Suite 208 Hanover, New Hampshire 03755
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Brandt, Charles.
“I heard you paint houses”: Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran and the inside story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the last ride of Jimmy Hoffa / Charles Brandt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-1-58642-155-7
1. Gangsters—United States. 2. Mafia—United States. 3. Teamsters—United States. 4. Hoffa, James R. (James Riddle), 1913–5. Sheeran, Frank. I. Title.
HV6446.B73 2004
364.1'06'0973—dc22
2004006625
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