"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (11 page)

I had too many jobs to remember. One job I do remember was taking hot blueberry pie mix coming out of a cooker onto an ice-cold aluminum conveyor. The more I raked, the cooler the blueberries got before they went into the Tastykake pies. The job pusher kept on me to rake harder. 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 that my mother went over to see a state senator named Jimmy Judge. My mother had some political connections. One of her brothers was a doctor in Philly. Another one was big in the glass union and was a freeholder, which is like a councilman, in Camden. He’s the one who got me the union apprenticeship at Pearlstein’s. Anyway, one morning when I woke up she told me she had arranged with the senator to get me on the Pennsylvania State Police. All I had to do was pass the physical. I wanted to be grateful, but that was the last thing I wanted to do, so I never went down to pay my respects to the senator. Years later when I told my lawyer, F. Emmett Fitzpatrick, that one he said, “What a cop you’d have made!” I said, “Yeah, a rich one.” Rape, child abuse, things like that I’d have arrested you for. Anything else and you’d have been on your way with an 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 crew. Football helped a little, too. I played tackle and guard for Shanahan’s. My old pal Yank Quinn was the quarterback. They had leather football helmets in those days, but with my oversized head I couldn’t get comfortable in one. So I played with a woolen cap on my head, not for bravado or anything, but it’s the only thing I could get to fit my big head. There’s no doubt if I was born later on in better times I would have loved to try out to be a professional football player. I wasn’t just big. I was very strong, very fast, very agile, and a smart player. All my teammates but one are gone now. Like I said, we’re all terminal; we just don’t know the date. Like all young people we thought we had forever to live back then.

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 had a trained kangaroo in the ring with boxing gloves on. My pals put me up to fight the kangaroo. 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 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, 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 the first two rounds my buddies are laughing like hell, but I don’t know what’s going on. I came out for the second round, and it was more of the same only this time I knocked the kangaroo down twice—which isn’t easy to begin with—and I got hit on the back of the head twice. 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 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 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 got taken down to Moko, which was our name for the city jail at Tenth and Moyamensing. In those days they’d keep you informally for a while and let you go without any legal proceedings. They didn’t work you over or anything, unless you asked for it. They picked their shots. When they thought I had enough punishment they released me.

I headed straight for Mary Leddy’s house, knocked on her door, and asked her out. We made a date to go see Erskine Hawkins’s big band at the Earl Theater. We had a ball. She was a real strict Catholic, and I was very respectful. She had beautiful dark-brown hair and the prettiest Irish face I had ever seen. And boy could she dance. I had in my mind that night that this was the girl I was going to marry. I wanted to settle down. I had done enough roaming. I meant well.

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 went to church every Sunday, and I went with her. I did try hard. In 1947 we got married at Mother of Sorrows Church, where I had gotten bounced as an altar boy for drinking the wine. I was still without a steady job, picking up work where I could, and working at Wagner’s.

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 College of Pharmacy as a secretary. 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 to my rap sheet, my first real legal proceeding was on February 4, 1947. Two big stiffs on a trolley must have said something I didn’t like, or maybe they looked at me the wrong way. It didn’t take much in those days. The three of us got off the trolley to fight. I was beating the both of them when the cops pulled up and told us to get going. The two stiffs were happy to get off the corner. I told the cop I wasn’t going anywhere until I was finished with them. Next thing you know I’m fighting three cops. This time they booked me for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. I had a pocketknife in my pocket. So to keep the bail high they threw in a charge for a concealed weapon. If I was ever going to use a weapon it wouldn’t be a pocketknife. I paid a fine, and they put me on probation.

We saved our money and didn’t stay too long with the Leddys, and I kept looking for work I could stay with. 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 desperation for a job, I went walking down Girard Avenue among the real butcher companies. I saw a black guy lugging hindquarters and loading them onto a truck for Swift’s meat company. 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 black guy was Buddy Hawkins and we became friends. Every morning for breakfast Buddy had a triple shot of Old Grand-Dad and a double piece of French apple pie. Buddy introduced me to Dusty Wilkinson, a black heavyweight who once fought the champ Jersey Joe Wolcott. He gave Wolcott a hell of a fight. Dusty was good people and we became friends. He was a good fighter, but he didn’t like to train. He worked as a bouncer at a black dance club called the Nixon Ballroom and at a bar, the Red Rooster, at Tenth and Wallace. I’d stop in and hang out with Dusty at the bar and drink for free.

With a steady paycheck coming in and a baby on the way, Mary was able to give notice at her job, and we were able to afford our own place to live in. We rented a house in Upper Darby. We paid half the rent in exchange for Mary taking care of the landlady’s daughter during the day.

And then we had our first baby girl, Mary Ann, born on Mary’s birthday. There’s no greater feeling than that. I made a vow to make as much money as I could for my family. Being Catholic we were going to have as many children as God provided to us. We had a nice christening for Mary Ann at the house. Dusty came to the house, which was a little unusual in 1948 in Philadelphia. The Phillies were the last major league team to get a black player.

After loading trucks for a while, I finally got a good steady union job as a truck driver with Food Fair. I kept that job for ten years. I delivered hindquarters and chickens mostly. Dusty showed me how to make a little extra on the side. I’d set aside some chickens and replace them with ice so the weight of the crates remained the same. I’d drive by the Red Rooster bar, and Dusty would have the people lined up to buy their chickens. He’d sell whole, fresh-killed chickens for a buck apiece, and we’d split the money down the middle. If I had sixty extra chickens, that was $30 apiece.

My daughter Peggy was born a little over a year later, and with the steady work at Food Fair, the extra job at Wagner’s, and the money from the chickens, things were looking prosperous around the Sheeran household. Mary’s mother helped out with the two babies.

Then I switched over a couple of nights from Wagner’s Dance Hall to the Nixon Ballroom as a bouncer with Dusty. The black girls would hit on me to make their boyfriends jealous, and I’d have to settle everybody down. One day Dusty came up with an idea. He told me that the men were beginning to think I was afraid to fight them because I would only settle them down. So we worked out a deal where I would back down and keep backing down while Dusty made bets that I would kick a guy’s ass. 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. Anyway, Dusty and I would split the profit on the bets. Unfortunately, that didn’t last too long. Pretty soon there were no volunteers.

We had our third daughter in 1955, Dolores. Mary and I went to church every Sunday, and the children had their own mass. Mary went to novenas when they had them and made all the sacraments. Mary was a terrific mother. She was a very quiet girl like my mother, but she showed our girls affection. That was hard for me to do, because I never got it as a kid. I learned how more with my grandchildren than with my own children. Mary did the raising of the girls. All my daughters never gave me a headache on their behavior. Not due to my care. Due to their mother’s attention and the way she raised them.

I used to take my second daughter, Peggy, to Johnny Monk’s club with me. Mary Ann liked to stay at home with her mother and the new baby, Dolores. Johnny Monk was the ward leader. His joint had very good food. We’d go there for New Year’s Eve, even though Mary was no drinker. 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.