"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (12 page)

The whole thing changed when I started hanging around downtown. Some of the drivers at Food Fair were Italian, and I started going downtown with them to the bars and restaurants that certain people also hung out in. I got into another culture.

I 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. 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 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, the publicity-shy Russell Bufalino had something to do with the mob’s unwanted publicity in 1957. Russell Bufalino helped organize the famous meeting of godfathers from around the nation at the town of Apalachin, New York, in November 1957. 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 Apalachin meeting did the mob much more harm than good. The police in Apalachin were suspicious of all the mob activity in the area and raided the house in which the meeting was being 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. 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 major decision of the Commission of La Cosa Nostra was made without Russell Bufalino’s approval. Yet the public knew nothing of him before Apalachin and the McClellan Committee hearings. Unlike the Al Capones or the Dapper Don–types who flaunt their status, the quiet Bufalino could have been mistaken for a typical Italian immigrant.

Born Rosario Bufalino in 1903 in Sicily, in the years following Apalachin and the McClellan hearings the Justice Department almost succeeded in having Bufalino deported, along with his close friend and ally Carlos Marcello, crime boss of New Orleans. With his plane tickets already purchased and arrangements made to take some of his money with him, Bufalino succeeded in beating his deportation charges in court.

Not wanting to take their chances in court with Carlos Marcello, the FBI literally picked Russell’s good friend Carlos up off the streets of New Orleans and put him on a plane to Guatemala. Carlos had a Guatemalan birth certificate, and according to the FBI he had no rights of an American citizen. Fuming and enraged, Marcello flew back and also beat his deportation charges in court.

Despite the government pressure Bufalino continued to conduct his business and flourish. The Pennsylvania Organized Crime Commission’s 1980 report “A Decade of Organized Crime” revealed that by that time: “There are no more Magaddino…or Genovese crime families—the members in these families are now under the control of Russell Bufalino.”

Bufalino was identified by the Pennsylvania Organized Crime Commission as a silent partner of the largest supplier of ammunition to the Untied States government, Medico Industries. 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
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 had three acquittals for organized crime activity in the seventies. The last, a federal extortion case, came down a mere five days prior to Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. The
Buffalo Evening News
reported on July 25, 1975: “‘It turned out the way I anticipated,’ said Bufalino, who has been linked to the CIA’s plotting of the Bay of Pigs invasion.” That same day the Rochester, New York,
Democrat
and
Chronicle
reported: “When asked if he will retire, Bufalino said, ‘I’d like to retire, but they won’t let me retire. I’ve got to pay my lawyers.’”

Russell Bufalino’s organized crime territory included Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia, upstate New York including Buffalo, and interests in Florida and Canada, parts of New York City, and parts of northern New Jersey. But his true power was in the respect he got from every mob family in the country. In addition, his wife, Carolina Sciandra, known as Carrie, was related to the Sciandra line of La Cosa Nostra. Although no Sciandra ever rose to godfather status, members of the family went back to the earliest days of the American Mafia.

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 Sheeran said that of all the alleged crime bosses he ever met, the mannerisms and style of the Marlon Brando portrayal in
The Godfather
most nearly resembled Russell Bufalino.

In a report of its findings the McClellan Committee on Organized Crime of the United States Senate called Russell Bufalino “one of the most ruthless and powerful leaders of the Mafia in the United States.”

Yet in the summer of 1999 I picked up a man, his wife, and his son along an interstate in upstate Pennsylvania. Their car had broken down, and they needed to get to a rest area. The man turned out to be the retired chief of police of the town where Russell Bufalino had lived and where his widow Carrie still lived. I identified myself as a former prosecutor and asked if the man could tell me anything about Russell Bufalino. The retired police chief smiled and told me that “whatever he did in other places he kept it out of our jurisdiction. He was old-school, very polite, a perfect gentleman. You wouldn’t know he had two dimes to rub together from looking at his house or the car he drove.”

 
chapter nine