"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (13 page)

Prosciutto Bread and Homemade Wine

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The day I met Russell Bufalino changed my life. And later on, just being seen in his company by certain people turned out to save my life in a particular matter where my life was most definitely on the line. For better or for worse, meeting Russell Bufalino and being seen in his company put me deeper into the downtown culture than I ever would have gotten on my own. After the war, meeting Russell was the biggest thing that happened to me after my marriage and having my daughters.

I was hauling meat for Food Fair in a refrigerator truck in the mid-fifties, maybe 1955. Syracuse was my destination when my engine started acting up in Endicott, New York. I pulled into a truck stop and I had the hood up when this short old Italian guy walked up to my truck and said, “Can I give you a hand, kiddo?” I said sure and he monkeyed around for a while, I think with the carburetor. He had his own tools. I spoke a little Italian to him while he was working. Whatever it was, he got my horse started for me. When the engine started purring, I climbed down and I shook his hand and thanked him. He had a lot of strength in his handshake. The way we shook hands—warmly—you could tell that we both hit it off with each other.

Later on when we got to know each other he told me that the first time he saw me he liked the way I carried myself. I told him that there was something special about him, too, like maybe he owned the truck stop or something, or maybe he owned the whole road, but it was more than that. Russell had the confidence of a champ or a winner while still being humble and respectful. When you went to church for confession on Saturday you knew which priest’s line to get on. You wanted to go to the fairest one that didn’t give you a hard time; he was like that priest. At the time we shook hands that first time I ever laid eyes on him I had no idea who he was or that I would ever see him again. But change my life he did.

Around that same time I had already started going downtown to the Bocce Club at Fifth and Washington with a bunch of Italian guys I worked with at Food Fair who lived in South Philly. It was a new crowd for me. From there we’d go over to the Friendly Lounge at Tenth and Washington, owned by a guy named John who went by the nickname of Skinny Razor. At first I didn’t know anything about John, but some of the guys from Food Fair pushed a little money on their routes for John. A waitress, say, at a diner would borrow $100 and pay back $12 a week for ten weeks. If she couldn’t afford the $12 one week she’d just pay $2, but she’d still owe the $12 for that week and it would get added on at the end. If it wasn’t paid on time the interest would keep piling up. The $2 part of the debt was called the “vig,” which is short for vigorish. It was the juice.

My Italian Food Fair buddies made a few bucks that way, and one time when we were at the Friendly Lounge they introduced me to Skinny Razor, and I got started doing it on my route. It was easy money, no muscle, strictly providing a service for people who had no credit. This was before credit cards when the people had nowhere to go for a couple of bucks between paychecks. But technically, pushing money was all illegal since it was the alleged crime of loan sharking.

Pushing money was a natural for me, because I was already pushing football lottery tickets in the White Tower hamburger joints on my route for an Irish muscle guy and ex-boxer named Joey McGreal, who was a Teamster organizer out of my Local 107. My Italian pals at Food Fair bought lottery tickets from me. I wasn’t backing the lottery. I couldn’t afford to do that in case somebody hit big. McGreal was backing the thing, and I took my cut on commission. I played the lottery tickets myself. Soon I began selling them downtown to people in the bars. The real bookmakers like Skinny Razor didn’t care if I sold them right in the bar, because they didn’t mess with football lotteries. It was small stuff. Even so, they were illegal in those days; I guess they still are.

You could tell Skinny Razor was successful with his side businesses of bookmaking and loan sharking from the way he conducted his business and the kind of respect he got from people who came in to talk to him. He looked like he was an officer or something and everybody else was an enlisted man. But none of my Italian friends identified him as any kind of a gangster big shot or anything like that. What kind of a big shot has the nickname of Skinny Razor?

John got the name Skinny Razor because he used to own a live chicken store and the Italian ladies would come and pick out a chicken they wanted from looking at the chickens in the cages all lined up. Then John would take out a straight razor and cut the chicken’s throat, and that was the chicken the Italian ladies would take home and pluck and cook for dinner.

Skinny Razor was very well liked and he had a great sense of humor. He called everybody “mother” in an affectionate way, not like they use that term today. He was very lean and went about 6'1", which was very tall for downtown. He looked a little like a skinny straight razor. Skinny was very good for the underdog. If you made a mistake you could always cop a plea with him, unless what you did was “severe.” If it was a misdemeanor he’d give you a break, but he wasn’t going to adopt you.

As hard as it is to believe today, people didn’t really know that there was a mob organization in those days. We heard about individual gangsters, sure, like Al Capone with their own gang, but a national Mafia with a hand in just about everything—not too many people knew about that. I was in the know about a lot of things, but I didn’t know about that even a little bit. Like everybody else, I didn’t know that the neighborhood bookie was tied in with the cat-burglar jewel thief or the hijacker of trucks or the labor boss or the politician. I didn’t know there was this big thing I was getting exposed to little by little in the beginning, when I was getting exposed to their culture. In a way it was like a dock worker being exposed to asbestos every day and not knowing how dangerous it is. They didn’t want people to know.

The Italian guys I worked with at Food Fair who pushed money for him didn’t even know how big the guy was that they called Skinny Razor.

Shooting the breeze over a bottle of homemade red wine, I bragged to my Food Fair buddies about the deal I had going with Dusty on the chickens and they put me wise to more money that could be made. After your truck was loaded with hindquarters the yard manager where you loaded your truck would put an aluminum seal on the lock and off you’d go. When you got to the Food Fair store with your delivery of hindquarters the store manager would break the aluminum seal and you’d load the meat into the store’s refrigerator. Once the seal was broken it could never be put back together again, so you couldn’t break the seal on your way to the store with the meat delivery. Only the store manager could break the seal. But on cold bitter days the yard manager who was supposed to put the seal on after the meat was loaded onto your truck would get a little lazy and hand you the seal to put on for him. If you palmed the seal, you could deliver, say, five hindquarters to a guy waiting for it at a diner. He’d deliver it to restaurants and split the money with you. After you gave this guy at the diner his five hindquarters, you’d put the seal on your lock. When you got to the store your seal would be intact and would then be broken by the store manager and everything would be copacetic. Then you’d be a nice guy and tell the butcher you were going to pack the meat for him in his icebox. You’d go in and there’d be hindquarters on hooks on the right rail. You’d take five off and put them on the left rail. Then instead of delivering twenty-five hindquarters you’d add the twenty you had left to the five you already had put on the left rail. The store manager would count your twenty-five and sign off on it. At inventory they’d see that they had a shortage, but they wouldn’t know who was responsible or how it happened. The yard manager would never admit he handed you the seal to put on yourself and that he was too lazy to go out in the cold and do his job the right way.

That’s how it worked in theory, but in reality nearly everybody was in on the deal and got a little piece of the pie for looking the other way.

Before the war I earned everything I ever had. During the war, you learned to take whatever you want, whatever you could get away with taking, not that there was much over there worth taking. Still, you took wine and women and if you needed a car you took it, too—stuff like that. After the war, it just seemed natural to take what you could take wherever you could take it. There was only so much blood you could sell for $10 a pint.

I got a little carried away one day and sold my entire load of meat on my way to a delivery in Atlantic City. I put the seal on my lock after the whole load of meat was transferred to the guy. When I got to Atlantic City the seal was broken by the manager and there was no meat inside and I was mystified. Maybe the guys who loaded the truck forgot to load it. The store manager asked me didn’t I realize I was driving a light truck? I said I thought I had a good horse. After that incident Food Fair put signs up in the stores for all managers to keep a sharp eye on me. But then, like I said, a lot of them were in on the thing anyway.

The signs didn’t stop me. They knew things were missing wherever I went, but they had no proof against me. They knew I was doing it, but they didn’t know how I was doing it. And under the contract, management couldn’t fire a Teamster unless they had certain grounds. They had none. Stealing was grounds only if they could prove it. Besides, I worked hard for them when I wasn’t stealing from them.

But on November 5, 1956, they decided to take a shot with what they had, and they got me indicted for stealing in interstate commerce. My lawyer wanted me to take a plea and turn on the people who were in it with me. But I knew that all the people in it with me were the witnesses the government planned on using in their case against me. If they put me in jail they’d have to bring a wagon to court to cart away their own witnesses. If they had me, they had everybody. All they wanted me to do was name names and they’d let me go. I put the word out to the witnesses against me to be stand-up, that I wasn’t going to rat anybody out. They should keep their mouths shut and act like they don’t know anything. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to break into the office and swipe the records about all the things Food Fair could not account for besides the meat I delivered.

The government witnesses, one after another, couldn’t pin anything on me. I got my lawyer to put in the Food Fair records about all the things they had missing all the time, all the shortages. The government objected because they said I swiped the records. I said some anonymous guy swiped it and left it in my mailbox. The judge threw the case out and said that if he owned stock in Food Fair he would sell it. Food Fair then made an offer to me through my lawyer that if I would resign they would give me $25,000. I told them I couldn’t afford the cut in pay.

We celebrated downtown, and I could see that Skinny Razor and some of the other people he sat with were most impressed that I didn’t rat anybody out. Not ratting was more important to them than winning the case.

Somewhere in that time period when I started hanging out downtown we went into the Villa d’Roma on Ninth Street for dinner. One night I spotted this guy and I recognized him as the old guy who got my horse started at the truck stop. I went over and paid my respects, and he invited me to sit down with him and his friend. It turned out that his friend was Angelo Bruno, and I would later learn that Angelo Bruno was Skinny Razor’s boss and the boss of all of Philadelphia and that Angelo Bruno was a silent partner in just about everything downtown, including the Villa d’Roma.

I had a glass of wine with them and Russell told me that he comes down to Philly a lot to pick up prosciutto bread. That’s bread made with prosciutto and mozzarella baked in it. You slice it down and eat it like a sandwich. It’s almost like a sandwich, but it’s not. I thought he was serious that that was the only reason he came to Philly, and the next time I had a delivery up his way I brought him a dozen loaves of prosciutto bread. It shows you how much I knew. He was very gracious.

Then I began seeing Russell in different places downtown, and he was always with his friend Angelo Bruno. Whenever I was up his way, I started bringing him Roselli’s sausages, because he said he came to Philly for them, too. Meanwhile, the more prosciutto bread and sausages I’m dropping off to him the more I keep seeing him in Philly. He always invited me to sit down and drink red wine and dunk bread in it. He loved the fact that during the war I had been to Catania, the town where he was born in Sicily. I told him about the macaroni hanging out on the line like laundry to dry on Sunday in Catania. Sometimes he’d invite me to eat with him and we’d talk a little Italian. He’d actually buy a two-dollar football lottery ticket off me and play the card. It was just social.

Then my plans to become a permanent partner in the Food Fair chain came to an abrupt halt. They put Globe Detective Agency to watch a certain restaurant they suspected, and they caught the guy who brought the meat to the drops. He didn’t work for Food Fair. He was just a guy who hung around downtown at Skinny Razor’s place. He used a pickup truck and it was loaded with Food Fair meat I had given him. Once again they had nothing on me, because they couldn’t identify the meat as being meat that any particular driver ever had on his truck. All they had me for was wishful thinking. But they knew it was me and they came to me and said that if I resigned they would let that guy go. I asked for the $25,000 if I resigned and they laughed at me. They figured I wasn’t going to let that guy go down, and they were right. I resigned.

Next thing you know when I’m in the Villa d’Roma I run into Russell and he knows all about it and says I did the right thing. He says that the guy has a wife and kids and I did the right thing saving him from jail. Meanwhile, I’ve got a wife and kids, too, and I’m out of a job.