"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (23 page)

Kelly had a candy company. The giant chocolate-covered Easter eggs were out of this world, filled with coconut nougat or peanut butter nougat. I always sent those eggs to my lawyers’ wives when I was away in school.

Kelly and his brother were partners with Meyer Lansky in the San Souci casino in Havana. When people think of the alleged mob they think of the Mafia or the Italians, but the Italian thing is only one part of the bigger thing. There’s a Jew mob and different other types. But they’re all part of the same thing. Kelly and Russell were very tight with Meyer Lansky, and Lansky got a lot of respect.

Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, the one that bet Russell he couldn’t give up cigarettes on that boat on their way out of Cuba, was with Meyer Lansky. Jimmy Blue Eyes was Italian, and he was Meyer Lansky’s best friend. They were like Kelly and Russell.

I was introduced to Meyer Lansky once at Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Lounge in Hollywood, Florida. I was walking in to meet Russell, and Meyer Lansky was leaving the table. I didn’t even talk to him except to meet him, but when I was in school and my brother was dying of cancer and the VA doctor wouldn’t give him morphine, Russell called Meyer Lansky from prison, and he got a doctor in there to help ease the pain for my brother. Meyer Lansky and Kelly and his brother had a lot taken away from them in Cuba just like Russell did.

Russell had a lot of business with Kelly. And both of them, just like Angelo, were dead set against drugs. There were no drugs where they were. Kelly had a good heart like Russell and Angelo. Russell took good care of the poor people in his area; they got food at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and really whenever they needed it, and they all got coal in the winter. Kelly was the same way.

I used to drive to Hollywood, Florida, with Russell for meetings at Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Lounge quite a bit. Once in a while we’d fly if there was some emergency, but most of the time I drove us down. Joe Sonken was with Russell’s family. Everybody went to the Gold Coast for meetings. All the different people from all over the country met at the Gold Coast. They had the best stone crabs in Florida. Russell would meet there with Santo Trafficante from Florida and Carlos Marcello from New Orleans many times over the course of a year. I met Trafficante’s lawyer there, Frank Ragano. They loaned Frank Ragano to Jimmy to help him out with the trials he ended up having on account of Bobby and the Get Hoffa Squad.

I met Carlos Marcello’s pilot there, too, a guy named Dave Ferrie. They later said he was gay, but if he was he didn’t make a pass at me. He still had his hair when I met him. They say he went a little nutty later on and carried a makeup kit around with him. You could tell he hated Castro with a passion, and he was very close to the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida.

One morning a couple of weeks after the meeting at the Gold Coast where I met Dave Ferrie, I was back in Philly at the local and I got a call from Jimmy Hoffa, who told me to go check on that thing we talked about. That meant I should go to the pay phone I used to use and to wait for a phone call. I got over to the pay phone and when it rang I heard Jimmy’s voice, say “Is that you?” I told him, “Yeah.”

He said: “I talked to your friend and he told me to tell you. Get your hands on a safe rig tomorrow and go down to the Harry C. Campbell concrete plant on Eastern Avenue outside of Baltimore. You can’t miss it. Bring somebody to help you drive. You’re going over the road. And don’t forget to call your friend.”

I hung up and called Russell from the pay phone and I said to Russell that I had heard from that guy, and Russell said that was good and we hung up.

I drove up to Philly to see Phil Milestone at Milestone Hauling. He owed some big money that he couldn’t pay, so he was doing favors instead, like he had me on the payroll but I didn’t have to work. He was an old time bootlegger. Good people. He was safe to get a truck from; he was no rat. Phil ended up doing time for trying to bribe an IRS agent.

Phil gave me a truck and I got ahold of a young guy named Jack Flynn to drive with me. (Jack died young sitting in his car of a heart attack when I was back in school on a parole violation in 1995. I made a call and got his girlfriend a union death benefit.) We drove the Milestone Hauling truck to Baltimore and pulled into the Campbell plant. I’ve been down there lately to find it and it’s got a new name, Bonsal. It’s more built up, with a few more buildings, but the old stone buildings are still there. In 1961 when we drove in it had a little landing strip. The landing strip had a small plane on it, and Carlos Marcello’s pilot who I had just met at the Gold Coast, Dave Ferrie, got out of the plane and came over to my rig and directed us to back up next to some army trucks. We backed up and all of a sudden this gang of soldiers came out of a building and began unloading military uniforms and weapons and ammunition from their army trucks and loading it all onto our truck.

Dave Ferrie told me that the war materiel being loaded was from the Maryland National Guard. He gave me paperwork on the load in case we got stopped. He told me to take it to the dog track in Orange Grove, Florida, outside of Jacksonville. He said I’d be met there by a guy with big ears named Hunt.

We drove straight down old Route 13. I used to drive coffee down to Florida for Food Fair and haul back oranges. I used to like to stop for those Lums chili dogs. You didn’t get them in the North. It took us about twenty-one hours to get there, and we turned the load over to Hunt and some anti-Castro Cubans. Jack Flynn stayed down in Florida to drive the rig back and I flew back to Philly. Hunt later turned up on TV as the one in charge of the Watergate burglars, E. Howard Hunt, but at that time he was connected to the CIA somehow. Hunt also got some kind of operation on his ears, because the next time I saw him his ears were closer to his head.

I drove up to Kingston to give Russell a report on the matter, and he told me that something was going to be happening in Cuba and that’s why Jimmy called me to drive the truck down to Florida. He told me that Jimmy Hoffa was keeping an open mind about the Kennedys. Jimmy was cooperating in this out of respect for Sam Giancana and out of respect for Russell, and because it would be good for everybody’s sake to take back Cuba from the Communists. Even if it would turn out to be good for the Kennedys.

Then the next thing I heard on television that April was that President Kennedy had loused up the Bay of Pigs invasion against Castro. At the last minute Kennedy decided not to send American air cover for the infantry in the amphibious landing. I would have thought John F. Kennedy would have known better than that from having been in the war. You cannot have a landing invasion force without air support. The anti-Castro Cubans who invaded didn’t even have ships offshore to shell the land above the beachhead. The invasion forces were sitting ducks on that beach. The ones that weren’t killed outright were captured by the Communists, and who knows what happened to a lot of those guys.

These Kennedys could louse up a one-car funeral, I thought.

I flew down to the Gold Coast with Russell to meet with Santo Trafficante and some of the people. I never heard anything said by any of the people, including Russell, about any plot they had with the Kennedy government to assassinate Castro with poison or a bullet, but some of that came out about ten years later in the newspapers. They used to say the alleged mob only whacked their own. Maybe they figured Castro was a lot like them. In his way, he was a boss. Castro had a crew and he had a territory, and he violated his territory and he came into their territory and took over their valuable property and kicked them out. No boss is supposed to get away with that.

I can tell you that some of the different people at Joe Sonken’s viewed old man Kennedy as one of their own. And in a way they no doubt viewed his sons Jack and Bobby as part of his crew.
”

In the summer of 1975 the U.S. Senate held closed-door hearings on the mob’s involvement in both the Bay of Pigs invasion and a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, primarily by poison. The Senate Select Committee was chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho and came to be known as the Church Committee. The committee heard testimony and gathered evidence regarding the suspected mob ties to the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and to a suspected mob-CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. At the onset of the 1975 hearings, in a shocking move, the CIA admitted to the Church Committee the mob’s involvement and assistance in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the existence of the mob-CIA plot to kill Castro. This plot was called Operation Mongoose.

A few days before his scheduled testimony before the Church Committee, Sam “Momo” Giancana was assassinated. He would never testify. But Giancana’s lieutenant did. The handsome and dapper Johnny Roselli testified under oath at length behind closed doors. A few months after his testimony, Johnny Roselli was assassinated and his body stuffed in an oil drum.

While the Church Committee was conducting its closed hearings,
Time
magazine reported in its June 9, 1975, issue that Russell Bufalino and Sam “Momo” Giancana were the crime bosses behind the mob’s ties to the CIA and to the anti-Castro invasion and to the assassination plot to poison Castro.

As a result of its independent findings and the CIA’s confession, the Church Committee drafted legislation restricting the CIA’s involvement in the affairs of a sovereign nation. This legislation passed. The Church Committee’s work, its findings, and its legislative reforms of the CIA became the subject of much debate following the 9/11 tragedy when certain pundits believed the Church Committee had gone too far in restricting the activities of the CIA.

“
Cuba or no Cuba, there was still a union to run. Somewhere around July 1961 Jimmy appointed me a sergeant-at-arms for the convention that was held at the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. The convention was held every five years for the election of officers and other matters. One of the other matters that I liked right away when I heard about it on the floor, and maybe the best thing to come out of this convention, was a big increase in the expense account. Being a guy brought up without a whole lot, I already thought the expense account was the best idea since sliced bread.

This 1961 convention was the first convention I ever attended. Raymond Cohen didn’t want me to go, but it was Jimmy’s wishes and Cohen had no say in the matter. As one of the sergeant-at-arms it was my job to check the credentials of anybody trying to get into the convention. The AFL-CIO tried to send in spies, and naturally, the FBI tried to get in. But they didn’t give me a hard time. They gave it a try and when they were turned away they stayed away on the perimeter and tried to listen and peek in from a distance. Looking back, probably both the AFL-CIO and the FBI already had planted bugs in the convention room. By trying to get in the front door they wanted us to think we were keeping them out.

The big problem for me to deal with was the newspaper photographers. You’d push them back away from the opening, and they would try to sneak back in with their flash bulbs popping. One of them was especially annoying the hell out of me.

I turned to the cop who was assigned to the door and I said to him, “I think I’m going to need a surgeon. Can you radio in for a surgeon?”

“A surgeon?” the cop asked me. “What do you need a doctor for?”

“Not a doctor,” I said. “I need a surgeon to perform an operation to get that photographer’s camera out of his ass, which is where it’s going the next time his flash bulb goes off.”

Even the cop laughed.

I guess about a month before the 1961 convention Jimmy lost his good friend Owen Bert Brennan to a heart attack. Some of the men thought Brennan worried himself into the heart attack on account of his business dealings with Jimmy that Bobby was investigating.

Because his pal Brennan died, Jimmy had to replace Brennan as one of the International vice presidents, and he ended up choosing Frank Fitzsimmons over an old Strawberry Boy from the Kroger strike named Bobby Holmes. Jimmy made his choice on the flip of a coin. Later on, this flip of the coin turned out to be what put Fitz in the position to succeed Jimmy when Jimmy went to school. Bobby Holmes was a very loyal Hoffa man. He was originally a coal miner from England. He was a part of Jimmy’s first strike over the strawberries on the Kroger dock. There’s no way Bobby Holmes ever would have betrayed Jimmy and done to Jimmy what Fitz did to him. I think if Jimmy had followed his gut instead of a flip of the coin everything would have worked out for everybody, and I would have retired someday as an International organizer.

At the convention Jimmy had a switch for the microphone and he turned it off if he didn’t like what he was hearing. Jimmy would say things like, “You’re out of order, brother, shut up.” This is the convention where Jimmy said the line: “I may have faults, but being wrong ain’t one of them.”

Jimmy nominated Fitz, and Fitz got elected vice president at that 1961 convention. Fitz took the microphone and went on and on about Jimmy Hoffa. Fitz practically did the “Pledge of Allegiance” to Jimmy Hoffa, but we know how that went.

The other vice president vacancy was also filled by Jimmy Hoffa. He nominated, and the delegates elected Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano of north Jersey, “the little guy.” And we know how that went.
”

 
chapter sixteen