Authors: Charles Brandt
Tags: #Organized Crime, #Hoffa; James R, #Mafia, #Social Science, #Teamsters, #Gangsters, #True Crime, #Mafia - United States, #Sheeran; Frank, #General, #United States, #Criminals & Outlaws, #Labor, #Gangsters - United States, #Biography & Autobiography, #Teamsters - United States, #Fiction, #Business & Economics, #Criminology
Two nights before the meeting I arrived at Sheeran’s apartment to spend the night in his guest room. Without comment Sheeran handed me a typewritten letter purportedly signed by Jimmy Hoffa in 1974 following Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night. More than half of the letter contained things Sheeran had told me all along, starting with the 1991 aborted interviews. The rest contained things that more easily could be read to bolster the fantasy version of events that he had promoted with his friend John Zeitts. I assured Frank that at some point I would check the authenticity of this letter.
The meeting went well. When Shawn asked if he thought he could find the house, Sheeran gave us the directions and mentioned “the footbridge.” This was the first time he had ever revealed the directions to me. His deepened voice and hard demeanor was chilling when, for the first time ever, he stated publicly to someone other than me that he had shot Jimmy Hoffa two times in the back of the head. To everyone in the room it had the ring of truth. Fox News did some preliminary independent research and confirmed the historical value of Frank Sheeran’s account of the last ride of Jimmy Hoffa.
Soon thereafter, I contacted the renowned forensic lab of Dr. Henry Lee. They assured me they could determine the authenticity of Hoffa’s signature and could lift latent Hoffa prints from the letter. However, I would have to contact the FBI and obtain Hoffa’s prints and handwriting exemplars for them. At that time we had no publisher and the book had yet to be written. I did not want to alert the FBI and have the story leak out before there was a book in the stores. I decided to put the matter on a back burner. Later on when we got a publisher I explained all this and the publisher told me that, coincidentally, they had published Henry Lee’s book. I gave them my e-mail correspondence with Lee’s lab and hoped that because of the publisher’s relationship the lab would make the necessary requests of the FBI themselves. The publisher contacted the lab and sent them the letter. There was no need for exemplars or prints; when the letter was put under a special light it turned out to be a laughable forgery. The paper it was typed on was manufactured in 1994, not 1974. The signature was inked over a faint photocopy of an authentic Hoffa signature. Even though the letter was not at all central to the book and could be removed easily, and even though the editor assigned to the book had no doubt that Sheeran had killed Hoffa, the publisher decided to cancel the book. I was upset at Frank until my now former editor suggested that I got off easy, considering what Sheeran had done to some other friends in his life. He said, “If you can’t trust a man who murdered one of his best friends, who can you trust?” He asked me to be sure never to give Sheeran his phone number.
When the dust settled and I confronted him Sheeran conceded that the letter had given him insurance, a way out if he ever needed it. It was to him a loose thread he could unravel any time the heat got to be too much for him. If a grand jury were convened he could expose the letter and that would cancel out everything else in the book.
My agent, Frank Weimann, told Sheeran over the phone that if he wanted to get another publisher he would have to come clean and stand behind the book. Weimann sent Sheeran a hard copy of his e-mail to the former publisher, which said, among other things: “I am willing to stake my reputation on this book for many reasons, not the least of these is that
‘I Heard You Paint Houses’
is of historical significance. Frank Sheeran killed Jimmy Hoffa.”
In the aftermath of losing the book deal Frank’s generous and delightful girlfriend and constant companion, Elsie, sadly passed away following surgery. Her room had been across the hall from Frank’s at the assisted living facility where they met. On occasion I had taken the couple to dinner, and it was always a lot of fun. Frank teased her about her love of food. He claimed he had fork marks on his hand from the time he made the mistake of reaching over to taste her dish. Although his daughters and I never told Frank of Elsie’s passing, he learned it somehow. Around that time his health took a dramatic turn for the worse, and he was repeatedly hospitalized. He was in severe pain and became bedridden.
At the hospital he sensed that he was dying, and he expressed to me that he didn’t want to live the way he was living. In our conversation about doing a video to stand behind the book, as Weimann had suggested, he said: “All I want now asking [sic], Charles, is keep the pain at a minimum, keep me dry, and let the Man upstairs do what He wants to do. I can’t be livin’ like this.”
After speaking by phone with Emmett Fitzpatrick, Frank Sheeran decided to go on videotape and stand behind the material in the book, including what happened to Jimmy Hoffa on July 30, 1975.
Although I agreed to make it as easy on him as possible, he now publicly would be endorsing the truthfulness of that material. I said to him, “All you’re going to have to do is back up what the book says. That’s all. Will you be prepared to do that, do you think?” He answered, “I might as well.” As I left him that night he said in reference to his having received the visiting priest’s sacraments, “I’m at peace.” I said, “God bless you. You’ll be at peace standing behind the book.”
The next day he said that the FBI will “have me [sic] a hard time to question because they can’t make me travel anywhere.” Because of his health and medical needs he did not expect that any prosecutor would bother to indict him.
When I turned the video on he became hesitant and withdrawn. I told him: “You’re hesitating, right? I don’t want to do it if you’re hesitating.” He said, “No, I’m not hesitating.” I said, “If you’re heart’s not in it, forget about it.” He replied: “It’s something that you’ve got to work yourself into. I’m going to do it.” He asked for his mirror to check his appearance.
We discussed that he had given his confession and received communion the day before. He said, “And I had it last week, too.”
I said that he was now facing his “moment of truth.” I gave him the galley copy to hold up to the camera. And then, without any of our normal protective language, I got down to it and said: “I’m going to get it now, okay. Now, you read this book. The things that are in there about Jimmy and what happened to him are things that you told me, isn’t that right?” Frank Sheeran said: “That’s right.” I said: “And you stand behind them?” He said: “I stand behind what’s written.”
I immediately asked him a question about what Jimmy Hoffa was like and that caused him to say that Jimmy, “…did not—what can I say—did not—You have to go into questions, then one question leads to another.—Let the book speak for itself.” I knew that he wouldn’t want to delve into details, especially about Jimmy Hoffa, but it was hard not to talk in some detail.
Unfortunately, the camera battery died, and it was awhile before I discovered it and plugged the camera in. Furthermore, to make him comfortable or at his request I stopped the tape from time to time and turned on an audio tape recorder. Still, ample material was recorded. In reviewing the recordings, both audio and video, there are a number of segments that are revealing of the man himself, some of his deeds, and the interview process.
At one point he asked me to be sure to specify in the book that whenever he was intimate with a woman other than his wife it was at a time that he was single. He said that to say otherwise “don’t serve no literary purpose…. That’s not going to win no Pulitzer Prize…. Make sure to note I was single.”
Looking at the cover of the book he said, “I think the title sucks.” I said, “But they’re the first words that Jimmy ever spoke to you, right?”
“Yeah,” he admitted and dropped that topic.
While he was looking at a photo of Sal Briguglio I mentioned that we would be following our plan to urge the FBI to release their file so that whatever Sally Bugs had told them would corroborate the book. I said the photo was taken “[b]efore you took care of him. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Did that picture of Sally Bugs stir up anything in you?” I asked.
“No, not really,” he said. “Water under the dam.”
I told him that if he got well enough Eric Shawn wanted to take us for lunch at Monte’s Restaurant in Brooklyn where he had picked up “the package.”
“Yeah,” he said, “the package, yeah—for the—for Dallas.” Later we returned to the topic of lunch at Monte’s, and I said that when we go, “We’ll see where you picked up those rifles.”
He said: “…[Y]ou’re right, and have a little angel spaghetti with oil and garlic.” I told him that I’d like to see him dipping his Italian bread into his red wine. “You got a picture of that,” he said.
I mentioned the place where he made drops “for the politicians.” I asked: “What was the name of that place?”
He promptly replied, “The Market Inn” and said, “See, my memory’s there, Charles.”
The most significant moment for me came when he revealed something brand new. It began when we were looking at a photo of the house in Detroit, and he said: “They’re supposed to be the original people. They were there originally…But they never testif—” He followed that with mumbling and said, “They wasn’t involved.” Whenever he was being extra careful with his words and making some of them inaudible I knew it was a topic I would likely return to. When I mentioned in the form of a question that the house was a loaner like the car, he ignored the question twice and then said, “Well, I don’t have to worry about being indicted.” Based on my experience with him it seemed to me that his response might be an indication that he was mulling over whether to tell me something new.
A little later I pointed out the photo of the house in Detroit “where Jimmy died—got hit.” He volunteered a comment that sounded like there was a “guy” involved in the house that I had not known about. It was a mumbled and swallowed comment that seemed to stop in mid-sentence. Later I had the tape analyzed by an audio expert; it sounded to him like “…that’s the house that the guy did his letters to.” The audio problem was compounded by the fact that Sheeran’s fifty-year-old full dentures no longer fit because of his dramatic weight loss. Immediately after making the comment Sheeran said, “I’m only going by what you got in the book, so—” He had made dismissive comments like this before when there was something additional that he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell me. Unless he knew that the “guy” was dead he would not want to reveal his identity.
At the time it sounded to me that the “guy” had “lent” them the house, but today I don’t hear an “n” on the CD that the audio expert made for me.
At any rate, after some short chitchat about his friend John calling to see how he was and a brief cell phone call from my stepson, I followed up.
“All right. But that house was on loan, huh?” I said.
“Yeah. The people that owned it…” he paused.
“They didn’t know anything about it,” I said, which is something he had told me years earlier and that was already in the book.
“Yeah,” he said. “The people that owned it, yeah. There was a real estater
—
” This brand-new revelation of the existence of some kind of real-estate broker or agent was followed by a lengthy pause during which I said nothing. Then he said, “They lived there at the time.” “Uh huh,” I said.
“And they were never. They were never—never questioned.”
“But they didn’t know anything about it, did they?” I said.
“No, of course not,” he said with an exagerrated emphasis that made me think that the “real estater” did know something. But this was not the time for me to press and cross-examine. We had an agreement, and he had lived up to it.
“Okay,” I said.
“I, I, I only said—what you got printed that’s the story.” And with that comment I knew there was more to it, and that it was going to be difficult for me to let it drop entirely.
“I understand,” I said. “I’m not questioning you anymore. I’m just curious. When you said the real estate—”
“Uh-huh,” he said attentively.
“The real-estate broker. I—You hadn’t told me that. So,” I laughed. “That’s okay. No problem….”
“Yeah,” he took his glasses off.
“All right,” I said as Sheeran turned, gave the camera a hard look, and began smoothing his hair. I knew that was my cue to turn it off, and I did. What comes next is from an audio recording.
In a short while my curiosity had the better of me. Even though my heart wasn’t entirely in it, I couldn’t resist. I had to make one last respectful try at the “real estater.”
“Now,” I said. “You got my interest about this realtor that you mentioned.”
“About the what?” he said.
“The realtor that you mentioned on the house in Detroit. You’d never mentioned that to me before.”
“What’s that?”
I sensed he was having a problem with my use of the word “realtor.” I should have stuck closer to his terminology. I knew better. I said, “The real—the real-estate guy on the house in Detroit. You said there was a real-estate guy involved. You don’t want to talk about that, huh?”
He mumbled and swallowed a few words that I strained to hear, but could not. And then he made up his mind and said clearly, “No. Well, you got enough, Charles.”
“I got enough,” I said.
“Be satisfied, Charles.”
“I’m satisfied.”
“You got enough. Don’t be probing.”
Indeed, I had more than enough. But there’s nothing like the whole truth. If I had somehow known that in a few days Frank Sheeran would take such a dramatic turn for the worse I might have pursued it. It’s lost now, unless the FBI file has a reference to it, and the FBI releases its file.