"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (48 page)

At one point during these efforts to step on toes James P. Hoffa was quoted as saying, “Only now does there seem to be some fruit from the investigation and there is some consolation from certain prosecutions. It does show the FBI is trying. But I hope the FBI renews its efforts to solve the case with regard to the disappearance of my father and not think justice has been done by putting certain suspects in jail on other cases.”

What is it that made the FBI so dead certain about this list of nine “certain suspects” that they were putting “in jail on other cases”? With all their resources and their ability to investigate anywhere in the land, why were all the FBI agents and the Department of Justice’s resources so narrowly focused for so long on such a small group of “certain suspects”? Why was the entire government effort, which included Department of Labor investigators and accountants, hovering over this small group? As a former prosecutor I can only ask the obvious question: Who was talking to the FBI?

“
They watch the federal buildings. If they see you go into a federal building and you don’t report it to somebody, you’ve got a problem. Sometimes I think they have people inside the federal buildings, like secretaries, but I never was told exactly how it worked. All I was told by Russell was that if I ever went into a federal building, even to answer a subpoena, I had better tell somebody in the family as soon as possible. You’re not going there for tea.

In some way they heard Sally Bugs was going into a federal building and having contact with the FBI and he was not telling anybody. Now, he knew better. They confronted him and he admitted going in to see the FBI, but he denied telling them anything. Confronting him like this would cause the FBI to pull back a little bit. If he was wearing a wire they would pull it. If they were tailing him they would pull the tail.

I had heard that Sally Bugs might have been a little nervous about the Castellito murder indictment on top of the Hoffa investigation. Sally had a liver problem, and maybe it made him look a little yellow in the face. I heard he was afraid he had cancer, which would make certain people concerned about his mental toughness. Maybe Tony Pro was in a bad mood because he was on trial for taking a kickback on a loan.
”

Provenzano was on trial for taking a $300,000 kickback on a $2.3 million loan to the Woodstock Hotel in New York’s theater district. The loan proceeds came from his local’s cash reserve.
New York Post
reporter Murray Kempton wrote, “Local 560 is a cash register.” When Provenzano’s indictment was handed down, Victor Riesel, the courageous labor reporter whom Johnny Dioguardi had blinded with acid twenty years earlier, reported in his syndicated column that it had been Provenzano’s plan to run for president of the International in 1981 when Fitzsimmons retired, and to do that he needed the popular Jimmy Hoffa out of the way. Seizing and keeping power was the same reason he had needed the popular Anthony “Three Fingers” Castellito out of the way in 1961. And on both occasions he had used Sal Briguglio.

“
They didn’t tell me much. They just told John Francis and me where to be. For the noise factor we both had .38s tucked in our belts against our backs. By this time I trusted The Redhead to work anywhere any time with me. On March 21, 1978, Sally Bugs was walking from the Andrea Doria Social Club, which was a block from Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. He was alone. How they knew he was going to walk out alone from that place at that time I never heard, but they had their ways. Sally Bugs wore thick glasses and that’s how he got the name “Sally Bugs,” because he looked bug-eyed in the glasses. I didn’t know him too well, but there was no mistaking those big glasses on a guy about 5'7". I walked up to him and said, “Hi, Sal.” He said, “Hi, Irish.” Sally Bugs looked at John because he didn’t know The Redhead. While he was looking at John for an introduction, Sally Bugs got shot twice in the head. He went down dead, and John Francis pumped about three more into him for the effect of the loudness and the impression of a shoot-out to scare away anybody that had an idea to look out his window after the two shots.

In something as well planned as this, where they have to take into consideration that there could be agents in the vicinity, they’ve got people sitting in a car to drive you away and get rid of the guns. Time is of the essence, and you’re out of there before the man hits the ground practically. They’ve got lots of backup on the scene. Backup is very important. You need people in crash cars to pull out from the curb and crash into any FBI cars.

In the newspaper they said that two hooded men knocked Sally Bugs to the ground first and then shot him. How two hooded men got close enough to Sally Bugs to shoot him the paper did not say. Sally Bugs was not blind. He could see good out of those glasses. Why the two hooded men would waste their time knocking him down to the ground first the paper did not say. Were the shooters hoping that on his way to the ground Sally Bugs would pull out his own piece and shoot them? Very likely the witness thought Sally Bugs was knocked down first because when you do it right he goes down very fast without any suffering. Most certainly the eyewitness knew enough to put hoods on the gunmen, so no one would have any doubt about him.

Anyway, with Sally Bugs it was another case of when in doubt, have no doubt.

And maybe now Tony Pro figured I did him a favor and we were all square on that beef he had with me. That I don’t know.
”

From my experience on both sides of this issue, I know that when a suspect asks for a deal, the prosecution asks him for an offer of proof, an outline of what the suspect has to offer. The things the suspect will be able to tell the authorities must be on the table before the authorities are in a position to know whether the information is worth offering a deal to obtain. From the beginning of the Hoffa investigation, Salvatore Briguglio appeared to be a man with something he wanted to get off his chest.

In 1976, during the waiting between lineups for the Detroit grand jury, a Michigan state police detective named Koenig kept an eye on the Andretta brothers and the Briguglio brothers. His attention was drawn to Sal Briguglio. Koenig said, “You could see that his brain was in turmoil and he was having difficulty coping with it. We all agreed he’d be the one to focus on.”

In 1977 Sal Briguglio’s need to talk manifested itself in discussions with Steven Brill, author of
The Teamsters
. Brill wrote in a footnote: “Salvatore Briguglio and I talked in 1977 with the ground rules that I would not reveal our discussions. On March 21, 1978, he was murdered. Our talks, which were conducted privately, were rambling and touched on the murder only occasionally. Even then, he only passively confirmed with a nod of his head certain relatively minor aspects of the crime that I put before him. He offered no elaboration and never revealed enough to implicate anyone except possibly himself.”

In 1978, only a few days before Sal Briguglio was murdered his need to talk led to a recorded interview with Dan Moldea, author of
The Hoffa Wars
. Moldea described Briguglio as appearing “worn and tired, showing the strain of the enormous federal pressure he was under.” Moldea quotes Briguglio as saying, “I’ve got no regrets, except for getting involved in this mess with the government. If they want you, you’re theirs. I have no aspirations any more; I’ve gone as far as I can in this union. There’s nothing left.”

Did Sal Briguglio tell the FBI as much of the plot as he was in a position to know? Did the FBI then leave Sal Briguglio on the street to obtain an admission on a wire from the suspected killer?

Why did law enforcement sources immediately direct newspaper reporters’ attention away from Provenzano as a suspect and betrayal as a motive? For example, Carl J. Pelleck of the
New York Post
reported the next day: “Investigators say the mob probably ordered the killing to get control of Provenzano’s Local 560—one of the largest in the nation—and its lucrative pension and welfare funds, which they would then parlay in investments in legalized gambling in Atlantic City.” Why did law enfocement offer up another suspect who was in jail? Pelleck wrote: “They also were not discounting the possibility that the hand of Mafia boss Carmine Galante might be behind the Briguglio slaying plot.”

Why won’t the FBI release its file to the public whom it serves, the public that pays its bills? Is the FBI embarrassed?

In 2002, following intense pressure from the media and from Hoffa’s children, who had unsuccessfully taken a lawsuit for access to the FBI Hoffa file all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the FBI released a 349-page summary of the Hoffa case. On September 27, 2002, the
Detroit Free Press
wrote, “The
Free Press
obtained the new Hoffa information as a result of a decade-long legal battle. It is the first public disclosure of the FBI’s own summary of the case. However, the report was heavily censored. Names were removed. Portions of interviews with potential witnesses were blacked out. Pages were missing from the report.”

In March 2002 the FBI, while keeping its sixteen-thousand-page file close to its vest, released fourteen hundred pages of it to the
Free Press.
In the final sentence in its article concerning these pages the newspaper made the observation that, “the documents suggest that the FBI’s most significant leads ran out in 1978.”

That was the year Sal Briguglio was silenced.

 
chapter thirty-one
 

Under a Vow of Secrecy

“
I can’t put my drinking on the Hoffa disappearance. I didn’t need an excuse to drink back then, but I was drinking heavily, I know that.
”

The
Philadelphia Bulletin
profiled Frank Sheeran on February 18, 1979, seven months before his Philadelphia RICO indictment. The headline read: “A Tough In Deep Trouble.” There was a photo of Sheeran with the caption “History of Violence.” The article said Sheeran was “a man noted for using his hands so well he did not need to carry a gun…a man so large police once found it impossible to handcuff his hands behind his back.” The only other photo in the article was that of Jimmy Hoffa captioned, “Close Ties to Sheeran.” The article emphasized “the FBI considers Sheeran a suspect in Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975.” The reporters quoted an unidentified Philadelphia lawyer who observed that Sheeran never cared about the vintage of his wine: “It just had to come from a grape. I never saw such a big man so able to crawl into a bottle of wine. He drinks incessantly.”