"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (50 page)

They finally got me on parole violations for drinking Sambuca with the alleged Philly boss, John Stanfa. You float three coffee beans in the Sambuca; one for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I didn’t have much of a tomorrow left, but the FBI was still after it. At the hearing they played the wired guy’s tapes, saying I should have turned him in for wanting his wife whacked. I was seventy-five and they ordered me back to jail for ten months. The day I got violated I held a press conference to let the world at large and certain people downtown and upstate know that I was no rat. I was not going to fold and be a rat just because they were sending me to jail at my age and in my condition. I wanted all the people I did anything with over the years to know that I was not weakening in my old age, like John Francis and Lou Cordi did before they died. And I wanted the FBI off my back in jail; no more late-night visits. I told the reporters I was going to write a book to prove that Richard M. Nixon did it to Jimmy.

While I was in jail I got a letter from Jimmy’s daughter, Barbara, asking me to tell what happened to Jimmy “under a vow of secrecy.”

I got out on October 10, 1995, and my wife Irene died of lung cancer on December 17. I got worse and worse with my hunched-over walking and my dropped right foot in the brace, and before you knew it I couldn’t get very far with my two canes. I had to use a walker everywhere I went. My three daughters that have anything to do with me were concerned that if I died I couldn’t be buried in a Catholic cemetery. I pictured Russell going to chapel at Springfield and telling me that there was “something more than this.” My daughters arranged a private audience for me with Monsignor Heldufor at St. Dorothy’s Church in Springfield, Pennsylvania. I met with him and we talked about my life and he forgave me for my sins. I bought a green casket and the girls bought me a crypt in a Catholic cemetery. The older girls are happy that their mother, Mary, will be buried in the crypt with me when she goes from her Alzheimer’s.

I have a small room in a nursing home. I keep my door open. I can’t stand to have a door closed.
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afterword
 

I heard Frank’s lawyer, Emmett Fitzpatrick, say to Frank at one of Frank’s birthday parties, “You’re a hell of a man with a telephone in your hand, Frank. What would you care if they sent you to prison. As long as they gave you a telephone in your cell, you’d be happy. You wouldn’t know you were in jail.”

During the years I spent on this project Frank Sheeran called me repeatedly throughout the day, practically every day, to talk about practically everything. He referred to nearly anyone he spoke about as being “good people.” He ended nearly every conversation by telling me, “Everything is copacetic.” I could always tell when he was having second thoughts about having admitted something—the number, the volume, and the nervous energy of his social calls increased. Occasionally, he would try to take back what he said. But his nerves would eventually settle down and he would be comfortable, even pleased, with having made the admission, with having told someone.

Frank got especially nervous as the day approached for our planned trip to Detroit to find the house where Jimmy Hoffa was hit.

In February 2002 I drove Frank to Detroit. At the time he was living by himself in an apartment in a Philadelphia suburb. He told me that he had just started having a lot of nightmares, mixing incidents in the war with incidents and people from his life in the mob. He began to “see” these people when he was awake, and he called them “chemical people,” because he believed they were from a chemical imbalance that would be fixed when he got his medicine checked. “There are two chemical people in the backseat. I know they’re not real, but what are they doing in the car?”

The drive west through Pennsylvania and Ohio into Michigan was a nightmare for me when he was awake. If he wasn’t talking about the “people” he was critical of my driving. At one point I said to him, “Frank, the only good thing about having you here in the car with me is that you’re not calling me on the telephone.” Fortunately, he laughed.

We took two days for the drive. At the motel the first night he made me keep the door open between our rooms. Ever since jail he didn’t want to be alone behind a closed door. The next day in the car he slept a lot and became much improved. I began to think that all he needed was some good restful sleep, which he rarely got alone in his apartment.

When I saw the Detroit skyline I nudged him awake. He took one look at the skyline and barked at me: “You got a piece?”

“A what?” I said.

“A piece,” he demanded.

“What do you mean a piece?”

“A P-I-E-C-E piece.” He made his hand into a gun and made as if to fire the gun into my floorboard.

“What would I be doing with a piece?”

“Lawyers have pieces. You’re allowed to have a permit.”

“I don’t have one,” I yelled back. “I’d be the last person you know to have one. What do you want a piece for?”

“Jimmy had friends here. They know I was on the other side of this thing.”

“Frank, what are you trying to do? Scare me? Nobody knows you’re here.”

He grunted, and I began to calculate the approximate ages of Jimmy’s former Detroit allies. As I settled down, I had the image of Jimmy’s “friends,” if any were still alive, in wheelchairs stalking us.

When we got to our motel I was relieved to see and meet Frank’s former fellow inmate and the man who was going to write the book in 1995 blaming the Hoffa hit on Nixon, John Zeitts. He had driven there from his home in Nebraska to visit Frank out of respect, and he would now spend the night in Frank’s room. He would change the bandage on Frank’s bedsore. At dinner that night at a steak house, Frank looked over at me and winked. “You got a piece?” he said and the two of them laughed. Frank told me that John had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam. That night I was entranced by the story of John’s escape from the Viet Cong. He bore long scars all across his torso. The Viet Cong liked to slice a prisoner’s skin because a certain type of fly would lay its eggs in the open wound. John would find maggots oozing out of his body years later.

That night alone in my motel room I wondered if I had waited too long to make this Detroit trip. I knew better than to rely on Sheeran’s help in finding the house. The next morning I asked John to help us, but he did not know there was a house. It was not part of anything in the fantasy version he had worked on with Frank in 1995. I had my notes with me and found the general directions that Frank had given during an editorial meeting we’d had with Fox News. Amazingly, they were almost as solid in 2002 as they had been in 1975. The only thing missing from my notes was a final left turn onto the street opposite a footbridge that was mentioned. It turned out that the footbridge was in a golf course on the right. It took a few passes before I saw the bridge at all, finally noticing it from a parallel road on the other side of the course, a road that was on higher ground and overlooked the links. I drove back around to the original road and saw the problem at once.

Over the years a chain-link fence had been built, and the fence made the bridge less noticeable than in the directions Sheeran had given me some time back. While we were stopped near that footbridge at a T intersection I got out of the car, looked down the street to my left, and spotted the rear of a house at the end of the block on the right that had the kind of backyard Sheeran had described. Of course, I thought, being on a golf course the footbridge could have had no significance to the directions except that it was at the bridge that a left turn had to be made. I made the turn and drove to the front of that house. The steely, tense look on Sheeran’s face told me at once that this was it. He studied it and confirmed that it was with a nod of his head and a grunt of “Yeah.” It was a very quiet street, a perfect house in a perfect street. The only thing that bothered me about the house was that it was brick and Sheeran had described a house with brown shingles. It wasn’t until after we returned home and I developed the photos I had taken that I realized that the top half of the house was all brown shingles on the rear and on the side of the house that you see as you approach it from the footbridge.

On the return trip east from Detroit it was evident that Sheeran had settled down. There were no “chemical people” and no complaints about my driving. We found the airport at Port Clinton, took some photos, and drove home in one day. Shortly after this trip I helped his daughters get him into an assisted living facility. I accompanied Frank and his daughter Dolores to a doctor who prescribed medication to control the “chemical people,” and I never heard about them again. I never again saw him in as distraught and nervous a condition as he was in heading in to Detroit without a “P-I-E-C-E piece.”

The next trip we took together was to find the company grounds in Baltimore where he had picked up a load of war matériel for the Bay of Pigs invasion and where he had delivered rifles just prior to the John F. Kennedy assassination. Before we went down to Baltimore he told me the name of the place was the Campbell Brickyard. He had a general idea where it was, but we couldn’t find it. Finally, I drove into the Bonsal Cement Plant to ask if anyone knew about the brickyard. As we entered there was something familiar about the plant to Sheeran. Inside the office I learned from a female employee that when her father had worked there Bonsal had been the Campbell Cement Company, but she didn’t know of any Campbell Brickyard. We drove around the grounds. Some new buildings had been erected. Sheeran pointed to an older structure and said, “That’s where the soldiers came out of to load the truck.” I took a picture and we returned to Philadelphia.

Some things did not go as smoothly as the trip to Baltimore.

It has been my experience that when an adult who has developed a conscience in his childhood wants to get something off his chest the route to confession is usually a circuitous one with many fits and starts, with roadblocks and red herrings and hints and glimpses of the truth. Often the person drops a hint and wants the questioner to figure it out. A good example of such an interrogation is the notorious case of Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons in her car in a lake and blamed a “black carjacker.” For nine days Sheriff Howard Wells displayed the patience and skill of a superb interrogator who knows how to avoid pitfalls, maintain a rapport, and follow the hints until it is time to confront the truth.

There were certain things that Frank Sheeran expressed to me that I knew would interfere with the clearing of his conscience. He didn’t want the three daughters that still were in his life to think any worse of him than they already might. His deceased wife, Irene, had assured his youngest daughter that Frank didn’t have time to kill Hoffa, because Irene was convinced he was “with her.” Frank didn’t want Barbara Crancer to think he was some kind of ogre because he had called her mother two days after her father’s disappearance to express his concern. Frank didn’t want to offend Russell Bufalino’s widow, Carrie, or anyone else who might be alive. He didn’t want people that he had been involved with over the years to think he had gone soft in the end like John Francis and Lou Cordi. He said, “I lived my life a certain way. I don’t want people thinking I went the other way.” Another time he said, “Even though he’s dead, if I would say that about Russ, as close as we were, there are other people out there who know I know things about them.” In the interview, I kept the focus on the Hoffa case.

About two years into the interview process, after Sheeran had admitted to me that he was the shooter in the Hoffa case but about a year before going to Detroit to find the house, my agent scheduled a meeting at Emmett Fitzpatrick’s office with Eric Shawn, a senior correspondent with Fox News who was knowledgeable on mob matters, and his producer, Kendall Hagan. It was our intention to get Frank comfortable with one correspondent that he could trust. At the meeting, consistent with the protection of his rights, Sheeran was going to utter for the first time to anyone besides me the words: “I shot Jimmy Hoffa.”