"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (28 page)

Russell Bufalino, circa 1968.
© Bettmann/Corbis

Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano with news reporters on August 5, 1975, one day after the Vesuvio meeting.
© Bettmann/Corbis

Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio in December 1975 after appearing before the grand jury investigating the Hoffa disappearance.
© AP/Wide World Photos

Russell Bufalino (in wheelchair) getting a friendly knockout punch from Sheeran, circa 1986.
Courtesy of Frank Sheeran

Sheeran pointing to the building of the former Machus Red Fox restaurant entrance. In the side mirror is the hardware store whose outside pay phone Hoffa used to call his wife.
Courtesy of Charles Brandt

The house Jimmy Hoffa entered on July 30, 1975.
Courtesy of Charles Brandt

“The Irishman” on his patio in October 2001, a few months before entering a nursing home.
Courtesy of Charles Brandt

A Nashville police officer who moonlighted for Tommy Osborn as a private investigator doing legitimate jury pool research told the Get Hoffa Squad that Osborn had told him that he was working on putting one of the jurors into a land development deal. The Get Hoffa Squad found it hard to believe and already had their hands full. They stored the information away for a future day.

Strike three was a black juror whose son had been contacted by a black business agent from Jimmy Hoffa’s home local in Detroit and offered a $10,000 bribe. According to a sworn affidavit the government prepared for Partin’s signature, a $5,000 down payment on the bribe had been delivered and the deal struck before the trial began and the juror selected. Partin revealed in the affidavit that one day Jimmy Hoffa said to him, “I’ve got the colored male juror in my hip pocket. One of my business agents, Larry Campbell, came into Nashville prior to the trial and took care of it.” The sealed affidavit was read by Judge Miller, who then denied the defense access to it, and excused the juror, who was replaced by yet another alternate. By this time, not knowing of Partin’s defection, the defense was sure the government had been bugging and wiretapping them since before the trial had even started.

“
I got a call from Bill Isabel that they needed me down there in Nashville, so I drove down. Over the phone he said they were expecting some protesters and they wanted me down there to help out if any protester got out of line with Jimmy. Now this was just something he was saying over the phone, because by then everybody was sure everything was bugged. It was like science fiction down there. What they really wanted me there for was to sit in the courtroom and make my presence felt by the jury in case any of the other ones they had reached out for on the jury got the idea to come out of the woodwork. Now nobody told me that directly, but I knew what it was when they told me to make eye contact with the jurors once in a while.

I stayed in the Andrew Jackson Hotel, but I wasn’t a part of the thing. They had too many cooks already spoiling the broth. I remember the Southern-fried chicken at the hotel restaurant was out of this world. It was always good to see Sam and Bill again. I remember seeing Ed Partin in the restaurant but not thinking anything of it. He was just sitting there with Frank Ragano, and Ragano had no idea he was sitting there with a rat. Imagine the government today putting a planted rat inside your lawyers’ offices. That hotel room they had was their lawyers’ offices and Partin was right in there with them.

Of course, no protesters showed up. The place was loaded with FBI anyway. And then one day, almost to make Bill Isabel’s reason for bringing me down come true, a nut came into the courtroom while I was standing in the back talking to Bill and Sam. It was on a recess and this young guy in a raincoat walks down to the front of the courtroom and gets behind Jimmy and pulls out a gun. I heard this gun going off and the first thing I saw was all the lawyers on both sides of the thing fighting for space while they were diving under the desks like they were foxholes. And there was Jimmy Hoffa charging at the nut with the gun. It turns out the nut had a pellet gun that looked real. It was the kind of gun used to kill squirrels and rabbits. He had fired it and hit Jimmy a couple of times in the back, but Jimmy had on a heavy suit. Jimmy swarmed the nut and decked him good. Chuckie O’Brien jumped on the nut and took him to the floor. Chuckie was a hefty guy and he was letting the nut have it real good. The marshals finally got over there, and one of the marshals sapped the guy with the butt of his revolver, but Chuckie kept whaling away at the guy. The marshals and Jimmy had to pull him off, or he’d have killed the guy.

I told Bill Isabel to be careful what he says next time about some protester getting out of hand. It turns out the guy claimed God told him to go kill Jimmy Hoffa. Everybody’s got a boss, I guess.

The jury wasn’t present in the courtroom for that pellet gun cowboy, but the defense filed for a mistrial. They claimed the nut in the raincoat was an example of how the population of Nashville was riled up against Jimmy Hoffa by all the anti-Hoffa government propaganda that was surrounding the case coming from Bobby Kennedy and his cohorts. It sounded good to me, but the judge denied it.

Bill Isabel told me that Jimmy said, “You always run away from a man with a knife and toward a man with a gun.” I don’t know about that. You have to know the circumstances. He’s right if you can startle the man with the gun, because he doesn’t expect you to come at him. Jimmy did the right thing in these circumstances. But if you go toward the man with a gun who cannot be startled, the closer you get the more you improve his aim. Most of the time you don’t see the knife until you’re cut with it. The best thing is to be a choirboy.

Jimmy said that “everybody’d been searched” by the marshals. That part was true all right. I got searched. The marshals had searched everybody who came into the courtroom. Jimmy said it wasn’t a coincidence that this man had been able to walk right up behind him. The idea was that the government used a nut to whack him. Only this nut was too nutty to be able to get his hands on a real piece. Jimmy knew that nuts were used from time to time by certain people for certain matters. That same year of his Nashville trial Sam Giancana’s friend Frank Sinatra had
The Manchurian Candidate
in all the theaters. It was a big movie out about the Communists using a nut to kill somebody running for president.

But in real life when a nut is used in America or in Sicily he’s always disposed of right away, on the scene even. Like years later when Crazy Joey Gallo used that black nut to whack Joe Colombo, the boss of the Colombo family in Brooklyn. The nut got off three shots at Joe Colombo at a rally of the Italian-American Civil Rights League at Columbus Circle near Central Park. No doubt everything had been worked out in detail and rehearsed with the nut. He was shown exactly how he was going to be hustled into a car and driven away to safety. Naturally, the nut was laid out right on the sidewalk by certain people after the nut did his job and shot Colombo.

Russell never forgave Crazy Joey Gallo for that—for using a nut that way on Joe Colombo. I always thought Crazy Joey was a fresh kid anyway. Poor Joe Colombo laid in a coma like a vegetable for a long time before he died. That’s the problem with using a nut. They’re not accurate enough. Nuts can cause a lot of suffering. Like the nut who shot George Wallace and left the man paralyzed. Or the nut that shot Reagan and his press secretary, Brady.
”

The Nashville trial lasted forty-two days. The jury went out to deliberate just four days before Christmas. While the jury deliberated Walter Sheridan remained concerned that the government had not weeded out all those jurors who had been bribed. There may have been a bribed juror or two that had not been talked about in Edward Grady Partin’s presence.