"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (35 page)

That didn’t mean you couldn’t do some good for yourself. If you organized a new company you could give them a waiver of donating their share into the pension fund for up to a year. That way they could adjust to the thing. Maybe raise their rates to their customers or whatever, so they would have time to prepare for the extra overhead of the pension donations. Let’s say the company has to donate $1 an hour for each employee. For a forty-hour week that’s $40. If he’s got a hundred employees, that’s $4,000 a week. If you gave him a six-month waiver, that’s a little over $100,000 he saves. Only it’s more than $1 an hour to begin with. He puts his savings on the table and you both share it under the table—everybody’s taken care of that way. Now the men don’t get hurt at all. Because all Teamsters pensions are retroactive to the day you started with the company, even if the company wasn’t contributing. They got their exact pension whether you gave the waiver or not.

After all the firings in Philadelphia the tensions kept heating up. Joey McGreal and his muscle crew decided they wanted to take over 107 once and for all and get all the union jobs for themselves so they could shake down the trucking companies and line their pockets. So one September night in 1967 they held a big rally in front of the 107 hall on Spring Garden Street. There must have been 3,000 people from all the different factions all stirred up. There were people walking up and down outside the building hollering and there were a few fistfights. Joey McGreal had muscle from downtown, not the Italians with Angelo, but muscle. Robert “Lonnie” DeGeorge and Charles Amoroso were part of McGreal’s muscle. They wanted to take over the building. They were trying to scare all the organizers and business agents and local officers into stepping down. The mounted police had their hands full that night.

I wasn’t there for any of that. I got a call late that night at home from Fitz to be there the next morning because after a rally like that you always figure it will get worse the next day. They’ll come back looking for bear. Fitz said to me, “Get things under control.” I know what that would have meant to Jimmy if Jimmy said that to me. I called Angelo Bruno and borrowed some Italian muscle. I had Joseph “Chickie” Ciancaglini and Rocco Turra and a few others. We had the good muscle. I had men inside the hall looking out the windows and men on the street. I had my back to the union hall. Two groups were walking toward each other from opposite ends of Spring Garden Street, the McGreal people coming from one direction and the people loyal to the local coming from the other direction.

All of a sudden shooting broke out. The first shot came from behind me and went whizzing past my head. They said I gave the signal for the shooting to begin. They said I pointed a finger at DeGeorge and somebody from our side shot him. There was so much shooting going on nobody could tell who was shooting at who or who started it. The cops on horseback had been there the night before, but they hadn’t shown up yet that morning. That was some battle that morning. Chickie took two slugs in the belly. I grabbed Chickie and pulled him into a car and got him to my mother’s brother who was a doctor. Dr. John Hansen told me to get Chickie to a hospital right away, because he was sure to die with the wounds he had. I went over to St. Agnes Hospital, which was right across the street from my uncle’s office. I laid Chickie down and rattled the garbage cans until somebody came out to get him.

I drove down to Newport, Delaware, to hide out in an apartment over a bar until things died down. I called Fitz and I said to him, “One down. Two limping,” and Fitz panicked and hung up the phone on me. That’s the first time I knew things were going to be very different under Fitz. Still, at that point I had no idea the man was going to be capable of turning down my request for expenses when I got arrested for this on the thing that he had asked me to handle. I had no idea I was going to have to end up going to Russell to get taken care of on the matter. “One down. Two limping,” and he hung up the phone on me.

The D.A.’s office put out an arrest warrant on me. They arrested Chickie, a black guy named Johnny West, and Black Pat, a white guy. I stayed in Delaware for a while, but I didn’t want a flight charge on me, too. So I got Bill Elliot, who had been a big shot on the Wilmington Police Department, to drive me to Philly. I wore a granny dress and a bonnet and turned myself in to a
Philadelphia Bulletin
reporter named Phil Galioso, who took me to the police commissioner, Frank Rizzo. (It’s funny when you think about it, but when Rizzo was mayor in 1974 he came to Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night.)

Chickie survived. He had an iron constitution. They tried to get the black guy Johnny West to turn on the three of us. They told him I had turned on him. He said, “Anybody but him, I’d believe you. But him, I’m keeping my mouth shut.” They tried the three of them within six weeks and the jury found all of them not guilty. Meanwhile, I stayed in jail. My lawyer Charlie Peruto was on vacation in Italy while I rotted in a cell for four months and Fitz didn’t lift a finger. He was probably too busy golfing or drinking. It cost me my union election at Local 326 in Wilmington. I couldn’t campaign because I was sitting in jail. I still only lost by a few votes. Finally, the judge let me sign my own bail and I got out.

Around that time the 107 union hall burned to the ground. We figured it was the Voice or McGreal’s faction, but we never found out. Right after that, Mike Hession stepped down as president. Hession was the kind of a guy who would fight you in a minute in a street fight, but I guess the other part got too heavy for him.

Meanwhile, Arlen Specter tried to get his top prosecutor, Dick Sprague, to bring me to trial on first-degree murder on DeGeorge. Sprague told him he didn’t even have a case of manslaughter and to go try his own losers. Specter was trying to build himself up in the political world on the Teamsters’ back.

There were 3,000 people there and a lot of shooting. How can you say anybody shot what? Nobody found any guns. Those charges against me lingered in the system from 1967 to 1972. Finally, they took me to court to pick a jury and begin the trial. I had my character witnesses there. They were all different labor guys, a guy from the steelworkers, my buddy John McCullough from the roofer’s union who got whacked just before my trial in 1980, and some others. Before we picked a jury, the judge put me on the stand and asked me how many times the Commonwealth asked for a postponement of the trial, and I told him “sixty-eight.” Then the judge asked me how many times I asked for a continuance and I said “none,” and he called it a disgrace and said a motion was in order.

My new lawyer, Jim Moran, got the judge to throw it out on the first speedy trial motion in Pennsylvania. While that motion was going on, the Commonwealth tried to give me a
nolle prosse
and I told them to stick it because with a
nolle prosse,
sure it drops the charges, but they can always reindict you. My advice is to take a dismissal from a judge if you can get it, not a
nolle prosse
from the D.A. That’s what I got on the thing.

When I lost that election in 1968 on account of being in jail for four months I went to work to fill an unexpired term as a business agent. It’s good work. You service the people. You make sure the company lives up to the contract. You have certain barns to cover. You process grievances. You defend people that the company is trying to fire. If a union is run right you don’t have too many discharge cases. Stealing or accidents where you were negligent, then you’re done. The company has some rights, too.

I remember one Polish guy I defended who had a gambling problem. The company caught him stealing Holland hams. At the hearing I told him to keep his mouth shut and let me do the talking. The company manager took the stand and testified that he saw the Polish guy take ten cases of hams off the dock and load them into his personal truck. The Polish guy looked at me and said out loud, “Frank, he’s a fucking liar. There were only seven.” I promptly made a motion to withdraw the grievance and took the management representative aside and we worked out a letter of resignation stating that the Polish guy was resigning from the company for personal reasons.

When you think about it, even before Jimmy did, I had the first taste of how it was going to be under Fitz. I was the first one who got to feel how Jimmy got to feel when Fitz betrayed him later on. It was a minor thing compared to what he did to Jimmy, but I’m still not happy with it. I lost my own election and I lost my local on account of being in jail. And I was sitting in jail for four months on account of Fitz. After I got out of jail I was out there with no union position. I got no respect at all from the man and he was the one who put me in the thing in the first place. I was trying to take care of a job for him, risking my life in a fire fight, getting indicted, and all he did for me was to hang up on me.
”

 
chapter twenty-two
 

Pacing in His Cage

From the brochure “Questions and Answers about Federal Correctional Institutions”:

“Q
UESTION
41: How can I take care of my business while in confinement?”

“A
NSWER
: You must appoint someone else to run your business while you are confined.”

Jimmy Hoffa lived by his own rules, and he would soon develop his own answer for Question 41.

The Federal Correctional Institution at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, that Jimmy Hoffa entered on March 7, 1967, was amusingly depicted in the movie
Goodfellas
as a place where Italian mobsters were able to live comfortable lives with their own cooking facilities, an endless supply of good food, good wine, and fine cigars. Their battle cry was “Let’s eat.” Surely, in a place like that, Jimmy Hoffa would have little trouble learning the ropes and figuring out the most efficient way to pull the strings that extended from the rolling farmland of central Pennsylvania to his puppet regime and the new general vice president, Frank Fitzsimmons, as well as strings that extended beyond Fitzsimmons to Hoffa’s former hand-picked staff at “the marble palace,” Teamsters headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The prison rules allowed for a total of three hours of visitation a month from a list of nonlawyers. The visitation list was restricted to family members. Inmates were permitted no phone privileges in those days. Letters were permitted to be written to only seven people from a list of relatives and lawyers. All letters in and out were screened. No union officer was permitted to visit or write to Jimmy Hoffa. There was no limitation on visitation from lawyers working on active cases. Hoffa’s son was a lawyer for the union and so was not restricted to the family member list; he could see his father as often as once a week.

Although the appeals on the jury-tampering case had been exhausted, the appeals on the Chicago case were still pending when Jimmy Hoffa first walked into Lewisburg for delousing, photographing, fingerprinting, and outfitting in blue denim. In addition, Hoffa would be eligible for a parole hearing in two and a half years—in November 1969. All of this legal activity meant that Hoffa could receive visitations from a number of lawyers. Frank Ragano was among those lawyers who visited Hoffa, consulted on the issues, and carried messages back to both the union and mob figures. Attorney Morris Shenker represented Hoffa on the machinations of his parole strategy and on another matter: the delicate maneuvers involved in securing a presidential pardon, from what would later be revealed as the corrupt administration of President Richard M. Nixon. Bill Bufalino regularly visited Hoffa in his role of lawyer and adviser.

The tight restrictions on visitation hamstrung those inmates without the financial resources, battery of lawyers, or power of a Jimmy Hoffa. Many young men did not have relatives who could afford to make the trip to Pennsylvania. They could not use up their three hours of allotted visitation. Jimmy Hoffa would arrange for “job interviews” for such men with Frank Sheeran. The young inmate would meet with Frank Sheeran in the dining hall that served as the visitation room. They would sit at a table next to Jimmy Hoffa, who would be consulting with one of his many lawyers.