1978

1978 is a hinge year in I Heard You Paint Houses: it sits between the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa and the later public testing of Frank Sheeran’s account, marking both a disputed report of an earlier confession and the apparent collapse of the FBI’s strongest leads. The book gives the year a sharper, darker meaning by connecting that investigative dead end to the silencing of Salvatore Briguglio and to the continuing question of who else participated in Hoffa’s killing.

The investigation’s reported dead end

In 2002, after pressure from the media and Hoffa’s children, the FBI released a 349-page summary of the case. The Detroit Free Press reported that the summary was heavily censored: names had been removed, witness-interview passages blacked out, and pages were missing. In March of that year, the FBI also released 1,400 pages from its much larger, 16,000-page file to the newspaper. The paper concluded that the documents suggested the FBI’s most significant leads had run out in 1978.

The book answers that conclusion with an emphatic, ominous sentence: that was the year Salvatore Briguglio was silenced. The juxtaposition turns a date in the investigative record into a question about what happened to the case’s leads and to a person connected to its underworld network. It does not, by itself, establish that Briguglio’s death caused the FBI’s leads to end; rather, the book places the two facts beside one another and leaves their connection charged but unresolved.

Sheeran and Francis in the account of Briguglio’s death

The book sets Briguglio’s killing within a sequence of ordered violence attributed to Rosario Bufalino. In 1972, it says, John Francis drove when Sheeran killed Joey Gallo. In 1978, again on Bufalino’s orders, Francis also fired when Sheeran shot Briguglio. The recurrence matters: Francis is not presented simply as a driver associated with one earlier killing, but as a member of a close trio with Bufalino and Sheeran who is described as taking an active role in a later one.

That history prompts the author to ask whether Francis might also have had a role in the 1975 Hoffa killing. The book does not claim to know the answer. It notes that such a role is possible, then identifies Francis as an independently wealthy commercial real-estate man with potentially wide connections. The 1978 episode therefore changes the shape of the mystery without resolving it: it makes Francis’s relationship to Sheeran and Bufalino more consequential, while leaving his possible involvement in Hoffa’s disappearance unproven.

A disputed earlier confession

The year also appears in a controversy over whether Sheeran had already confessed to killing Hoffa over the telephone. In 1978, there was public disagreement about whether he had confessed to Steven Brill, author of The Teamsters, perhaps while under the influence of alcohol. The FBI believed that Sheeran had confessed and pressed Brill for a tape. Dan Moldea later wrote that Brill told him over breakfast at a hotel that he possessed a recorded confession. Brill, perhaps to avoid becoming a witness who might need protection, publicly denied having it in The New York Times.

This account makes 1978 an uncertain prehistory to the book’s later, more sustained testimony. The alleged tape is not presented as an available, verified confession: its existence is disputed, and Brill’s public denial stands against Moldea’s report. The episode nevertheless shows that the possibility of Sheeran’s confession had circulated long before the interviews that became the book.

The year’s later evidentiary afterlife

The book’s account of 1978 was assembled through interviews that began in 1991, when Sheeran admitted more than he later wished to discuss and stopped the questioning. After meeting with a monsignor in 1999 and receiving absolution, Sheeran contacted the author and agreed to resume. Their interviews continued for four years. The author describes his own role as an experienced interrogator and says he worked to keep Sheeran’s rights protected so that the statements would not constitute a legally admissible confession. Sheeran read and approved each chapter and then the full manuscript.

Later details gave the account of Hoffa’s disappearance a material, though still debated, evidentiary setting. In February 2002, Sheeran and the author found the Detroit house where Sheeran said he had shot Hoffa; its location and exterior matched his description. Fox News arranged Luminol testing of the floorboards, which showed eight small indications of blood along a trail from the vestibule down the hallway toward the kitchen. Subsequent testing found human male blood, but its DNA did not match Hoffa’s. The result did not corroborate Sheeran’s confession, the local prosecutor said, but did not refute it either.

The 1978 thread thus remains suspended between allegation and corroboration. A reported telephone confession was never established in the account as a verified recording; Briguglio’s killing was tied to Sheeran, Francis, and Bufalino; and later forensic findings supplied a mixture of matching details and limits. The year’s significance lies in that unresolved convergence: it marks the point at which the FBI’s most promising leads reportedly faded, even as the book’s retrospective narrative places a killing and a possible participant at the center of what remained unknown.