All He Did for Me Was to Hang Up

“All He Did for Me Was to Hang Up” is the phrase through which Frank Sheeran reduces a larger grievance to one abrupt gesture: after Sheeran says he risked his life on Fitz’s behalf, was indicted, and lost his union standing, Fitz’s response was to end their exchange. In Sheeran’s retrospective account, the hang-up is both a personal slight and an early sign of how power would shift after Jimmy Hoffa went to prison.

The grievance behind the phrase

Sheeran places his experience against the change in union leadership that followed Hoffa’s incarceration. On March 7, 1967, Hoffa entered Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary; the book frames Sheeran, a Hoffa ally on the front lines of union conflict in Philadelphia, as among the first to feel the chill of the new order under Fitz. Sheeran later calls his own experience a smaller version of what Hoffa would suffer: “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.”

The chapter heading, “All He Did for Me Was to Hang Up,” gives that comparison its sharpest form. Sheeran says he had been trying to take care of a job for Fitz, risking his life in a firefight, and was indicted in the process. He says that after the resulting jail term he had no union position and received no respect from Fitz, whom he blamed for putting him in the situation. The phrase makes the hang-up stand for the gulf between the danger Sheeran says he accepted and the scant support he felt he received in return.

The costs to Sheeran

Sheeran connects the jail term to a concrete political and occupational loss. In 1968, he says, he lost an election because he had spent four months in jail. After his release, he filled an unexpired term as a business agent, work he describes as servicing members, enforcing contracts, processing grievances, and defending workers facing dismissal. The role restored a place in union work, but his account distinguishes that practical responsibility from the respect and standing he felt Fitz had withheld.

His recollection of defending a Polish worker illustrates the everyday judgments the job required. The company accused the man of stealing Holland hams, and Sheeran told him to stay quiet while he handled the grievance. When the worker interrupted management’s testimony to insist that he had taken seven cases, not ten, Sheeran withdrew the grievance and arranged a letter of resignation stating that the man was leaving for personal reasons. This episode shows the business agent negotiating between a member’s interests and an employer’s case; beside the title phrase, it throws Sheeran’s own complaint into relief, since he portrays his service to Fitz as receiving no comparable accommodation.

A prelude to Hoffa’s betrayal

The book links Sheeran’s grievance to the moment Hoffa was about to begin his prison sentence. The night before Hoffa “went to school,” Sheeran drove from Wilmington to Washington to see him. Hoffa gave him $25,000 for the lawyers representing Johnny Sullivan and two others indicted over the shooting of John Gorey and Rita at the Teamsters Local 107 union hall in 1964. Sheeran described Rita as a civilian caught in the wrong place with the wrong man. The visit places him in a role of practical loyalty to Hoffa at the same time that the leadership transition was beginning to expose his vulnerability under Fitz.

The expression therefore does more than record a brusque ending to an exchange. Sheeran uses it to connect his own lost election, jail time, and removal from union standing to the later rupture between Hoffa and Fitz. Its force rests on the contrast he draws: he had undertaken dangerous work for Fitz, while the response he remembers is a hang-up. The book presents that personal grievance as an early measure of the broader betrayal he says Hoffa would eventually face.