Assassination of John F. Kennedy

The assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963, becomes in the book a moment when private suspicion and public grief briefly converge. Robert F. Kennedy asked Walter Sheridan to examine possible involvement by Jimmy Hoffa, while Frank Sheeran, hearing the news at a union hall in Wilmington, Delaware, wondered whether it touched an earlier matter at Monte’s. The account preserves these reactions as questions, not proof: it offers no established link between the killing and Hoffa, Sheeran, or the earlier incident.

The assassination and its immediate aftermath

JFK was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The book places the news amid the shock of a national tragedy, then follows the way it sharpened attention to organized crime. Robert F. Kennedy, grieving his brother, made calls about people he suspected might have been involved. One was to Walter Sheridan, whom he asked to check out possible involvement by Jimmy Hoffa. The request establishes that Hoffa was considered worth investigating; it does not establish that he had any role in the assassination.

The inquiry had a wider setting. On the day of the killing, Robert F. Kennedy was in Washington presiding over a two-day meeting with federal attorneys who had come from offices around the country. They were working out the next phase of the attorney general’s campaign against organized crime. The sudden death of JFK therefore arrived while the Justice Department was already organizing a national effort against criminal networks—a coincidence of timing that lends the episode its political tension without resolving its central question.

Sheeran hears the news in Wilmington

Sheeran recalled that the union hall in Wilmington was near the train station and still belonged to Teamsters Local 107 in Philadelphia. He was there on union business and had stopped at trucking terminals on the way. When he entered the hall, the assassination was being reported on the radio. The remembered setting is practical and specific: a workday, a union stop, and breaking news heard in a public room rather than through a later investigation or a private briefing.

Sheeran said the news bothered him as it bothered everyone, although JFK had not been one of his favorite people. He added that he had nothing personal against him and thought he had a nice family. The account thus distinguishes political dislike from personal hostility. It presents Sheeran’s reaction as ordinary distress, then marks the more unsettling thought that followed: even before Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald, Sheeran wondered whether the assassination had anything to do with “that matter at Monte’s.”

That thought remains deliberately unresolved. Sheeran did not identify a proven connection, and he said there was nobody he could ask about it. The statement records the boundary of his knowledge as well as the suspicion itself: he had an association in mind, but no reliable way to test it. In the book’s telling, the allusion makes the assassination intersect with Sheeran’s underworld world without turning an unanswered question into a finding of fact.

Hoffa, organized crime, and the limits of suspicion

The inquiry into Hoffa forms a separate strand from Sheeran’s recollection. After the assassination, Robert F. Kennedy asked Sheridan to check Hoffa’s possible involvement. The text places this request within the attorney general’s ongoing campaign against organized crime, but supplies no result from Sheridan’s check in this episode. The distinction matters: the book reports that suspicion reached Hoffa, not that evidence in this passage confirms it.

Robert F. Kennedy’s private remarks in the weeks and years that followed show that he considered more than one possible explanation. On December 9, 1963, he spoke with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. about whether Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone or as part of a larger plot, possibly organized by Cuba or by gangsters. Two years after the Warren Commission issued its 1964 report, Robert F. Kennedy told Richard Goodwin, “I never thought it was the Cubans. If anyone was involved it was organized crime. But there is nothing I can do about it. Not now.” Those remarks reveal his suspicion and his sense of political constraint; they do not name Hoffa as a participant or settle who was responsible.

How the book preserves the account

The episode reaches the reader through a retrospective interview history, not a contemporaneous transcript of the assassination. The author first interviewed Sheeran in 1991, but Sheeran stopped the session after becoming unhappy with the questioning. After a later meeting arranged at the request of Sheeran’s daughters, the interviews resumed and continued for four years. Sheeran read and approved each chapter and then reread and approved the complete manuscript. These details establish how the book’s testimony was gathered and reviewed, while leaving the distinction between Sheeran’s remembered impression and independently established fact intact.

The book’s later confirmation procedures concern Sheeran’s account of Hoffa’s fate, not proof of his speculation about JFK. During his final illness, Sheeran stood behind the material in the book, including his role in what happened to Hoffa on July 30, 1975. That final endorsement gives the Hoffa narrative a particular weight within the book, but it cannot be transferred to the separate, unverified thought he recalled in Wilmington. The assassination episode is significant precisely at that boundary: it shows how the killing prompted inquiry and suspicion, while preserving the gap between a remembered association and a demonstrated connection.