Detroit

Detroit serves as the book’s principal landscape of James R. Hoffa’s union authority and of the unresolved story of his disappearance. It is where Frank Sheeran says he first entered Hoffa’s inner working world, organizing cab drivers and sharing close quarters with the Teamsters leader; decades later, Detroit becomes the destination of a search for the house Sheeran identified as the scene of Hoffa’s killing. The city thus connects a concrete labor career to a crime account whose most decisive claims remain bound to testimony and physical clues.

Union Ground and Local 299

Sheeran recalls flying to Detroit and reporting to Teamsters Local 299 on Trumbull Avenue, Hoffa’s home local, down the street from Tiger Stadium. The union was conducting a drive to organize the city’s cab drivers. Across from the hall stood a large taxi garage, and when Sheeran’s cab pulled in he could see Teamsters picketers at work. He describes the sight as a recognition of where he belonged: he was happy to be an organizer at Local 299 and hoped that a successful stint would lead to an organizing position at Local 107 in Philadelphia, even if the union had to create an additional post for him.

The Detroit assignment also gave Sheeran a view of how organizing operated on the street. About eight organizers assembled each morning, then went out to picket and distribute flyers prepared by Bill Isabel and Sam Portwine, the public-relations men assigned to the drive. The picket locations shifted: sometimes the organizers stood at the garage opposite Local 299; at other times they went to cab stands around the city, including Cobo Hall and the Warner Hotel. Detroit was not merely a backdrop to Sheeran’s union ambitions. It was the daily worksite where he learned the routines, alliances, and practical pressure of organizing.

Sheeran’s account describes the drive as an apprenticeship within Hoffa’s network as well as a campaign of public-facing union work. Isabel and Portwine were both close to Hoffa, and Sheeran says he had already begun to imagine a future as an International organizer, traveling from the national office and taking legitimate opportunities to help himself. He believed that, had nothing happened to Hoffa at the end, he would have reached that position. The ambition gives the Detroit episode a counterfactual edge: the city marks the beginning of a possible career whose path, in Sheeran’s telling, was broken by Hoffa’s fate.

Close Quarters with Hoffa

During the organizing period, Sheeran spent nights at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, often rooming with James R. Hoffa when he came in from his home in Detroit. Their shared lodging makes the relationship legible through small, domestic details rather than formal titles. Sheeran, Isabel, and Portwine hollowed out a watermelon and filled it with rum so Hoffa would not realize they were drinking. On another night, Hoffa came in unexpectedly while Sheeran had a gallon of wine cooling in the window. Asked what was there, Sheeran answered that it might be the moon. Isabel and Portwine later said that Sheeran got away with more around Hoffa than anyone else did.

The hotel routine also shows Hoffa’s strictness and family pride. He rose first each morning, and breakfast was served at seven; anyone not ready in time went without it. His son, young James, visited the hotel, and Sheeran remembers him as respectful toward his father. Hoffa was proud that his son planned to attend law school, a plan he carried out before becoming Teamsters president. These ordinary routines place Detroit’s union circle within a wider family life, even as the book’s larger narrative makes that intimacy vulnerable to later suspicion and betrayal.

A City of Connections and Conflict

Detroit’s union and criminal networks overlap in Sheeran’s recollections. Sam Giancana visited Hoffa’s suite at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Sheeran says that at first he did not stay for the men’s business, though he would be there to greet Giancana when he arrived. He contrasts Giancana’s public visibility, including his frequent appearance in newspapers, with Russell Bufalino’s reserve. Detroit therefore appears as a meeting ground where union leadership and organized-crime figures could share space, while Sheeran’s account distinguishes between being present and being privy to the business discussed.

The city also provides the local framework for the 1975 meeting that Sheeran says he tried to prevent from becoming fatal. He recalls asking Russell Bufalino to let him call Hoffa at his cottage by the lake, describing the call as a peace mission. On Sunday afternoon, July 27, Sheeran says, he called from his own apartment in Philadelphia to Hoffa’s cottage at Lake Orion near Detroit. He emphasizes that he used his own phone and argues that someone involved in a plot would have used a pay phone. The detail is part of his defense, not independent proof of his innocence. His account places the warning call in a geography that connects Philadelphia, where he says he was, with Hoffa’s lakeside retreat near Detroit, where the threatened meeting was approaching.

Hoffa told Sheeran that Anthony Giacalone had arranged a meeting at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant on Telegraph Road, a public place. Sheeran urged Hoffa to bring a gun as a precaution; Hoffa refused, saying that the meeting had been arranged by someone he trusted and would take place in a restaurant. Sheeran says Hoffa was gone by Wednesday, July 30. In the book’s construction, Detroit and its surroundings hold both sides of the episode: the public restaurant chosen for a reconciliation and the private lakeside setting from which Hoffa could no longer be reached.

The Murder House and the Limits of Proof

Decades after Hoffa disappeared, Detroit became the site of a search guided by Sheeran’s directions. During an earlier meeting with Fox News correspondent Eric Shawn, Sheeran gave directions to the house and mentioned a footbridge, then stated publicly for the first time that he had shot Hoffa twice in the back of the head. Fox News conducted preliminary research into his account. The house itself was not located until a later trip, when the author used notes from an earlier editorial meeting and searched the area with Sheeran.

The directions still pointed toward the right place, but a chain-link fence had made the footbridge harder to see. The bridge stood on a golf course; after several passes, the author spotted it from a higher road on the opposite side of the course, returned to the original road, and found the turn at a nearby T intersection. From there the rear of a house at the end of the block matched Sheeran’s description of the backyard. At the front of the house, Sheeran studied it and confirmed the identification with a nod and a grunt. Its brick exterior initially seemed inconsistent with his memory of brown shingles. Only after the party returned home and the photographs were developed did the rear and side reveal the brown shingles he had described.

That identification gave Detroit a final, uneasy role: it made Sheeran’s account more specific without, by itself, resolving the case. The search depended on remembered directions, a concealed bridge, the shape of a backyard, and a belatedly visible feature of the house. The book places those details beside the earlier union scenes and the 1975 warning call, so the same city becomes at once a workplace, a setting of personal familiarity, and the ground on which a disputed confession is tested against place.