Frank Sheeran

Frank Sheeran is the central figure of “I Heard You Paint Houses,” both the subject of its life history and the source of its most consequential claim: that he killed Jimmy Hoffa. The book presents him as a man whose working life moved between union organizing, criminal violence, and family attachments, and whose account of Hoffa’s disappearance became public through a long, contested process of interviews and final confirmation. Sheeran’s story is therefore more than a portrait of an enforcer; it is also a record of how a confession was elicited, withheld, revised in its telling, and finally placed before readers for judgment.

Identity and Background

The book describes Sheeran as a witty Irishman raised as a devout Catholic and shaped by the Great Depression. His biography gathers identities that do not settle into a single moral category: combat-hardened World War II veteran, high-ranking official in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, convicted felon, alleged mob enforcer, father of four daughters, and beloved grandfather. In a civil RICO suit, Rudy Giuliani alleged that Sheeran was acting in concert with La Cosa Nostra’s ruling commission; among the twenty-six figures on Giuliani’s list, the book notes, Sheeran was one of only two non-Italians. Those descriptions coexist with the account of his military service and his love for his children and grandchildren, rather than canceling one another out.

Sheeran’s own account emphasizes restlessness and a life made up of changing jobs. After losing his meat-truck job at Food Fair for stealing and reselling beef and chickens, he took day work through a Teamsters union hall, drove when regular drivers were absent, taught ballroom dancing, and worked as a bouncer at the Nixon Ballroom. He described his wandering streak as a kind of gypsy life. Day-by-day union work allowed him to go where he was needed, while cash jobs downtown helped him support himself and contribute to the care of Mary and the girls according to what he had earned that week. His mobility was both practical and characteristic: work without a fixed commitment left him free to move between ordinary employment and favors for Russell Bufalino.

Entry into Union Work and Violence

Sheeran described his early service to Russell Bufalino as favors rather than paid work. He did not present himself as a hired hitman: he ran errands, did favors, and understood that help might be returned when he needed it. Bufalino introduced him to Jimmy Hoffa by telephone while they were at a bar in South Philadelphia. Hoffa’s opening line was, “I heard you paint houses.” Sheeran explained that the phrase referred to blood from a shooting on walls or floors; his response, “I do my own carpentry work, too,” referred to making coffins and disposing of bodies. The exchange introduced the criminal code in which their later working relationship would be framed.

Hoffa then put Sheeran to work for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, where he said he earned more than he had from his previous jobs combined, with additional money for expenses. He also handled matters for Hoffa, as he had for Bufalino. In Sheeran’s telling, this movement from informal favors to paid union employment did not replace his ties to organized crime; the two kinds of work ran alongside one another.

His account also describes learning the local criminal world from Skinny Razor and his associates, whom he compared to combat veterans training a new recruit. Although people thought he was closer to Angelo and the downtown group because he saw them more often, Sheeran said his allegiance remained with Bufalino, who was usually upstate and had lent him to Angelo’s circle to learn and earn. Bufalino called him his Irishman; downtown associates began calling him Irish or the Irishman instead of Cheech. Sheeran said that after the Whispers matter he kept a gun available, including a snub-nosed .38 in his car’s glove compartment. He recounted using it against a man who tried to rob him at a dark Spring Garden Street intersection, shooting the assailant in both kneecaps before driving away. The story conveys how violence, in his telling, became an ordinary and readily available instrument of self-protection and intimidation.

Union Career and Hoffa’s Imprisonment

Sheeran’s union ambitions took him from casual work to organizing. He recalled flying to Detroit and reporting to Teamsters Local 299 on Trumbull Avenue, Hoffa’s home local, where an organizing drive was under way to unionize cab drivers. Seeing the picketers across the street from the union hall, he believed he had found his place. He hoped that success in Detroit would lead to an organizer position at Teamsters Local 107 in Philadelphia, and ultimately aspired to become an International organizer, a national-office role that would send him wherever the union needed him. He later reflected that he might have reached that position if events surrounding Hoffa had not intervened.

In Nashville, Sheeran said, he was summoned by Bill Isabel and told over the phone that he was needed to deal with possible protesters. He understood the assignment differently: the real purpose, he believed, was for him to sit in the courtroom and make eye contact with jurors, intimidating any juror who might have been approached. He stayed at the Andrew Jackson Hotel and recalled seeing Ed Partin there with Frank Ragano, without then understanding the significance of their presence. The episode places Sheeran within a union campaign in which jury pressure, surveillance fears, and legal proceedings overlapped, while making clear that this description comes from his retrospective account.

His responsibilities expanded in Delaware. Hoffa divided Local 107 into three locals, and Sheeran said he received the charter for a new one, Teamsters Local 326 in Wilmington, becoming its acting president pending an election. His first assignment was to fire five disruptive Philadelphia organizers whom Local 107’s president feared dismissing. Sheeran drove north on I-95 and named several of the men he fired, including Johnny Sullivan and Big Bobby Marino. He stayed in Philadelphia afterward to guard against backlash, then returned to Delaware. To learn the issues facing car haulers, he spent two weeks driving one at the Chrysler plant in Newark, Delaware, so he could represent workers in grievances with practical knowledge of their work. The details show both the authority Hoffa entrusted to him and the effort Sheeran said he made to justify it.

Hoffa’s imprisonment in 1967 marked a turning point in Sheeran’s sense of the union’s leadership. The book frames him as an early Hoffa loyalist to feel a change in the balance of power as Frank Fitzsimmons took over. On the night before Hoffa went to prison, Sheeran said he drove from Wilmington to Washington, where Hoffa gave him $25,000 for lawyers representing men indicted in connection with the shooting of John Gorey and Rita at the Local 107 union hall. Sheeran’s account placed this payment and his earlier organizing work within a relationship built on assignments, money, and personal trust. Hoffa’s incarceration, in that account, threatened not only a title at the top of the union but also the influence and security of the people who had worked under him.

The Disappearance and Sheeran’s Account

Sheeran’s account places Hoffa’s disappearance within a plan organized around a wedding. Bill Bufalino’s daughter was to marry on August 1, 1975, two days after Hoffa vanished, and Sheeran said that more than five hundred people from families around the country were expected. He described a drive to Detroit with Russell Bufalino, their wives, and Bufalino’s sister-in-law. In his version, the wedding gave Hoffa reason to believe that Bufalino and Tony Pro would be in the Detroit area and available to meet him. Sheeran characterized the dispute over Tony Pro’s million-dollar pension as a decoy used to bring Hoffa out.

The meeting was arranged for 2:30 p.m. on July 30 at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant outside Detroit. Anthony Giacalone was said to have arranged it, with Tony Pro and Anthony Giacalone expected to appear, and Anthony Giacalone supposedly serving as a peacemaker. Hoffa left for the meeting and was seen in the restaurant parking lot, but did not return home. Sheeran’s account then shifts to a private journey: he described entering a plane at the Port Clinton airfield in Ohio, recognizing the pilot, and seeing his black Lincoln with Bufalino waiting in the passenger seat. He estimated that the drive around Lake Erie to the Georgiana Motel could take nearly three hours, while the flight toward Detroit took about an hour.

Sheeran said that he felt nothing as he sat in the plane. In his explanation, the decision had already been made, and the emotional discipline he learned in war kept nervousness from confusing him. The matter-of-fact tone is part of the account’s significance: it places an alleged killing not in a dramatic burst of feeling but within an already settled course of action. This remains Sheeran’s testimony as presented by the book, not an independently established account of what happened to Hoffa.

The scale of the investigation underscores the gap between a confident confession and a solved case. The Federal Bureau of Investigation assigned 200 agents to the disappearance and compiled seventy volumes, more than 16,000 pages, in the HOFFEX file. An early list named seven men, including Sheeran, Russell Bufalino, and Tony Pro; adding Anthony Giacalone and Chuckie O’Brien brought the number of suspects to nine. The book thus places Sheeran’s later admission against years of investigation that had identified him as a suspect but had not publicly resolved Hoffa’s fate.

Confession, Confirmation, and Narrative Role

The author’s relationship with Sheeran began in 1991, shortly after Sheeran’s release from jail on medical grounds. That first interview took place in Sheeran’s apartment; after admitting more than he was comfortable with, he reconsidered the questioning and ended the session. Following a 1999 meeting with a monsignor who granted him absolution, Sheeran contacted the author and agreed to resume. The interviews continued for four years. The author describes bringing experience as a homicide and death-penalty prosecutor, a lecturer on cross-examination, and a student of interrogation to the process. Sheeran once told him, “You’re worse than any cop I ever had to deal with.” The interviews were not simply a channel for recollection: they were an extended contest over what Sheeran would say, how he would say it, and whether he would continue at all.

The book also situates this interview history within an earlier report of a possible confession. In 1978, there was controversy over whether Sheeran had confessed by telephone to Steven Brill, possibly while drinking. The Federal Bureau of Investigation believed he had and sought the tape; Dan Moldea later wrote that Brill had told him over breakfast that he possessed a recording. Brill publicly denied having it. During most of the later interviews, the author says, care was taken to protect Sheeran’s rights so that his words would not constitute a legally admissible confession. Sheeran read and approved each chapter and then reread and approved the full manuscript, making his involvement in shaping the account part of its evidentiary history.

As his health failed, Sheeran made the claim more explicit in public. After acknowledging in an interview that he was the shooter in the Hoffa case, he agreed to meet Fox News correspondent Eric Shawn. Asked whether he could find the house, Sheeran gave directions and mentioned a footbridge. For the first time before someone other than the author, he said he had shot Hoffa twice in the back of the head. Later, after speaking by phone with his lawyer, he agreed to appear on videotape and stand behind the book’s account. In the recording, he held up a galley copy and affirmed that the material about Hoffa was what he had told the author and that he stood behind it. The camera battery failed and the recording was interrupted, but audio and video captured substantial material.

Six weeks before his death on December 14, 2003, Sheeran gave a final recorded interview from his hospital bed. He said he had confessed and received communion from a visiting priest; the book describes his confirmation as deliberately made without protective legal language. The following day, when his strength was already ebbing, he asked the author to pray with him, and they said the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary together. The final scenes bring the strands of his life into close proximity: the claimed killer, the Catholic seeking absolution, and the dying man who wanted his account preserved. The book does not make those identities resolve neatly into one another. It presents Sheeran’s words as history to be judged by the reader, while leaving the disappearance itself haunted by the absence of a final, independently confirmed chapter.