Joey McGreal

Joey McGreal emerges in the account as a factional power broker in the struggle over Teamsters Local 107. His ambitions are described in practical terms: control the local, secure its union jobs, and use those positions to shake down trucking companies. That combination makes his conflict with the local’s officers more than a contest over union administration. It is a fight over who would command the work and profit from the leverage attached to it. The account does not establish that McGreal personally took part in the subsequent shooting, but it places his faction at the center of the confrontation that followed.

A faction seeking control

The dispute gathered force after Jimmy Hoffa divided Local 107 into three locals, a step the narrator says was intended to reduce violence. He appointed Frank Sheeran acting president of the new Local 326 in Wilmington and directed him to dismiss five disruptive organizers whom Local 107 president Mike Hession was afraid to fire. Among those Sheeran says he dismissed was Johnny Sullivan, whom he identifies as being with McGreal and appealing a case connected to the Gorey matter. The episode establishes an existing link between McGreal’s circle and the organizers Sheeran was sent to remove; it also shows how decisions about union appointments and discipline fed into a widening factional contest.

McGreal’s faction then moved openly against the leadership of Local 107. Sheeran recounts that McGreal and his muscle crew wanted to take over the local and obtain its union jobs for themselves, allowing them to pressure trucking companies and enrich their group. Their campaign brought them into direct conflict with the local’s organizers, business agents, and officers. The account portrays the dispute as an organized bid for control, not simply a spontaneous quarrel among workers.

The rally and the shooting

One September night in 1967, McGreal’s side held a large rally outside the Local 107 hall on Spring Garden Street. Sheeran estimates that about 3,000 people representing different factions were involved. People shouted outside the building, fistfights broke out, and mounted police struggled to manage the crowd. McGreal’s faction had muscle from downtown; Sheeran distinguishes them from the Italians associated with Angelo Bruno. Robert “Lonnie” DeGeorge and Charles Amoroso were among McGreal’s muscle. The stated purpose of their pressure was to frighten the local’s organizers and officers into giving up their positions.

Sheeran says he was not at the rally. Afterward, Frank Fitzsimmons called him at home and told him to come the next morning because he expected the situation to worsen. Sheeran responded by borrowing muscle from Angelo Bruno and arranging for men to watch from inside the hall and from the street. As two groups approached one another from opposite ends of Spring Garden Street, McGreal’s people came from one direction and people loyal to the local from the other. Gunfire began suddenly. Sheeran reports that the first shot passed his head from behind; he also recounts allegations that he signaled the start of the shooting and that someone on his side shot DeGeorge. He emphasizes that, amid the exchange, no one could establish who fired at whom or who started it. The account does not identify McGreal as a shooter or say that he ordered the gunfire.

Fallout and uncertain responsibility

The hall’s leadership and the violence left consequences beyond the morning confrontation. Sheeran says he later heard that the Local 107 hall burned to the ground. Those recounting events suspected either the Voice of Teamsters Local 107 or McGreal’s faction, but the cause was never established. Hession stepped down as president soon afterward; Sheeran suggests that the pressure had become too much for him. McGreal’s faction is therefore associated with a continuing atmosphere of intimidation and suspicion, but the narrative preserves the difference between suspicion and proof.

The broader account also makes clear that the fighting had legal and political repercussions for others involved. Sheeran describes being arrested in connection with the shooting and says the charges against him remained in the system from 1967 until 1972. That prosecution, his time in jail, and the loss of his opportunity to campaign in the Local 326 election belong to Sheeran’s experience rather than to a documented account of McGreal’s own legal fate. The distinction matters: McGreal is positioned as a central antagonist in the struggle for Local 107, but the evidence here does not specify what charges, if any, he faced over the confrontation.

Later recollection

A later recollection places McGreal in prison with Jimmy Hoffa for a period toward the end of Hoffa’s imprisonment. By then, Sheeran says, McGreal had settled down and was good company. The brief description does not explain why McGreal was imprisoned or describe a change in his circumstances; it offers a contrast in demeanor with the earlier portrait of a faction leader whose crew sought to seize a union hall and its jobs.

That contrast is a limit as well as a feature of the account. McGreal appears most fully through the risks and rivalries surrounding Teamsters Local 107: the organizers associated with him, the rally, the opposing groups, and the unresolved suspicion after the hall burned. The later prison memory supplies a more personal detail, but not an explanation that reconciles the two portraits. Together, these episodes depict a figure whose influence is clearest through the faction he led and the conflict his bid for union control helped intensify.