Loyalty and Betrayal

Loyalty and betrayal are not opposites in the book so much as adjoining conditions of its underworld and union politics: trust creates obligations, but also gives others leverage over the person who trusts them. Frank Sheeran recalls loyalty as a demand for discretion, reliable action, and continued service. Around Jimmy Hoffa, those expectations govern friendships, alliances, and family ties alike; when they fail, the consequences range from lost union standing to permanent estrangement. The account’s central irony is that the people who promise to help Hoffa preserve his power also become entangled in the changes that keep him from reclaiming it.

Secrecy and the obligations of trust

Sheeran presents discretion as a condition of respect in his circle. Friends questioned Hoffa’s willingness to speak freely to Ed Partin, a man he hardly knew. In Sheeran’s telling, the danger was not merely that information might leak: speaking too openly could make others lose respect for Hoffa and undermine the confidence on which their relationships depended. Trust therefore had a disciplinary side. It required keeping matters inside, not simply professing allegiance.

Hoffa’s response to the Chicago case supplies a small, concrete instance of caution learned after exposure. Sheeran says he later heard from Harold Gibbons that Hoffa thereafter signed everything James R. Hoffa. The signature becomes a mark of defensive self-management: after a damaging episode, even a written name could carry a heightened awareness of risk. The detail contrasts with the earlier willingness to confide in Partin and shows how experience could make trust more guarded without dissolving the need for allies.

Sheeran also describes his own commitment to Hoffa in unusually absolute terms. Hoffa, he says, cared less about money than power; prison would not make him surrender it. He would try to avoid prison, rule from prison if necessary, and recover control after release. Sheeran places himself inside that plan, saying he would help. Loyalty here is not an abstract admiration for Hoffa. It is an undertaking to continue supporting a particular objective through changing circumstances, including imprisonment.

Help offered from outside prison

While Hoffa was at Lewisburg, visits had an ordinary, intimate texture alongside their political purpose. Sheeran recalls paying three dollars to eat lunch with the inmates, giving Hoffa his meatballs when the meal was spaghetti, and sometimes visiting without conducting business. Their exchanges could turn to a shared memory of watermelon at the Edgewater in Chicago, which Hoffa had not known was spiked with rum. Such details make the relationship more than a chain of favors: familiarity and small acts of care coexist with schemes for regaining influence.

Outside the prison, supporters worked on Hoffa’s appeals and prospects for release. Sheeran says money was sent to Attorney General John Mitchell to help secure parole or a pardon, with the funds coming from a Las Vegas skim or Hoffa’s own money. Russell Bufalino was influential in Las Vegas, and Sheeran names Russell, Fitz, Carlos Marcello, and Santo Trafficante among those trying to help. Hoffa worried that Fitz was not acting energetically enough, but at first interpreted the delay as passivity rather than betrayal. The distinction matters: suspicion developed over time, as an alliance that had seemed dependable came to look like a failure of effort, then something more deliberate.

Sheeran recounts that a shotgun attack on Allen Dorfman’s Cadillac, soon after Hoffa went to prison, was understood as a message. He and Hoffa thought it was more likely directed at Fitz than at Dorfman, who controlled the pension fund and was unlikely to be frightened into compliance. In this episode, allegiance is expressed through pressure as well as assistance: the attack’s meaning depends on who was thought to be warning whom. The account conveys how loyalty and intimidation could occupy the same political network, without establishing every participant’s intentions as independently verified fact.

Prison fractures and the transfer of allegiance

Hoffa’s confinement gradually altered how he understood Fitz. Sheeran recalls that, after nights alone in a small cell, Hoffa became convinced he was being double-crossed. He concealed that belief because he still needed Fitz’s assistance to get out. This is loyalty under strategic constraint: Hoffa’s outward cooperation persisted even as inward trust collapsed. Prison did not merely separate him from power; it forced him to depend on a successor whose motives he increasingly doubted.

A separate break came with Tony Pro. Sheeran was not present for the argument but recounts that it began when Pro asked Hoffa for help with his pension and Hoffa could not secure it for him, because the two men’s convictions raised different pension-law problems. The dispute reportedly escalated into an exchange of insults and threats, and guards had to intervene. Sheeran says their mutual hatred lasted until both men died. The rupture carries weight because Pro had previously supported Hoffa: he had helped raise money for Hoffa’s jury-tampering trial, backed him on the executive board, and publicly praised him. In Sheeran’s account, a practical grievance transformed an established alliance into lasting enmity.

Sheeran also remembers Bill Bufalino ending his visits after an argument about Partin. Bufalino told Hoffa he was resigning, walked out, and, as far as Sheeran knew, never returned to the prison. He remained a union lawyer under Fitz, but Sheeran understood that he was no longer with Hoffa. Bufalino was prosperous in his own right, and Russell Bufalino was godfather to his daughter; the incident thus places personal connection beside a consequential shift in political allegiance. The prison visit that had allowed Hoffa to give him a hard time ended instead with a clear departure.

Release, restrictions, and uncertain promises

The release negotiations sharpen the book’s account of betrayal without resolving every question about responsibility. The Get Hoffa Out of Jail Squad, as the narrative calls it, considered whether Fitz had arranged for Hoffa to resign from his union offices so he could no longer run for president from prison, and whether Hoffa had been led to expect that resignation would bring parole. The account poses these possibilities as questions, not settled facts. It also suggests that Hoffa may have trusted he could return gradually and seek the presidency again at the 1976 convention. The uncertainty is central: the political maneuvering is presented through the same relationships whose reliability is in dispute.

Sheeran’s account of the pardon draws a sharp line between what supporters believed in Lewisburg and what they learned afterward. At a pre-Christmas visit, he says, the papers passed to him at lunch contained no restriction barring Hoffa from union office until 1980. The group believed Hoffa was being released early and discussed a few months of rest in Florida before his return to work. After Hoffa reached Detroit, they saw the final papers and learned of the restriction. In Sheeran’s telling, the release brought joy first and the sense of a final double-cross afterward: freedom from prison did not mean freedom to resume the union role that had defined Hoffa’s ambition.

Betrayal beyond the union

After release, the conflict with Fitz became public and retaliatory. Hoffa repeatedly called him crazy and a liar. Fitz then fired Hoffa’s wife, Josephine, from her union position, costing her an annual income of $48,000, and ended James P. Hoffa’s legal retainer of $30,000 a year. Chuckie O’Brien, who had grown up in the Hoffa household as a foster son and called Hoffa Dad, kept his Teamsters job while becoming closer to Fitz and more distant from Hoffa. Their relationship was already under strain: Hoffa disapproved of O’Brien’s gambling and spending, and refused to support his bid to lead Detroit’s Local 299. Loyalty fractured not only through political maneuvering but through competing judgments about family, work, and who deserved advancement.

The final personal rupture in this evidence belongs to Sheeran and his daughter Peggy Sheeran. The day before a meeting with Tony Pro, Sheeran stopped at his former wife Mary Leddy Sheeran’s home to leave cash. Peggy, then twenty-six, was watching the news about Hoffa’s disappearance with her mother. Sheeran recalls that she looked at him, told him to leave, and said she did not want to know a person like him. He says they never spoke or met again after that day, August 3, 1975. The daughter he remembered as once close to him disappeared from his life. This ending extends the book’s pattern of loyalty and betrayal beyond union offices and criminal alliances: a life organized around obligations to powerful men leaves a cost at home that no later favor can repair.