Sheeran’s claimed solo murder of Joey Gallo is presented as both a killing and a contested act of historical reconstruction. Sheeran told Charles Brandt that, in 1972, he entered Umberto’s Clam House alone with two guns and killed Gallo on Russell Bufalino’s orders. The account challenged the familiar version of the shooting; Brandt’s case for it rests not only on Sheeran’s confession, but on a later eyewitness identification and a comparison with the details of the rival story.

The Confession and Its Setting

Brandt places the Gallo account within a long interview relationship rather than presenting it as an unmediated statement. He first interviewed Sheeran in 1991, after helping secure his medical release from jail. Sheeran ended that session soon afterward, having disclosed more than he wanted to, and the questioning resumed only after Sheeran’s 1999 meeting with a priest and his subsequent decision to contact Brandt. Their interviews then continued for four years. Brandt describes his own approach as sustained questioning informed by prosecutorial and interrogation experience; the account of Gallo’s death emerged within that process.

The book’s preparation also bears on how the confession is framed. Sheeran read and approved each chapter, then reread and approved the complete manuscript. That approval is part of the record of how the account reached print, but it does not by itself establish what happened at the restaurant. Brandt distinguishes a narrative shaped through interviews and checking from a claim that could simply be treated as independently proven.

Two Accounts of the Shooting

In Sheeran’s version, the defining fact is the presence of one gunman. He said he walked into the restaurant alone and shot Gallo, whom he described as the fresh kid. This account directly conflicts with the story Brandt identifies as prevailing, which came from informant Joe Luparelli: three men associated with the Colombo crime family supposedly learned Gallo was at Umberto’s, armed themselves, and stormed through the Mulberry Street side door. In that telling, they shot Gallo as he fled and wounded his bodyguard, Pete Diapoulos.

Brandt challenges the three-gunmen account on both evidentiary and narrative grounds. He notes that the men identified in it were not arrested on Luparelli’s information, which was never corroborated in a single detail; two of the alleged gunmen remained unidentified. He also argues that a supposedly impulsive attack in a high-ranking Genovese figure’s restaurant would have raised questions about authorization and the consequences for the people associated with it. Umberto’s was owned by Mattie Ianello, a Genovese family capo who was present during the shooting. In Brandt’s account of mob territorial protocol, an outsider could not carry out a killing in another boss’s territory without approval. He suggests that the three-man story may have shifted attention away from the people who ordered or sanctioned the killing, while making clear that this interpretation is his assessment of the competing accounts.

The Eyewitness Identification

A later report strengthened the case for a lone gunman. Author Jerry Capeci checked original news accounts and cited Al Seedman, then the New York City police chief of detectives, as having told reporters that one gunman was responsible. Capeci subsequently wrote that if forced to choose who killed Gallo, he would choose Sheeran. These accounts did not, on their own, identify the shooter, but they supported the central distinction between one gunman and three.

The more direct identification came through Eric Shawn of Fox News, who located an eyewitness after receiving a tip. She was a New York Times journalist who had been at the restaurant and wished to remain anonymous. At a later dinner with Brandt and Ted Feury, she described the layout and her view of the Mulberry Street door. As her seafood arrived, she saw a tall man enter through that door and walk diagonally past her toward the bar. When she looked up at the first shot, the man was facing Gallo’s table, his back to the bar; while others ducked, he stood calmly. She could not say that she remembered seeing a gun in his hand, but she was certain he was the one shooting.

After seeing a photograph of Sheeran from around the time of the killing, she identified him as the man she had seen. She described him as tall and Irish-looking, and rejected the account of three men entering through the side door: from her seat, she said, she would have seen them. Asked again by Brandt how certain she was, she remained positive. Her identification was made many years after the event, a limitation Brandt acknowledges; he also emphasizes that she had seen the man before the shooting began, giving her a chance to form an image before the gunfire. The witness’s account corroborated the lone-gunman version and identified Sheeran, though it remained a retrospective identification rather than a contemporaneous one.

Publication and Historical Significance

After the book appeared, Capeci’s review of the early reporting and the anonymous witness’s account supplied two different forms of support for the solo-shooter claim: one concerned the number of gunmen, the other the identity of one. Brandt presents their convergence against Luparelli’s uncorroborated three-man version as the reason he accepted Sheeran’s confession despite its conflict with books, a film, and accounts circulating online. The evidence is not presented as a courtroom verdict; it is a chain of testimony, comparison, and retrospective identification.

The shooting thus becomes more than a disclosure within Sheeran’s life story. It demonstrates how the book’s method depends on testing an interview subject’s claim against accounts that differ in detail, and on the possibility that a witness who had avoided revisiting the event might still recognize the man she saw. The narrative moves from Sheeran’s assertion, through a disputed account of three attackers, to a witness who described a single tall gunman and identified Sheeran. That sequence gives the confession weight while leaving the reader aware of the distance between a compelling reconstruction and a definitive judicial finding.