Teamsters–La Cosa Nostra alliance

The Teamsters–La Cosa Nostra alliance was not simply a pact between a union and criminal bosses: it was a changing network of personal loyalties, union authority, financing, and intermediaries. The book presents Jimmy Hoffa’s power to organize workers and control pension loans as converging with the reach of crime-family leaders, while Frank Sheeran’s friendships and errands carried him between those worlds. Its most charged image is a penciled note beside Hoffa’s telephone, Russ & Frank, which, in the opening account, turns two trusted allies into suspects in Hoffa’s disappearance. The alliance’s strength lay in its overlapping channels; its danger lay in how those channels could also transmit pressure, money, and violence.

A network with ranks and boundaries

The book describes the newly exposed criminal network as divided into twenty-four territories and organized along military lines. Bosses and godfathers occupied the top, followed by underbosses and consiglieres, then capos and soldiers who carried out orders. Frank Sheeran belonged to a different category: an associate whose standing depended on what he earned, but who had no official rank in the Italian families’ hierarchy. That distinction matters. The alliance could draw on people such as Sheeran without making them members of the formal chain of command.

Hoffa’s union alliances were presented as a form of resistance to employers who used force against organizing campaigns. But the book also emphasizes the gap between that justification and the interests of the men Hoffa relied on. Johnny Dio, for example, owned and operated a nonunion garment shop; many mobsters treated unions as instruments for crime and the accumulation of wealth and power, rather than as causes in themselves. Hoffa continued to defend his union against public accusations of racketeering, even as his closest political and business relationships connected him to figures with criminal records. The arrangement was therefore both practical and unstable: union strength could serve workers and Hoffa’s authority, while also furnishing criminal partners with influence and opportunity.

Personal ties and cross-country contact

The connection between the organizations became concrete in the relationship among Hoffa, Russell Bufalino, and Sheeran. Hoffa’s yellow pad, kept beside his phone, bore the handwritten words Russ & Frank. The opening frames the note through the fear of Hoffa’s family: because he was cautious and aware of enemies, they believed only someone close enough to be trusted could have approached him. The note does not itself establish what happened, but it condenses the alliance’s defining vulnerability—intimacy could provide access as well as protection.

Sheeran’s account supplies the ordinary routines beneath that association. He says Bufalino called him to drive him to business across upstate New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York City. In November 1957, Sheeran drove him to a house in Apalachin and dropped him off; he says he noticed nothing unusual and did not attend the meeting. The following day, news broke that police had arrested about fifty gangsters from around the country. The arrests made the network’s national scale visible to Sheeran and, in his telling, explained why Bufalino had asked him to wait while he conducted business in houses, bars, and restaurants. Sheeran later recalled that he and Bufalino shared wine, exchanged food, knew one another’s wives, and asked after one another’s children. Those ties were not separate from business: they made the driver a familiar, trusted presence around a powerful boss.

The same network crossed regional lines through meetings. Sheeran recounts driving with Bufalino to Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Lounge in Hollywood, Florida, where people from across the country gathered. Bufalino met there with Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, and Sheeran met Trafficante’s lawyer, Frank Ragano, who later helped Hoffa with trials connected to Bobby Kennedy and the Get Hoffa Squad. These encounters show how the alliance moved through relationships among union figures, lawyers, and regional bosses, not only through formal union offices.

Pension money as the alliance’s financial channel

The pension fund gave the relationship an institutional and financial base. In the book’s account, Hoffa pushed to establish a fund under arrangements that allowed loans to people he approved. The loans carried interest and were secured, and were treated as investments of fund money; at the same time, the fund’s growth made it a substantial source of capital. It reportedly held about $200 million by the time Sheeran became involved and reached a billion dollars by the time he retired. The funds came from employer contributions for each hour worked by covered employees, while the workers themselves had not yet begun to retire in large numbers.

The book says the fund quickly became a lending source for the national crime syndicate. Loans supported ventures including casino construction in Havana and Las Vegas, and further gambling development was anticipated as Atlantic City approached the opening of legalized gambling in 1975. Hoffa’s own gain, as described in Sheeran’s account, was an off-the-books finder’s fee: connected bosses brought borrowers, charged them ten percent of the loan, and shared that percentage with Hoffa for approving loans. The names associated with this arrangement included Bufalino, Marcello, Trafficante, Sam Giancana, Anthony Provenzano, and Johnny Dio. The fund thus connected union authority to criminal finance through an ostensibly secured loan process and a separate personal reward for Hoffa.

Red Dorfman and his stepson Allen Dorfman illustrate how this business acquired administrators and intermediaries. Hoffa placed them in charge of union insurance policies and made Allen the contact for pension-fund loans. Allen collected the points and shared them with Hoffa; the account characterizes Hoffa’s portion as modest compared with the wealth taken by earlier and later union leaders. Both Dorfmans invoked the Fifth Amendment repeatedly during congressional hearings. The network’s durability depended not only on money but on roles that linked union administration, borrowers, and people able to manage or conceal the flow of business.

Prison channels and the survival of influence

Hoffa’s imprisonment at Lewisburg restricted direct contact but did not, in the book’s account, sever his connections. Prison rules limited him to three hours of monthly visits from nonlawyer relatives, barred phone calls, restricted correspondence to seven approved people, and screened letters. Union officers could neither visit nor write. Lawyers handling active cases were exempt, however, and Hoffa received visits from attorneys who could consult with him and carry messages to union and criminal figures. Frank Ragano visited; Bill Bufalino came as lawyer and adviser; and Morris Shenker worked on Hoffa’s parole strategy and the effort to secure a presidential pardon.

Sheeran describes another, less formal channel. Hoffa arranged job interviews with him for young prisoners who might improve their parole prospects by having work lined up. In the dining hall, Sheeran says, a tug on his shirt signaled that the young man should go to the buck house so he and Hoffa could discuss business while guards looked the other way. The arrangement turned a permitted visit into a space for private communication. At other times, the meetings were social: Sheeran could give Hoffa his meatballs at Wednesday lunch, and the two could talk without conducting business. The small routines make the continuing relationship tangible, but also show how the formal restrictions were negotiated through lawyers, favors, and informal prison practices.

The alliance after Hoffa’s disappearance

The book links the alliance to Hoffa’s disappearance without treating every allegation as settled fact. Five days after Hoffa vanished, the FBI recorded a meeting at Vesuvio Restaurant in New York City attended by Anthony Salerno, Russell Bufalino, Frank Sheeran, Tony Pro, and Salvatore Briguglio. Sheeran’s later account says the meeting was to report to Salerno how Hoffa’s killing had been carried out and to identify any loose ends. He also describes the limits and permissions around the act as territorial: in his telling, New York had not sanctioned it but had not opposed it, while action required approval in Detroit and consideration of Chicago’s close ties to Detroit. The FBI record establishes the meeting and its attendees; the explanation of its purpose and the claimed authorization structure come from Sheeran’s account.

The scale of the investigation gives that account a broader context, not independent proof of its details. The FBI assigned 200 agents to the disappearance and assembled seventy volumes, more than 16,000 pages, in the HOFFEX file. An early memo named seven men as suspects, including Tony Pro, Stephen Andretta, Thomas Andretta, Salvatore Briguglio, Gabriel Briguglio, Sheeran, and Bufalino; adding Tony Jack and Chuckie O’Brien brought the total to nine. The investigation’s focus on this small circle echoes the alliance described elsewhere in the book: national reach, local territories, and personal connections converged around Hoffa. Sheeran’s account remains a claim within that history, while the disappearance itself remains unresolved; the alliance explains why trusted associates could appear both as the infrastructure of Hoffa’s power and among the people investigators scrutinized after he was gone.