“Going to Australia”

“Going to Australia” is a euphemism for being killed in Frank Sheeran’s account, not a literal journey. Its decisive use comes in his description of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance: Sheeran says he tried to warn his friend days before Hoffa vanished, then describes the outcome in language that makes death sound like a distant, almost casual departure. The phrase also reaches backward to an earlier job that, Sheeran says, could have left him dead. Across both episodes, the expression joins the vocabulary of violence to a recurring condition of the book: Sheeran tells a story in which people may be marked for death, while the language used to describe that fate keeps its details partially veiled.

Meaning and Usage

The wording depends on euphemism rather than explanation. In the account of his call to Hoffa, Sheeran says, “Sadly, as we say, gone to Australia—down under.” The phrase turns the fact of disappearance into a destination, while the added reference to being down under makes the implication legible without stating it plainly. Its breezy cadence stands against the grave meaning Sheeran assigns it: the person described this way is not simply traveling but is understood to have been killed.

The expression’s indirectness suits a narrative in which the circumstances of violence are often discussed through euphemisms such as taking care of a matter. Sheeran presents the words as familiar within his criminal world, but the book’s evidence supports a narrower claim than that they were a universal formula: it shows him using the phrase for a fate he says awaited both Hoffa and, in another episode, himself. Its significance lies in how a phrase can signal lethal intent while leaving the act itself outside the sentence.

The Warning to Hoffa

Sheeran places the phrase at the end of a short, sharply bounded interval. He says he contacted Hoffa on Sunday afternoon, July 27, 1975, from his own apartment in Philadelphia, using his own rotary telephone to call Hoffa’s cottage at Lake Orion. Hoffa was gone by Wednesday, July 30. Sheeran presents the call as a peace mission: he says he wanted to keep the thing from happening to his friend. Calling from his own phone, he later argues, was evidence that he was not participating in the plot; if he had been involved, he says, he would have used a pay phone.

The phrase therefore does more than name the fate Sheeran attributes to Hoffa. It frames the gap between a warning and an outcome. Sheeran remembers standing in his kitchen, reviewing how to approach Hoffa before dialing a number he knew by heart. The ordinary objects of the scene—a kitchen, a wall phone, a familiar number—sit beside the coded description of a killing. The result is a contrast between the intimacy of the attempted warning and the obscurity of the violence that followed. The book presents this as Sheeran’s account, not as an independently established explanation of what happened to Hoffa.

Permission, Risk, and an Earlier Use

The expression also makes sense within Sheeran’s description of violence as an organized matter requiring authorization. When Hoffa and Tony Pro’s hostility sharpened after a prison dispute over their pensions, Hoffa told Sheeran he would ask Russell Bufalino for permission to have Tony Pro killed. Because Tony Pro was a made man and a captain in the Genovese family, Sheeran says, no one would act against him without approval. Sheeran heard nothing further and took Hoffa’s remark as a passing thought in anger; he says that when an order was serious, the person assigned the matter would generally receive about a day’s notice.

In this account, “going to Australia” is not a description of a spontaneous disappearance but an endpoint within a world of orders, permission, and anticipated violence. Sheeran later speculates that Hoffa might have been trying to set Tony Pro up by arranging a meeting where Tony Jack could see Hoffa acting reasonably and Tony Pro behaving offensively. That is explicitly retrospective conjecture, not a confirmed explanation. The phrase carries the weight of a possible fate in that speculation, while the narrator’s uncertainty exposes how much of the alleged process remains hidden even from someone who says he was close to its participants.

Sheeran also uses the expression retrospectively about an earlier job. He says that, without Russell Bufalino’s intervention, he would have been killed after carrying it out, with no questions asked before or afterward. He describes that rescue as the first of several times Russell saved his life. This earlier usage gives the euphemism a personal dimension: Sheeran does not only apply it to a powerful friend’s disappearance but also to the danger he says he survived. The phrase thus binds together two positions in the same world, the man who fears being eliminated and the man who claims to have been near a plot that ended in another person’s disappearance.

Retelling and the Limits of the Record

The phrase reaches readers through a layered oral history. Charles Brandt says he first interviewed Sheeran in 1991, but Sheeran ended that session after admitting more than he wished. Following a meeting with a monsignor in 1999, Sheeran contacted Brandt again and agreed to questioning; the interviews continued for four years. Brandt describes a sustained process of asking and probing, and says that care was taken to preserve Sheeran’s legal rights so his words would not constitute an admissible confession. Sheeran read and approved each chapter and later reread and approved the manuscript as a whole.

The account’s final confirmation is also carefully situated. During his last illness, Sheeran agreed to appear on video and stand behind the book’s material, including its account of what happened to Hoffa. Asked whether the claims about Hoffa were things he had told Brandt and whether he stood behind them, Sheeran answered, “I stand behind what’s written.” The recording did not transform the euphemism into a transparent factual record: it reinforced that Sheeran endorsed the account, while leaving the underlying disappearance unresolved. In that tension, “Going to Australia” remains both a pointed disclosure of what Sheeran says the phrase means and a veil over the precise acts, agents, and evidence that would establish how Hoffa met his fate.