“Paint houses” murder code phrase

The “Paint houses” murder code phrase marks a turning point in Frank Sheeran’s relationship with Jimmy Hoffa: words that might sound like a trade inquiry become the opening to work that Sheeran later describes as a problem to be “squared away.” Its force comes from the contrast between the ordinary language of a house-painting job and the violence the phrase conceals.

First Use and Meaning

The phrase appears as the title of the chapter in which Sheeran recalls receiving Hoffa’s call. Before it, Sheeran describes a restless, loosely committed working life: he took day jobs through the union hall when useful, increasingly accepted cash work downtown, and paid support to Mary and the girls according to what he had earned that week. The account establishes a man accustomed to moving between jobs and places, but it does not yet name the work that Hoffa’s words will bring him.

Hoffa’s call begins without small talk. Sheeran remembers reaching for the phone and being surprised that Hoffa was calling him; after a brief greeting, Hoffa went directly to the point: “I heard you paint houses,” Jimmy said. Sheeran answered, “Y-Y-Yeah, and I d-do my own carpentry work, too.” His stammer and attempt to make the answer sound literal register his embarrassment, while Hoffa’s reply—“That’s what I wanted to hear. I understand you’re a brother of mine.”—links the coded inquiry to their shared union identity. Sheeran confirmed that he belonged to Local 107, since 1947. The exchange thus makes the phrase both a test of recognition and an entry into a relationship in which union brotherhood and covert violence would be intertwined.

From Recognition to Assignment

The phrase did not remain a private exchange between Hoffa and Sheeran. A few weeks into Sheeran’s new downtown job, Bill Isabel drove him and another man to an Italian restaurant and watched him in the rearview mirror before saying, “We heard from Jimmy that you paint houses.” Sheeran understood that the question marked a return to the kind of work he had hoped to leave behind. He stayed silent, nodding rather than asking what was meant. Isabel explained that a problem in Chicago needed to be straightened out: a friend there, Joey Glimco, ran cab Local 777 and had trucks on the waterfront. He wanted Sheeran to fly out the next morning; someone would meet him at the airport.

The assignment was presented as a problem, not as a fully described plan. Sheeran says he did not ask who the target was or what had happened, and that he did not want to discuss it afterward. He reports only that the problem needed resolving and that he resolved it. In his account, the sparse instructions and the absence of questions are part of how the work operated: the code identified the kind of service being sought, while keeping the specific circumstances—and the people directing it—unspoken.

Sheeran later supplies a practical explanation for choosing an unfamiliar operator. The intended man, he says, would be wary of people he knew on the street because he had wronged them; an Irish-looking stranger walking past would not attract the same suspicion. The target was to be left on the sidewalk as a message to others who needed to understand that the man had not escaped the consequences of his actions. The phrase therefore points beyond killing as an isolated act. In this account, it names a service whose intended audience includes both the victim and the people left to interpret the public result.

His description of newspaper reports about masked gunmen extends the same logic of controlled silence. He says witnesses routinely claimed the shooter wore a mask, whether or not one was present, so that those on the shooter’s side could know no useful identification had been made and the witnesses could avoid danger. The account makes concealment a shared arrangement: the code obscures the request, the stranger’s appearance helps obscure the operator, and the witness’s report can help preserve the appearance that nothing was seen.

The chapter’s later account of Hoffa speaking to Edward Grady Partin gives the phrase a further, consequential meaning. Hoffa allegedly discussed explosives and a gun silencer while describing a plan to kill Bobby Kennedy, and assumed Partin might be a man who painted houses because he was from Louisiana, had a criminal record, and was thought to be connected to Carlos Marcello. Partin reported the conversation to the Get Hoffa Squad; he later explained that Hoffa had assumed his Louisiana origins placed him in Marcello’s orbit. The episode shows that the code could function not only as an invitation to work but as a dangerous presumption about who belonged to the hidden world it signified. Hoffa had not established that Partin was such a man before speaking, and the confidence behind the euphemism helped expose the threat rather than conceal it.

The Code’s Risky Assumption

The exchange with Partin reveals a limit built into the phrase: it could be treated as proof of a shared criminal vocabulary even when no such understanding had been established. In the summer of 1962, Hoffa allegedly spoke privately with Partin in his Washington office, describing access to plastic explosives and a gun silencer and the ease of killing Bobby Kennedy, who, Hoffa said, traveled without a security detail and often alone in a convertible. Hoffa had never asked whether Partin painted houses. Instead, he inferred that the tough-looking Louisiana union official, with a criminal record and ties he presumed to Marcello, belonged to the world the euphemism implied.

That inference had immediate consequences because Partin was not simply a presumed associate: he was president of Teamsters Local 5 in Baton Rouge, out on bail on a kidnapping charge arising from a family custody dispute involving a trucker in his local, and under indictment for diverting $1,659 in union funds for personal use. Partin reported Hoffa’s remarks to the Get Hoffa Squad. After Partin emphatically passed an FBI lie-detector test, Walter Sheridan conveyed the threat to Bobby Kennedy. The code’s concealment therefore depended on more than a phrase: it depended on correctly judging who could hear it and what that listener would do. In this instance, Hoffa’s assumption exposed the threat instead of hiding it.

Narrative Function and Limits

The phrase works less like a fixed definition than a credential whose meaning depends on who hears it and what they believe about the speaker. In Sheeran’s recollection, it opens a channel from union kinship to an assignment whose particulars are withheld; in the account of Edward Grady Partin, the same coded assumption is made without first establishing that the listener shares the code. That difference turns secrecy into a vulnerability: the words can signal belonging, but they cannot guarantee it.

The two episodes also carry different kinds of narrative authority. Sheeran presents the Chicago assignment as something he himself accepted and completed, while the later threat against Bobby Kennedy reaches the reader through Partin’s report and Walter Sheridan’s account. The book thus places the narrator’s guarded admission beside a reported disclosure that became evidence for investigators. The phrase’s significance lies not only in what it conceals, but in how easily an assumed understanding can fail—and how speech intended for an insider can expose what it was meant to hide.