“Russ & Frank”

“Russ & Frank” is both a handwritten note and a revealing shorthand for the book’s central tension: the men Jimmy Hoffa trusted most were later treated as leading suspects in his disappearance. Written on a yellow pad beside Hoffa’s telephone, the phrase names Russell Bufalino and Frank Sheeran, two close allies whose access to Hoffa made loyalty and danger difficult to separate.

The Note at the Cottage

At a summer cottage by a lake, members of Hoffa’s family were gathered in a room, tearful and anxious. The FBI found Hoffa’s yellow pad near his phone, with “Russ & Frank” penciled on it. The brief notation preserved the two names together, without explanation; its force came from the circumstances in which it was found and from the closeness the names represented.

The family feared that a cautious, vigilant Hoffa, alert to his deadly enemies, could have been harmed only by someone trusted enough to get near him. In that setting, the note’s intimacy became ominous. The men it named were not presented as strangers who had penetrated Hoffa’s defenses, but as people inside his circle. The book describes them as becoming leading suspects in what it calls the most notorious disappearance in American history.

Allies Turned Suspects

Sheeran, a staunch Hoffa supporter in the Teamsters, had remained close to him through legal ordeals and conflict with Bobby Kennedy. His loyalty was so familiar that he was thought of as family. Bufalino was Sheeran’s godfather and close friend, as well as a trusted ally of Hoffa. The phrase therefore gathers two different kinds of closeness on a single line: Sheeran’s personal bond with Hoffa and Bufalino’s place in the network surrounding them.

The book situates the note within a larger body of allegations. Serious studies of Hoffa’s disappearance had alleged that Sheeran turned against his friend and mentor, participated in the killing, and acted within a plan sanctioned by Bufalino. Those are allegations and claims, not conclusions established by the note itself. Its evidentiary power is more limited and more suggestive: Hoffa had written both names together, and his family believed that a trusted person could have gained access to him.

A Meeting Written in Advance

The phrase returns in Sheeran’s account of the arrangements for Hoffa to sit down by the lake on a Saturday. Sheeran says he had to be content that the three of them would meet, and again recalls Hoffa’s yellow pad with “Russ & Frank” written on it, kept by the phone where anyone could find it. The note thus recurs not only as an object discovered by investigators but as part of the narrated preparations for a meeting.

That recurrence places the written names alongside a planned encounter and lets the phrase carry the account’s unresolved pressure. In one context, it is a family’s unsettling discovery after Hoffa disappeared; in the other, it belongs to Sheeran’s recollection of a meeting he expected to take place. The book does not make the words themselves a coded instruction. Their significance comes from the gap between the apparent familiarity of the shorthand and the deadly suspicions attached to the men it identifies.

From Shorthand to Recorded Confirmation

The book presents itself as a history based on one-on-one interviews with Sheeran, most of them tape-recorded. The first interview took place in 1991, but Sheeran ended it after having admitted more than he wished to. After a 1999 meeting with a monsignor, who granted him absolution, Sheeran contacted the interviewer again; questioning resumed and continued for four years. Sheeran read and approved each chapter and then reviewed the complete manuscript.

About two years into that renewed process, Sheeran had admitted to the interviewer that he was the shooter in the Hoffa case. Later, in a meeting arranged with Fox News correspondent Eric Shawn, he publicly said for the first time to someone besides the interviewer, “I shot Jimmy Hoffa.” He supplied directions to the house and referred to a footbridge; the account records him stating that he had shot Hoffa twice in the back of the head. These statements belong to the book’s presentation of Sheeran’s testimony, not to what the yellow-pad phrase independently proves.

Six weeks before his death, Sheeran faced a video camera with a copy of “I Heard You Paint Houses” and stood behind the material in the book, including his account of what happened to Hoffa on July 30, 1975. Asked whether the book’s account of Hoffa came from what he had told the interviewer, he agreed; asked whether he stood behind it, he said that he did. In this arc, “Russ & Frank” begins as two names in Hoffa’s own handwriting and becomes a frame for the book’s movement from suspicion toward Sheeran’s recorded, late-life confirmation.