Baltimore

In Frank Sheeran’s account, Baltimore is more than a destination on a trucking route: an industrial site outside the city becomes the meeting point for two covert deliveries years apart. In 1961, a truck from Milestone Hauling carried military supplies from the Maryland National Guard toward Florida; shortly before John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sheeran returned to the same grounds with a duffel bag containing three rifles. A later visit with Charles Brandt brings the place back into view, linking a remembered operation to buildings that had survived under a new name.

The plant and its changing names

The site was the Harry C. Campbell concrete plant on Eastern Avenue, outside Baltimore. In Sheeran’s later recollection it was the Campbell plant; when he and Brandt went looking for it, he called it the Campbell Brickyard. The names do not line up neatly: an employee at the Bonsal Cement Plant told Brandt that, during her father’s time there, Bonsal had been the Campbell Cement Company, but she did not know of a Campbell Brickyard. The recollections and the employee’s account establish a change in the plant’s name, without settling every label attached to it.

The grounds Sheeran remembered were industrial and partly open. In 1961, he recalled a small landing strip and a small plane there, alongside old stone buildings. When he returned with Brandt, the site had acquired the name Bonsal and was more built up, with newer structures added; the older stone buildings remained. Baltimore thus enters the account through a particular working landscape, not through a description of the city itself: a plant yard, a strip of ground for a plane, army trucks, and buildings that could still be recognized decades later.

The 1961 truckload

A few weeks after meeting Dave Ferrie, Sheeran received a call from Jimmy Hoffa telling him to go to a pay phone and await further instructions. The call directed him to obtain a truck capable of carrying a load and drive to the Campbell plant. Sheeran then contacted Russell Bufalino and reported that he had heard from the person they had discussed; Bufalino approved, and the call ended. The indirect, staged communication placed the Baltimore trip inside a chain of instructions rather than presenting it as an ordinary haul.

Sheeran obtained a truck from Phil Milestone of Milestone Hauling. Milestone, an old-time bootlegger who owed substantial money, was paying favors instead; Sheeran said he was on the payroll without having to work and considered Milestone safe to approach because he was no informant. Sheeran recruited Jack Flynn to drive with him. In 1961, they pulled into the Campbell plant in the Milestone truck. Ferrie, whom Sheeran had recently met, came over from a small plane and directed them to back up beside army trucks. Soldiers then emerged from a building and transferred military uniforms, weapons, and ammunition from the army vehicles onto Sheeran’s truck.

Ferrie said the materiel came from the Maryland National Guard and gave Sheeran paperwork for the load in case they were stopped. He directed them to take it to a dog track in Orange Grove, Florida, outside Jacksonville, where a man identified as Hunt would meet them. Sheeran and Flynn drove south on old Route 13; the journey took about twenty-one hours. At the destination, they handed the load to Hunt and anti-Castro Cubans. Flynn stayed in Florida to drive the truck back, while Sheeran flew home to Philadelphia. The account therefore makes the Baltimore plant the transfer point in a route that continued far beyond Maryland.

Sheeran later reported to Bufalino in Kingston. Bufalino told him that something was going to happen in Cuba and explained that this was why Hoffa had called him to drive the truck to Florida. He described Hoffa’s cooperation as reflecting respect for Sam Giancana and Bufalino, and the shared hope of taking Cuba back from the Communists, even if the effort ultimately benefited the Kennedys. In this account, Baltimore is where the physical cargo changed hands; the explanation of the political purpose came later, in a separate conversation.

A second delivery before the assassination

Sheeran’s account returns him to the same site a few days to a week before November 22, 1963. Hoffa’s brief instruction was to see his friend. Bufalino then sent him to Brooklyn, where associates had something for him to take to Baltimore. At Monte’s Restaurant, a hangout for people in the Genovese family, Tony Pro brought out a duffel bag and directed Sheeran to the Campbell plant where he had previously driven the truck. Ferrie, described as Marcello’s pilot, would be waiting.

Sheeran understood from the bag’s weight and shape that it contained three rifles, but said he did not know what the delivery was for. At the plant, Ferrie was there with another man associated with the Genovese family. Sheeran did not get out of his car: he handed over the keys, the other man opened the trunk and took the bag, and Sheeran left. The exchange was brief and deliberately spare. The book connects the rifle delivery to the same Baltimore grounds used for the earlier weapons transfer, but the account does not establish that the rifles were used in the assassination or explain their intended purpose.

Return to the grounds

On a later trip with Brandt, Sheeran remembered the place as the Campbell Brickyard but could not find it from his general sense of its location. Brandt drove into the Bonsal Cement Plant to ask about the old site. Inside the office, the employee supplied the company-name history she knew, while remaining unfamiliar with the name Campbell Brickyard. They then drove around the grounds rather than treating the office answer as a complete identification.

At an older structure, Sheeran recognized the place from which, he said, the soldiers had emerged to load the truck. Brandt photographed it, and they returned to Philadelphia. The visit offers a concrete point of recognition and a recorded image, while leaving the plant’s names and the full history of the operation imperfectly resolved. In the narrative, Baltimore holds together two episodes separated by roughly two years, then reappears as a physical test of memory: the company has changed names and the grounds have grown, but an older building remains to connect Sheeran’s recollection to the place where he said the first loading occurred.