Charlie Allen

Charlie Allen, whose original name was Charlie Palermo, occupies a pivotal and unstable place in the account of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance: Hoffa and Frank Sheeran helped him find work and establish himself, but Allen later cooperated with federal investigators and secretly recorded Sheeran. The book presents him both as a dependent within Hoffa’s network and as a witness whose accounts became part of the government’s pursuit of Sheeran.

Identity and Early Connections

Allen first entered Sheeran’s account after an armed robbery left him needing to get out of Philadelphia. Sheeran, then driving a truck for Crown Zellerbach, drove him to Scranton and left him with Dave Osticco, a longtime associate of Russell Bufalino, who kept Allen in a safe house. When the pressure in Philadelphia grew, Allen decided to surrender; Sheeran believed the robbery was the case that later sent him to Lewisburg.

At Lewisburg, Allen was imprisoned while Hoffa was serving time there. Hoffa asked Sheeran to help Allen prepare for parole by finding him a job, and Sheeran did so. Allen then spent time around Sheeran, drove him places, and eventually became an organizer on the payroll of Teamsters Local 326. Sheeran describes using him as a forceful representative, while also emphasizing the earlier pattern of Hoffa and Sheeran looking after him: Hoffa had asked for help, and Sheeran had provided it.

Political Courier and Informant

Allen’s work for Hoffa extended beyond jobs and personal errands into political delivery. At a prison-reform fundraising dinner in Washington, Hoffa arranged for Allen and his partner, Frank Del Piano, to attend. Sheeran’s account says that Hoffa and Philadelphia political intermediary Alan Cohen gave Allen $40,000 in cash to deliver to Attorney General John Mitchell for the Nixon campaign. Allen later told the FBI that Cohen handed him a heavy black satchel, about two feet long and one foot wide, and that he did not look inside because, as he put it, “you don’t do that to Jimmy.” A limousine took Allen and Del Piano from the hotel to Mitchell’s house; Allen delivered the bag with the message, “JIMMY sent me.”

The account distinguishes Allen’s early description of this delivery from his later cooperation against Sheeran. In a 1977 FBI interview, Allen disclosed the cash delivery before agreeing to wear a wire. Sheeran says Allen initially stuck up for him on the Hoffa case, but that the FBI later used Allen after catching him operating a methamphetamine lab in New Jersey. Allen had reason to fear both prosecution for the lab and the consequences of Russell Bufalino and Angelo Bruno learning about his drug activity. The federal government gave him two years for the lab; Louisiana later sentenced him to life for sexually abusing his stepdaughter. Sheeran says he had looked after Allen from the time he left prison until discovering the wire in 1979, a reversal that turned a former employee and dependent into an instrument of the investigation.

The Wire and the Disputed Jail Story

The break between Allen and Sheeran became public at the Cherry Hill Inn, where Sheeran was preparing to leave after drinks. Allen, then serving as his driver, leaned over and asked, “Did you kill Jimmy Hoffa?” Sheeran answered with an insult; federal agents listening through Allen’s wire rushed out to protect him. Sheeran says he had a .38 and feared the agents would mistake his reaction for an imminent attack. He drove up the Route 72 off-ramp against traffic to the Branding Iron, where a woman acquaintance took the gun and carried it out in her purse. In the book’s telling, the question was not a spontaneous challenge but a prompt timed by investigators, and the concealed recording transformed an intimate working arrangement into a police operation.

Allen’s credibility was also contested through his account of Hoffa’s life in prison. At Sheeran’s 1980, 1981, and 1982 trials, Allen claimed he had served as Hoffa’s bodyguard at Lewisburg and had been cut on the cheek while defending him from a sexual assault. Sheeran rejected that story: he said Allen had been cut while trying to steal candy bars from another inmate’s stash. In Sheeran’s version, the relationship ran the other way—Hoffa had pitied Allen, asked Sheeran to help him find work, and Sheeran had eventually placed him on the Local 326 payroll. The contrast matters to the book’s portrait of Allen: once presented as a beneficiary of Hoffa’s and Sheeran’s help, he later testified in a way that, Sheeran argued, magnified his own closeness to Hoffa while recasting the men who had assisted him.

Trial Testimony and the Limits of His Account

The book places Charlie Allen in the post-disappearance investigation not only as an informant but as a continuing presence around Frank Sheeran. Five days after Jimmy Hoffa vanished, Allen drove Sheeran to a meeting at Vesuvio Restaurant in New York City. Sheeran says Allen waited at a separate table, drinking coffee, while the men at the meeting discussed how Hoffa’s disappearance had been carried out. The detail makes Allen’s position characteristic of the account: close enough to transport Sheeran and remain nearby, but not, in Sheeran’s telling, part of the conversation itself.

Allen’s statements and conduct became contested evidence at Sheeran’s trials. In the 1980, 1981, and 1982 proceedings, Allen claimed he had been Jimmy Hoffa’s prison bodyguard and had suffered a cut on his cheek defending Hoffa from a sexual assault. Sheeran offered a sharply different explanation: Allen had been caught trying to steal candy bars from another inmate. The disagreement was more than a dispute over one injury. It challenged Allen’s account of his own standing at Lewisburg, where Sheeran said Hoffa had instead taken pity on him and arranged for Sheeran to help him find work.

At the federal trial, Allen also said Sheeran had ordered the shooting of Fred Gawronski because Gawronski spilled wine on him. Sheeran’s lawyer, F. Emmett Fitzpatrick, challenged Allen under cross-examination. Separately, the FBI had recorded Sheeran through a wire Allen wore while on the payroll of Teamsters Local 326. In that recording, Sheeran’s words about a company manager were explicit: “Break both of his legs. I want him laid up. I want him to go to the hospital.” The FBI arranged for the manager to appear at a grievance hearing with a fake cast and crutches; Sheeran was convicted in a Delaware state case connected to that threat. The recording thus supplied evidence of violence in a labor dispute, while Allen’s testimony also carried the far larger question of Sheeran’s connection to Hoffa’s disappearance.

The book’s portrait of Allen remains filtered through Sheeran’s account, including its accusations and its efforts to discredit him. An FBI report quoted Allen describing Sheeran as a very heavy drinker, drunk almost every day in the years after Hoffa disappeared. Sheeran, for his part, stresses that he had helped Allen obtain work, let him drive, and put him on the union payroll before discovering the wire. That history gives the betrayal its force, but does not by itself settle the truth of Allen’s testimony: the same relationship that made him an intimate witness also gave Sheeran reason to portray him as an ungrateful turncoat.