Florida

Florida is presented not simply as a destination but as a meeting ground where private travel, personal loyalty, and organized crime’s national connections converge. The Gold Coast Lounge in Hollywood, Florida, brought together figures from different regions; through Russell Bufalino’s visits there, Frank Sheeran describes seeing how a local friendship connected him to a much wider network. The account also associates Florida with Santo Trafficante’s business and with later revelations about mob involvement in Cuba, while distinguishing those connections from the events surrounding Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, which the narrative places elsewhere.

A meeting place for a national network

Sheeran says that he and Bufalino drove to Hollywood, Florida, for meetings at Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Lounge quite often. They usually made the journey by car; on occasion, they flew when an emergency required it. The lounge belonged to Joe Sonken, whom the narrative associates with Bufalino’s family, and it drew visitors from around the country. In Sheeran’s account, people from different regions met there, making the venue a recurring point of contact rather than a one-time stop.

Bufalino met Santo Trafficante, the Florida boss, and Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans boss, there many times over the course of a year. Sheeran also met Trafficante’s lawyer, Frank Ragano, who was later lent to Jimmy Hoffa to help with the trials arising from the Get Hoffa Squad’s pursuit. These introductions show how the Florida meetings connected regional figures to Hoffa’s legal and labor conflicts. The lounge’s ordinary feature as a restaurant—Sheeran remembers its stone crabs—sits alongside its role as a place where important visitors gathered.

Sheeran’s route into the circle

The Florida journeys were part of Sheeran’s close association with Bufalino. Earlier, Bufalino had asked him to drive across upstate New York to Apalachin, where police arrests exposed a gathering of gangsters from across the country. Sheeran later describes driving Bufalino to Florida and attending meetings there. The sequence makes the car itself an instrument of access: Sheeran was not merely acquainted with Bufalino but repeatedly transported him between places where business and relationships brought regional leaders together.

Sheeran presents that access as personal as well as practical. He and Bufalino shared meals and wine, knew one another’s wives, and exchanged news about their children. Their familiarity helps explain why Sheeran could accompany Bufalino on journeys and enter the Gold Coast’s wider circle. The narrative thus makes Florida one setting in which a private bond becomes a channel into a larger criminal network, without claiming that every person present shared the same role or degree of involvement.

Florida, Cuba, and the limits of what is known

The account also links Florida’s criminal network to lost interests in Cuba. Kelly Mannarino and his brother had been partners with Meyer Lansky in the San Souci casino in Havana, and Sheeran describes Kelly and Bufalino as close to Lansky. At the Gold Coast, Sheeran met Dave Ferrie, identified as Marcello’s pilot and as closely connected to anti-Castro Cubans in Florida. These associations place the lounge within a network shaped by business ties and the political upheaval surrounding Cuba, though they do not establish that the venue itself was the site where a specific operation was planned.

Sheeran recalls flying with Bufalino to the Gold Coast to meet Trafficante and others after the Bay of Pigs invasion. He says he did not hear anyone, including Bufalino, discuss a plot with the Kennedy government to assassinate Fidel Castro; he says reports about such a plot appeared in newspapers about ten years later. The later account of the Church Committee hearings describes the committee’s inquiry into suspected mob ties to the invasion and a suspected mob-CIA plot, and reports that the CIA acknowledged the mob’s assistance in the invasion and the existence of a plot called Operation Mongoose. The distinction matters: the Florida meetings provide the setting for Sheeran’s recollection of the people involved, while the reported admissions and allegations come from later disclosures.

What Florida does—and does not—establish

Florida’s importance in the narrative is relational: the Gold Coast connected Bufalino with Trafficante, Marcello, and visitors from across the country, while Sheeran’s driving placed him close to those connections. The account also describes Hoffa as doing business with Trafficante and other crime figures through loans involving the Teamsters pension fund, with Hoffa receiving an off-the-books finder’s fee. That business context helps explain why Florida’s connections matter to the book’s broader portrait of labor, money, and organized crime.

The narrative does not identify Florida as the location of Hoffa’s disappearance. Five days after Hoffa disappeared, an FBI note placed Bufalino, Sheeran, Anthony Salerno, Tony Provenzano, and Salvatore Briguglio at the Vesuvio Restaurant in New York City; the passage presents that meeting, not a Florida gathering, as the reported occasion for discussing how the disappearance had been carried out. Florida is therefore significant as a recurring hub in the network around Hoffa, not as an established scene of the disappearance itself.