Joey Gallo’s killing occupies two roles in Frank Sheeran’s account: it is a carefully planned underworld execution, and a confession whose truth the book asks readers to weigh against the circumstances in which it was told. Sheeran says that he shot Gallo at Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy, Manhattan, after the birthday celebrant arrived with family members and a bodyguard. He claims responsibility for the attack himself, while describing John Francis as the driver and denying that the multiple-shooter stories reflect his account.

Publicity and the order

Sheeran’s explanation begins with Gallo’s growing public profile. After Gallo’s botched attack on Colombo, Sheeran says, Gallo courted celebrity: he went out with movie stars and writers, appeared in newspaper photographs, and joined New York’s nightlife. In Sheeran’s telling, Gallo’s appetite for publicity surpassed even Colombo’s. He also says Gallo was shaking down a restaurant in Little Italy to support that lifestyle, crossing a boundary that made his celebrity and his racketeering liabilities at once.

This reasoning echoes the book’s account of the earlier attack on Colombo. Sheeran describes Colombo’s public rallies as attracting unwanted attention to organized crime and says that Colombo’s refusal to stop them led to his being targeted. Yet Sheeran distinguishes the authorization from the method: attacking Colombo in front of his family violated protocol, even if Gallo had approval to attack him. The parallel is pointed. Gallo, in Sheeran’s account, became a problem for the same reason he had helped make Colombo one: publicity that drew scrutiny toward the people around him.

Sheeran says he had never met Gallo before the assignment. Francis, whom he calls The Redhead, showed him newspaper photographs so he would recognize the target and had a diagram of Umberto's Clam House, marking its corner entrance, Mulberry Street entrance, and men’s room. Gallo was expected to finish his birthday night at the restaurant, and Sheeran says the planners knew where he would sit: to the left of the Mulberry Street entrance. He allows that someone may have helped bring Gallo there, but does not establish that as fact.

The restaurant attack

The planned attack depended on precision and a narrow opportunity. Gallo would be with his bodyguard, his new wife, his sister, and other women relatives. Sheeran emphasizes that an approaching shooter could get no closer than about fifteen to twenty feet without alerting the bodyguard, and that the women must not be hit. In his account, the bodyguard was the only person in the party likely to be armed: Gallo, a convicted felon, would not risk carrying a gun under New York’s Sullivan Law. Sheeran describes the need to disable the bodyguard first and to go in alone, avoiding a shootout that might endanger the family.

Associates were stationed near the corner to greet Gallo’s party and make the arrival seem ordinary. Sheeran says their headlights appeared, the men dispersed, and their part was finished. He entered through the Mulberry Street door, walked toward the bar with his back to the side of the room where Gallo was sitting, then turned toward the table. He recalls being startled to see a little girl among the family members. A moment later, Gallo’s driver was shot from behind; the women and child ducked under the table.

Gallo swung out of his chair and ran toward the corner door. Sheeran speculates that Gallo may have been trying to draw fire away from the table, to escape, or both. Sheeran says he moved down the bar and followed him through the door. Outside, not far from the entrance, Gallo was shot about three times. Sheeran describes the possibility that Gallo was heading for a gun in his car, but says he had no chance to reach it. The account ends with the killing on the sidewalk, on Gallo’s birthday.

A disputed account of responsibility

Sheeran explicitly rejects the stories that three shooters took part. He says he is not naming anyone else as a shooter, while acknowledging that stray shots from two guns could have made witnesses think more than one person fired. That qualification does not resolve the discrepancy; it marks the boundary of what he is willing to claim. His narrative presents himself as the lone shooter and Francis as a driver who remained composed, changed cars, checked for a tail, and took a long route back toward Yonkers. Sheeran says Francis later disposed of the weapons in a river.

The account also situates the killing within the protection and distance that organized-crime assignments required. Sheeran says he and Francis were useful to Russell Bufalino because they were experienced Irishmen whom the New York families, described by Sheeran as intensely Italian, would not want directly linked to a major killing. In his telling, Bufalino’s ties to Colombo and support for the Italian American Civil Rights League placed him close to the dispute, while the Commission entrusted him with important matters. These are Sheeran’s explanations of the relationships and the assignment, not independent confirmation of who ordered the killing.

Francis’s later role complicates the story. Before Francis died of cancer, Sheeran says, a source told him that Francis had implicated him in fourteen killings on which Francis had served as driver, including Gallo’s. Sheeran says he did not know whether Francis had spoken, and suggests that illness, pain, medication, and fear of dying in jail could have affected any statement. He also says he would not blame Francis for wanting to make peace. The allegation therefore appears as hearsay within Sheeran’s own account, not as a verified confession by Francis.

Confession, recording, and limits

The book presents the Gallo killing through a long oral-history process rather than as a contemporaneous record. Charles Brandt first interviewed Sheeran in 1991, but Sheeran ended that session after admitting more than he wanted to disclose. Following a 1999 meeting with a priest, he agreed to resume questioning; the interviews continued for four years. Brandt describes using his experience as a prosecutor and interrogation specialist, and says the process was arranged to protect Sheeran’s legal rights. Sheeran read and approved each chapter and later the complete manuscript.

The final public confirmation came in a different setting. In a meeting arranged with Fox News correspondent Eric Shawn, Sheeran was expected to say for the first time to someone besides Brandt that he had shot Jimmy Hoffa. Two nights earlier, he had handed Brandt a purported letter from Hoffa, whose authenticity Brandt said he would check. At the meeting, Sheeran gave directions to the house associated with Hoffa’s disappearance, mentioning a footbridge, and said publicly that he had shot Hoffa twice in the back of the head. Fox News conducted preliminary research into the historical value of his account. This episode concerns Hoffa, not Gallo, but it shows how the book frames Sheeran’s testimony: as a claim developed in private interviews and then carried into public view.

During his final illness, Sheeran chose to go on videotape and stand behind the book, including its account of what happened to Hoffa. Holding a galley copy, he affirmed that its statements about Hoffa came from him and said he stood behind what was written. That confirmation does not independently verify the earlier Gallo account. Instead, it fixes the form in which the book leaves the episode: a detailed first-person description, a declared claim of sole responsibility, and a record of the narrator’s later willingness to own his words. The attack’s precision contrasts with the evidentiary uncertainty that surrounds it; the scene is narrated in detail, while the question of proof remains open.