John Francis

John Francis, known as The Redhead, occupies a consequential place in Frank Sheeran’s account as both a trusted driver and a participant in killings attributed to the Bufalino organization. His recurring role is to move Sheeran into and out of dangerous situations while knowing only part of what happens; later disclosures suggest that he was more than a driver, but do not resolve the full extent of his involvement in the disappearance of James R. Hoffa.

Identity and Position

Francis was Irish and lived in a suburb of New York. Sheeran says he had carried out killings in Ireland with the IRA, knew members of the Westies, the Irish gang based in Hell’s Kitchen, and sometimes involved himself in drugs to earn money. He kept that activity from Russell Bufalino, Sheeran says, because Bufalino would otherwise not have kept him as a driver. These details give Francis a position between worlds: connected to Irish criminal circles, yet trusted within Bufalino’s network.

Francis became Bufalino’s driver and also drove Sheeran on a number of assignments. Sheeran describes their relationship as close and Francis as reliable, with good timing. Their method depended on a carefully bounded role: Francis might drop Sheeran at a corner, circle the block, and return at the arranged moment. At Umberto’s Clam House, Francis left Sheeran near the restaurant and drove around while Sheeran went inside; if Sheeran failed to reappear, Francis would wait briefly and then leave. The arrangement made him useful precisely because he could provide transport without necessarily witnessing what happened inside.

Sheeran’s account emphasizes that this limited knowledge was part of the method, not evidence that Francis was uninvolved. At the restaurant, Francis could truthfully say that he had dropped Sheeran off to use the bathroom and had not seen what took place. The distinction between what a driver knew and what he could later say became central to the book’s portrayal of Francis: trusted to work alongside Sheeran, yet positioned so that the details of an assignment could remain compartmentalized.

Assignments and Killings

Before the killing of Joey Gallo in 1972, Francis had already proved himself to Sheeran as a driver who could be trusted on dangerous assignments. Sheeran recounts that, on a late-night call from Bufalino, he collected a gun and went to meet Francis without being told in advance whom the job concerned. Francis drove him to Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy, where Gallo was dining. The discreet pickup-and-return routine described elsewhere in Sheeran’s account became part of the operation: Francis could wait outside while Sheeran went in, preserving a separation between the driver and the violence inside.

Sheeran presents the attack as an exception to the customary reluctance to kill in a Little Italy restaurant. The restaurant had important owners and the neighborhood depended on tourists feeling safe, but Gallo was difficult to reach at ordinary hours, and the operation took place near closing time. Sheeran says Francis dropped him off and later headed back toward Yonkers by a circuitous route, first checking for a tail and changing cars; he then disposed of the weapons in a river. The account does not give Francis a role inside the restaurant during Gallo’s killing, but it makes his driving and escape work essential to the operation.

Francis’s participation was more direct in the 1978 killing of Sal Briguglio. Sheeran says that he and Francis were told only where to be, and that each carried a .38 revolver. On March 21, Briguglio came out alone from the Andrea Doria Social Club, a block from Umberto’s. Sheeran approached and greeted him; when Briguglio looked toward Francis, whom he did not know, Sheeran shot him twice in the head. Francis then fired about three more shots, which Sheeran describes as creating the noise and impression of a shoot-out. The account places Francis not merely at the scene but alongside Sheeran in the attack itself, while the planned escape relied on additional drivers and backup nearby.

These episodes also frame the later uncertainty about Francis’s testimony. Sheeran says he heard that, while dying of cancer in the 1980s, Francis had implicated both men in fourteen killings, including those of Gallo and Briguglio. He could not verify the report, and allowed that Francis may have spoken while delirious, in pain, and medicated; rather than condemn him, Sheeran said he did not blame a dying man who wanted to make peace. Much later, Sheeran confirmed Francis’s involvement in the two killings already associated with him, but resisted probing beyond what he considered established, in part because he said families needed protection from bad publicity.

The Confession and the Real-Estate Clue

Years after the killings, a report about Francis’s final illness added a troubling possibility to his role. Sheeran heard from a source he considered reliable that, while dying of cancer in the 1980s, Francis had implicated himself and Sheeran in fourteen killings, including those of Joey Gallo and Sal Briguglio. Sheeran could not confirm the account. He allowed that Francis might have spoken while delirious, in severe pain, and under medication, and did not condemn him for wanting to make peace before death. The report widened the possible scope of their partnership without supplying a reliable account of the other alleged killings.

That response echoes a boundary in Sheeran’s own later confession. He would confirm Francis’s involvement where it was already suspected, but, according to Charles Brandt, it took considerable effort to get him to implicate even a dead man in anything not already attributed to him. Sheeran also invoked the need to protect families, including his daughters, from bad publicity. His restraint did not settle what Francis had done; instead, it marked the limit of what he was willing to say, leaving the report of fourteen killings unverified.

A separate disclosure emerged from Brandt’s effort to understand Francis. In fall 2004, Brandt contacted retired New York City police detective Joe Coffey, who had not heard of Francis. After receiving a copy of Brandt’s book, Coffey looked into the driver’s identity through a mob contact. When Brandt spoke with him again in February 2005, Coffey reported that Francis had held a commercial real-estate license and was independently wealthy. He was close to Russell Bufalino and Frank Sheeran, Coffey said, and was not merely a driver. The discovery transformed the meaning of the occupation that had defined Francis in Sheeran’s stories: driving could have been one function of a man with resources and connections of his own.

That new information sharpened, but did not answer, the question of Francis’s possible part in Jimmy Hoffa’s 1975 disappearance. Brandt noted that Francis drove for Sheeran when, on Bufalino’s orders, Sheeran killed Gallo in 1972, and that Francis himself fired during the 1978 killing of Briguglio, again in a job Brandt attributed to Bufalino’s orders. Given the tight association among the three men, Brandt considered it possible that Francis had a role in the Hoffa killing, while explicitly acknowledging that possibility was not proof. A Detroit reporter’s later account offered another unresolved connection: the owner of the house where Sheeran said he shot Hoffa had moved out months before the disappearance, and her son said a mysterious single man had rented a room there. Brandt wondered whether the independently wealthy real-estate professional Francis could be connected to that tenant; the evidence presented does not establish that he was.

In 2005, Brandt filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Francis and other men connected to the case, including Sheeran, the Andretta brothers, Briguglio, and Chuckie O’Brien. He also hoped to corroborate whether Briguglio had been a confidential informant. Brandt expected little from the request, noting that the Hoffa family and Detroit newspapers had also sought records without success. He cited a former Detroit bureau chief’s view that prosecution would require revealing informants and confidential sources. The anticipated possibility of redactions left Francis’s place in the Hoffa case suspended between established association and unproved inference: the newly discovered real-estate identity made the question more consequential, but the missing files offered no resolution.

A Trusted Outsider in Bufalino’s Network

Francis’s importance also lay in the kind of intermediary he was. Sheeran describes him as one of two old Irishmen with extensive combat experience whom Russell Bufalino could use for assignments that other bosses would not want linked to their own families. In Sheeran’s account, Francis’s Irish background did not exclude him from the network’s most consequential work: Bufalino trusted both men with important errands, and The Commission entrusted Bufalino with major matters partly because he had a comparatively liberal attitude toward non-Italians. Bufalino’s closeness to Joseph Colombo and support for the Italian American Civil Rights League further locate Francis’s work within a wider alliance of organized-crime power and public-facing political activity. Francis thus appears not simply as a driver attached to Sheeran, but as a trusted link through which Bufalino could extend his reach beyond Italian-American circles.