John Gorie and Rita are killed

The 1964 killings of John Gorey and Rita at the Teamsters Local 107 union hall became a point of dispute over who had ordered the shooting and why. In Frank Sheeran’s later account, the deaths were followed by an indictment of three men and an episode of financial assistance from Jimmy Hoffa to their lawyers—a connection that could invite suspicion, but that Sheeran explicitly said did not prove Hoffa’s involvement.

The Shooting and Its Uncertain Motive

John Gorey was associated with the Voice, a rebel faction within the union, and the FBI, as Sheeran recounted it, suggested that he had been killed for that reason. Sheeran challenged the explanation: Gorey was not a leading figure in the Voice, he said, and if the faction itself had been the target, its head, Charlie Meyers, would have been a more consequential victim. He also argued that corruption was already widely known, rather than something Gorey needed to expose.

Sheeran described Gorey as a gambler and outlined several possible reasons that people might use violence against someone who owed gambling debts: defiance, a debt too large to negotiate, exhausted patience, or a desire to warn other customers. These were possibilities, not an explanation he established for Gorey’s death. On this particular case, Sheeran considered the killing excessive: in his view, Gorey had not troubled anyone, and the shooting needlessly killed Rita as well. He characterized her as a civilian caught in the wrong place with the wrong man.

Hoffa’s Donation and Sheeran’s Account

On the night before Hoffa went to prison in March 1967, Sheeran said he drove from Wilmington to Washington to see him. Hoffa gave him $25,000 for the lawyers representing Johnny Sullivan and two other men indicted for the 1964 shootings. Hoffa explained the donation by saying he had made a promise; Sheeran accepted that explanation without asking why the money had been requested.

The payment might appear to connect Hoffa to the crime, but Sheeran rejected that conclusion. He said Hoffa would not have ordered the killing of a man and his girlfriend inside a union hall, and maintained that Gorey was an obscure figure whom Hoffa probably did not know. Sheeran speculated that someone might have asked Hoffa for a contribution and later described Gorey as a Voice troublemaker, but he presented this only as a possibility. The account therefore preserves both the suggestive fact of Hoffa’s substantial donation and Sheeran’s denial that it was payment for, or evidence of, an order to kill.

The Money’s Passage and the Aftermath

Sheeran recalled that people in Philadelphia knew he was going to Teamsters headquarters in Washington to collect the donation. After he returned, Bobby Marino offered to deliver the money to the lawyers. Sheeran refused to hand it over, suspecting that Marino wanted the funds for himself rather than for the defendants. Harry Riccobene later made a similar offer, and Sheeran again insisted that only the lawyers should receive the money. His account describes the donation’s passage not as a straightforward act of aid, but as a transaction exposed to mistrust and competing claims within the Philadelphia underworld.

The event is narrated retrospectively through Sheeran’s recollection, years after the shooting and while he recounts his dealings with Hoffa before Hoffa’s imprisonment. That distance matters: the account distinguishes what Sheeran says he witnessed—the donation and the attempts to take control of it—from what he cannot establish about the motive for the killings or the reason Hoffa made the promise. The deaths remain the central fact; the surrounding explanations remain contested.