Russell Bufalino

Russell Bufalino emerges as both a far-reaching criminal power and a figure of personal attachment: a boss who cultivated business across regions, but also cooked for friends, remembered their families, and treated Frank Sheeran like a son. The book’s central image of him is inseparable from the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. Hoffa kept a yellow pad beside his telephone, and among its pencil notes were the names Russ & Frank. To Hoffa’s family, those names suggested men close enough to reach a guarded man who trusted few people; the book consequently places Bufalino and Sheeran among the leading suspects in the disappearance.

Identity and Rise Within the Network

Sheeran’s account of meeting Bufalino in the 1950s begins with an apparently ordinary favor: driving him to Apalachin, a small town in upstate New York. Bufalino said he had onward transportation arranged and gave Sheeran no reason to think the trip was unusual. The next day, police arrested about fifty gangsters at the gathering. Its national publicity made the scale of the Mafia visible to Sheeran, who understood more clearly why Bufalino had previously asked him to drive him to private meetings and wait outside. In Sheeran’s description, the men conducted business face to face and in cash, across a web of separate territories and criminal enterprises.

Bufalino’s association with Angelo Bruno and other powerful figures connected him to an expansive range of rackets, including loan sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, hijacking, prostitution, drugs, and murder. Sheeran had once imagined that Bufalino’s trips to Philadelphia might be about food; after Apalachin, he understood that Bufalino had substantial business there. The revelation also changed Sheeran’s sense of his own position. He had been seen with a man now recognized as one of the country’s major bosses, and the favors, rides, meals, and conversations that had seemed personal were also part of a criminal network.

Bufalino’s operations crossed state lines and connected people who did not necessarily share the same rank or territory. Sheeran drove him between upstate New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York City, and Florida. At Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Lounge in Hollywood, Florida, Bufalino met repeatedly with Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello; Sheeran also encountered Trafficante’s lawyer, Frank Ragano, who was lent to Hoffa to assist with trials arising from the Get Hoffa Squad’s investigations. These meetings place Bufalino at a point of connection among criminal leaders, labor figures, lawyers, and intermediaries, while Sheeran’s role as driver and courier gave him access to the network without making him its equal.

Patronage, Friendship, and Sheeran

Bufalino helped Sheeran move from precarious work into a place within the Philadelphia underworld. Sheeran saw more of Angelo and his associates because they were based downtown, while Bufalino was often upstate; appearances could make Sheeran seem closer to Angelo’s circle. But, in Sheeran’s telling, his allegiance remained with Bufalino, who had effectively lent him to Angelo’s people so that he could learn and earn. Bufalino gave him the name Irishman, which replaced the nickname Cheech among people downtown. The change marked Sheeran’s entry into a new social and criminal identity, built partly through his association with Bufalino.

Their friendship was sustained by repeated acts of familiarity. Bufalino knew Sheeran’s wife and asked after his children; Sheeran knew Bufalino’s wife, Carrie, spoke Italian with him, brought him prosciutto bread and sausages, and drove him on business. Bufalino gave Sheeran gallons of homemade red wine, and the two shared bread dipped in it. On many Wednesdays, Bufalino and Carrie met Sheeran and Mary for dinner, following an unwritten custom that kept married couples publicly together that evening. The relationship had material value, but Sheeran emphasizes that he did not ask Bufalino for money when he drove him. He understood, in retrospect, that simply being seen beside Bufalino helped him.

The patronage could also run in the other direction. After Bufalino faced deportation proceedings, which began because he had arrived from Sicily as an infant, Sheeran recommended a lawyer. The proceedings and appeals hung over Bufalino for fifteen years. When his last appeal failed and he had packed his bags and bought tickets, the lawyer used contacts with the Italian government to prevent Italy from accepting him; the United States then had to keep him. Bufalino was grateful to Sheeran. The episode reverses the apparent hierarchy between boss and subordinate: Sheeran, once an inexperienced driver benefiting from proximity, had become someone whose recommendation could help preserve Bufalino’s place in the country.

Sheeran also describes their friendship through domestic routines rather than business alone. He drove Bufalino to New Kensington to visit Kelly Mannarino, where the men cooked tomato sauce they called gravy, each insisting that dinner include both his own cooking and the other’s. The contest ended in homemade wine, jokes, and long meals. Bufalino and Carrie had no children, and Sheeran says Bufalino treated him like a son, while admitting he could not know exactly what the older man felt. When Mannarino became gravely ill with cancer in 1980, Bufalino cried at the sight of him. In Sheeran’s recollection, this was the only time he saw Bufalino openly show emotion.

Hoffa, Loyalty, and the Break

Bufalino’s bond with Hoffa was sincere in Sheeran’s account, not merely a useful alliance. He admired a man who was hard but fair, and he and Hoffa were bound by a belief that a person’s word could be relied on, whether its consequences were welcome or not. Sheeran distinguishes this personal respect from the shifting interests around them. Hoffa’s dealings with organized-crime figures, union power, and pension-fund lending could bind allies together, but those ties also created competition and resentment.

In 1974, as talk circulated that Hoffa might be less useful in securing pension-fund loans, Sheeran asked Bufalino about the criticism coming from Anthony Provenzano’s area. Bufalino replied that the fund had a limited amount to lend regardless of who controlled it. He remained supportive of Hoffa and said that after Sheeran’s trial he would take him to meet Anthony Salerno, Provenzano’s superior, whose influence over delegates exceeded Provenzano’s control of a few locals. Yet the arrangement was not secure. At a later meeting, Hoffa said he intended to deal with those who had been harming him. Bufalino told him that men above Bufalino believed Hoffa had failed to show appreciation, then quietly alluded to Dallas. Hoffa did not answer. Sheeran took the silence and the meeting’s end as signs that Bufalino and other powerful figures no longer supported Hoffa’s bid; he thought the manner of Hoffa’s campaign, more than the mere fact that he was running, had cost him their backing.

The book connects that rupture to the plan that brought Hoffa to a meeting outside Detroit. Sheeran says the proposed million-dollar pension dispute with Provenzano served as a decoy and that Hoffa was encouraged to believe Bufalino and Provenzano would be in the area for a reconciliation. Hoffa went to the Machus Red Fox Restaurant on July 30, 1975, expecting a meeting arranged by Anthony Giacalone, with Provenzano and Giacalone supposed to attend. Hoffa was seen in the restaurant parking lot and never returned home. Sheeran’s account thus makes Bufalino’s prior closeness to Hoffa part of the mechanism of the alleged betrayal: the trust that once held the relationship together also made the deception possible.

Five days after Hoffa disappeared, Bufalino and Sheeran attended a meeting at the Vesuvio Restaurant in New York City with Anthony Salerno, Anthony Provenzano, and Salvatore Briguglio. Sheeran describes the gathering as a report to Salerno on how the disappearance had been carried out and whether any loose ends remained. He says New York had not sanctioned the act, though it had not opposed it, and insists that Detroit’s approval was necessary because the operation took place in its territory. These statements are Sheeran’s retrospective account, not an independent finding that establishes every participant’s role. They nevertheless show how the book places Bufalino within a system where violence required territorial permission, reporting upward, and attention to unfinished business.

Investigation, Imprisonment, and Final Years

The FBI’s investigation made the relationship between Bufalino and Sheeran part of the public record of suspicion. A HOFFEX file memo listed Sheeran and Bufalino among seven men of early interest; adding Anthony Giacalone and Chuckie O’Brien brought the number of suspects in the account to nine. The book reports that the FBI deployed two hundred agents and amassed seventy volumes, containing more than 16,000 pages. During a 1977 Syracuse grand jury appearance, Sheeran says prosecutors asked whether Bufalino had ever directed him to shoot anyone. Bufalino was separately asked whether Sheeran had been involved in killings and denied knowledge of such activity. Investigators also questioned Sheeran about Hoffa’s pad and a private club called the Pad in Endicott. Sheeran presented his visits there as social, including games and wine, while the questioning underscores how ordinary details of his association with Bufalino had become potential clues.

Bufalino’s legal jeopardy continued after the disappearance. In 1977, he was convicted of extortion in a case involving a jeweler and a $25,000 jewelry debt. A man named Jack Napoli had obtained the jewelry by pretending to be Bufalino’s friend, though Bufalino said he did not know him. At a meeting at the Vesuvio, the seventy-three-year-old Bufalino threatened to strangle Napoli if he did not repay what he had taken. Napoli had been wearing a wire as a consequence of the Hoffa investigation. Bufalino served four years. After his release in 1981, he conspired with two men to murder Napoli, but one of them, Jimmy Frattiano, made a deal with the FBI and testified that Bufalino had called for Napoli to be killed. Bufalino received a fifteen-year sentence. The case shows the investigation’s reach beyond the still-unresolved Hoffa disappearance: surveillance and cooperation by witnesses continued to shape the risks surrounding Bufalino.

The book also places Bufalino among the unindicted coconspirators in Sheeran’s 1980 federal RICO case, which named about twenty people. The FBI warned Sheeran’s attorney that sources believed those associates feared he might cooperate after conviction and had arranged to kill him. This allegation is presented as a threat reported to the defense, not as proof that Bufalino ordered one. Later, when Sheeran’s arthritis worsened, he was transferred from Sandstone to the prison hospital in Springfield. Bufalino was there in a wheelchair after a severe stroke, and Anthony Salerno was dying of cancer. Sheeran again describes Bufalino as his teacher: Bufalino played bocce from his chair, teased him over gin, and loved ice cream, which Sheeran arranged to obtain despite the prison commissary being available only once a week. When Sheeran’s daughter had her first child, Bufalino brought him the news at the bocce court.

In their private conversations at Springfield, Sheeran says they spoke about Hoffa and learned more details about what had happened. Both, he recalls, felt that events had gone further than they had wanted and that Hoffa did not deserve his fate. That statement does not undo the book’s account of their part in the conspiracy; it places remorse beside the loyalty and violence that had defined their relationship. Bufalino died at ninety in a nursing home under FBI observation. The book leaves him as a man whose tenderness toward Sheeran and his friends was real within the narrator’s memory, but whose loyalties operated inside a system of coercion, territorial authority, and lethal decisions. It is precisely this closeness—to Hoffa, to Sheeran, and to the machinery surrounding them—that makes the names on the yellow pad endure as both a mark of trust and a source of suspicion.