The “Rat” and Informant Code

The “Rat” and Informant Code is the underworld rule that speech to authorities can destroy a person’s standing and endanger others, while silence preserves the trust on which clandestine relationships depend. In Frank Sheeran’s account, the code is not merely a prohibition against talking: it governs how people interpret confidence, police their contact with government, and decide who may be trusted. Yet the book also makes the label unstable. A man may be called a rat without proof that he betrayed anyone, and a witness’s apparent cooperation may be entangled with pressure, bargaining, or an effort to protect himself.

The Rule of Confidence

Sheeran presents discretion as a condition of belonging. When Jimmy Hoffa spoke openly to Ed Partin, some of their friends questioned the judgment behind confiding in a man Hoffa hardly knew. In Sheeran’s description, a person who expects to be trusted must keep things inside; careless disclosure risks the respect that makes future confidence possible. The episode frames informing not only as a legal act but as a social breach: the danger begins when private knowledge leaves the circle in which it was entrusted.

The family’s discovery of Jimmy Hoffa’s yellow pad gives that circle a suggestive physical trace. Kept beside his telephone, the pad carried the penciled words Russ & Frank. Sheeran and Russell Bufalino were close allies of Hoffa, and Sheeran was regarded as nearly family through his loyalty during Hoffa’s legal troubles. In the prologue, the family fears that only someone trusted enough to approach a vigilant Hoffa could have harmed him. The note does not establish what either man knew or did; it shows how intimacy, normally a foundation of confidence, could become a source of suspicion after Hoffa disappeared.

Sheeran’s own association with Bufalino developed through favors and repeated private contact. He drove Bufalino to meetings and business stops, including the 1957 gathering at Apalachin, and later described himself as a friend who knew Bufalino’s wife and exchanged food and homemade wine with him. After the arrests at Apalachin exposed the scale of the gathering, Sheeran understood more clearly why Bufalino traveled in person and used him as a driver. The relationship illustrates the code’s practical setting: knowledge of routes, meetings, and associates accumulated through service, while the account does not portray ordinary proximity as proof of disclosure.

Informants as Instruments and Adversaries

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of Charlie Allen is Sheeran’s most sustained example of the code being turned against a former associate. Sheeran says the government wired Allen and used him in the late 1970s to build a case against people connected to Hoffa’s disappearance. He describes Allen as someone Hoffa had helped, and whom Sheeran himself assisted in finding work, allowed to travel with him, and later placed on the payroll as an organizer for Teamsters Local 326. According to Sheeran, Allen eventually wore a wire against him after Sheeran had caught him doing so in 1979.

The betrayal is presented as a reversal of roles as much as a breach of loyalty. At Sheeran’s 1980, 1981, and 1982 trials, Allen claimed that he had served as Hoffa’s jail bodyguard and had been injured defending him. Sheeran disputed that story, saying Allen had actually been cut while trying to steal candy bars and that Hoffa had looked out for Allen, even helping him pursue a job that might support parole. Sheeran also says Allen later worked for him and turned against him after another arrest. These are Sheeran’s claims, not an independent resolution of Allen’s credibility; their importance to the code lies in the contrast between past assistance and later cooperation with investigators.

The account gives Allen’s changing relationship to the government a revealing chronology. Before agreeing to wear a wire, Allen told the Federal Bureau of Investigation the truth, according to Sheeran, about a delivery made for Hoffa to John Mitchell. At a Washington prison-reform fundraiser, Sheeran says, Hoffa and Philadelphia political figure Alan Cohen gave Allen $40,000 to deliver to Mitchell for the Committee to Re-elect the President; Mitchell passed along $17,000 and kept the remaining $23,000. Sheeran says Allen disclosed the incident in an early conversation with investigators, about a year before he agreed to record Sheeran. The sequence complicates a simple traitor-versus-loyalist account: Allen’s cooperation was gradual, and his early statements, later wire, and disputed trial testimony served different purposes.

Surveillance, Suspicion, and Punishment

The code also requires watchfulness around government institutions. Sheeran recalls Bufalino warning him that if he entered a federal building—even to answer a subpoena—he had to notify someone in the family as soon as possible. The warning assumes that a visit itself may be observed and interpreted as contact with authorities. In this world, informing is not only something a witness does in a formal interview; unexplained access to a federal building can become evidence of disloyalty in the eyes of associates.

Sheeran applies that logic to Salvatore Briguglio, whose alleged contact with the Federal Bureau of Investigation remains uncertain in the account. He says people heard Briguglio was entering a federal building without telling the group; when confronted, Briguglio admitted going there but denied giving information. Sheeran suggests that such a confrontation could make investigators withdraw a wire or surveillance, whether or not Briguglio had actually cooperated. The episode exposes the code’s self-reinforcing character: suspicion prompts an internal inquiry, and the inquiry may itself change what authorities can observe, without resolving whether the original suspicion was true.

After Hoffa disappeared, the Federal Bureau of Investigation focused on a small circle of suspects. A memorandum listed Anthony Provenzano, Stephen Andretta, Thomas Andretta, Salvatore Briguglio, Gabriel Briguglio, Frank Sheeran, and Russell Bufalino; adding Anthony Giacalone and Chuckie O’Brien brought the number to nine. Sheeran’s account asks how investigators became so certain about this group and raises the possibility that someone was talking to them. The list establishes the investigation’s concentrated focus, not proof that any named suspect informed. Its narrative effect is to place the code under pressure from both sides: investigators sought witnesses, while the suspects had reason to fear that someone within their circle had crossed the line.

The code carries a lethal implication in Sheeran’s description of Allen Dorfman’s death. He says Jackie Presser was a concealed source for the authorities who circulated the claim that Dorfman was a rat and was about to cooperate. Dorfman was then shot with silencers in a Chicago hotel parking lot in broad daylight. Sheeran insists Dorfman was loyal to Hoffa and says that such a killing could not have happened in Chicago without local approval, while explicitly declining to say that Chicago carried it out. His account therefore presents accusation itself as dangerous: a claim of betrayal could function as a death sentence even when, in Sheeran’s view, the accused man was no informer.

Rumor, Testimony, and Unresolved Truth

Sheeran repeatedly distinguishes what he knows from what he has heard. He says an Italian man later claimed credit for the killing of Joey Gallo, then speculates that a person who had become an informant might embellish his record to gain the government’s regard. He offers no confirmation that this explanation is true. The passage links the code to the competing incentives of testimony: criminal acts may be claimed, denied, or magnified as a person tries to shape how authorities see him.

A similar uncertainty surrounds John Francis. Before Francis died of cancer, Sheeran says, a reliable source told him that Francis had implicated him in fourteen killings, including Gallo’s. Sheeran does not know whether Francis spoke, and allows that pain, medication, and a wish not to die in jail may have affected him. He says he would not blame a dying man for trying to make peace. That qualification leaves the code in moral tension with the ordinary limits of human endurance: loyalty demands silence, but Sheeran does not treat a gravely ill prisoner’s possible disclosure as a straightforward act of treachery.

The book extends that uncertainty to Briguglio. Sheeran considers whether Briguglio may have wanted to make an offer to prosecutors, noting the general process by which a suspect seeking a deal must first outline what information he can provide. He asks whether Briguglio told the Federal Bureau of Investigation what he knew and whether investigators left him free in order to obtain an admission from a suspected killer. The questions are presented as questions, not established facts. The account also notes that Briguglio spoke privately with a writer in 1977 and shortly before his 1978 murder appeared strained under federal pressure, but neither detail by itself proves that he informed.

As a governing idea, the code makes silence both a shield and a trap. It binds confidants, drivers, union associates, and alleged witnesses to a shared expectation, but it also creates a climate in which a meeting, a government visit, or a rumor can be read as betrayal. Sheeran’s retrospective account depends on that climate while repeatedly showing its limits: accusations are not confessions, proximity is not proof, and even a deathbed report may remain unknowable. The label rat carries enormous force precisely because the evidence behind it is often incomplete.