In Frank Sheeran’s account, the Washington Hilton was the setting for a carefully staged transfer: Sheeran carried a suitcase containing about half a million dollars into the hotel, met John Mitchell in its lobby, and handed over the bag during an exchange disguised as ordinary conversation. The episode places a major political payment in a public hotel space, while leaving the money’s precise origin uncertain.

The delivery to Washington

Sheeran recalled that John Francis gave him the suitcase at the Branding Iron Restaurant, at 7600 Roosevelt Boulevard. He estimated that it weighed a hundred pounds. He was not sure whether the money represented Jimmy Hoffa’s funds from Allen Dorfman and pension-fund loans, or money from Russell Bufalino, Carlos Marcello, and others connected to the Las Vegas skim. Sheeran said the source was not his business.

The drive itself was prepared for the possibility of surveillance. Sheeran had fitted his Lincoln with a seventy-five-gallon auxiliary gas tank and a switch, which he said would let him keep going if federal agents following him had to stop for fuel. He described traveling roughly 150 miles from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., through Delaware and Maryland on I-95. Although he usually used a CB radio for warnings about police radar, he said he did not speed with a package of that size.

The lobby exchange

At the Washington Hilton, Sheeran parked, took the suitcase into the lobby himself, and sat in an easy chair rather than asking a bellhop to handle it. After a short wait, Mitchell came through the front door and sat in the next chair. Their talk about the weather and the drive served, in Sheeran’s telling, to make the meeting look unremarkable.

Mitchell asked whether Sheeran belonged to a union. Sheeran said he was president of Local 326 in Wilmington, a position he had regained after winning the 1970 election by a three-to-one margin. Mitchell asked where the union office was; Sheeran placed it near the train station. Mitchell wished him a safe drive back to the union hall, then said, “Nothing comes cheap.”

Mitchell stood with the suitcase. Sheeran asked, “Don’t you want to go somewhere and count it?” Mitchell replied, “If I had to count it, they wouldn’t have sent you.” The exchange ended without a reported counting of the money at the hotel. In Sheeran’s version, Mitchell’s remark signaled that the amount and the trusted courier had already been accepted.

Payment and political context

Sheeran said he understood the half-million dollars to be intended for Nixon’s reelection, while allowing that it might have been connected to a parole or pardon. The account does not settle where the money originated or establish a more exact purpose than that reported connection. Its uncertainty is part of the episode: Sheeran describes the mechanics of carrying and transferring the bag in detail, but says he did not know whose money it was.

He also recalled that another half-million-dollar delivery was made to help Hoffa get out of prison. Salvatore Briguglio brought that money from Tony Pro on behalf of Fitz, without Russell Bufalino’s knowledge, according to Sheeran. Unlike the payment associated with Nixon’s reelection, that second arrangement was tied to parole carrying a restriction that would prevent Hoffa from running for union office until his sentence expired in March 1980. The hotel scene thus sits within a larger account of competing payments and conditions surrounding Hoffa’s release, but the Washington Hilton is specifically where Sheeran says Mitchell took the suitcase he had brought from Philadelphia.