Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (74 page)

Although he was not directly affiliated with the Irish Mob, Sheeran represented a classic type of Irish American gangster: the freelance enforcer who went wherever the money was. Vincent Coll, Jack Diamond, Mad Dog Sullivan, Trigger Burke, and others had established a long and dubious tradition as Irish gunmen from hardscrabble and often impoverished backgrounds who circulated throughout the underworld. These were tough, cold-blooded men willing to undertake the impossible and dangerous jobs that others were either ill-equipped or too scared to take on. Coll, Diamond, and Burke all died prematurely via the dirt nap or the electric chair. Sheeran survived because he did most of his jobs under cover of either the Mafia or the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

His upbringing was typical depression-era Irish American. In Darby, Pennsylvania, the small town outside of Philadelphia where Sheeran was born and raised, unemployment was near eighty percent. Sheeran’s father occasionally found work as a janitor at the Blessed Virgin Mary Church & School in Darby, but mostly he drank. Sometimes he’d drag his strapping son Frank into local saloons, where he staged impromptu smokers in which Frank fought local kids or even adults, with dad wagering on his son and keeping the winnings to pay the rent or buy beer.

For guys like Frank Sheeran, minimally educated, relatively unskilled, born into a pre–Civil Rights America that was mean and pitiless, World War II was like a gift from the gods. Sheeran lied in order to enroll in the service underage. At seventeen, he was stationed for a while at Lowry Field in Colorado, where, because of his imposing physical stature, he served as an MP with the Army Air Corp. He then went off to Europe, where he spent the war as a rifleman in the 45th Infantry Division, otherwise known as the Thunderbird Division.

The average number of combat days for a soldier in World War II was around 80. Before the war was over, the Irishman would log four hundred and eleven days in combat. Sheeran’s status as a war veteran reiterates the harsh truth that the Irish American underworld drew many of its toughest adherents from the ranks of the ex-military. In Sheeran’s case, the sheer number of his combat days were instrumental in establishing his ruthless proficiency as a killer. General George S. Patton himself gave the Thunderbird Division their marching orders. According to an officer of the division who was present during Patton’s June 1942 speech to the division, “[He told us] to kill and to continue to kill and that the more we killed the less we’d have to kill later…. He did say the more prisoners we took, the more men we would have to feed and not to fool around with prisoners. He said there was only one good German and that was a dead one.” The General’s position on civilian casualties was equally severe: “He said…if the people living in the cities persisted in staying in the vicinity of the battle and were enemy, we were to ruthlessly kill them and get them out of the way.”

Among the many theaters of battle where Sheeran saw combat was Anzio, a bloody killing field in which U.S. soldiers were routinely ordered to exterminate prisoners and civilians. Wrote Sheeran, “When an officer would tell you to take a couple of German prisoners back behind the line and for you to ‘hurry back,’ you did what you had to do.” Following orders and killing people became the young soldier’s stock-in-trade.

When he returned stateside, Sheeran became a bouncer, loan shark, hustler, and a ballroom dance instructor at Wagner’s Dance Hall in Philly. He fell in with a notoriously tough Teamster local, which eventually brought him into the realm of Russell Bufalino, a man described by Bobby Kennedy during the McClellan Hearings as “one of the most ruthless and powerful leaders of the Mafia in the United States.” According to Sheeran, Bufalino was tough enough to have once told Mafia acolyte Frank Sinatra at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, “Sit down Frank, or I’ll rip your tongue out and stick it up your ass.”

The Mafia boss took a liking to Sheeran and was the first to call him “the Irishman.” Bufalino admired the way Sheeran carried himself, like a man who had killed before and would do it again if circumstances called for it and the price was right. When the mafiosi first introduced Sheeran to Jimmy Hoffa, he told the Teamster boss, “I’ve never seen a man walk straight through a crowd of people like the Irishman does and never touch a single person. Everybody automatically parts out of the way. It’s like Moses parting the Red Sea.”

Hoffa put the Irishman to work right away, flying him to Chicago to paint a house. Wrote Sheeran

I was used to getting put on a landing craft and now I was moving up in the world, invading Chicago on a plane. I was in Chicago maybe an hour. They supplied me the piece and they had one guy right there to take it from me after the thing and get in one car with it and drive away. His only job was to break the piece down and destroy it. They had other guys sitting in crash cars to pull out in front of cops who might go after the car I got in. The car I got in was supposed to take me back to the airport.

Sheeran did many other hits in the same manner, surreptitious killings in which he knew almost nothing about the intended target or whoever else was involved in the job. Clean. Professional. The way hits were meant to be carried out in the underworld.

Although Sheeran was loyal to Hoffa on the friendship level (“I’ll be a Hoffa man ’til the day they pat my face with a shovel and steal my cufflinks,” he told his Teamster brothers on Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night in 1973), he was an equal opportunity hit man. He was the only person to win a Man of the Year award from an Upstate Pennsylvania chapter of the Italian American Civil Rights League as well as a Teamsters Man of the Year award in 1973, two years before he whacked Hoffa.

By the time the order came down to take Jimmy out, Sheeran had to admit it was no big surprise. After serving fifty-eight months in prison for misappropriating $1.7 million in union pension funds and getting released early courtesy of a commutation from President Richard M. Nixon, Hoffa wanted his old job back. The mob had other ideas. Hoffa began to mouth off, threatening to tell where the bodies were buried. The legendary Teamster boss knew he was playing with fire, telling his friend the Irishman on numerous occasions, “Watch your ass…you could end up being fair game…. You’re too close to me—in some people’s eyes.”

Sheeran got the order to take Hoffa out from his other best friend, Bufalino.

“Your friend made one too many threats in his life,” said the mafioso.

Responded Sheeran, “The nuclear fallout’s going to hit the fan when they find the body.”

“There won’t be a body,” said Bufalino. “Dust to dust. That’s what it is.”

Wrote Sheeran: “I moved around in my seat. I couldn’t show anything in my face. I couldn’t say a word…. The wrong look in my eyes and my house gets painted.”

On Hoffa’s famous last day in 1975, the last thing he wrote on a notepad next to the phone in his home was “Russ and Frank.” Bufalino and Sheeran. Hoffa was off to meet with them and a handful of key mafiosi to square things away with the mob. Sheeran was there to make Hoffa feel safe and at ease.

The Irishman and a couple others guys were supposed to pick Jimmy up in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant on Telegraph Road in Hoffa’s hometown of Detroit. They arrived late, which angered the Teamster boss. When they told Jimmy there had been a change in plans, that they were now going to convene their meeting at a nearby house in a placid Detroit neighborhood, Hoffa was his usual profane self—“What the fuck…. Who the fuck…. How the fuck…”—but he went along with it partly because Sheeran was there.

In two cars, they drove to the house on a quiet street. Sheeran escorted Hoffa up the front stairs to the house. He opened the door and led Hoffa inside. It was only when the Teamster boss got into the front hallway and saw that there were no Mafia men on the premises to greet him that he knew he’d been setup, although he still believed the Irishman was on his side. Sheeran recalls:

He turned fast, still thinking we were together on the thing, that I was his backup. Jimmy bumped into me hard. If he saw the piece in my hand he had to think I had it out to protect him. He took a quick step to go around me and get to the door. He reached for the knob and Jimmy Hoffa got shot twice at a decent range—not too close or the paint splatters back at you—in the back of the head behind his right ear. My friend didn’t suffer.

Frank Sheeran did some other hits in later years and was lucky to live to retirement. Like most Irish American gangsters, he was a man who had pursued his version of the American Dream with a wife, kids, and an extended family. He was a working-class hood who lived a working-class life, suppressing whatever misgivings or guilt he may have had about his violent deeds behind a mask of toughness. It was only in his golden years that the ghosts of the Irishman’s past began to haunt him. The year before his death, Sheeran told his coauthor that he’d started having nightmares that mixed incidents from the war with incidents from his life in the mob. He began to “see” these people when he was awake, haunting apparitions he sometimes called “chemical people,” because he believed they were partly a result of the chemical imbalance that was caused whenever he neglected to take his medicine. Once, when he was driving in a car with the author, he said, “There are two chemical people in the backseat. I know they’re not real, but what are they doing in the car?”

In December 2003, Francis Sheeran died and was buried underground.

In these early years of the twenty-first century, the Irish American gangster is mostly a thing of the past.

All that remains are the demons.

—Thomas Joseph English
January 2005

sources

Interviews

The early chapters of this book chronicling events that took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth century derive mostly from archive research in libraries, museums, and city crime commissions, as well as from the books, articles, essays, manuscripts and reports listed below. The latter chapters, where participants of some events are still alive, I relied, when possible, on interviews. Given the nature of the subject matter, many contemporary sources insisted on anonymity. The following is a partial list of names that I am able to identify: Patrick Nee, James Martorano, Eddie MacKenzie, Kevin Cullen, Raymond Flynn, Ciaran Staunton, Michael Patrick MacDonald, Joe Coffey, Frank McDarby, Richie Egan, James Tedaldi, Tom McCabe, Greg Derkash, Jeffrey Schlanger, Lawrence Hochheiser, Kenneth Aronson, Gerald Shargel, Jim Nauwens, Mickey Featherstone, Marcelle Feathersone, Bud Schulberg, Edward McDonald, and Peter Quinn.

Books

Abbott, Shirley.
The Bookmaker’s Daughter: A Memory Unbound
. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Allen, Oliver E.
The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall.
Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1993.

Anbinder, Tyler.
Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum
. New York: Free Press, 2001.

Arnesen, Richard.
Waterfront Workers in New Orleans, 1860–1920
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Asbury, Herbert.
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928.

———
The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.

———
Sucker’s Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America
. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1938.

———
Gem of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.

———
The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950.

Beatty, Jack.
The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1992.

Berger, Meyer.
The Eight Million: Journal of a New York Correspondent
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942.

Bergreen, Laurence.
Capone: The Man and the Era
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Blumenthal, Ralph.
The Stork Club: America’s Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Café Society
. Boston: Little, Brown, 2000.

Brandt, Charles.
“I Heard You Paint Houses”: Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran & the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, & the Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa
. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2004.

Brill, Steven.
The Teamsters
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.

Bulger, William M.
While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Butler, Richard J. & Driscoll, Joseph.
Dock Walloper: The Story of “Big Dick” Butler
. NY: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1933.

Cagney, James.
Cagney by Cagney
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.

Callahan, Bob. (ed.).
The Big Book of American Irish Culture
. New York: Viking, 1987.

———
Who Shot JFK? A Guide to the Major Conspiracy Theories
. New York: Fireside Books, 1993.

Carroll, James.
The City Below
. Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Clarens, Carlos.
Crime Movies: From Griffith to the Godfather and Beyond
. New York: W.W. Norton, 1980.

Coffey, Michael & Golway, Terry (eds.).
The Irish in America
. New York: Hyperion, 1997.

Cohen, Rich.
Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons and Gangster Dreams
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Collins, Max Allen.
The Road to Perdition
. New York: Pocket Books, 2002.

Curley, James Michael.
I’d Do It Again: A Record of My Uproarious Years
. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1957.

Davis, John H.
Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
. New York: McGraw Hill, 1989.