The Irishman

Jimmy Hoffa: “Would you like to be a part of this, Frank? Would you like to be a part of this history?”

Frank Sheeran: “Yes, I would. Whatever you need me to do, I’m available.”

– Frank Sheeran in “I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa,” 2004

Frank Sheeran probably killed hundreds of people in his two years of service as an infantryman in World War II.

He was deployed for an unprecedented 345 days of hands-on combat at a time when soldiers still died hearing each side scream from only a few feet away. Most soldiers, by comparison, would see around 30 days of combat during a year of deployment. He had PTSD, like Rambo portrayed and that countless other war veterans before him experienced, and he had become an alcoholic during the war.

The army honorably discharged Frank and he quickly became a hitman for the Italian mafia. He was a 6’4″ brute who towered over everyone near him, and he had a work ethic honed by years of fighting in trenches, where even a single moment of lax attention led to death of your and your teammates. And he had been stationed in Italy, where he learned a bit of Italian and picked up a thirst for red wine. It was so rare for the Italian mafia to welcome an Irishman into their family that they nicknamed Frank The Irishman.

In the 1950’s, dozens of thousands of WWII veterans were looking for work, and they were hired by mafia families to do what the government had trained them to do. Some were hired by companies to fight off unions trying to take over jobs, and some where hired by unions to balance the odds. By then the mafia and Teamsters shared their resources.

Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino introduced The Irishman to Jimmy Hoffa, and the first thing Hoffa said to him was: “I heard you paint houses.”

In mafia lingo, to paint houses meant to splatter a wall red with blood.

The Irishman replied: “Yes. And I do my own carpentry work,” meaning he also disposed of the bodies.

Hoffa set up The Irishman became a delivery truck driver for Teamster local #107 in Philadelphia. When not painting houses for Bufalino, Frank was a hard working Teamster who diligently loaded and unloaded products for Philadelphia businesses.

Working with the Teamsters was always a double-edged sword. Companies needed big trucks to stock shelves and carry away manufactured or grown products, and those trucks were ripe so ripe for picking that many companies just assumed a 10% cost of doing business with Teamsters.

“I work hard for them when I ain’t stealing from ’em,” Frank said.

He also ensured companies were incentivized to work with Local #107. If someone wouldn’t use union labor, their building would catch on fire or non-union workers would be beaten to the brink of death but left strong enough to share their story with other workers.

But if you were in the union you were like family, and Teamster membership soared during Jimmy Hoffa’s tenure. Members of Teamsters Local #326 in Delaware elected Frank Sheeran president in a role similar to Big Daddy’s in Baton Rouge Local #5. The FBI called both lieutenants in Hoffa’s army; the military reference would continue with them calling Big Daddy Hoffa’s sergeant at arms. The lines between the Teamsters and the mafia blurred. Combined, the Teamsters and the mafia controlled almost all trucks that shipped every product made or sold in America, and practically every laborer and small business that used those products. Frank rose in rank.

To quench dissent of non-union laborers or to silence mouthy members of the mafia, people asked The Irishman to paint houses. He was a focused assassin with two years in World War II as his resume, and his role alternated between representing Teamsters at management meetings and national conferences with moonlighting with pistols.

Though The Irishman was more than 6’4″ tall and still strong from his days in the infantry, he chose to use a pistol instead of beating someone to death because it was never personal, it was always business, never personal, and a pistol is quick and reliable and sends layered messages. He used a bulky .357 when he wanted a loud bang! to disperse and confuse possible witnesses, and a smaller .38 when he wanted a mild pop! so someone would drop unnoticed.

After a hit, he’d immediately wipe evidence off the pistol and throw it in a river and find a new one. This was long before DNA analysis, but FBI technology could lift fingerprints from anything touched and match bullets pulled from bodies or nearby buildings with the barrel that shot it.

Frank painted houses for more than thirty years without being caught. He was one of the last survivors of Hoffa’s inner circle when The Teamsters drove America. Long after both Hoffa and Big Daddy died, Frank went to prison, not for murder but for labor law violations and racketeering – the same charge that would stick to Big Daddy and Governor Edwin Edwards.

Frank had systemic arthritis, probably from years of humping heavy ruck sacks in the army, and he withered away in prison down to a thin 6’0″ version of his former self. An attorney and true-crime author named Charles Brandt facilitated The Irishman’s release from prison due to declining and probably terminal health. Charles wanted to document The Irishman’s history while there was time.

Charles had a reputation for extracting truth from witnesses and convincing juries of their authority. He was aided in coaxing stories from The Irishman by the coincidentally named Frank Weisman, a literary agent fascinated with Hoffa and the mafia and my grandfather and their roles in killing President Kennedy. That Frank knew what questions hadn’t been asked in all the books before, and he worked with Charles Brandt to dig deep into The Irishman’s memories and look for clues with relevance that even The Irishman wouldn’t have realized; there were so many pieces of the puzzle that very few, if any, people saw a bigger picture materializing from thousands of fragments.

Frank The Irishman was a tenacious old man who lived longer than anyone expected. Brandt and Frank the agent worked with him for 14 years to nurture I heard You Paint Houses into a narrative memoir that is also a treatise on Hoffa and the mafia. Aiding their effort was Frank Sheeran’s latent Irish Catholic upbringing: he wanted to confess his sins before he died. The Irishman confessed to around a dozen murders, including open FBI cases for famous mobsters like “Crazy Joe” Gallo. The FBI always followed hits on mafia hitmen because it usually led them to someone giving the orders. The big hit that Frank admitted two quick shots in the back of Jimmy Hoffa’s head with a pocket-sized .38 that painted a Detroit suburban house red on 22 July 1975.

Killing was business. Brandt develops The Irishman’s story to show that had he refused, he would have been a witness to the mafia’s plot and they would have killed him and probably his family, too. Towards the end of their 14 year effort, Brandt and Frank the agent got The Irishman to imply how big their business was.

“If they can whack a president, they can whack a president of a union,” Frank quoted mob boss Russell Bufalino as having said when planning Hoffa’s demise in the spring of 1975. The Irishman also says he saw other mafia hitmen carrying duffle bags that he, as an infantryman, recognized as bulging with assault rifles.

Frank passed away a few months before his memoir was finally published. He died an alcoholic; most people who knew him said that after Hoffa died, The Irishman was never the same and drank from what he says was guilt at killing his friend and mentor. What’s interesting to me, as a fellow combat infantryman, is that even with all of the violence Frank Sheeran saw in the Teamsters and mafia, he either refused to talk about his two years in combat or he couldn’t find the words to explain what he experienced and how it changed him into The Irishman and led him to shoot Hoffa in the back of his head.

Neither Hoffa’s body nor evidence of his demise have been found, not even with modern DNA analysis that was unfathomable back when Frank was doing carpentry work. Like tossing used pistols into a river, whatever they did with Hoffa’s body was done knowing that everyone would be looking for evidence with the best resources money could provide, and people like Frank were prescient in that they didn’t know what they didn’t know so they were so thorough that posterity would rely on testimonies rather than physical evidence.

But The Irishman’s story seemed plausible. Martin Scorcese bought the movie rights to I Heard You Paint Houses from Steerforth Press and raised $257 Million to make his opus about Hoffa and the mafia. Scorcese hired the best Hollywood actors and had worked with them in decades of gangster classics and centered his opus around Frank Sheeran and renamed it The Irishman. Big Daddy was portrayed by the burly Craig Vincent who had played a thug in Scorsese’s 1995 Casino, which had starred Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, two starts also in The Irishman. Scorcese adapted characters from The Irishman to match the actors America had known for decades.

Craig Vincent researched his role by watching Brian Dennehy in Blood Feud, finding old news interviews with Big Daddy on Youtube, reading a few books by Hoffa and a few other people portrayed in The Irishman, and contacting surviving Partins to learn more about what Big Daddy was like and what were the traits that led so many careful men to trust him. We couldn’t give him more than Hoffa’s quotes about him being charming and Dennehy’s portrayal of his mannerisms. Craig couldn’t mimic Big Daddy’s southern drawl and sly smile like Dennehy had, but he was reliable and physically fit the role so Scorcese modified the character to fit Craig’s dark complexion and northeast Italian accent. Big Daddy became “Big Eddie” Partin, and Scorsese squeezed his large role in Frank’s book into in twenty-five minutes of film.

After editing, Big Eddie a mere five minutes of Martin Scorsese’s whopping three hour and twenty nine minute film, which was probably the most that modern movie-goers would sit and watch, even with all of those big name actors. The Irishman sold out theaters the summer of 2019 and quickly recouped the quarter of a billion dollar investment.

Scorsese was an artist. He admitted he was making a film for entertainment, not a documentary; he had to convey a lot of emotion into brief scenes so the story would move forward quickly. In one scene used for marketing, Big Eddie Partin is towering silently behind the more well known actors like Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Ray Ramono. Scorsese had lowered the camera angle to make Craig Vincent appear even larger than he was in real life; it looks like he’s a puppet master controlling the men below him.

After The Irishman was released, Craig and I chatted and I told him my grandfather would have appreciated that scene. And it solved the problem of conveying what was becoming obvious: Big Daddy was a mole behind the scenes that overheard everything said near them and, when no one was around, offer what was assumed to be confidential insight. Men like Big Daddy and The Irishmen were trusted, in part, because they knew how to remain silent yet still get things done.

A few months before she died, Wendy saw advertisements for The Irishman and saw tahat Ed Partin would be portrayed. As some of her final words, she quipped that The Irishman was a combat killer with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), but she was born WAR – Wendy Anne Rothdram – and marrying a Partin WARP’ed her. Like Frank Sheeran and many other veterans with PTSD, Wendy drank too much and killed her liver. It’s likely she suffered from PTSD, too. She passed away in April of 2019, three months before The Irishman was released in theaters.

In March of 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered all public theaters on Earth. Netflix picked up The Irishman and it set global streaming records, and over the next year approximately a Billion people all over the world saw a condensed and fictionalized version of my grandfather’s part in history. The story was centered around The Irishman, but a few of us knew there was a bigger story yet to be told. To me, no story could be complete without honoring my mother. And I still didn’t know how to tie all of this into why she abandoned me in the 1970’s, or why my family history mattered today.

I ordered around 50 books from Amazon not already on my bookshelf, and I used the internet to research what was publicly known versus only existed in my memories or our family’s letters and memorabilia.

To learn what I uncovered, it’s useful to start with Jimmy Hoffa. He vanished from Detroit’s Red Fox diner parking lot on 22 July 1975. Though there may be debate on whether or not The Irishman killed him, the details of Jimmy Hoffa’s rise and his life up until the day he vanished are well known. What I write next is what I believe based on what I’ve read about Hoffa and how it relates to Wendy and me.

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