The Irishman was adapted from the book I Heard You Paint Houses, based on interviews with
Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran.
But there's a problem, he's not a reliable narrator.
Are you getting the real story of Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance?
It's complicated.
Frank Sheeran is the title character at the center of The Irishman, and events in the
film were based on the claims he made in Charles Brandt's I Heard You Paint Houses.
Essentially, Sheeran said he was coming clean, he knew he was nearing the end of his life,
and he wanted to confess the secrets he'd been carrying around for decades.
So what's the real story?
While there's no real way to definitively prove or disprove many of his claims, they
did find that he was, by most accounts, a minor player in the South Philadelphia mafia
who really did hang with the likes of Russell Bufalino.
But those who knew him said he was a far cry from the version brought to the screen.
One of his contemporaries in the Irish mafia, John Carlyle Berkery, described him like this:
"Frank Sheeran never killed a fly.
The only things he ever killed were countless jugs of wine.
You could tell how drunk he was by the color of his teeth: pink, just started; dark purple,
stiff."
Slate interviewed FBI agents, law enforcement, prosecutors, and reporters, and found that
no one had ever even suspected Sheeran of killing anyone.
He really was a World War 2 veteran, and he really did get law enforcement's attention
a few times: he once beat up a non-union truck driver, and he was also indicted two times
for his alleged involvement in the slaying of union rivals...but even in those cases,
he was only accused of hiring other people to do the actual killing.
"I heard you paint houses"
"Yes, yes, sir, I do."
Mob influence reaches a long, long way, and The Irishman shows names being plucked from
tombstones to register fake votes for JFK.
Did that happen?
According to an investigation by the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post, yes,
it did.
Earl Mazo was a reporter who headed up a planned 12-part series on election fraud, and one
of the things he found when he started matching voter names and addresses was that some of
those names were, indeed, taken from tombstones in a Chicago cemetery.
Only four of the stories in the series were ever run.
That's not the only time claims of election interference were brought up.
In 1997, the Los Angeles Times reported on a book that claimed JFK had been elected with
the help of the mafia, who made sure he won the state of Illinois.
The book was, of course, highly controversial, but the 1960 presidential election was surrounded
by accusations of voter fraud, recounts, and, says Slate, counties where the votes were
so overwhelmingly in Kennedy's favor that they just had to be disputed.
According to Sheeran, he was the one who killed Crazy Joe Gallo as he dined with his family
at Umberto's Clam House.
The motive?
He says it was all because Gallo was rude to Sheeran's boss and friend, Russell Bufalino.
Bufalino gave the nod, and Sheeran gave him a hail of bullets.
But that's not the official story at all, that was broken wide open by Nicolas Gage,
a reporter for The New York Times who had spent years covering the mob.
He told a different tale.
When The Times ran their story, they reported the killing had come because of a dispute
with the Colombo family.
They had marked Gallo for death months before he was killed, and everyone in the family
knew it.
When an informant named Joseph Luparelli saw Gallo at Umberto's, he got up, left, and headed
straight for a nearby restaurant where he knew he could find representatives of the
Colombo family.
He told them where to find Gallo, and within 45 minutes they were back at Umberto's and
armed to the teeth.
Gallo was eating dinner with his family when he was shot, and his new wife, Sina Essary,
described the hitmen as, quote, "little, short, fat Italians," which is absolutely nothing
like a description of the 6-foot-4 man known as The Irishman.
It's just a single line, uttered by Joe Pesci's Russell Bufalino.
It's easy to miss, but it has huge implications.
"If they can whack a president, they can whack a president of a union."
He's talking about the idea that the mafia was behind the assassination of JFK, and one
of the confessions Sheeran made to Brandt was that he had been the one to deliver rifles
to Dallas, rifles that were the same kind used to kill Kennedy.
Scorsese left that incident out of the film because, he told IndieWire, it crossed just
a little too far into conspiracy theory territory, and he didn't want to take away from the rest
of the story the characters had to tell.
But the real Sheeran did make the claim, so is it true?
No.
The National Archives contains a huge amount of information on things that have come out
about the Kennedy assassination, including details on the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that
had been left in the Texas School Book Depository.
It had originally come from Crescent Firearms, and was shipped to Klein's Sporting Goods
in Chicago.
There, it was bought by someone using the name "A. Hidell" and shipped to Dallas, Texas.
The handwriting on the order form was a match to the handwriting of Lee Harvey Oswald, and
the P.O. box it was shipped to had been rented by him as well.
Jimmy Hoffa is a larger-than-life figure with a life that's just as fascinating as his death,
and one of the claims made in The Irishman is that he had his hands in pretty much everything,
and he did.
And yes, according to the Los Angeles Times, that absolutely included loaning Teamster
money to the mobsters that built Las Vegas.
Throughout the 1950s and 60s, hundreds of millions of dollars from the Teamsters Central
States Pension Fund were funneled into Vegas through mobsters like Moe Dalitz.
Payments were made, and Vegas got built.
"Do you want to be a part of this, Frank?"
"Yes, I do, sir."
"Would you like to be a part of this history?"
"Yes, I would.
Whatever you need me to do, I'm available."
At the heart of The Irishman is the mystery of what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.
So how does what we know stack up with what was depicted?
Hoffa really was at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, on July
30, 1975.
He had driven there in a green Pontiac Grand Ville, and was waiting for Anthony Giacalone
and Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano.
The point of the meeting?
To mend some fences, but The New York Times says that both parties have consistently denied
there was any such meeting scheduled.
At 2:15, Hoffa called his wife to say he planned on being home by 4 p.m.
He never went home, though, and his car was found in the restaurant's parking lot the
next morning.
Hoffa's disappearance came not long after he received a controversial presidential pardon
from Richard Nixon.
Part of the deal was that he was supposed to stay out of union business until 1980,
but he was already in the process of trying to take power back from Frank Fitzsimmons.
The Irishman shows Hoffa getting into a car at the Machus Red Fox, one driven by Chuckie
O'Brien.
Strangely, there's several long conversations about a wet spot on the back seat.
"What kind of fish?"
"I don't know, the kind you eat?
A fish."
According to a 1975 article in The New York Times, investigators really did find stains
in the back seat of a car owned by Joseph Giacalone and borrowed by Chuckie O'Brien.
He insisted that it was blood from a salmon he had just delivered to a friend, and further
investigation confirmed the story.
As the precise, albeit strange, thing that O'Brien had insisted it was, it quickly went
from serious evidence to nowhere.
Hoffa's body has never been found, and there's a very simple, very logical explanation: he
was cremated.
Even Sheeran's staunchest skeptics have to admit that makes a lot of sense.
Why transport the body somewhere and bury it when you could just dispose of it permanently
and easily right where he was killed?
Some of the long-standing theories about what happened to Hoffa are way more implausible
than Sheeran's story.
Buried under Giants Stadium?
Really?
Talk about an unnecessary amount of work and risk.
In 1976, the FBI compiled the Hoffex, essentially a list of all suspects and persons of interest
in the case.
Now, the big question: was Sheeran on it?
Yes.
He was the last entry in a section titled "Suspects Outside of Michigan," and he was
described as a, quote, "known associate" of Russell Bufalino.
He was also known to have been in Detroit at the time Hoffa disappeared, and was, indeed,
known to be a close friend of the union leader.
Here's the thing about Sheeran, his tell-all confessional to Charles Brandt isn't the first
time he spoke out about what happened to Hoffa.
And it wasn't just the second time, either.
Sheeran has told a ton of different versions of the story over the years.
In 1995, he spoke with The Philadelphia Daily News and made some wild claims.
According to that story, he was going to tell his then-biographer John Zeitts the truth,
including:
"I did not kill Hoffa.
I had nothing to do with it.
But I never had the answer until 1988."
He went on to claim that Hoffa had been killed by contract killers hired by Nixon and the
White House, and also said the body would never be found.
Within a year, he came forward claiming to have documents that showed the location of
Hoffa's remains after all, and by then he was claiming Nixon had hired Vietnamese mercenaries
to kill Hoffa.
It wasn't until 2001 that Sheeran first claimed to have been the one who actually killed Hoffa.
At the time, various news outlets declined running with his story because of his track
record of making false claims, and between 2001 and 2003, he alternately said he had
killed Hoffa in a car before destroying the body and the evidence, that he just disposed
of the body but hadn't killed him, and then finally he recited the tale that made it into
The Irishman.
"I'm behind you, Jimmy, all the way."
The Irishman includes one claim that's been repeated often, Hoffa's long-time friend Chuckie
O'Brien was the one who picked him up and drove him to his death.
That's been said a lot, but according to former Justice Department legal counsel and Harvard
law professor Jack Goldsmith, it's absolutely not true.
Goldsmith has a personal connection to the matter, he's O'Brien's stepson, and he was
12-years-old when Hoffa disappeared.
He's spent years trying to clear his stepfather's name, and has condemned The Irishman for repeating
the accusations that destroyed O'Brien's life, in spite of the fact that he had an alibi
and was never charged with anything.
Goldsmith has written extensively on Hoffa's disappearance and on his stepfather's innocence,
and says there's a few huge problems with telling Sheeran's tale in such a high-profile
way.
One is the repetition of O'Brien's involvement, which the FBI and law enforcement have acknowledged
didn't happen as it's portrayed.
That's put a very bright spotlight on someone who's still alive, and Goldsmith says it also
distracts from the larger issues of Hoffa's sprawling control over so many aspects of
the nation's economy, which is largely overlooked in favor of telling the far juicier story
of murder...true or not.
Robert De Niro got the rights to make The Irishman based on Brandt's book in 2007, and
investigative journalist and Hoffa author Dan Moldea says he spent a good amount of
time warning De Niro that he had been, quote, "conned," and that he was making a movie based
on a completely false confession.
When push comes to shove, many of the claims made in The Irishman can't be proven or disproven,
and De Niro has since issued a statement addressing the backlash around the accuracy of the film.
He had this to say:
"I wasn't getting conned.
I have no problem with people disagreeing...we're not saying we're telling the actual story,
we're telling our story.
I believed it."
So, there you have it.
De Niro believed in it, not many other people do, he doesn't claim it's the truth, and as
for Hoffa's disappearance?
It's still not known what happened to him, and it'll probably always stay a mystery.
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