Frank Sheeran

Francis Joseph Sheeran (October 25, 1920 – December 14, 2003), also known as "The Irishman", was an American labor union official and enforcer for Jimmy Hoffa and Russell Bufalino. Raised in a devoutly Catholic Irish-American family in Darby, Pennsylvania, a working-class town near Philadelphia, he grew up poor during the Great Depression and enlisted in the US Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He served with the 45th Infantry Division during the Italian Campaign in the Mediterannean Theater as both an infantryman and in the Military Police Corps. After returning to Pennsylvania, he did various odd jobs before becoming involved with the Teamsters and its president, Jimmy Hoffa.

Sheeran was a leading figure involved in the infiltration of unions by organized crime in the 1960s and ‘70s, and allegedly helped the Teamsters assist the CIA with the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. In 1980, he was convicted of labor racketeering and sentenced to 32 years in prison, of which he served 13 years. He was accused of having links to the Bufalino crime family, including its boss, Russell Bufalino, in his capacity as a high-ranking official in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the president of Local 326 in New Castle, Delaware. After being indicted on federal charges by the FBI and the Philadelphia PD, he was sentenced to three decades in prison, of which he would spend 13 and was released due to his old age. He then went to live at a nursing home in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Shortly before his death in 2003, he said he had killed Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. Author Charles Brandt detailed what Sheeran told him about Hoffa in the alleged confession in the narrative nonfiction work I Heard You Paint Houses (2004). The truthfulness of the book, including Sheeran's confessions to killing Hoffa and Joe Gallo, has been disputed by some. His father was of Irish descent, while his mother was of Swedish descent. During the great depression Frank would sometimes help his father steal food from farms near their home to feed the family. On July 14, 1943, he set sail for North Africa.

Sheeran served 411 days of combat duty—a significant length of time, as the average was around 100 days.

Sheeran said: All in all, I had fifty days lost under AWOL—absent without leave—mostly spent drinking red wine and chasing Italian, French, and German women. However, I was never AWOL when my outfit was going back to the front lines. If you were AWOL when your unit was going back into combat you might as well keep going because one of your own officers would blow you away and they didn't even have to say it was the Germans. That's desertion in the face of the enemy.

War crimes Sheeran recalled his war service as the time when he developed a callousness to taking human life. He claimed to have participated in numerous massacres and summary executions of German POWs, acts which violated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs. In interviews with Charles Brandt, he divided such massacres into four categories: Revenge killings in the heat of battle. Sheeran told Brandt that a German soldier had just killed his close friends and then tried to surrender, but he chose to "send him to hell, too". He described often witnessing similar behavior by fellow G.I.s. The Dachau reprisals and other reprisal killings of Nazi concentration camp guards and trustee inmates. Sheeran then married Irene Gray, with whom he had one daughter, Connie. Irene died in December 1995.

Organized crime and the Teamsters Union When he left the service, Sheeran became a driver for Food Fair and he met Russell Bufalino in 1955 when Bufalino offered to help him fix his truck, and later worked jobs driving him around and making deliveries. Sheeran also operated out of a bar located in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, which was run by Bill Distanisloa, a soldier under the then powerful Philadelphia crime family captain and future acting boss Angelo Bruno.

According to his biography, Sheeran's first murder was killing Whispers DiTullio, a gangster who had hired him to destroy the Cadillac Linen Service in Delaware for $10,000. However, Sheeran did not know that Angelo Bruno had a large stake in the linen service. Sheeran later became acting president of Local 326 of the Teamsters Union in Wilmington, Delaware.

Prison and death Sheeran was charged in 1972 with the 1967 murder of Robert DeGeorge, who was killed in a shootout in front of Local 107 headquarters. However, the case was dismissed on the grounds that Sheeran had been denied a speedy trial. He was also alleged to have conspired to murder Francis J. Marino, a Philadelphia labor organizer, in 1976, and Frederick John Gawronski, who was killed the same year in a tavern in New Castle, Delaware.

Sheeran was indicted along with six others in July 1980, on charges involving his links to the labor leasing businesses controlled by Eugene Boffa Sr. of Hackensack, New Jersey. On October 31, 1980, Sheeran was found guilty of 11 charges of labor racketeering. He was sentenced to a 32-year prison term and served 13 years.

Hoffa death In the years leading up to Hoffa’s death, he had been in a feud with mobster Anthony Provenzano about union leadership.

Charles Brandt writes in I Heard You Paint Houses (2004) that Sheeran confessed to killing Hoffa on July 30, 1975. Bill Tonelli disputes the book's truthfulness in a Slate article, as does Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith in The New York Review of Books.

The FBI has examined evidence which could connect Sheeran to the murder of Hoffa, including using the latest advances in forensic technology to test remnants of blood and floorboards from the house where Hoffa was reputedly killed. Although bloodstains were found in the Detroit house where Sheeran claimed that the murder had happened,

Biographical film The book "I Heard You Paint Houses" by Charles Brandt is the basis for the 2019 film The Irishman directed by Martin Scorsese. Scorsese was long interested in directing a film about Sheeran's life and his alleged involvement in the slaying of Hoffa. Steven Zaillian is the screenwriter, and producer Robert De Niro portrays Sheeran, Al Pacino plays Hoffa, and Joe Pesci plays Bufalino. The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 27, 2019, and was released on November 1, 2019. Digital streaming started on November 27, 2019, via Netflix.