Frank Sheeran

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Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran (born October 25, 1920 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † December 14, 2003 ibid) was an American mobster and contract killer of the Cosa Nostra .

He was suspected early on of having been involved in the disappearance of union leader Jimmy Hoffa on July 30, 1975, and shortly before his death admitted that he was responsible for his murder. He is also linked to 25 to 30 other murders; Among other things, the murder of the mafioso Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo on April 7, 1972 is attributed to him.

As the son of an Irish father, he was the second non-Italian ( listed by the FBI ) to be a full member of the Cosa Nostra. Frank Sheeran's person in particular shows how deeply the Mafia was able to penetrate the Teamsters' union ( “labor racketeering” ).

Life

youth

Frank Sheeran was born to a Catholic Irishman and a Swedish mother.

Sheeran was nine years old when his family lived through the 1929 Great Depression . Some of the family moved across the country to make ends meet. Problems that arose, for example when there was rent debt, were solved by quickly moving to another area. Thefts improved the lunch menu.

His father organized exhibition fights in bars in which the young Frank had to compete against older teenagers. Then when the ten year old z. B. had lost to a fifteen year old opponent, then there was of Sheeran Senior punishment nor a slap on top of it, because the Father through the defeat of the free beer had escaped.

Sheeran learned to dance with showmen and had his first experiences with women. Immediately after the USA entered the war at the end of 1941, he was drafted and spent 411 days fighting at the front during World War II , including in Sicily and the rest of Italy , where he acquired knowledge of the Italian language , a circumstance that later became his' Admission ticket 'for the Cosa Nostra should be.

He learned how to kill, especially the "execution" of captured enemies , but the order to kill was never given directly: if Sheeran was ordered to take prisoners to the back lines and come back quickly, then he knew what was being asked of him.

"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."

- Frank Sheeran in an interview with Charles Brandt

In Germany , he said he was involved in what was later known as the Dachau massacre during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp .

Return to the USA

Sheeran was 25 years old when he returned to the United States. He first worked as a bouncer , dancer and truck driver, then married and had children.

During a cargo trip to Syracuse, New York , shortly after passing Endicott , Sheeran had to stop due to engine problems. After he opened the hood , a small Italian man offered to help Sheeran use his tools to repair the damage.

This man was Rosario Alberto "Russel" Bufalino , from 1959 to 1975 head of the criminal clan specified as the " Bufalino family ". Impressed by Sheeran's manual skills and his Italian language skills, he hired him on the spot as a driver, and thus began a career as a much-used hit man.

He already did some murder assignments for Bufalino. B. on April 7, 1972, Joseph "Crazy Joe" Gallo murdered while celebrating his 43rd birthday; his bodyguard Peter Diapoulas only barely survived. Investigators believe that this attack was ordered by Joseph Yacovelli and carried out by Frank Sheeran. This ended after more than ten years the internal conflict in the Colombo family , which had started under Joseph Profaci and was actually formally ended under Joseph Magliocco in 1963.

Jimmy Hoffa

Contact with Jimmy Hoffa , the boss of the transport workers' union ("Teamsters"), came about when Bufalino passed the phone to him one day and Hoffa was on the phone. Sheeran later claimed that Hoffa said, "I heard you paint houses".

The term “to paint houses” was the mafia's euphemistic description for murder and describes the splattering of blood on the walls when someone is shot. Sheeran replies that he also does "carpentry work"; that is, he also removes the corpses.

Sheeran was then employed by Jimmy Hoffa at the Teamsters and now belonged to Local 326 in Wilmington (Delaware) , but had "special tasks" to do for the President. Sheeran said he murdered three people once within 24 hours; two in Puerto Rico and one in Chicago ; When he returned to report to Hoffa, Hoffa is said to have only said that he was late.

When Hoffa had to start a prison sentence in 1969, Sheeran had already murdered 13 people, not counting war deaths, as ordered. Hoffa tried to regain the presidency over the Teamsters after his dismissal, which led to his disappearance on July 30, 1975.

The “weak” Frank Fitzsimmons was allegedly more agreeable to the Mafia as president because, unlike Hoffa, he did not interfere in their Teamsters activities. Bufalino allegedly had Hoffa warned again about Sheeran, but finally the invitation for Hoffa came on July 30th, from which Hoffa never returned.

Frank Sheeran was among the fifty people who had to testify before the grand jury in September 1975 to investigate Hoffa's disappearance, but refused to testify on the basis of the 5th Amendment to the United States Constitution .

In particular, statements made in 1976/77 by Ralph Picardo, who has been incarcerated in Trenton State Prison (New Jersey) for murder since May 1975 , moved Sheeran from the group of usual suspects to those actually involved.

Picardo was as a driver of Anthony Provenzano himself a member of Local 84 of the Teamsters and was in jail because he called a loan shark had shot (Engl. "Loan shark"), and apparently sought a deal with justice. Picardo's statements were made public as early as 1978 by Dan E. Moldea in his book "The Hoffa Wars". Picardo confirmed Hoffa's invitation to the Machus Red Fox restaurant , from whose parking lot Jimmy Hoffa disappeared without a trace. This invitation came from Anthony Giacalone in order to resolve existing disagreements between Anthony Provenzano and Jimmy Hoffa in the conversation.

Accordingly, Hoffa was brought from his foster son Chucky O'Brien from the restaurant to a nearby house. Thomas Andretta , Salvatore Briguglio, his brother Gabriel Briguglio and their driver Frank Sheeran would have found themselves in the house and murdered Hoffa.

Even Dan E. Moldea only assumed that Sheeran was involved in the murder case until 1999 and saw in Sheeran more the knowing and in O'Brian the ignorant decoy for Hoffa, who trusted both and never climbed into a car to meet strangers would.

Dan E. Moldea himself had conducted several interviews with a number of suspects, but never with Sheeran. That was reserved for Charles Brandt , who began in 1999 to conduct interviews, discussions and phone calls with Frank Sheeran. Apparently there was an agreement to publish the book "I heard you paint houses", which is a biography of Sheeran, only after his death.

Frank Sheeran died in a nursing home near Philadelphia , the book was published in 2004.

The confession

With his confession to Brandt, Sheeran admitted for the first time what had been suspected until then: he and Chucky O'Brien as the driver had taken Hoffa to a house near the restaurant and then shot Hoffa in the hallway in the head. But he did not remove the body himself. This was, as he was informed afterwards, burned and disposed of. The identity of the eliminator ( "Cleanman") wanted Sheeran but initially not reveal because that person is still alive. Accordingly, Salvatore Briguglio would resign as a body disposer; Sheeran had shot him by hand in 1978. Sheeran later named Tom and Steve Andretta .

Since Sheeran had always belonged to the group of suspects anyway, his statements were taken very seriously by the investigating authorities, in contrast to allegations by Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski , who died in a hospital in New Jersey in 2006 and whose story is in Philip Carlos' Book "The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer" were published, but had been called a legend (" hoax ") by a former FBI agent (Kuklinski claimed to have killed Hoffa for 40,000 US dollars, the body was then was processed into a fender in Japan; one of the theories is known to have been that Hoffa's body was disposed of with the help of a scrap press in Detroit ).

Sheeran further specified his testimony shortly before his death with the name of the house in which the murder took place. In fact, traces of blood were found in the house in Detroit, but they were too old to be analyzed and assigned to a specific person.

literature

  • Charles Brandt: "I heard you paint houses": Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran and the inside story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the last ride of Jimmy Hoffa. Steerforth Press, Hanover (New Hampshire) 2004, ISBN 1-58642-077-1 .
  • Dan E. Moldea: The Hoffa Wars , Charter Books, New York 1978, ISBN 0-441-34010-5 .
  • Philip Carlo: The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer. ISBN 0-312-34928-9 .

Movie

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sheeran at deathfigures.com
  2. ↑ The Hoffa Files: How This Tough Guy Made Las Vegas ( Memento from October 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) on klas-tv.com (English)
  3. ↑ George Knapp: The Hoffa Files: The Missing Body of Jimmy Hoffa ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
  4. ↑ Detroit House Searched for Clues in Hoffa case . Fox News. July 30, 1975. Archived from the original on June 27, 2012. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved May 30, 2012. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.foxnews.com
personal data
SURNAME Sheeran, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES The Irishman (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mobster and hit man from the Cosa Nostra
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , United States
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 2003
Place of death Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , United States