The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
He confessed… but did he really do it?
Is Martin Scorsese’s epic film about a mafia hitman based on truth or ‘baloney’? Chris Harvey weighs the evidence
Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic The Irishman arrives in cinemas and on Netflix this month trailing five-star reviews. Reuniting the director with Robert De Niro,
Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel, and marking Scorsese’s first-ever collaboration with Al Pacino, the film has been heralded as a late-career masterpiece. Over the course of three-and-a-half hours, it creates a rich, troubling, transfixing tableau of America at a time when the Mafia’s influence reached high and low. Off screen, though, The Irishman has ignited the literary equivalent of a mob war.
Bang! In September, a targeted hit was carried out by the New
York Review of Books on the source material for the film, a 2004 book by lawyer Charles Brandt, which documents in compelling detail the late-life confession of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran (played in the film by De Niro), a Delawarebased union organiser and violent convicted criminal with connections to the Italian crime syndicate La Cosa Nostra.
The book’s title, I Heard You Paint Houses, refers to gangland slang for an assassination, and Brandt unmasks Sheeran as a longserving hitman for a prominent Mafia boss, putting him centre stage in one of America’s most enduring mysteries: who was responsible for the disappearance – and likely murder – of union leader James Riddle Hoffa (played by a volcanic Pacino) from a Detroit restaurant parking lot in July 1975. The NYRB article, by Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, claimed the idea that Sheeran had killed Hoffa was “preposterous”.
Bang, bang! A lethal volley of wild shots aimed at Sheeran and Brandt was fired off in August by the online magazine Slate in a piece headlined THE LIES OF THE IRISHMAN. Bill Tonelli, author of several books on the Italian American experience and the birth of organised crime, quoted FBI and underworld sources labelling Brandt’s account “baloney beyond belief ”. Tonelli’s verdict: “Frank Sheeran never killed a fly”.
Now, in this article, Brandt comes back at his critics, all guns blazing. “How do I personally feel,” he says, over the phone, when I ask for his response to the accusations of lies. “I laugh at ’em.”
He brings up his experience as a homicide prosecutor and chief deputy attorney general for Delaware. “How many actual crimes have these people ever investigated?” he asks. “Have they ever investigated a shoplifting case? The answer is: no.”
First, some background. Brandt crossed paths with Sheeran in 1981, when the former was working as a defence attorney in Delaware and the latter was facing racketeering charges. Brandt was retained by Sheeran but quit after a dispute over his fee. Sheeran was found guilty and sentenced to 18 years in prison – later extended to 32 years on a separate charge.
In 1991, though, Brandt, by then working as a medical malpractice lawyer, was able to secure Sheeran’s early parole on medical grounds. He knew that the 6ft 4in heavy was a historic suspect in the Hoffa disappearance and had made a deal with him to write a book telling his side of the story.
During a five-hour interview, after celebrating his release from jail with copious glasses of chianti, the Irishman told Brandt his version of events, initially without notes or tape recording. Their subsequent interviews were recorded on micro-cassette tapes, says Brandt, except for the odd unexpected phone call. “I almost always had the tape recorder running, that’s where [Sheeran’s words] came from, but also from my memory of hearing them over and over, as an interrogator.”
The irony of Sheeran’s former defence advocate attempting to prove “he did it”, while his detractors fight for his innocence may be neat, yet Sheeran was known to have made earlier false claims about what happened to Hoffa. Was Brandt concerned he would do that to him? “I never interrogated a suspect who didn’t make false claims,” he says, “so I was satisfied that I knew how to deal with them.” The publisher’s advance, of $20,000, was split between Brandt and Sheeran’s daughters, as are any royalties.
To research the Hoffa mystery is to step into a murky well of half-truths, mob gossip and unsupported theories. Facts are scant and everything is shrouded in omerta. Hoffa, former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was declared legally dead in 1982. This tough, 5ft 6in organiser, who had helped to build up the trucker’s union to more than a million members by the Fifties, had intimidated his way to power, fame and influence in the US before being jailed for jury tampering in 1964.
As early as 1957, he had been suspected of using the Teamster pension fund as a private bank providing loans to the Mafia.
Some of Las Vegas’s most famous casinos had been built that way. “The Teamsters weren’t tied to
‘How do I respond to accusations of lies?’ asks author, Charles Brandt. ‘I laugh at ’em’
organised crime,” author Steven Brill told the LA Times in 1992. “They were organised crime.
And when Hoffa started to act independently, the Mob simply killed him.”
In 1971, Hoffa secured early release from jail in a deal with President Richard Nixon by resigning his union presidency. Although barred from standing for the top job again until 1980, the defiant Hoffa wanted his union back and planned to stand in 1976. He had been warned off by the Mafia, who found his replacement Frank Fitzsimmons a more compliant source of funds. Hoffa responded by threatening to go public with the Mob’s involvement with the Teamsters. It would cost him his life.
In Brandt’s book, Sheeran told how he was introduced to Hoffa in the late Fifties by Pennsylvania Mafia boss Russell Bufalino. Sheeran maintained that he carried out murders on behalf of Hoffa, who became a close friend. “The first words Jimmy ever spoke to me were, ‘I heard you paint houses.’ The paint is the blood that supposedly gets on the wall or the floor when you shoot somebody. I told Jimmy, ‘I do my own carpentry work, too.’ That refers to making coffins and means you get rid of the bodies yourself.”
The Irishman was not strictly an Irishman. Sheeran was born in Pennsylvania to a first-generation Catholic Irish father and a mother of Swedish extraction. Over “hundreds of hours” of interviews which Brandt conducted in the five years up to his death in 2003, he described a brutal upbringing, in which his father would put him in fights with much older boys, and bet on him to win. Sheeran would later become a combat-hardened veteran of the Second World War, who admitted to shooting unarmed prisoners and taking part in the reprisal killings of concentration camp guards after the liberation of Dachau.
Scorsese’s film briefly traces the postwar criminal career that brought Sheeran into contact with Bufalino. It also touches on other episodes in which Sheeran claimed direct or indirect participation, such as the failed US invasion of Cuba and the revenge slaying of mobster “Crazy” Joey Gallo in 1972. But it moves inexorably towards the Irishman’s betrayal of Hoffa in the mid-Seventies.
It is widely believed that
Hoffa was killed on the orders of Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, a New York mafioso, who had been feuding with Hoffa since they were in jail together. A meeting at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in a Detroit suburb had apparently been set up to broker peace. A witness who made small talk with Hoffa that day recalled, under hypnosis, that Hoffa had said he was “meeting [Anthony] Giacalone and Tony Pro”. Neither showed up. Hoffa, who hated bad timekeepers, was furious.
What happened next is the contested bit. According to Sheeran, it was he who met Hoffa at the Red Fox, in a car driven by Hoffa’s foster son Charles
HENRY HILL IN GOODFELLAS (1990)
Hill was the plucky kid (Christopher Serrone), turned hardened wiseguy (Ray Liotta), turned FBI informant whose gradual rise up the ranks of the Mob is lavishly tracked, in Scorsese ultimate tale of a gangster’s paradise gone sour.
BUGSY SIEGEL IN BUGSY (1991)
The Brooklyn-born “celebrity gangster” – friends with Capone and Hollywood’s finest – set up a heap of lucrative rackets in Vegas and got the glitzy biopic treatment from Barry Levinson, in the film that brought Warren Beatty and Annette Bening together.
JOHN DILLINGER IN DILLINGER (1945)
Johnny Depp would play the FBI’s most-wanted bank robber in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009), but the superior film is Max Nosseck’s riveting, rather overlooked noirish docudrama from 1945, starring a chillingly impassive Lawrence Tierney.
LEFTY RUGGIERO IN DONNIE BRASCO (1997)
This time Depp, in Mike Newell’s career-peak drama, played the undercover Fed of the title, but the tragic saga of Ruggiero, a doomed, ageing foot soldier in the Bonanno crime family, gave Al Pacino a field day in turtlenecks and fur collars. Tim Robey
The Irishman is in cinemas from Friday, and on Netflix from Nov 27
When Jade Bird was 14, she wrote a letter to her future self. Bird’s mother brought that note to a party after a recent gig in Brixton, in the hope of showing her daughter that she had achieved her teenage dreams. Actually, the 22-year-old singersongwriter has gone way beyond them. Recalling the letter now,
Bird laughs: “It was the most schizophrenic thing I’ve ever seen! I wanted to still be with my ex, living in a house; I wanted to drive a car, which I can’t do; I wanted to study in New York but work in a bar on the side and still be doing my music. It was like I was defeated before I even started!”
Far from being a barmaid with music as her side-hustle, Bird is taking off. Her self-titled debut album, a heartbreak-steeped rattle through indie, Americana and soul music, has earned comparisons with Sheryl Crow and Patti Smith. It’s a raw, bristling, empowering record, equally suited to soundtracking a grand road trip or to dancing along to in the kitchen. Her music videos have attracted millions of views on YouTube. This summer, she joined Dolly Parton on stage – “the highlight of my life, let alone career” – following an invitation from Grammy winner Brandi Carlile, who says she sees Bird as Parton’s “counterpart”.
Perched on the edge of a sofa that’s designed to sink into, in a room where the air is heavy with hairspray, Bird looks fresh, despite having barely slept. (I put this down to youth; she swears it’s concealer.) She tells me that she has had to learn “when to stop smiling”, but even as she says this breaks into a wonky, easy grin.
Born in Northumberland to Army parents barely out of their teens, Bird has squeezed a lot of life into her two decades. As a child, she was shuffled between military bases (her father fought in Bosnia and Kosovo). After her parents separated when she was seven, she moved in with her grandmother in Bridgend, South Wales, until her adolescence.
“It was always quite negative messages on love I was given as a kid,” she explains. “It sounds heartbreaking but it’s not that bad. write a song a day for a while.”
She still writes at speed, comparing her approach to a stream of consciousness. “I can’t think of a song that gave me much hassle,” she shrugs. The dozen tracks on her album were whittled down from 200, and she can remember exactly where she was and what she was thinking for each: Ruins “was written directly after an argument”; for Side Effects, “I was extremely frustrated in a hotel and wanted to run away with my partner” (she has been with Luke Prosser, her