5 MOVIE MOBSTERS

AL CAPONE IN THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)

Bald and terrifying, Robert De Niro was a late replacement for Bob Hoskins in Brian De Palma’s rollicking prohibition thriller, playing the infamous Chicago kingpin you would least want to meet at the wrong end of a baseball bat.

“Chuckie” O’Brien, accompanied by one of Tony Pro’s hitmen. They drove to a detached house in Detroit, where Sheeran executed Hoffa. “Jimmy Hoffa got shot twice at a decent range – not too close or the paint splatters back at you – in the back of the head behind his right ear. My friend didn’t suffer.”

In his New York Review of Books piece, Goldsmith refutes that narrative. He’s a former counsel in the Bush administration, who also happens to be the stepson of Chuckie O’Brien (on whom Mario Puzo modelled the character of consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfather). O’Brien was originally placed in the frame by the FBI after an eyewitness reported seeing a swarthy, heavyset man, driving a maroon car leaving the Red

that the film cements the idea that O’Brien, who is now in his eighties, drove Hoffa to his death. “I’m not angry,” he says. “I’m bummed for Chuckie if the movie repeats the account in the Sheeran confession that Chuckie picked up Hoffa and drove him to his killers, because it is simply false. But Chuckie has been living with this untruth – repeated in a dozen books and thousands of articles, based on an early FBI theory of the case that it has now repudiated – for 44 years. The

FBI knows that Chuckie was not involved that day, and I hope one day it reveals the truth.”

Brandt tells me that he believes “unequivocally” that Goldsmith is wrong, and O’Brien was involved, as investigative reporters continue to attest. Goldsmith remains forthright. “Nothing Sheeran adds to the known but false public narrative rings true,” he says. “I don’t think Sheeran was involved in any way. Nor does the FBI.”

Details which Sheeran describes, such as the fact that the floor of the car O’Brien was allegedly driving was wet from a fish that he had delivered earlier, Goldsmith says, were easy to find. “It has been publicly known since 1975 that Chuckie was delivering a fish that day.”

I confront Brandt with the explicit criticisms of his book and Sheeran’s account, in a sometimes heated conversation. Sample: why does he think that Sheeran was never considered to be a hitman by law enforcement? “What the hell are you talking about? What kind of a silly question is that? Considered a hitman? It isn’t something you put on your back and say, ‘Hey,

I’ll murder for hire.’”

I want to know how he responds to Tonelli’s Slate article, which puts forward the view that “the guy made it all up”.

“It’s a joke,” says Brandt. “Read the book.” He dismisses, too,

FBI agent Quinn John Tamm, who told Tonelli that “Sheeran never killed a fly” – “I don’t know why he’s saying that, but he had nothing to do with the Hoffa investigation,” Brandt tells me. “His [investigation of Sheeran] was a labour law investigation.

“The FBI agent who would know best is Bob Garrity. He was the agent in charge of the Hoffa case from the day Jimmy disappeared for the next two years.” Brandt says Garrity told him at a book signing, “We always liked Sheeran for [the murder]”. (When contacted by Tonelli, Garrity said that, “for a number of reasons which are personal”, he had no comment to make.)

The former FBI man then told Brandt that “the Hoffa family thought the sun rose and set on Frank Sheeran.” That guilt about betraying Hoffa’s trust was what Brandt exploited, he confesses, to get Sheeran to talk about what had happened. “Can you imagine how bad he felt,” Brandt asks. The author didn’t admit to using that emotional leverage in the first edition of his book (which has been republished with an updated conclusion to tie in with the film), he says, “because I was afraid that I would be killed. I’m serious. I was afraid that somebody would read that and decide that I had taken advantage of Sheeran’s conscience, and that I needed to be put away.

“I kept it limited to Frank Sheeran desiring to confess, so that any mobster who read it would not think that I worked him over.”

It was De Niro who fell in love with the book and the character of Sheeran as far back as 2006, when he was reading it as reference material for a film Scorsese was then planning to make. The Oscar-winning screenwriter of Schindler’s List, Steve Zaillian, was brought in to write the script, while Brandt added background details that hadn’t been published. Many of Sheeran’s words recorded by Brandt make it into the screenplay, and De Niro, he says, is “a dead ringer for the Irishman”.

I ask the executive producer, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, whether the film has been compromised by the attacks on the source material – especially given that one of the principal players in the narrative, Chuckie O’Brien, is still alive. “We’re telling one man’s version

[of events] and we’re standing behind the decision to make the film 100 per cent,” she says.

Brandt remains unbowed: “There’s nobody who can read that book and come away thinking,

‘that is not true’, unless they have their own axe to grind.” Can he offer an explanation as to why Sheeran would have chosen to confess to him? “Are you kidding me,” he asks. “Read the book again. That’s what the whole movie’s about, what the whole book is about. That’s how his life ended, with a strong desire to confess.”