I Heard You Paint Houses Read online

  Just to be on the safe side I got rid of that .38. If you kept a piece around the car or the house it was best to have a brand-new piece, one that was never fired. That way it could never be linked to anything. You never would know with an old piece whether somebody else used it in something that you didn’t even do. So I recommend a brand-new piece out of the box.

  I was getting a little stronger into pushing money, starting to get into bigger sums. People knew where to find me and they would come to me for it. I didn’t need a truck route anymore. Those days of pushing $10 loans to waitresses at the White Tower hamburger joints were over.

  I had this one guy who I made a loan to who I thought was avoiding me. I couldn’t find him anywhere. No vig, no nothing. One night one of the guys came into the Friendly and told me they had seen this guy I was looking for over at Harry “The Hunchback” Riccobene’s bar called the Yesteryear Lounge. When I caught up with him playing cards in Harry’s bar, the guy told me his mother died and the funeral set him back the money he was saving to give me. I felt bad for the guy, and I went to the Friendly and told Skinny Razor I found the guy at Harry’s. Skinny said, “Did you get any of your money?” I said, “Not yet,” and Skinny said, “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. His mother died.” So I said, “Yeah, poor guy. I guess you heard.” Skinny Razor said, “His fucking mother’s been dying over and over again for ten years.”

  I felt more than a little bit taken advantage of because I was new. Imagine a guy using his mother’s name like that. So I went back down to Harry’s and told the deadbeat to get up from the card table. He was my height but he outweighed me a little bit. He got up ready and threw a punch at me, and I beat him to the punch. I decked him, and down went the card table, chairs flying. He came up with a chair in his hand, and I snatched it away from him and threw it at him and proceeded to beat him to a bloody pulp and left him unconscious on the floor.

  All of a sudden Harry came in, looked around, and went nuts. He had a hunchback, but he was still tough and he was still a made man and very high up with Angelo. He started yelling at me for trashing his bar, getting the guy’s blood on the barroom floor. I told him I’d pay for the damage. He said it didn’t matter, what kind of respect was I showing trashing his bar? I could have taken the guy outside into the street to fight him. Not right in the bar. I didn’t know Harry too good, but I told him the guy swung at me. I told him the guy owed me money and he wouldn’t even come up with the juice. Harry said, “This bum had the balls to go out on the street and borrow more money? He owes everybody already.” I said, “I didn’t know that when I loaned him the money.” Then Harry “The Hunchback” walked over to the guy on the floor and pulled him up by his hair and began beating his face for him, too.

  Meanwhile, when I’d go into his place, Skinny Razor started making comments to me that I shouldn’t just be driving a truck. Skinny said, “How come you’re doing nothing, mother? You should be doing something.” He said that they should be doing something for me. I shouldn’t just be out maneuvering. I should start going up the ladder. I should be in with the big shots. He kept it up a few different times. One of these times I told him I liked the movie On the Waterfront. I said I wouldn’t mind getting started in some kind of union work. I liked the way the organizers like Joey McGreal and the business agents handled themselves for the betterment of the men in my union, the Teamsters. Skinny Razor must have talked to Angelo, and Angelo must have talked to Russell. A little later I started getting hints from Russell when we would sit down and dunk the bread in the wine. Russell started saying things like, “You ain’t going to be driving a truck forever, my Irishman.”

  Then one time this other guy got a load of hijacked jewelry and never came up with the money. When you do something like that, you know there’s going to be aggravation. But a lot of these people just don’t know how to tell the truth or how to be square with people and live on the level. Getting over on everybody is like a habit for them, like chewing gum. Some of them have drinking problems or gambling problems that affect their judgment. I don’t know if he did or not; I don’t know what his problem was. The only thing I do know is that he had a problem.

  I got sent around to give the deadbeat a message. I know some other people tried to tell him what it is. But he was giving everybody a different story. Downtown they told me to stay close to him. I started hanging out with him a little bit. One night I was with him at the Haverford Diner at Sixty-third and Harrison. I left him there at 8:30 because he was staying behind and waiting for another guy he knew.

  Later that night the deadbeat got shot in his own basement with a .357 Magnum. I was living then on City Line Avenue and the cops came busting in and took me in for questioning. They could do that back then, before the Supreme Court changed the rules. Now they got all these people out there running around that killed their wives or their girlfriends and nobody can take them in and ask them their name even. They grabbed us whenever they felt like it. They sat us down and fired questions at us from all corners of the interrogation room. It was the real third degree.

  They found a .357 Magnum in my apartment, but it had never been fired, which is my point. They had a witness at the Haverford who said I kept asking the waitress out loud what time it was during the time I was in the deceased’s company. They said I asked her again for the time just when I got up to leave at 8:30.

  According to them this was me trying to establish an alibi in the mind of the waitress so that nobody could say I was with the man later on in the night when he got whacked. Then they told me they found a fingerprint of mine on his banister going into the basement. I told them that the day before I had picked up a baby’s crib I was borrowing from him and they could find my prints all over his basement because the crib had been in his basement. It’s a good thing I had become close to the man or that fingerprint would have gone against me. They asked me if I had anything I wanted to get off my chest and I told them, “I got nothing to get off my chest because I didn’t do anything.” They asked me to take a lie detector test, and I reminded them that I wasn’t made with a finger, and I told them very respectfully that I thought they should take a lie detector test themselves on whether they ever had occasion to help themselves to some loot they recovered, which went on a lot in those days.

  As I learned the ropes I learned that for many good and sound reasons the bosses and the captains sent a guy to whack you who was your friend. The obvious factor was that the shooter could get close to you in a lonely spot. A less obvious factor is that if any evidence is found against the shooter, if he is your friend, there are many innocent explanations on how it got there in your house or in your car or on your body.

  Take the Jimmy Hoffa hair they found in the car, for instance. Jimmy was close to Tony Giacalone and his family. Jimmy’s hair easily could have been on the clothing of one of the Giacalones. The hair could then have been transferred in passing from the clothing of one of the Giacalones to the Giacalone kid’s car. Or Jimmy himself could have been in that car on a prior occasion. Or it could have come from Chuckie O’Brien’s clothing to the car. There were a million possibilities besides that car being used on that day to pick Jimmy Hoffa up and take him somewhere.

  Anyway, I had been at the guy’s house the day before, picking up a crib. The cops thought I was there to get a lay of the land, so to speak, to become familiar with the basement where his body had been found, maybe to leave a window or a door unlocked or something in the basement. But they never did charge anybody with that case, even though they tried like hell to pin it on me.

  If a guy will welsh out on a load of hijacked jewelry, there’s no telling what he’s capable of doing. And there’s no telling what he’s capable of saying if pressure’s put on him. He’s a rat in the making. If you want to have an orderly society, this kind of thing is like treason. Even the government executes you for treason. That kind of mistake is “severe,” especially if they give you many a chance to make it right, like they did with the guy. T
here are certain rules that you follow and that’s what it is.

  By this time I was a major part of the culture, and as a friend of both Russell and Angelo I had a great deal of respect. I know some of it went to my head. Because we were Catholic, Mary and I hadn’t gotten a divorce, but we were separated and I lived whatever life I wanted to live.

  The Golden Lantern was a restaurant that was across the street from the Nixon Ballroom. One summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day the place had forty-four waitresses, and I had sex with thirty-nine of them. Little Egypt and Neptune of the Nile had been good teachers, and I was very popular with the women. Word must have spread among them and they each wanted a turn. Women found me attractive and I liked the feeling. I was single. But what was it all about? Ego, that’s all. There was no love there. Just a lot of drinking and a lot of ego. Both of them will kill you.

  They gave me a job at a nightclub called Dante’s Inferno. It was owned by a guy named Jack Lopinson, but Lopinson owed a lot of money on the place to a loan shark named Joseph Malito who hung out there. My job was to watch the money for Lopinson and for Malito, the money man on the thing, to make sure the money was ending up in the cash register and not in the bartenders’ pockets, and to keep the customers in line if any of them would get out of line.

  A loudmouthed Teamsters organizer for Local 107 named Jay Phalen, one of Joey McGreal’s men, used to come in and get drunk, and I’d have to tell the bartenders when he had his limit and to stop serving him. One night Phalen pulled a gun on some other customer and I came up and dropped him. I lifted him up off the floor and threw him out into the street and told him never to come back in there again. He was banned for life, and he stayed out as long as I was there at Dante’s Inferno.

  Whenever I thought about what Skinny Razor said to me about them doing something for me, I got more and more tired of people like Phalen and jobs like Dante’s Inferno. In one way it was good that I wasn’t cooped up all the time in one humdrum routine, but a lot of it was like the army, where you hurry up and wait, a lot of boredom in between the combat. Every so often I would think about what it would be like to get in union work, get a steady paycheck, and advance in that organization. That way I’d no doubt have more money to give to Mary every week, or at least it would be a set amount each week instead of feast or famine, and I’d be someplace else instead of in bars all the time and maybe that way I’d cut down on the drinking.

  Whenever Russell said something about me not driving a truck forever, I started telling him outright that I would like to get with the union. He said, “Then why don’t you, Irish?”

  I said, “I already looked into it, with Joey McGreal, the one I do the football lotteries for. He’s a Teamsters organizer out of 107. McGreal told me they didn’t have any vacancies. I told him there’s an organizer I eighty-sixed out of Dante’s they should get rid of. McGreal told me it wouldn’t matter. They had other guys in line. He told me you’ve got to know somebody high up in the thing. You need a rabbi to support you and vouch for you. Besides McGreal, the only other one I know is my own shop steward and he doesn’t have any juice to spare my way. Whatever juice he has he needs to try to advance himself. He wants to be an organizer, too.”

  Russell said something in Sicilian about stormy weather conditions that roughly translates into “You never can tell how things are going to work out. The weather’s in God’s hands.”

  I walked into the Friendly one afternoon before going to Dante’s for work. Skinny Razor said to me, “Russell’s coming in tonight and he wants you here before 8:00. He’s getting a call from a guy. He wants you to talk to somebody.” I didn’t know what Russell wanted or who he wanted me to talk to, but I knew enough to be prompt.

  I got back to the bar about 7:30 and Russell was outside talking to some people. He told me to go on inside and to come out and get him when he got a call. At 8:00 exactly the bar phone rang and Skinny Razor answered it. I got up from my table to get Russ, but Russ came walking in; he must have heard the phone ring from outside. I had taken the table near the phone. Skinny said to the party on the other end, “How you doing? Good. And the family? Yeah, we’re all good. Knock wood. Oh yeah, Angelo’s fine. He got a good physical with the doctor last week. He’s in the pink. Knock wood again. Let me give McGee the phone. You take care of yourself, you hear.” Skinny handed the phone to Russ.

  Russ took the phone, but he didn’t talk into it. He brought the phone over to my table and sat down. He put an envelope on the table.

  “I got that friend I told you about. He’s sitting here with me. He’s a good union man. I want him to meet his president. See what you think of him.” Russell turned his head and said to me, “Say hello to Jimmy Hoffa.” Then Russ handed me the phone.

  I reached for the phone and I thought, can you imagine this? Jimmy Hoffa calling to talk to me? “Hello,” I said. “Glad to meet you.”

  Jimmy Hoffa didn’t even say hello. He got right to the point. The next thing I heard were the first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to me.

  “I heard you paint houses,” Jimmy said.

  “Y-Y-Yeah, and I d-do my own carpentry work, too.” I was embarrassed because I was stammering.

  “That’s what I wanted to hear. I understand you’re a brother of mine.”

  “That’s right.” I was keeping my sentences short and my words few. “Local 107. Since 1947.”

  “Our friend speaks very highly of you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “He’s not an easy man to please.”

  “I do my best,” I said.

  “The best thing, and the most important thing the labor movement cannot do without, and must have and fight to keep, is solidarity. Big business has been on the attack and on the offensive; they are financing splinter groups whose very goal is to tear the union apart. Big business is right now as we speak behind some aggressive tactics of certain AFL-CIO unions trying to steal our locals out from under us right here in my home base in Detroit and elsewhere. Big business is working with the government right now to block us at every turn and embarrass us to the public and our own membership, that way sowing the seeds of dissent at a time when we need unity. We need solidarity more than ever before in our history, not just our history but the history of the working man’s struggle in America. You want to be a part of this fight?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You want to be a part of this history?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Can you start tomorrow in Detroit?”

  “Sure.”

  “Come to Local 299 and report to Bill Isabel and Sam Portwine. They’re in charge of public relations for the International.”

  We hung up and I thought, boy, he’s a speaker. For a minute there, I thought it was Patton.

  “Russ,” I said. “This was quite the surprise. I didn’t think it was Christmas so soon, and I know it’s not my birthday.”

  “Don’t worry; he needs you as much as you want to be in with him. I hate to lose you. I hope he doesn’t keep you out there in Detroit too long.”

  “That’s right, yeah. I told him I’d be in Detroit tomorrow. I better start driving right now.”

  “Don’t be in such a hurry,” Russ said, and handed me the envelope that he had placed on the table when he sat down. “Go ahead, open it.”

  In it was a plane ticket to Detroit and a pile of $100s.

  All of a sudden I started laughing. I just sat there and laughed. “What can I say,” I said. “Nobody ever did anything like this for me in my life. I won’t ever forget this.”

  “You got it coming, Irish. Nobody’s giving you nothing. You earned it. Let’s go eat and meet Angelo.”

  “What about Dante’s?” I asked. “I’m supposed to work there tonight.”

  “Skinny Razor already took care of that. They got somebody covering for you until you get back from Detroit. And don’t bother getting a cab to the airport. Angelo is sending somebody to get you in the morning. You don’t want to be late fo
r Jimmy Hoffa. He’s worse than me about time.”

  I started laughing again. I was afraid Russ maybe thought I was going nuts. But this was very funny to me. I don’t know why. I guess maybe I was embarrassed at how much the old man was taking care of me.”

  chapter thirteen

  They Didn’t Make a Parachute Big Enough

  At the time of the Frank Sheeran job interview by long-distance phone call, Jimmy Hoffa was coming off a period full of accomplishment and notoriety. In the mid-to late fifties Jimmy Hoffa had bulldogged and bluffed his way through the McClellan Committee hearings. He had become president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. And he had survived several criminal indictments.

  More significantly for his future and that of his rank and file, in 1955 Jimmy Hoffa had created a pension fund whereby management made regular contributions toward the retirement of their Teamsters employees. Before the creation of the Central States Pension Fund, many truckers merely had their Social Security to fall back on when they retired.

  “Jimmy knew how to use his temper. I wasn’t with him when he got that pension fund off the ground, but Bill Isabel told me how he exploded at the trucking companies at their meetings. He threatened them with everything. He wanted the fund, he wanted the fund set up in a certain way, and he wanted to have control of the fund. He wanted it set up so certain people he approved of could borrow money from the fund. Now don’t get me wrong, the fund managers charged interest on the loans, like the loans were an investment of the fund’s money. The loans would be secured and all. But Jimmy got it the way he wanted it. So he could lend out the money to certain people. Right away the fund kept getting bigger and bigger, because the men it covered weren’t retiring yet, and the companies kept putting in so much for every hour worked by every man into the fund. By the time I came on there was about $200 million in the fund. By the time I retired there was a billion. I don’t have to tell you how much juice comes out of that kind of money.”