I Heard You Paint Houses Read online

  In the summer of 1975 the U.S. Senate held closed-door hearings on the mob’s involvement in both the Bay of Pigs invasion and a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, primarily by poison. The Senate Select Committee was chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho and came to be known as the Church Committee. The committee heard testimony and gathered evidence regarding the suspected mob ties to the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and to a suspected mob-CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. At the onset of the 1975 hearings, in a shocking move, the CIA admitted to the Church Committee the mob’s involvement and assistance in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the existence of the mob-CIA plot to kill Castro. This plot was called Operation Mongoose.

  A few days before his scheduled testimony before the Church Committee, Sam “Momo” Giancana was assassinated. He would never testify. But Giancana’s lieutenant did. The handsome and dapper Johnny Roselli testified under oath at length behind closed doors. A few months after his testimony, Johnny Roselli was assassinated and his body stuffed in an oil drum.

  While the Church Committee was conducting its closed hearings, Time magazine reported in its June 9, 1975, issue that Russell Bufalino and Sam “Momo” Giancana were the crime bosses behind the mob’s ties to the CIA and to the anti-Castro invasion and to the assassination plot to poison Castro.

  As a result of its independent findings and the CIA’s confession, the Church Committee drafted legislation restricting the CIA’s involvement in the affairs of a sovereign nation. This legislation passed. The Church Committee’s work, its findings, and its legislative reforms of the CIA became the subject of much debate following the 9/11 tragedy when certain pundits believed the Church Committee had gone too far in restricting the activities of the CIA.

  “Cuba or no Cuba, there was still a union to run. Somewhere around July 1961 Jimmy appointed me a sergeant-at-arms for the convention that was held at the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. The convention was held every five years for the election of officers and other matters. One of the other matters that I liked right away when I heard about it on the floor, and maybe the best thing to come out of this convention, was a big increase in the expense account. Being a guy brought up without a whole lot, I already thought the expense account was the best idea since sliced bread.

  This 1961 convention was the first convention I ever attended. Raymond Cohen didn’t want me to go, but it was Jimmy’s wishes and Cohen had no say in the matter. As one of the sergeant-at-arms it was my job to check the credentials of anybody trying to get into the convention. The AFL-CIO tried to send in spies, and naturally, the FBI tried to get in. But they didn’t give me a hard time. They gave it a try and when they were turned away they stayed away on the perimeter and tried to listen and peek in from a distance. Looking back, probably both the AFL-CIO and the FBI already had planted bugs in the convention room. By trying to get in the front door they wanted us to think we were keeping them out.

  The big problem for me to deal with was the newspaper photographers. You’d push them back away from the opening, and they would try to sneak back in with their flash bulbs popping. One of them was especially annoying the hell out of me.

  I turned to the cop who was assigned to the door and I said to him, “I think I’m going to need a surgeon. Can you radio in for a surgeon?”

  “A surgeon?” the cop asked me. “What do you need a doctor for?”

  “Not a doctor,” I said. “I need a surgeon to perform an operation to get that photographer’s camera out of his ass, which is where it’s going the next time his flash bulb goes off.”

  Even the cop laughed.

  I guess about a month before the 1961 convention Jimmy lost his good friend Owen Bert Brennan to a heart attack. Some of the men thought Brennan worried himself into the heart attack on account of his business dealings with Jimmy that Bobby was investigating.

  Because his pal Brennan died, Jimmy had to replace Brennan as one of the International vice presidents, and he ended up choosing Frank Fitzsimmons over an old Strawberry Boy from the Kroger strike named Bobby Holmes. Jimmy made his choice on the flip of a coin. Later on, this flip of the coin turned out to be what put Fitz in the position to succeed Jimmy when Jimmy went to school. Bobby Holmes was a very loyal Hoffa man. He was originally a coal miner from England. He was a part of Jimmy’s first strike over the strawberries on the Kroger dock. There’s no way Bobby Holmes ever would have betrayed Jimmy and done to Jimmy what Fitz did to him. I think if Jimmy had followed his gut instead of a flip of the coin everything would have worked out for everybody, and I would have retired someday as an International organizer.

  At the convention Jimmy had a switch for the microphone and he turned it off if he didn’t like what he was hearing. Jimmy would say things like, “You’re out of order, brother, shut up.” This is the convention where Jimmy said the line: “I may have faults, but being wrong ain’t one of them.”

  Jimmy nominated Fitz, and Fitz got elected vice president at that 1961 convention. Fitz took the microphone and went on and on about Jimmy Hoffa. Fitz practically did the “Pledge of Allegiance” to Jimmy Hoffa, but we know how that went.

  The other vice president vacancy was also filled by Jimmy Hoffa. He nominated, and the delegates elected Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano of north Jersey, “the little guy.” And we know how that went.”

  chapter sixteen

  Give Them a Little Message

  “Before the convention Jimmy sent me to Chicago, and again right away after the convention Jimmy sent me back to Chicago to work directly under Joey Glimco. A bunch of rebels wanted to take a taxicab local belonging to Joey Glimco and make it an independent. Everybody knew that Paul Hall’s Seafarers Union with the AFL-CIO was behind the rebels and would take over the local once it became independent. It was Teamsters Local 777. The rebel leader was Dominic Abata. He had gotten enough cards signed by dissidents to bring the matter to an election.

  I’m sure the rebels had their reasons for wanting to leave Joey Glimco. But Joey had fifteen cab locals in Chicago outright, besides all the other Teamsters locals he had in the other trades and all the other unions he controlled behind the scenes. So with all those other locals at stake, Joey Glimco was not a man who could afford to set a bad example by letting the rebels of Local 777 get away with leaving the Teamsters. He might lose them in the end, but he had to make their departure a painful experience. And the price they paid for their freedom had to send a message to the rest of his locals to stay in line.

  Joey Glimco was shorter even than Jimmy. He was heavyset and very powerful. They claimed he was 5'4", and maybe he was in his younger days, but people lose height as they get older. I was 6'4". I’d hate to even measure my height today. Glimco had a hawk nose and hawk eyes. He had beaten a couple of murder raps years ago. He talked like you would imagine that Al Capone talked.

  Joey liked to eat and he was a hell of a gin player. Joey would beat the pants off Jimmy Hoffa in gin. Jimmy would tear up six decks of cards playing gin. Joey bought football lotteries from me, and then everybody started playing them. There were a lot of nice people in Chicago, and he was one of the best. He was very well respected. It was always hard to tell in Chicago who was boss because they all seemed to get along and go way back together. Some of the old-timers went back to the old days in Brooklyn, before they came out to Chicago.

  They all liked to eat in Chicago, not just Joey. The Chicago outfit guys liked to eat even more than Russell and Kelly and Angelo. And that’s saying something. How they all got together to eat in Chicago was in steam baths. The steam baths they owned were very popular eating places, and there were no outsiders to contend with. They would close the baths to the public and bring in the food and the wine and the booze and put it all on big tables in a big lounge area. It was a banquet with main dishes of veal, chicken, baccala, sausage, meatballs, different pasta dishes, vegetables, salad, a couple of different kinds of soup, fresh fruit and cheeses and all kinds of Italian pastry, not just cannolis. The
y’d sit in bathrobes like it was the beach. They’d eat and drink and smoke big cigars. In between card games they might get a massage. Then they’d eat again. All the while they’re joking about sex and telling different funny stories and sometimes a couple of them would go off to the side and talk a little business. Next thing you know they’d drop off and go into the steam bath and sweat out all the food and alcohol they had put in their bodies. They’d come back out after a shower looking like a million dollars and start eating again. It was a hell of a thing to see. It put you in mind of the Roman baths in the movies.

  Let’s face it, cabbies are hard to organize to begin with, much less rebels that already signed more than enough cards to leave you. We had lost that first organizing drive I was on in Detroit, and there we had no other union against us. The lesbian cabbies beat us in Detroit. Cabbies usually have something else going on for themselves on the side. Pushing a couple of girls or making deliveries of one kind or another. Hustling customers for after-hours joints or for certain restaurants. Some of them even hustled jewelry in those days. They don’t want to make waves with their bosses because their bosses look the other way on a lot of stuff they do. A lot of them are transient, anyway.

  But Jimmy wanted to beat Paul Hall in Chicago and away we went.

  One morning Glimco’s scouts reported back that Dominic Abata was at a certain location with a couple of his men. This was before they gave him twenty-four-hour police protection. Joey Glimco told me, “Go out there and give them a little message.” That means you don’t bring a piece because you’re only giving a message. It’s a muscle job. I took two muscle guys from Philly that Jimmy had sent out to Chicago, and we went over to where Abata was supposed to be. We walked past a chain-link fence up to a cinder block building, and all of a sudden fifty guys poured out from the building right at us. The two I was with turned and ran. I stood my ground. The crowd came up to me. I said, “I know who you all are. If you go after me you better kill me. If you don’t I’ll be back and I’ll kill you.”

  Abata made eye contact and said, “We know who you are.”

  I said, “Give me your two best men and I’ll fight them right now. Maybe three, but I doubt it.”

  Abata said, “That’s all right. You can go. You got a lot of balls. But I suggest you choose your company a little better next time.”

  When I got back to the Edgewater and saw Jimmy, I was so mad I said, “You better get those two yellow bastards on a plane and back to Philly before I find them myself.” I never did see those two again.

  When I told him what happened to me that night, Jimmy said, “You Irish son of a bitch. You could fall in a bucket of shit and come up with a brown suit.”

  The next morning I got on Glimco, too, about his information. It was the same during the war. If a patrol went out and came back and said there was a squad of Germans up ahead, you better not get up there and run into a full regiment. Your ass is going to shit. I said to Joey, “The next time you send me out to give a guy a message I better know how many you expect me to beat at one time.”

  The big thing that summer was hijacking cabs that had the rebel’s sign on them or a Seafarers sign. If a rebel cabbie left his cab at a stand and went in for coffee he’d come out and find his cab gone. It had been hot-wired, or maybe he had left the keys in it. The cab would be driven down to Lake Michigan right past the cop car by the lake. You’d get out and let the car coast into the lake and sink into the water so the cabbie couldn’t drive it. That way you’d cut the rebels’ revenue and cost them money. Then your backup car would drive you out past the cop, and you’d hand the cop a paper bag with money in it. The bag was just so nobody could see the five $20 bills or whatever. You’d tell the cop the cab’s brakes had failed or that it had run out of gas, and he’d laugh and you’d drive on out looking for another one to put in the lake.

  The beef wasn’t with management. It was two unions fighting each other. In the end Abata’s rebels won that election in Chicago in the summer of 1961.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, just after Abata took over the rebel cab local, they held an AFL-CIO convention and Paul Hall took the microphone and called Jimmy Hoffa a “fink.” And then big Paul Hall gave Abata’s rebels a Seafarers charter and made them part of the AFL-CIO. Paul Hall had a lot of balls. You could tell by looking at him that he was a fighter. He was one of those guys you could probably beat, but you’d have to take a couple of days off before you thought about fighting him again.

  Jimmy declared open warfare after that. Or I should say, the AFL-CIO declared this war, not Jimmy. Because you know Paul Hall didn’t make his move in Chicago without the whole executive board of the AFL-CIO behind him, which Paul Hall was on anyway. And you know the AFL-CIO knew Paul Hall’s tactics were like Jimmy’s. This taxicab thing in Chicago was going to turn into fighting fire with fire.

  Jimmy sent me to do what I had to do on a couple of matters. One of them was in Flint, Michigan. The other one was in Kalamazoo, Michigan. But even though they were in Michigan, somehow I had the feeling both of those matters had to do with the Chicago taxicabs or Paul Hall. I know the Seafarers had their hit squad, too.

  Right after Paul Hall gave the rebels the charter, Paul Hall and Dominic Abata were out celebrating in the cocktail lounge at the Hamilton Hotel in Chicago. Joey Glimco set up an informational picket line outside the hotel and a couple of dozen Teamsters began chanting “unfair.” One of them went inside and began shouting at Hall and Abata, calling them every kind of curse word. The cops who were guarding Abata told him to leave, and the guy decked one of the cops. They arrested him and brought him outside, followed by Abata and Hall. And that was just what Joey Glimco had planned all along. He had decoyed them to come out of the hotel. The Glimco people jumped the cops and Hall and Abata, and for a few minutes before the squad cars started showing up all hell broke loose that night.

  During the Chicago thing I flew back to Philly for the weekend and went over to Dante’s Inferno. Who’s sitting at the bar but Jay Phalen, the one I had flagged for pulling a gun on a customer. I asked the bartender what was going on. He shrugged and said Jack Lopinson, who owned the place, just started letting Phalen back in. An owner who lets a man back in who’s barred for life for pulling a gun on a customer is an owner who is up to something. One look at Phalen and I knew something wasn’t right. Call it instinct. Or call it that I knew Phalen was with McGreal, the one I sold the football lotteries for, and McGreal didn’t keep Phalen around for his conversation skills.

  I said goodnight and I went home to the rented room I was keeping for weekends. At two that morning I heard on the radio that there had been a double execution-style murder at Dante’s Inferno. Jack Lopinson’s wife, Judith, and his “accountant,” John Malito, had been shot to death, and Lopinson had been wounded in the arm by an unknown assailant. I got my ass dressed.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I thought. “Guess which one of Mame Sheeran’s three children is about to get a knock on his door from Homicide.”

  I didn’t feel a whole lot like spending the night under the hot lights in an interrogation room, so I took the prudent step of moving to a motel for the night, and on Monday morning I went back to Chicago. A contact I had in the district attorney’s office returned my call out there to tell me the downstairs landlady had heard someone she assumed was me come in around ten and had heard someone come down the stairs and go out around two. She told Homicide that someone had eaten the pot of spaghetti and meatballs she had left outside my door for me around nine that night. The empty pot was outside her door when she woke up. Homicide was not too thrilled with this landlady because they thought for sure they finally had me dead to rights. I was tipped off that I’d be subpoenaed to come back for the coroner’s inquest, and that Homicide was still working to build a case against me.

  But before they had their inquest the detectives rounded up a bunch of witnesses, including Jay Phalen and Jack Lopinson, and put them all in a big room to sort through the
m and conduct interviews. They had brought in everybody they could find who had been in the bar that night and was still in the Philly area. Jay Phalen was sitting there and he didn’t think he was getting enough attention. He kept hearing the detectives asking everybody questions about me. Finally, he jumped up and said, “How come you keep asking about Frank Sheeran? I’m the one who did it.”

  It turns out Jack Lopinson had hired Phalen to kill his wife, Judith, so he could end up with a blond and to kill his loan shark, John Malito, so he could end up with the money he owed Malito without having to pay the man back. When Phalen came up the stairs, Lopinson was going to shoot him and claim Phalen had tried to rob the joint and had killed his wife and friend. But as dumb and as nutty as Phalen was he outsmarted Jack Lopinson. Phalen had a hunch Lopinson was upstairs laying in wait for him. So, before he came up the stairs Phalen turned out all the lights in the joint and ended up winging Lopinson in the arm on his way out.

  Judith Lopinson was a nice woman and a good-looking woman. All Lopinson had to do was divorce her. I didn’t know John Malito very well, but he seemed like good people. I know he would have loaned Lopinson more money if Lopinson had asked him for it instead of having the man kissed by Phalen.

  Both of these two bedbugs did life for that one. Homicide never even called me back from Chicago for the coroner’s inquest.

  Around that period I started dating the woman who would become my second wife, Irene, each time I was in Philly. She was younger than me and we fell in love. She wanted to have a family. I went to Mary and explained it to her and she agreed to a divorce. Irene and I got married right away, and the next year we had our daughter, Connie. Things were different with Irene. My running days were over. I gave up selling the football lottery. I had taken a few pinches on it, paid a few fines, and I got tired of doing business with the likes of Phalen’s pal Joey McGreal. I didn’t need that part of my life anymore, the downtown hustling. Even with the Teamsters culture that I had joined I slowed down my running. I stopped going across the bridge from Detroit to Windsor, Canada, with Bill Isabel and Sam Portwine. Windsor was a town where everything went in those days before America opened up in the sixties. Windsor was a very swinging place, a lot of action. But from now on with a new marriage I was a spectator. Maybe I was following the example Jimmy Hoffa set. During my marriage to Irene, I had good steady money coming in from more than one Teamsters job. This was before they outlawed that practice. There was money in my youngest daughter Connie’s life, but not too much in my older daughters’ lives.