By Jerry Capeci
Hoffa & Crazy Joe: Mysteries No More?
It was early, about 6:30 AM, on April 7, 1972, at the scene of a storied mob hit in Little Italy. I arrived looking for information and was bombarded by the rat-a-tat words of a familiar sounding voice I had heard the night before on the radio, announcing a New York Rangers hockey game.
“Gun shots. GUN shots!” said Dave Marash. “I know about slap shots, I know about wrist shots, I even know about penalty shots. I don’t know about gun shots at six in the morning. What the hell am I doing here?”
Marash – yes, that Dave Marash, the award winning Nightline newsman – and dozens of other sleep-deprived reporters had been dispatched to Umberto’s Clam House to cover the assassination of renegade Colombo family gangster Joseph (Crazy Joe) Gallo. (right)
Gallo had been blown away about an hour earlier as he wound down a celebration of his 42d birthday along with his wife, her daughter and a few remnants of the entourage of Gallo-phites that had begun partying hours earlier at the Copacabana, including his bodyguard Peter (Pete The Greek) Diapoulos.
No one has ever been charged with Gallo’s murder. Until now the prevailing wisdom, from accounts by two cooperating witnesses, including Diapoulos – he said there were three shooters – has placed the hit on a Genovese soldier who, when last heard from had relocated somewhere in California.
But in a book published this week, long time Teamsters Union official Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran described in chilling detail how he walked into the Little Italy landmark, interrupted the partygoers and took out Gallo under orders from his mentor, Northeast Pennsylvania Mafia boss Russell Bufalino.
In “I Heard You Paint Houses,” by lawyer Charles Brandt, Sheeran also detailed how he shot and killed former Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa, also under orders from Bufalino, on July 30, 1975 – perhaps the most successful mob rubout of a prominent, well-known personality in the history of the American Mafia. And unlike similar claims over the years by many other self-confessed executioners, law enforcement authorities say Sheeran may well be telling the truth. Like his Hoffa tale, his claims about the Gallo murder also have the ring of truth. Here’s how he told the tale:
For the Gallo hit, Sheeran said, he packed a .32 caliber handgun and a .38 revolver “with stopping power.” A .38, he said, also makes enough noise to send witnesses ducking for cover, but not as much as a .45, which could bring cops from blocks away. His wheelman was John (The Redhead) Francis, another Bufalino associate who had gotten word that Gallo would be at Umberto’s then, and that only Pete The Greek would be armed.
Francis, 36 at the time of the shooting, dropped Sheeran at the corner of Mulberry and Hester. The Irishman walked in the Mulberry street door looking “like a broken down truck driver with a cap on, coming to use the bathroom. I have very fair skin. I don’t look like a Mafia shooter.”
He turned, faced the two tables where Gallo and his coterie were, and was a “bit startled” to see a little girl there. “A split second after I turned to face the table, Crazy Joey Gallo’s driver got shot from behind. The women and little girl dove under the table. Crazy Joey swung around out of his chair and headed down toward the corner door.”
“It was easy to cut him off by going straight down the bar to the door and getting right behind him,” said Sheeran. “He made it though Umberto’s corner door to the outside. Crazy Joey got shot three times outside of the restaurant…Could be he had his piece in his car and he was going for the car. He had no chance of making it. Crazy Joey went to Australia on his birthday on a bloody city sidewalk.”
Sheeran later “heard that some Italian guy took credit for the whack they put on Gallo” and that Pete The Greek said there were two or three shooters. “That’s okay by me,” he said, adding that the would-be shooter was probably looking to beef up his mob resume and The Greek was trying to explain away his failure as a bodyguard.
Later, outside Umberto’s it was a different kind of mob scene, with reporters and photographers and camera crews crowding the sidewalk. Some small things ring true about Sheeran’s version. I recall the cigar-chomping Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman telling us that, according to the witnesses, the carnage was carried out by a lone gunman who escaped in a waiting car. “Somebody either followed him or was given information about where he was,” said Seedman. “Then the assassin walked in with just one thing in mind – to get Gallo.”
John The Redhead surfaced five years later when he was nailed along with one of Gallo’s most bitter foes, Colombo boss Carmine (Junior) Persico, in an IRS sting on bribery and tax charges. Years later still, sources say, cops, the FBI, and Manhattan prosecutors would tie Francis to Sheeran and Bufalino but not the Gallo hit. In May, 1992, sources say, Francis and Sheeran were seen meeting with other organized crime figures at a Manhattan restaurant.
As for Hoffa’s disappearance, it is a deed so fraught with mystery that it has long been relegated to late-night talk shows, gossip items and jokes. Two years ago, even the FBI gave up trying to solve the case. Six months later, the Detroit District Attorney’s office threw in the towel as well. The two people still seeking the final chapter, are Hoffa’s son, James P. Hoffa, who reclaimed the Teamsters Union Presidency 25 years after his father’s quest to retrieve it against the mob’s wishes had cost him his life, and his daughter, Barbara Crancer, a federal judge in St. Louis.
In recent years, Crancer had called and written Sheeran, searching for closure. Three years ago, when new DNA evidence established that Hoffa had been in the back seat of a car believed to have taken him to his death, Hoffa’s son told Fox News reporter Eric Shawn that Sheeran had been a friend and could have lured his father into the car.
Hoffa’s lawyer, Bruce Maffeo, told Gang Land that Hoffa and his family “would not have any comment at this time.”
Sheeran described Jimmy Hoffa and Bufalino as the “two greatest” men he met in his life. When he died last December at age 83 in an assisted living facility, Sheeran was wearing a gold watch encircled with diamonds that Hoffa had given him nine months before Sheeran killed him. On his finger, he wore a gold ring topped by a three-(Sheeran & Hoffa, courtesy Steerforth Press) dollar gold piece surrounded by diamonds that Bufalino had given him the same night.
Dave Marash is on assignment in Baghdad these days, where Gang Land reached him this week. He has no opinion about who whacked Gallo. But even as he ranted outside of Umberto’s 32 years ago, Marash had already seen his fair share of gunshots.
Nine months earlier, he was at the mob hit that led to Gallo’s demise, the shooting of Joseph Colombo at the 2d annual Italian-American Civil Rights League rally in Columbus Circle. That occurred in the middle of the day, in a city where trucks backfire every 10 seconds and where, a block away workers were pounding, banging and clanging away building a new wing of Roosevelt Hospital.
“But when the gunshots rang out,” recalled Marash, “everyone in Columbus Circle knew what they were. Most of the crowd either threw themselves to the pavement, or ran into Central Park. I ran towards the gunshots, towards the toppling bodies of Colombo and the hit man who had shot him and was being quickly erased from the scene. I knew then I was either a real reporter or just plain nuts.”
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