This article contains spoilers for the events depicted in “The Irishman.”
“The first words Jimmy ever spoke to me were, ‘I heard you paint houses,’” said the man now known as “The Irishman” shortly before his death.
The man was Frank Sheeran, and besides being an Irishman, he was also a bagman and hit man for the mob. Jimmy was James Riddle Hoffa, the Teamsters union president whose 1975 disappearance has never been solved, and the paint was not paint at all.
“The paint is the blood that supposedly gets on the floor when you shoot somebody,” Sheeran helpfully explained in the book “I Heard You Paint Houses" (2004), written by a lawyer and former prosecutor, Charles Brandt, based on deathbed interviews with Sheeran and released posthumously.
With the long-awaited arrival of the Martin Scorsese drama “The Irishman” on Netflix on Wednesday, it’s a good time to explain who’s who in the crowded story and to try to answer a question Sheeran himself asks in the film:
“How the hell did this whole thing start?”
The book’s account of Hoffa’s demise has been challenged by experts on the mob and Hoffa, and by journalists who have written about the case. It has been speculated that Sheeran enlarged his role for the sake of a last payday for his family, although most agree that Sheeran’s telling of the buildup to the climax is credible.
Robert De Niro plays Sheeran, a World War II veteran working as a truck driver in the 1960s, with a side job diverting the beef and chicken he was supposed to be delivering and selling it directly to restaurants. When his truck breaks down at a gas station in Pennsylvania, he is approached by a stranger named Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), who knows his way around an engine enough to get it running again.
The real Bufalino, born in Sicily, kept a low profile in Kingston, Pa., and although frequently charged with crimes, “has never been convicted of anything but traffic offenses,” according to a 1973 article following an arrest. He was once deported, but when his native Italy refused to accept him, he was allowed to stay in the United States.
He was perhaps best known as an organizer of what became known as the Apalachin Conference in 1957, when leaders from several Mafia families gathered in a rural home in upstate New York to hash out disagreements. State troopers, suspicious of the sudden activity in the area, raided the home. The incident was a blow to the mob, putting the Mafia on the radar of law enforcement and the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover in particular. But Bufalino rose in the ranks in the years that followed.
Players in the world of Philadelphia organized crime, a less glamorized lot than their New York City counterparts, were known to hang out in the Friendly Lounge, described in later years as something like college for young mobsters. Its owner, known by the nickname Skinny Razor (played by Bobby Cannavale in the film), was like a mentor to the up-and-comers, journalists later wrote. Another regular face in the neighborhood was Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel), a powerful boss of a Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey crime family. (Keitel’s Bruno, known in life as the “Docile Don” for his low-key demeanor, sees relatively little screen time in a story more interested in the middlemen.)
The book’s account of Hoffa’s demise has been challenged by experts on the mob and Hoffa, and by journalists who have written about the case. It has been speculated that Sheeran enlarged his role for the sake of a last payday for his family, although most agree that Sheeran’s telling of the buildup to the climax is credible.
Robert De Niro plays Sheeran, a World War II veteran working as a truck driver in the 1960s, with a side job diverting the beef and chicken he was supposed to be delivering and selling it directly to restaurants. When his truck breaks down at a gas station in Pennsylvania, he is approached by a stranger named Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), who knows his way around an engine enough to get it running again.
In his prime as shown in the film, Hoffa (Al Pacino) was a larger-than-life leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the country’s most powerful union, and one with ties to major Mafia families and bosses. This was not the idealistic, socialist unions of Woody Guthrie songs. In those midcentury years, the Teamsters and other unions carried out bombings, murders, arsons and all manner of violent crime to maintain and grow power. Hoffa, like Bufalino, took Sheeran under his wing, putting him to work.
Sheeran’s relationship with Bufalino and Hoffa introduces several of the film’s memorable supporting characters, and they’re all drawn from real life.
by Michael Wilson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. Now available on Netflix. The acting, directing, cinematography, everything... really first rate. One of Scorsese's best. I only wish they hadn't moved so quickly through the mob's connection/influence vis-a-vis the elder (Joseph) and younger Kennedys, and connections to Cuba. See also: Michael Woods Reviews: The Irishman (LRB).]
“The first words Jimmy ever spoke to me were, ‘I heard you paint houses,’” said the man now known as “The Irishman” shortly before his death.
The man was Frank Sheeran, and besides being an Irishman, he was also a bagman and hit man for the mob. Jimmy was James Riddle Hoffa, the Teamsters union president whose 1975 disappearance has never been solved, and the paint was not paint at all.
“The paint is the blood that supposedly gets on the floor when you shoot somebody,” Sheeran helpfully explained in the book “I Heard You Paint Houses" (2004), written by a lawyer and former prosecutor, Charles Brandt, based on deathbed interviews with Sheeran and released posthumously.
With the long-awaited arrival of the Martin Scorsese drama “The Irishman” on Netflix on Wednesday, it’s a good time to explain who’s who in the crowded story and to try to answer a question Sheeran himself asks in the film:“How the hell did this whole thing start?”
The book’s account of Hoffa’s demise has been challenged by experts on the mob and Hoffa, and by journalists who have written about the case. It has been speculated that Sheeran enlarged his role for the sake of a last payday for his family, although most agree that Sheeran’s telling of the buildup to the climax is credible.
Robert De Niro plays Sheeran, a World War II veteran working as a truck driver in the 1960s, with a side job diverting the beef and chicken he was supposed to be delivering and selling it directly to restaurants. When his truck breaks down at a gas station in Pennsylvania, he is approached by a stranger named Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), who knows his way around an engine enough to get it running again.
The real Bufalino, born in Sicily, kept a low profile in Kingston, Pa., and although frequently charged with crimes, “has never been convicted of anything but traffic offenses,” according to a 1973 article following an arrest. He was once deported, but when his native Italy refused to accept him, he was allowed to stay in the United States.
He was perhaps best known as an organizer of what became known as the Apalachin Conference in 1957, when leaders from several Mafia families gathered in a rural home in upstate New York to hash out disagreements. State troopers, suspicious of the sudden activity in the area, raided the home. The incident was a blow to the mob, putting the Mafia on the radar of law enforcement and the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover in particular. But Bufalino rose in the ranks in the years that followed.
Players in the world of Philadelphia organized crime, a less glamorized lot than their New York City counterparts, were known to hang out in the Friendly Lounge, described in later years as something like college for young mobsters. Its owner, known by the nickname Skinny Razor (played by Bobby Cannavale in the film), was like a mentor to the up-and-comers, journalists later wrote. Another regular face in the neighborhood was Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel), a powerful boss of a Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey crime family. (Keitel’s Bruno, known in life as the “Docile Don” for his low-key demeanor, sees relatively little screen time in a story more interested in the middlemen.)
The book’s account of Hoffa’s demise has been challenged by experts on the mob and Hoffa, and by journalists who have written about the case. It has been speculated that Sheeran enlarged his role for the sake of a last payday for his family, although most agree that Sheeran’s telling of the buildup to the climax is credible.
Robert De Niro plays Sheeran, a World War II veteran working as a truck driver in the 1960s, with a side job diverting the beef and chicken he was supposed to be delivering and selling it directly to restaurants. When his truck breaks down at a gas station in Pennsylvania, he is approached by a stranger named Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), who knows his way around an engine enough to get it running again.
In his prime as shown in the film, Hoffa (Al Pacino) was a larger-than-life leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the country’s most powerful union, and one with ties to major Mafia families and bosses. This was not the idealistic, socialist unions of Woody Guthrie songs. In those midcentury years, the Teamsters and other unions carried out bombings, murders, arsons and all manner of violent crime to maintain and grow power. Hoffa, like Bufalino, took Sheeran under his wing, putting him to work.
Sheeran’s relationship with Bufalino and Hoffa introduces several of the film’s memorable supporting characters, and they’re all drawn from real life.
by Michael Wilson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. Now available on Netflix. The acting, directing, cinematography, everything... really first rate. One of Scorsese's best. I only wish they hadn't moved so quickly through the mob's connection/influence vis-a-vis the elder (Joseph) and younger Kennedys, and connections to Cuba. See also: Michael Woods Reviews: The Irishman (LRB).]
