"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt

twenty-six, but he was a natural hitter. You need leverage, but a lot of your power comes from your forearm down into your wrist. There’s a snap to your punch that comes from your wrist to your fist, and that’s what knocks the other guy out. You can actually hear that snap; it sounds like a pistol shot when it’s working to perfection. Joe Louis had that famous six-inch punch. He’d knock a guy out with a punch that only traveled six inches. His power came from the snap. It’s like snapping a towel at somebody’s butt. There’s no power in your arms.
    Then if you learn a trick or two besides, you’re set for life. They say Jack Dempsey learned all the tricks of fighting as a thirteen-year-old working in the mining camps of Colorado. I can believe that about Dempsey after my nine months in the deep woods of Maine.
    We hitchhiked back to Philly that next summer, and all of a sudden we found we had a new interest besides boxing—chasing girls. I worked two or three jobs, whenever I could find work, until I got an apprenticeship at the Pearlstein Glass Company at Fifth and Lombard. It was a commercial area then just off South Street; now it’s where the young kids go to shop. I was studying to be a glazier. I learned how to set windows in all the big buildings in town. Sometimes I worked in the shop grinding bevels on the glass. I learned a lot, and it was nowhere near as hard work as logging. At the end of a workday I still had plenty of energy left to compete against Yank for the neighborhood girls.
    My secret weapon against Yank was my dancing. Most big men are clumsy and heavy-footed, but not me. I had a good sense of rhythm and I could move every part of my body. I had very fast hands, too, and good coordination. Swing music was sweeping the country and social dancing was all the rage. I went dancing six nights a week (never on a Sunday) to a different hall every night. That’s how you learned the dances. You learned by going dancing. They all had certain steps, unlike today where you just make it up as you go along. After the war, one of the jobs I had was a ballroom dance instructor.
    In 1939, when I was nineteen, my dance partner, Roseanne De Angelis, and I took second place in the fox-trot competition against 5,000 other couples in Madison Square Garden in the Harvest Moon Ball dance contest. Roseanne was some graceful dancer. I met her up at the Garden before the contest when her partner got hurt on the dance floor during practice. My partner got tired and worn out, so Roseanne and I teamed up. The Harvest Moon was the biggest event in dancing in the whole country. It was sponsored every year by the New York Daily News. Many years later I taught my daughters how to dance, every kind of dance, even the tango and the rumba.
    I made good money at Pearlstein’s, almost $45 a week. That was more than my father made at the Blessed Virgin Mary. Out of that money I paid room and board at home so we didn’t have to keep moving. My sister, Peggy, was still in school and worked after school at the A&P as a stocker. My brother, Tom, was out of the house. He had dropped out of school and joined the CCC, a youth conservation corps that Roosevelt had set up to provide jobs for the youth on account of the Depression. The young men would go to camps set up in rural areas around the country, and they’d work on conservation projects.
    Most of the money I had leftover from paying my parents out of my Pearlstein’s pay was spent in the dance halls. There wasn’t a lot left over to spend on dates with the girls, but Yank and I found ways to have fun without money. One afternoon I took a pretty young Irish girl with freckles buck-bathing in the creek off Darby Road, where Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital is now. The creek was about a hundred yards from the road. Yank snuck up on us and swiped our clothes. Then he stood up at the top of the hill near the road and yelled down for the girl I was with to come out of the water, get