"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt Page A
Authors: Charles Brandt
Tags: United States, Fiction, General, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Mafia, LABOR, True Crime, Business & Economics, Criminology, Criminals & Outlaws, organized crime, Gangsters, Mafia - United States, Hoffa; James R, Teamsters, Sheeran; Frank, Gangsters - United States, Teamsters - United States
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dressed, and go with him or he’d leave with her clothes, too. So she came out and went off with him and he gave a kid a quarter to hold onto my clothes until Yank and the girl got out of sight and then drop them back down by the creek and run like hell.
I’m sure I played a trick back on him; I just don’t remember exactly which trick it was. Did I spread the rumor that a pregnant girl he didn’t even know was his responsibility? Probably. Did I give him a hot foot? No doubt. But that’s about all we did. Played jokes. Walked around and messed around. We were no longer boxers and fighters and road warriors; we were lovers and dancers. I had been to the Little Egypt University and the Neptune of the Nile Graduate School, and it was my duty to the young maidens of the City of Brotherly Love not to let all that good education go to waste.
I had the ideal carefree young man’s life—the Life of Riley—popular with the girls, good pals, no responsibilities; a life where your only real job is to build memories for the rest of your days. Except I couldn’t stay put. I was impatient. I had to move on. Pretty rapidly I found myself halfway around the world. But by then I no longer could have the luxury to be impatient. I had to do things the Army’s way: hurry up and wait. ”
chapter five
411 Days
“ I first heard the song “Tuxedo Junction” in 1941. I was an MP in Colorado, pulling guard duty at Lowry Field for the Army Air Corps. Most people think it was Glenn Miller who first made that song famous, but it was a black bandleader named Erskine Hawkins. He wrote the song and had the first hit with it. That song stayed with me like a theme song through the whole war. After the war I had my first date with Mary, my future wife, to see Erskine Hawkins at the old Earl Theater in Philly.
One cold night in December 1941 I won a dance contest jitterbugging to “Tuxedo Junction” at the Denver Dance Hall. The next thing I knew I was on a troop train at four in the morning heading for the West Coast to defend California. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I just turned twenty-one and I was 6'2". Four years later when the war ended I got my discharge one day before I turned twenty-five; I was 6' 4". I had grown two inches. People forget how young we were. Some of us were not full-grown yet.
I spent the war as a rifleman in Europe in the Thunderbird Division—the 45th Infantry Division. They say the average number of days of actual combat for a veteran is around eighty. By the time the war was over the Army told me I had 411 combat days, which entitled me to $20 extra pay a month. I was one of the lucky ones. The real heroes, some of them with only one combat day, are still over there. As big a target as I was and as many fire fights as I was in, I never got hit by a German bullet or shrapnel. I said a lot of foxhole prayers, especially pinned down in a dugout in Anzio. And whatever anybody wants to say about my childhood, one thing my childhood did teach me was how to take care of myself, how to survive. ”
Eliciting information from Frank Sheeran about his combat experiences was the most difficult part of the interview process. It was two years before he could accept the fact that his combat experience was even worth discussing. And then it became painstaking and stressful for both a respectful questioner and his reluctant subject, with many stops and starts.
To help me understand his combat days, Sheeran tracked down the 45th Infantry Division’s hardbound, 202-page official Combat Report, issued within months of World War II’s end. The more I learned from both this report and Frank himself, the clearer it seemed to me that it was during his prolonged and unremitting combat duty that Frank Sheeran learned to kill in cold blood.
The Combat Report states: “The 45th paid heavily for maintaining our American heritage: 21,899 battle casualties.” Considering that a fully
I’m sure I played a trick back on him; I just don’t remember exactly which trick it was. Did I spread the rumor that a pregnant girl he didn’t even know was his responsibility? Probably. Did I give him a hot foot? No doubt. But that’s about all we did. Played jokes. Walked around and messed around. We were no longer boxers and fighters and road warriors; we were lovers and dancers. I had been to the Little Egypt University and the Neptune of the Nile Graduate School, and it was my duty to the young maidens of the City of Brotherly Love not to let all that good education go to waste.
I had the ideal carefree young man’s life—the Life of Riley—popular with the girls, good pals, no responsibilities; a life where your only real job is to build memories for the rest of your days. Except I couldn’t stay put. I was impatient. I had to move on. Pretty rapidly I found myself halfway around the world. But by then I no longer could have the luxury to be impatient. I had to do things the Army’s way: hurry up and wait. ”
chapter five
411 Days
“ I first heard the song “Tuxedo Junction” in 1941. I was an MP in Colorado, pulling guard duty at Lowry Field for the Army Air Corps. Most people think it was Glenn Miller who first made that song famous, but it was a black bandleader named Erskine Hawkins. He wrote the song and had the first hit with it. That song stayed with me like a theme song through the whole war. After the war I had my first date with Mary, my future wife, to see Erskine Hawkins at the old Earl Theater in Philly.
One cold night in December 1941 I won a dance contest jitterbugging to “Tuxedo Junction” at the Denver Dance Hall. The next thing I knew I was on a troop train at four in the morning heading for the West Coast to defend California. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I just turned twenty-one and I was 6'2". Four years later when the war ended I got my discharge one day before I turned twenty-five; I was 6' 4". I had grown two inches. People forget how young we were. Some of us were not full-grown yet.
I spent the war as a rifleman in Europe in the Thunderbird Division—the 45th Infantry Division. They say the average number of days of actual combat for a veteran is around eighty. By the time the war was over the Army told me I had 411 combat days, which entitled me to $20 extra pay a month. I was one of the lucky ones. The real heroes, some of them with only one combat day, are still over there. As big a target as I was and as many fire fights as I was in, I never got hit by a German bullet or shrapnel. I said a lot of foxhole prayers, especially pinned down in a dugout in Anzio. And whatever anybody wants to say about my childhood, one thing my childhood did teach me was how to take care of myself, how to survive. ”
Eliciting information from Frank Sheeran about his combat experiences was the most difficult part of the interview process. It was two years before he could accept the fact that his combat experience was even worth discussing. And then it became painstaking and stressful for both a respectful questioner and his reluctant subject, with many stops and starts.
To help me understand his combat days, Sheeran tracked down the 45th Infantry Division’s hardbound, 202-page official Combat Report, issued within months of World War II’s end. The more I learned from both this report and Frank himself, the clearer it seemed to me that it was during his prolonged and unremitting combat duty that Frank Sheeran learned to kill in cold blood.
The Combat Report states: “The 45th paid heavily for maintaining our American heritage: 21,899 battle casualties.” Considering that a fully
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