Frank Sheeran Didn’t Kill Hoffa — The Irishman Got It Wrong -HT
On July 30th, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa walked into a restaurant parking lot in suburban Detroit to meet two mob bosses. He called his wife at 2:30 to say he’d been stood up. He told her he’d be home by 4 to grill steaks. That was the last time anyone heard his voice. For 50 years, nobody knew who killed him. Then in 2003, a dying hitman named Frank Sheeran confessed to pulling the trigger.
Martin Scorsesei turned that confession into a 3 and 1/2 hour epic starring Robert Dairo, Al Pacino, and Joe Peshy. Millions of people finally thought they knew the truth. But when the FBI tested Sharan’s story, they found blood in in the house where he claimed to have shot Hafa. They ran the DNA. Um, it wasn’t Hafa’s blood. And when they asked mobsters who actually knew Sharon what they thought, one of them laughed and said, “Frank Sharon never killed a fly.
The only things he ever killed were countless jugs of red wine.” The Irishman isn’t a true story. It’s a dying man’s lie that Hollywood paid $175 million to tell. But before we tear apart Sharan’s confession, you need to understand what we actually know about the day Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. That morning, Hawa left his home in Lake Orion, Michigan around 1:15 in the morning.
He was heading to the Machis Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township to meet two men. Anthony Jackaloney, known as Tony Jack, was a Detroit mob enforcer. [music] Anthony Provenzano, known as Tony Pro, was a capo in the Genevese crime family. Hawa and Tony Pro had been close once, but their relationship soured in prison. Now Hawa was trying to reclaim the Teamsters presidency, and the mob did not want that. He knew too much.
and he was threatening to expose the pension fund loans they had been skimming for years. Hafa arrived around 2:00, but neither man showed. Between 2:15 and 2:30, he called his wife, Josephine, uh, from a pay phone. He told her he had been stood up. He said he would be home by 4:00 to grill steaks. Several witnesses saw him standing in the parking lot, pacing.
Two men even stopped to shake his hand, recognizing the famous union boss. Then sometime between 2:45 and 3:00, the FBI believes Hawa got into a maroon 1975 Mercury marquee owned by Anthony Jackaloney’s son. The car was being driven that day by Chucky O’Brien, a man Hawa had essentially raised as his [music] own son.
Police dogs later detected Hawa’s scent in the back seat. In 2001, DNA testing confirmed that a hair found in the car [music] belonged to Jimmy Hoffa. That’s where the facts end. Everything after his theory, and competing confessions from at least 14 different people. Frank Sharon was just one of them. And his story has more holes than a shooting range target.
So, let’s talk about who Sharan actually was and why he suddenly decided to confess to the most famous unsolved murder in American history. By 2003, when Sharon told his story to author Charles Brandt, he was 83 years old, living in a nursing home, dying of cancer, completely broke. His three daughters had nothing. His legacy was fading.
and he knew what every aging mobster understands. Admitting you drove a car for the mafia, doesn’t sell books, but confessing to killing [music] Jimmy Hoffa, that’s a bestseller. That’s a movie deal. That’s generational wealth. Sharon had nothing to lose. He was months from death. He couldn’t be prosecuted. His daughters would split the profits.
And it gets worse. When Publishers Weekly reviewed I heard you paint [music] houses, they called it long on sensational claims and short on credibility. They also revealed that a previous publisher had dropped the book after a letter supposedly written by Hafa turned out to be a forgery by Shearan. He was caught forging evidence to support his own confession.
Dan Mula is the definitive expert on the Hafa case. He spent decades investigating, interviewed hundreds of FBI agents and mob sources, and wrote the Hawa Wars in 1978. Before the Irishman started filming, Moldia personally warned Robert Dairo that Sharan’s story was fabricated. Dairo’s response, “It’s a great story.” Uh, Martin Scorsesei admitted in interviews he does not care whether the story is true.
He told Entertainment Weekly, “The movie is not about the facts. It is about the world the characters inhabit. They spent $175 million on a story the director admits might be fiction.” But forget what experts say. Let’s talk about what the physical evidence actually proves. Frank Sharon claimed he shot Jimmy Hoffa inside a house on Beaverland Street in Northwest Detroit.
He said he walked Hawa through the front door and shot him twice in the back of the head. In 2004, the FBI treated that claim seriously enough to investigate. They got a warrant, went to the exact house um and ripped up the floorboards. They found blood stains soaked into the wood.
For a moment, it looked like Sharon might be telling the truth. The FBI sent samples for DNA analysis. Everyone waited. The results destroyed his story completely. That blood did not belong to Jimmy Hawa. Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, whose stepfather is Chucky O’Brien, put it bluntly. He said, “There is zero evidence, none at all, that connects Hawa or Sharon to that house.
Whatever violence happened in that house had nothing to do with Jimmy Hoffa. Sharan either picked a random house and got lucky that it had blood evidence or he knew about some other crime that happened there. Either way, his confession collapsed in the forensic laboratory. There there is another physical problem with his account.
Frank Sharan stood 6’4 in tall, but witnesses who saw men in the car with Hawa described them as short or average height. A 6’4 Irishman does not blend in with average height Italian mobsters. So if Sharan did not kill Hawa, who did? The FBI, mob historians, and everyone who has seriously studied this case point to the same man, Salvatore Burggulio, called Sallybugs, you actually see him in The Irishman, played by Luis Caneli.
But Scorsesei treats him as a background character, just another soldier. In reality, Sally Bugs was almost certainly the triggerman. Briglio was a hitman who worked for Tony Provenzano. According to federal prosecutors, he killed over 50 people for the Genevese crime [music] family. He was known for being brutal, sometimes torturing victims, quantum victims before [music] killing them.
In 1961, Brigulio murdered Anthony Castalito, a union rival who had dared to get more votes than [music] Tony Pro in a Teamsters election. Uh they lured Castalito to a farm um in upstate New York, beat him with a lead pipe, strangled him with a rope, [music] and dismembered his body. It was never found.
This was the kind of work Sally Bugs did. Uh Ralph Picardo was the FBI’s most valuable informant inside the Teamsters. He worked as a driver for Tony Provenzano. Immediately after Hawa disappeared, Picardo told FBI agents exactly who [music] was responsible. Chucky O’Brien picked up Hafa and drove him to a house where Salvatore Brigio, his brother Gabrielle, and Thomas Andreda [music] were waiting with orders to kill him.
This came from someone inside the organization when the hit was ordered. But here is the detail that really seals it. On March 21st, 1978, less than 3 years after Hawa disappeared, Sally Bugs was walking down Malberry Street in [music] Little Italy. Two men approached from behind and shot him four times in the face and chest.
Mob experts call this a cleanup hit. When you commit a crime this big, this high-profile, you do not leave the shooter walking around where he might get arrested and start talking. You silence him permanently. At the time of his death, Briguglio was about to go on trial for the Castalo murder.
Uh prosecutors believe the mob feared he might flip and take everyone down with him. [music] So they eliminated the problem. Frank Sharan lived almost 30 more years after Hawa vanished. Nobody ever touched him, threatened him uh or tried to silence him uh because he did not know anything worth silencing. And this is where Sharan’s story completely falls apart [music] for anyone who understands how the mafia actually works.
The hit on Hafa was authorized by the Genevese crime family. It came through Tony Provenzano who had a bitter feud with Hafa from their time in prison. In the mafia, there is an unwritten [music] rule. You do not outsource your most important hit to someone from another family. You use your own soldiers, [music] men whose loyalty you can guarantee.
Frank Sharan did not belong to the Genevese [music] family. He was connected to Russell Bfolino out of Pennsylvania. Tony Pro would never have handed the most consequential murder of his career [music] to another boss’s friend. He would have used his own men, men like Sally Bugs, who was a Genevies soldier completely loyal to Provenzano.
The whole premise of Sharan’s confession violates how mob hits actually work. And then there is what other mobsters said about him. John Carile Burkery, an Irish mobster who worked in Philadelphia alongside Sharan, did not hold back. He said Sharan was full of [ __ ] That Frank Sharan never killed a fly.
That the only things he ever killed were countless jugs of red wine. FBI agent John [music] Tam called the confession baloney beyond belief. He said Shearan was a full-time criminal, but he did not know of anybody Sharan personally ever killed. The idea that the Genevese family would trust this man with the most high-profile murder in organized crime history is absurd.
But the final problem with Sharan’s story is the testimony of the one person who was definitely in that car. Chucky O’Brien was like a son to Jimmy Hoffa. He grew up in the Hawa household after his biological father abandoned the family. Jimmy treated him as his own flesh and blood for decades. Chucky was driving the Mercury marquee that day.
His DNA was found in the car along with Hoffas. [music] He is the indisputable link between Hawa and the vehicle that took him to his death. Sharan claimed he sat in the back seat with Hawa, but Chucky denied this until his dying day. He insisted Frank Shearan was not in that vehicle. He maintained this through decades of FBI um questioning and countless interviews.
And here is what makes O’Brien’s denial credible. He was already implicated in the disappearance. The FBI already believed he drove Hafa to his death. Admitting Sharan was there would not have made his situation any worse. uh he had no reason to protect Sharan specifically. Professor Goldsmith discovered something even [music] more damaging.
In 1978, the FBI recorded Sharan telling associates he was not even in Detroit that day. He said he had gas receipts, was [music] at dinner in Pennsylvania, and had 18 witnesses to confirm his alibi. So in 1978, talking privately to people he trusted, Sharon insisted he was not there. 25 years later, dying and broke, he suddenly remembered he was the triggerman.
Which version do you believe? Frank Shearan died in December 2003. He got what he wanted. His story became a bestseller. His daughters got the movie money. And in 2019, Martin Scorsesei turned his lies into cinematic legend. Dairo Pacino and Peshi brought a fabrication to life with all the prestige Hollywood could muster. The Irishman isn’t a true story.
It’s a dying man’s fantasy, polished and presented as history to an audience that doesn’t know any better. Jimmy Hoffa’s real killer was almost certainly Sally Bugs Bugglio, a Genevese soldier who was silenced with bullets to the face less than 3 years later. The forensic evidence proves Sharan’s confession was false.
The mob’s own rules make his involvement impossible. And the one witness who was definitely there said Sharan wasn’t in the car. Selwin Rob, a reporter for the New York Times who covered organized crime for decades, put it perfectly. Uh he said, “There are 14 people who have claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa.
Um there is an inexhaustible supply of them. Frank Sharan was just the one who got a movie deal. Next time someone tells you, uh they know what happened to Hafa because they watched The Irishman, uh tell them the truth. They watched a great story. Uh, but that is all it was. Uh, if you want to see more cases where Hollywood got the story completely wrong, that video is on screen now.