Russell Bufalino in Real Life — The Ending The Irishman Never Showed – HT

 

 

 

Scorsesei showed you an old man in a wheelchair fading gracefully into death. It It’s a beautiful piece of cinema and it’s a lie. The real Russell Bfelino was 85 years old and walking out of Levvenworth under active parole surveillance when Scorsese’s version had him long dead. He did time for extortion.

 He got arrested for conspiring to murder the witness who put him away. And the claim the whole movie is built on that he ordered Frank Sharan to kill Jimmy Hoffa may not even be true. This is what the Irishman left out. To understand how the ending actually happened, you have to understand where he started and what kind of man ends up in Levvenworth at 77 in the first place.

Russell Befolino was born in 1903 in a Sicilian mountain town called Montadoro. His family brought him to America as an infant. By the time he was grown, he was in Pittston, Pennsylvania, building a crime family in the middle of coal country. Uh Pittston was not New York, which is the first thing that makes this guy unusual.

 Every other boss you have ever heard of was operating out of a city with skyscrapers. Buffalino was running an empire out of a mining town. He owned at least seven dress factories and he controlled the region’s garment industry so completely that any New York clothing contractor who wanted to do business in the coal belt had to pay tribute through him.

 That is not a small town mob. That is a Pennsylvania boss uh collecting rent from Manhattan. And everyone who met him said the same thing about how he operated. He never raised his voice. He almost never got photographed. Law enforcement in Pennsylvania did not even know his name for decades. They could called him the quiet dawn.

 And the nickname was not ironic. It was the entire method. Other bosses ran on intimidation, on volume, on being the loudest guy in the room. Buffalino ran on being the guy no one noticed until it was already over. If you ask me, that is scarier than anything you have seen in a movie. A yelling dawn you can at least prepare for. A quiet one you never see coming.

In 1959, Joseph Barbara, the boss of the Pennsylvania family, died. Uh the commission recognized Buffalino as the new boss. What they could not have known, what basically nobody outside the mob would know for years was that he was already the most useful man they had. 2 years before he officially took over, he was the man they picked to organize the most consequential meeting in American mafia history. The year was 1957.

 Veto Genevi wanted a summit of every major boss in the country. He tasked uh Stephano Magadino uh the Buffalo boss with setting it up. Magadino chose Buffalino uh for the logistics because Buffalino did not draw attention. The silence was what made him useful. On November 14th, 1957, roughly 101 mafia figures from 27 different families converged on Joseph Barber’s estate in upstate New York.

They rolled onto the property in outofstate cars. The New York State Police noticed the unusual collection of plates and moved in. 58 mobsters got arrested. Another 50 ran through the woods in expensive suits and Italian loafers, which is probably the most absurd visual in 20th century American crime history.

 The biggest summit the American mafia had ever held ended with the most powerful gangsters in the country sprinting through rural underbrush trying not to ruin their shoes. That image alone should have been a Scorsese scene and it is not in any of his movies. More importantly, it was the moment the myth of the hidden American mafia died.

 For decades, the FBI had officially denied that Lacosa Nostra even existed. Appalachin made that impossible. The Senate held hearings. Federal law enforcement reorganized. The entire national understanding of organized crime got rewritten in under a year. And the man who organized the meeting that blew the lid off the whole operation somehow walked away from the aftermath and ran his family for another 37 years.

 Zapolichin should have ended his career. Somehow it made it. Appalachin is not even the weirdest thing on his record. Four years later in 1961, the CIA put Russell Balino on the payroll to Espay on Cuba. That is not a typo and it is not a joke. Before Castro took power, Buffalino along with two associates named James Plumeary and Salvatore Granelo had controlled a racetrack and a large casino near Havana. Castro kicked them out.

 The CIA decided these men had the right profile for the job. They had motivation because Castro had cost them money. They had contacts uh because they had recently been running operations on the ground and they knew the terrain. So, the CIA hired them to conduct espionage ahead of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

 Buffalino’s crew received $450,000 in previously hidden funds. They built out a spy network and the intelligence they sent back was, according to analysts at the CIA, um, garbage full of false claims about imminent popular uprisings um, that never actually came. The United States government paid the American mafia to spy on Cuba.

 And the mafia took the money, fabricated most of the intelligence, and sent fake reports back to Washington. Nothing like that makes it into the Irishman. The real Russell Buffalino wasn’t only a gangster hiding from the government. For a while, he was working for them. Running a spy ring for the CIA is not even the strangest thing Bfalino did that decade.

 In 1971, Francis Ford Copela was casting the Godfather. Uh he wanted to give the role of Johnny Fontaine, the Sinatra inspired Kuner uh to somebody other than Al Martino. Martino made a phone call. He called Russell Buffalino. Uh according to Martino’s own uh on the record interview years later, Buffalino then called Paramount Studio Chief Robert Evans directly. Martino got the part.

 A rival candidate, Vic Deone, withdrew from the running by some accountants. Under mob pressure, there are bigger claims floating around this story. Wanda Ruddy, the third wife of producer Al Ruddy, has said Buffalino had final script approval on the film. She was not actually present during the 1971 production.

 Uh, so that particular claim has always been treated as heray. The Martino phone call though is documented. a man who rarely spoke was shaping dialogue for the film that would define how America thinks about the Emob for the next 50 years. And that same man was the one Frank Sheeran would later claim gave him the order to kill Jimmy Hoffa.

The Sharan claim is stranger than anyone in the movie lets on and we will come back to it. If you are this far in and liking where this is going, subscribe. I publish the real stories behind the mob movies Hollywood keeps getting wrong. When Jimmy Hoffa disappeared on July 30th, uh, 1975, Russell Befolino was the first name the FBI wrote down.

 Hawa walked out of a restaurant called the Machis Red Fox in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, and was never seen again. The FBI internal summary of the investigation known as the Hoffex uh memo named Bolino as one of the original planners of the disappearance. Hoffex was the document that shaped the early theory. 2 days later on August 1st, um Buffalino and Frank Sharan were both in Detroit.

 um attending the wedding of Bill Buffino’s daughter. Uh Bill was Russell’s reputed cousin and a Teamster’s attorney. The wedding put them in the same city as the disappearance. So Hawa had been dead 48 hours and the two men at the top of the FBI suspect list were eating cake in the same city where the disappearance had taken place.

 If the two of them had been trying to make themselves look suspicious, they could not have done a better job. Nobody got charged. The Hoffex memo named 12 possible suspects. Buffalino was near the top of the list. Frank Sharon was at the bottom. The least emphasized uh suspect in the whole document. A detail that matters a lot more than the movie ever admitted.

Nobody was ever convicted for the disappearance. The Hawa disappearance never produced a single conviction for anyone involved. What actually brought Russell Buffalino down was smaller, stupider, and recorded on tape. In April 1976, a man named Jack Napoli owed $25,000 to a New York jeweler.

 $25,000 became the reason for the downfall. Napoli was in the federal witness protection program, which Buffalino either did not know about or did not care about. The witness protection program should have made Napoli untouchable. Bufalino threatened to have him killed over the debt. Napoli wore a wire and Buffalino did not check.

 Wore a wire captured the crime. The Quiet Dawn, who had organized Appalachin, who had run a spy ring uh for the CIA, who had influenced casting at Paramount, uh got brought down over a $25,000 jeweler beef he never should have been involved in personally because he did not pat down a guy in the witness protection program.

The Quiet Dawn was undone by carelessness. Bufalino was indicted in 1977 and convicted on August 8th, 1978. He was indicted and then convicted. He got a 4-year sentence, his first federal conviction in more than two decades of running a crime family. That was his first federal conviction in more than 20 years.

 He served almost three of those years. And in May 1981, he was released. He was 77 years old and he was arrested again in the same calendar year. The new charge was murder conspiracy. Prosecutors alleged that Buffalino from behind bars had arranged to have Jack Napoli killed the same Napoli whose recording had put him in prison in the first place.

 The star witness in the new trial was uh Jimmy Frediano, a boss known as the Weasel at the time the highest ranking mafia figure who had ever flipped for the federal government. Frediano testified that Buffalino had asked him and Michael Rizatello to kill Napoli back in 1976. Bufalino was convicted in October 1981. In November, he was sentenced to 10 years at the United States Penitentiary at Levvenworth, Kansas.

 The Quiet Dawn, at 77 years old, was going to Kansas. Levvenworth is one of the most legendary prisons in American history, and Buffalino walked in at an age when most men are trying not to break a hip. He managed to survive inside for 6 years. By 1987, his health had finally collapsed and the Bureau of Prisons transferred him to the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, which is effectively a hospital prison for inmates who are expected to die inside.

He was released in May 1989, 6 years and 8 months into a 10-year sentence. He was 85 years old. And every single week of that, every month inside Levvenworth, every day in the Springfield hospital prison is completely absent from Scorsese’s 3 and 1/2 hour film. There is no Levvenworth scene. There is no Springfield scene.

 There is no uh family scrambling without its boss, no reckoning with what those years did to the Boufalino organization. the entire last act of his working life gets skipped. This is the part the movie really doesn’t want you to think about. The entire premise of the Irishman rests on Frank Shearan’s claim that he killed Jimmy Hoffa on Russell Bfalino’s orders.

Sharan made that claim to Charles Brandt, uh, an attorney turned author in interviews recorded in the years before Sharan died in December of 2003 in 1995, uh, 8 years before he died. While he was still perfectly lucid, Frank Sharan told the Philadelphia Daily News directly, “I did not kill Hawa and I had nothing to do with it.

” that was on the record in a newspaper uh before he had a book deal uh before he had a movie in development, before there was any reason to lie in the other direction. Government evidence from 1975, including testimony from Sharon himself at the time, suggested he was not even in Detroit the day Hawa disappeared. Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith reviewed the case for the New York Review of Books and found the confession wanting.

 Uh, a Bill Tenelli investigation in Slate found numerous factual problems is throughout Brandt’s book. A contemporary of Shearans in the Philadelphia Irish mob said, “Sharan never killed a flaw.” Uh, none of this means Buffalino was innocent of planning against Hawa. The FBI Hoffex memo still puts his name near the top of the suspect list.

 What it means is that the specific story you watched, the 190minute Netflix event you sat through, the whole reason the film even exists is the deathbed confession of a man who publicly told a reporter he didn’t do it when he was still sober enough to know better. I think the whole movie only works if you don’t know about the 1995 denial.

 Once you do, the confession scene stops being a revelation and starts being a footnote to a 20-year paper trail that never really added up. The most famous scene in the whole movie, Sharon pulling the trigger in that Detroit house may never have happened. And the quiet Don who allegedly ordered it may have ordered something different or nothing at all.

When you think about Russell Bolino’s whole career, that is almost the perfect ending. Even his most famous alleged hit is a question mark. That was the ending Scorsesei refused to show. But the real one wasn’t even over yet. When Bufalino came home to Kingston, Pennsylvania in 1989, he was not actually free.

 The US Parole Board kept him under active supervision for three more years. Uh the Pennsylvania Crime Commission placed him under what they publicly called constant surveillance if necessary uh which continued until September 1992. His crime family was falling apart. At the same time, the Pennsylvania Crime Commission’s own reports confirmed the Balolino organization was crumbling because of his declining health and the convictions of its senior members.

William Delia, the man who would eventually succeed him, was already running day-to-day operations. The empire was collapsing in real time, and its founder was watching from a nursing home in Kingston. He spent the last 2 years of his life uh in that nursing home. He had no children. His wife of 66 years, Carrie, was still alive.

 He had outlasted most of his contemporaries, survived federal prison twice. and kept his name out of the papers for most of his adult life. He died on February 25th, 1994 at Nesbbit Memorial Hospital in Kingston, Pennsylvania at the age of 90. He was buried at Dennis Cemetery in Swersville. He had died far from any cinematic finale.

 Russell Bolino organized the meeting that blew open the American mafia’s secrecy to the nation. He allegedly helped cast the most famous mob movie ever made. He ran espionage operations for the United States government. He mentored the man whose deathbed confession became the basis for Scorsese’s late career masterpiece, a confession that might be fiction.

 and he died in a nursing home at 90. A twice convicted federal prisoner who had spent the last decade of his working life losing to the feds. Watched by parole officers until he was too sick for anyone to bother watching. Scorsese filmed a quiet patriarch fading gracefully into death. The silence that made Russell Befolino dangerous outlasted absolutely everything else he had.

 What the movie skipped, the Levvenworth years, the murder conspiracy, the surveillance, the empire collapsing while he watched from a Kingston nursing home, is the actual shape of the ending. It is harsher than the film, and it is more accurate. The movie made him immortal. The real one made him small. I’ll let you decide which ending feels more honest.

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