As president of the powerful but corrupt and mob-linked Teamsters Union, Hoffa was the nation’s best-known labor leader in the 1950s and 1960s. The government hounded him for a decade for his serial lawbreaking, and finally sent him to prison in 1967. After President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence in 1971, Hoffa was seeking to regain control of his union when he mysteriously vanished from a parking lot next to the Machus Red Fox restaurant in a suburban Detroit shopping plaza.
The investigation into Hoffa’s disappearance was, from the outset, “shoulder-deep in a rat’s nest of rumors and speculation,” as the Detroit Free Press reported three days after the event. The FBI was overwhelmed with tips from organized crime informants, union officials, supposed eyewitnesses to the crime and burial, and a bevy of mystics and dreamers who purported to know Hoffa’s fate. The Bureau eventually uncovered evidence about a mob conspiracy to kill Hoffa, but never solved the crime.
In the forty-four years since Hoffa vanished, several people have falsely confessed to the crime, and federal and state officials, acting on tips, have torn up a dozen barns, pools, or fields in Michigan and elsewhere looking for Hoffa’s remains. These searches were all fruitless and the case remains open today.
The Irishman purports to do what the FBI and others seem unable to do: tell us who killed Hoffa, and how. The film is based on a 2004 book by Charles Brandt called I Heard You Paint Houses (the title alludes to supposed mob slang for carrying out a hit). The book’s central claim is that Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran murdered Hoffa. Sheeran was a Teamsters official in Delaware, an associate of Hoffa’s as well as senior mob figures, and a well-known boozer and thug. Brandt’s book recounts Sheeran’s confession to the murder, and describes the house where he claims the murder happened.
I have a personal stake in the veracity of Sheeran’s confession. Sheeran repeats the public conventional wisdom since 1975 that a man named Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien drove the car that picked up Hoffa from the suburban parking lot and delivered him to his killers. O’Brien was Hoffa’s closest aide for decades. He is also my stepfather. I was twelve years old when Hoffa disappeared, and I lived through the bedlam of the Hoffa investigation.