Charles Brandt, a former homicide prosecutor whose 2004 true-crime best seller, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” was adapted by Martin Scorsese into “The Irishman,” starring Robert De Niro as the Mafia hit man who killed the ex-Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, died on Oct. 22 in Wilmington, Del. He was 82.
The death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by his brother-in-law, Gary Goldsmith, who did not specify a cause.
Mr. Brandt’s book purported to solve the mystery of Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance and presumed death in 1975. He identified Hoffa’s killer as Frank Sheeran, a World War II veteran and truck driver who had been recruited into the underworld by the Mafia boss Russell Bufalino.
Mr. Sheeran did some enforcement work for Mr. Bufalino, who introduced him to Mr. Hoffa, who said to Mr. Sheeran, “I heard you paint houses.” That was apparently mob slang for killing people — with the word “paint” meaning blood.
In a series of interviews over five years, Mr. Sheeran told Mr. Brandt that he had been ordered to kill Mr. Hoffa, who had just been released from prison and was trying to regain power in the underworld.
Mr. Sheeran recalled luring him to a house in Detroit for a supposed meeting with organized crime figures.
“When Jimmy saw that the house was empty, that nobody came out of any of the rooms to greet him, he knew right away what it was,” Mr. Sheeran was quoted as saying in Mr. Brandt’s book. “If Jimmy had taken his piece with him he would have gone for it.”
But Mr. Hoffa, alas, was not carrying a gun.
“Jimmy Hoffa got shot twice at a decent range — not too close or the paint splatters back at you — in the back of the head behind his right ear,” Mr. Sheeran said. “Then I dropped the piece on the linoleum, went out the front door with my head down.”
In Mr. Sheeran’s telling, two “cleaners,” as they were called, then arrived. They stuffed Mr. Hoffa into a body bag and had him cremated — not buried under Giants Stadium in New Jersey, as had long been rumored.
“I Heard You Paint Houses” was a New York Times best seller.
“The book Brandt has written gives new meaning to the term ‘guilty pleasure,’” Bryan Burrough, a Vanity Fair correspondent, wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “Brandt keeps the focus tightly on Sheeran and Hoffa, quick-marching the reader through Sheeran’s rise from carnival gofer to klepto-trucker to union organizer to trusted assassin.”
Mr. De Niro, who had starred in Mr. Scorsese’s Mafia movies “Goodfellas” (1990) and “Casino” (1995), read “I Heard You Paint Houses” and was overwhelmed by Mr. Sheeran’s story. He told Mr. Scorsese that they should adapt it for the screen.
“He sat down, he started talking about the book, but he became — I could see he was really emotionally involved with the character,” Mr. Scorsese told Esquire magazine in 2019, just before the film premiered. “So much that he couldn’t describe — he couldn’t really speak.”
Critics praised the movie.
“What interests Scorsese — what he has always cared most about — aren’t facts but feelings,” A.O. Scott, who at the time was one of The Times’s two chief movie critics, wrote in his review. “Like many of his other films, ‘The Irishman’ spends some time mapping the structures of power and the codes of behavior that govern its particular slice of reality.”
The film, Mr. Scott wrote, was “surprisingly, surpassingly delicate.”
But it was fiercely criticized by journalists and Mafia experts, who said Mr. Sheeran had exaggerated (at best) or fabricated (at worst) his role in Mr. Hoffa’s death.
“Frank Sheeran never killed a fly,” John Carlyle Berkery, an Irish mob figure in Philadelphia, was quoted as saying in a 2019 Slate article with the headline “The Lies of the Irishman.” “The only things he ever killed were countless jugs of red wine.”
Selwyn Raab, who wrote about the Mafia for The Times for more than two decades, told Slate: “I know Sheeran didn’t kill Ho
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