My source on this story is an unusual one. I refer here to mob hitman and labor organizer, Frank Sheeran, the central figure in Charles Brandt’s non-fiction saga, “I Heard You Paint Houses.”
When the book was published in 2004, the media took little or no notice of Sheeran’s revelations about Joe Biden, then a U.S. senator from Delaware. When the “Irishman,” the movie version of the book, was produced in 2019, the Biden material did not make the cut.
Ironically, as shall be seen, the 1972 incident in question prefigured in a low-tech way the high-tech shenanigans that got Biden nominally elected president nearly 50 years later.
In a genre filled with mob BS artists, Sheeran makes for an unusually reliable narrator. Brandt, a former prosecutor, interviewed the dying Sheeran over a period of years and fact-checked his accounts to the degree that they could be.
Sheeran’s most startling claim is that he shot and killed Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa. He also claimed to have shot Mafia wild man Joey Gallo, the latter in 1972, the former in 1973. He is very convincing in both accounts.