Nine years ago today, Robert De Niro and I had a contentious meeting about the murder of Jimmy Hoffa
A sitdown about "The Irishman" at The Old Europe
Above (l-r): Robert De Niro, Gus Russo (in the brown shirt), and Dan Moldea at The Old Europe restaurant in Washington, D.C., December 2, 2014. (Photo credit: Dale Myers)
(12-2-2023) Before I return with Part 2 of my relationship with the FBI during the Jimmy Hoffa murder case, I need to deal with the matter of Frank Sheeran, aka “The Irishman.” (See: Part 1)
The Irishman and the book upon which it is based
The motion picture, The Irishman, premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 27, 2019. The movie featured the remarkable work of director Martin Scorsese and his star-studded cast, including, among others, Robert De Niro (his partner on the project), Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, Anna Paquin, and Joe Pesci.
Writer Steven Zaillian, who won an Oscar in 1993 for his brilliant work on Schindler’s List, wrote the screenplay, based on author and former prosecutor Charles Brandt’s well-written but factually flawed 2004 book, I Heard You Paint Houses, a one-source story based on the supposed life and times of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, along with the events leading up to and in the aftermath of his alleged role as the killer of ex-Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa.
Upon the book’s initial release nineteen years ago—which was published twenty-six years after my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars—I publicly and repeatedly challenged Sheeran’s story that he had killed Hoffa, adding that Sheeran had confessed to many crimes that he, in fact, did not commit.
Based on my research of the murder since 1975, I believed, like many in the law-enforcement community, that Salvatore Briguglio—a top lieutenant to New Jersey labor racketeer Anthony Provenzano, who likely engineered Hoffa’s killing—had done the job.
Notably, I had briefly interviewed Sheeran for my book in March 1978—a week after Sal Briguglio, whom I had interviewed for the fourth time the previous month, was murdered in New York. In my book, I suggested that Sheeran might have played some role in Hoffa’s killing.
That led to a March 22, 1979, letter from Sheeran’s attorney, a former district attorney in Philadelphia, who accused me of defaming Sheeran and demanded a retraction, as well as an apology. Sheeran’s attorney wrote to me:
Mr. Sheeran has recently become familiar with the book authored by you entitled The Hoffa Wars.
Mr. Sheeran wishes me to inform you that he emphatically denies the allegations about his involvement in Mr. Hoffa’s alleged death and to state specifically that your allegation that he was present in Detroit on the last day that Mr. Hoffa was seen is false, unfounded and has been specifically contradicted by evidence supplied by Mr. Sheeran to the Federal Government.
On Mr. Sheeran’s behalf, I demand a retraction and a public apology for all of your many allegations of his activities surrounding and contributing to the alleged disappearance or death of Mr. Hoffa.
My attorney replied to Sheeran’s lawyer, simply saying: “Mr. Moldea stands by his reporting.”
I never heard from Sheeran or his attorney again.
The Zeitts project on Sheeran
I had several interviews with John Zeitts, who had written an unpublished manuscript about Frank Sheeran with Sheeran’s full cooperation in or about 1999—before Charles Brandt and I Heard You Paint Houses came on the scene. Zeitts, an amateur writer and researcher, had done time with Sheeran in prison. The Zeitts-Sheeran book was titled, Stand-Up Guy: Frank “Big Irish” Sheeran.
Before his death in 2011, Zeitts gave me full access to, among other materials, his many hours of audio-and-video-recorded interviews with Sheeran, as well as their draft manuscripts—which contradicted key events in the Brandt-Sheeran book and, thus, conflicted with events in the Scorsese-De Niro motion picture.
For instance, Zeitts recorded a video in 1997 with Sheeran falsely claiming that the FBI had misled another reporter and me to believe that the Teamsters and the Mafia were behind Hoffa’s murder when, according to Sheeran in this recording, the person who orchestrated the killing was former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell . . . and that he had hired a Vietnamese hit team to commit the murder!
This is just one of Sheeran’s many conflicting and even ridiculous versions of the events revolving around Hoffa’s 1975 disappearance.
Essentially, years before the release of the $200 million Scorsese-De Niro motion picture, their main character, Frank Sheeran, had already self-destructed.
Published criticism of The Irishman
From the outset, Brandt’s work was super-charged by the reporting of Eric Shawn, a Fox News reporter who had met and interviewed Sheeran in 2001. Eric became the principal cheerleader for the book and Sheeran’s story. Over the years, Eric occasionally asked me to appear in his filmed reports about Sheeran, allowing me to play the role as his designated naysayer.
However, after eighteen years of enthusiastic and loyal support for the Sheeran-Brandt version of events, Shawn pulled off a sudden reversal, distancing himself from the book even before the movie was released in September 2019.[1]
Before and after its release, The Irishman was besieged by published criticisms of the fabrications in Sheeran's story.
Here is a partial list of those respected authors, writers, and journalists who published articles and broadcasted stories that challenged Sheeran’s lies and fabrications: George Anastasia (Philly Voice), Scott M. Burnstein (Gangster Report), Mark Dawidziak (Cleveland Plain Dealer), Steve Garagiola (WDIV-Detroit), Ken Haddad (WDIV-Detroit), Larry Henry (The Mob Museum), Julie Hinds (Detroit Free Press), Allan Lengel (Deadline Detroit and Tickle the Wire), Mark Perry (American Conservative), Manuel Roig-Franzia (Washington Post), Zak Rosen (WDIV-Detroit), Leo Sisti (L’Espresso), Bill Tonelli (Slate), Nick Vadala (Philadelphia Inquirer), Vince Wade (Daily Beast), and John Wisely (Detroit Free Press).
I published two stories about Sheeran during the fall of 2019.[2] In addition, I participated in a lively symposium at The Mob Museum in Las Vegas about the The Irishman and the Hoffa case in December 2019.
The most prolific and authoritative among the critics was Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith—the author of the excellent 2019 bestselling book, In Hoffa’s Shadow—who published three devastating essays about The Irishman for the New York Review of Books, Lawfare, and the New York Times.
Remaining cool under fire, Scorsese shrugged off these bad reviews with his now-familiar “artistic license dodge,” saying that he and his team had simply purchased the rights to a book and recreated its main character into “our character.”
Meantime, De Niro still remained defiant, insisting that Sheeran had provided the true and accurate version of what had really happened to Jimmy Hoffa.
My 2014 sitdown with Robert De Niro
Since 2008, when De Niro publicly announced his intention to produce a major motion picture with Martin Scorsese based on the life and death of Jimmy Hoffa, attempts were made by mutual friends of ours—specifically former CIA case officer Jack Platt and the respected crime reporter and author, Gus Russo, among others—to arrange a meeting between De Niro and me. After De Niro’s announced commitment to Sheeran’s story, I did not think the meeting would ever happen.
Then, on December 2, 2014, Russo told me that De Niro would be his last-minute guest that night at a twice-a-year dinner that I have hosted since 1988 for published authors at The Old Europe restaurant in the Glover Park section of Washington, D.C. Among his reasons for attending was that he wanted to discuss Sheeran and the Hoffa case with me.
Over seventy unsuspecting authors attended the dinner, shocked and thrilled to see De Niro, who could not have been friendlier, a better sport, or more of a gentleman. He posed for scores of photographs and treated everyone who approached him with respect. He was accompanied by Jane Rosenthal, the president of Tribeca Productions, which she co-founded with De Niro.
Then, as the crowd thinned out, Russo invited De Niro and me to a table in a corner of the restaurant where the three of us could talk privately. A photograph was taken of the meeting.
I was neither pitching nor catching. I did not think De Niro had any interest in doing films about any of my books—so I wasn’t trying to sell him anything. Of course, I admired and respected him. And I hoped that we could walk away from our meeting as friends.
But we immediately got off on the wrong foot as De Niro, in his good-natured manner, got in my face.
Proud that he had purchased the rights to I Heard You Paint Houses six years earlier, De Niro told Gus and me: “This is the book. This is the real story about the murder of Jimmy Hoffa.”
Taken aback, I harshly replied: “With all due respect, you don’t know what you’re talking about. . . . Bob, you’re being conned if you believe that.”
“I’m not getting conned,” he replied.
Along with my discussion about the Zeitts materials and my own interactions with Sheeran, I could not help but note the similarities between the Sheeran/Brandt version of Hoffa’s murder and how the Joe Pesci character got whacked in the classic 1990 Martin Scorsese-Robert De Niro movie, Goodfellas. . . . They were both shot in the back of their heads at the entrances to private residences.
When De Niro generously offered to give me a review copy of the screenplay in return for a signed non-disclosure agreement, I replied that I already had Steve Zaillian’s script, adding that I had a source inside his production team who gave it to me with no strings attached.
The conversation deteriorated from there. Sadly, De Niro and I did not part as friends.
On November 8, 2019, after seeing the movie at its local unveiling, I posted the following to my friends and colleagues on Facebook:
I have just returned from the E Street Cinema in downtown Washington after seeing The Irishman. I filled an entire reporter’s pad with my notes, but I want to see it again before publishing a more detailed review. . . .
For anyone who has investigated the murder of Jimmy Hoffa and can get past all of Sheeran’s bullshit, the movie is a fascinating walk down memory lane.
For those who just enjoy outstanding motion pictures and simply don’t care whether true stories are accurately told, The Irishman is a jolting must-see experience whether on the big screen during its limited run at selected theaters around the country or after November 27 when it exclusively appears on Netflix.
As a mantra, I told reporters: “It is a stunning work of filmmaking by Martin Scorsese—although it appears to be his homage to Oliver Stone’s own film fantasy, JFK, with its great cinema but bad history.”
Before and after the film’s release, news about my warning to De Niro in December 2014 that he was “being conned” by Sheeran’s story generated attention, too. And De Niro, who was defiant, was specifically asked about our meeting:
During a recent interview with IndieWire Executive Editor Eric Kohn, De Niro addressed Moldea’s accusation and did not seem phased by claims The Irishman depicts an untrue story.
“Dan is a well-respected writer. I met him in D.C. for a writers thing where they get together every year. He said that we were getting conned. I wasn’t getting conned,” De Niro said. “I have no problem with people disagreeing. He of course is an authority on Hoffa and everything else. As Marty says, we’re not saying we’re telling the actual story, we’re telling our story. I believed it.”
De Niro continued, “I know one thing — I know all the stuff that Frank said, the descriptions of the places he was at, the way he talked, that’s all real. The way he describes what happened to Hoffa is a very plausible thing to me. I’d love to hear what actually happened to him. But this made a lot of sense to me.”[3]
ENDNOTES
[1] Like it or not, Fox News currently owns the franchise on the Jimmy Hoffa murder case because no other television journalist cares enough about this crime to do what Eric Shawn has done in his role as a chronicler of other reporters’ disclosures and works. To his credit, Eric has kept this case alive.
[2] These were my two stories:
DEM, The Mob Museum, “Is the New Martin Scorsese Movie Based on a True Story?” (Excerpt from Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer), November 1, 2019.
DEM, Deadline Detroit, “Dan Moldea: ‘I warned Robert De Niro The Irishman’s murder story about Hoffa was pure fiction,’” November 3, 2019.
[3] Zack Sharf, IndieWire, “Robert De Niro Defends The Irishman Against Claims It’s Based on an Untrue Story,” November 13, 2019.
Great story, thank you. You might be interested in the work of Richard Wexler, formerly a practicing journalist and for many years director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. Totally different material, of course, but similar to your work in its clarity, rigor, and commitment to keeping the record straight in the face of powerful interests pushing in a different direction.
I’m sure after spending millions to produce a film, neither DeNiro or Scorsese wanted to hear that they got the story wrong . You opened yourself up to being regarded as a conspiracy theorist by them. DeNiro didn’t need to know you already had a copy of the script or where you got it.