Mafia and Truth; The Irishman and Lies
I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by: Charles Brandt is an enthralling work of True Crime writing. I read it during this past busy week for myself and sincerely regretted being forced to put the book down every time other work or obligations–this whole trying-to-start-a-writing-career-from-fucking-nothing thing does take work and time–would draw me away. Charles Brandt’s prose is better than adequate, it’s actually quite smooth and readable and is less afraid of real emotion than you are led to expect from the beginning of the book. Frank Sheeran is an endlessly fascinating character who–while clearly a criminal piece of shit that I’d never want to spend any significant amount of time with–shows just enough signs of remorse and humanity to make him more interesting, allows you to almost sympathize with him. The claims in the book; that Sheeran murdered Jimmy Hoffa and dozens of others, that the mafia and specifically Sheeran were involved in both the JFK assassination and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, that as a non-Italian he ascended to the heights of the Italian mob while essentially becoming besties with someone the book claims is one of the most important figures in the mafia, Russel Buffalino; all, while you’re reading the book, seem just outrageous and fucked up enough to be true. Which, of course, only made the book that much harder to put down.
The Irishman, a 2019 Netflix film directed by: Martin Scorsese is probably of the rarest class of movie adaptations out there. It is a movie that is better than the book it is inspired by in essentially every way. The movie doesn’t just tell you how Sheeran says the Hoffa killing occurred and its aftermath, it makes you feel the weight of the betrayal as Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) murders one of his closest friends and a man he truly admires, Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). It makes you understand, viscerally, how this one dark act empties the man, turns everything he professed to believe in into a lie. You can see it in De Niro’s eyes. The movie doesn’t simply give you the details of a long life of crime, it makes you understand and suffer through the impact that kind of life would have on the man himself and everyone around him. One of Frank’s four daughters does not just have a letter she wrote to the author about living with a man like that shoved into one of three–quite defensive in tone–epilogues, afterwords, or conclusions. Instead, in the film, she confronts him with it. The toxic effect of growing up with a mafia father. The speech she gives him near the end of the movie is discomforting and painful in just the way it needs to be, and is the emotional climax of the movie. It is, like all great movie scenes, something that will stick with you for a long time afterward. The book doesn’t really even mention Sheeran’s loneliness, even if it is often apparent. I first saw Scorsese’s film with a large group of friends in a small downtown Denver movie house. The last thirty minutes of the–very long–movie are among the loneliest I’ve ever felt in a theater. The movie is funnier than the book, the writing is sharper, there are shots in it that could be framed and hung up as art. The score is beautiful. It is one of Scorsese’s best films.
And apparently, both the book and the film are based on bullshit.
The book, and therefore the movie that was based upon the book, are founded on a series of interviews, interrogations, and confessions Charles Brandt conducted on Frank Sheeran. Charles Brandt says he worked on Frank Sheeran for almost five years, and he mentions numerous times that he is an experienced prosecutor and police interrogator who has broken numerous major cases. He also mentions a crime novel he wrote with a main character based upon himself quite a few times, but nothing in how he described the story or the character felt anything more than self-serving or made me want to read his fiction. Anyway, according to Brandt, he coerced these confessions out of Sheeran, made him stand by the book via videotape shortly before his death, and independently corroborated Sheeran’s assertions as much as he could.
Many, many people disagree with what Sheeran said. They say he “made it all up.” That he was never nearly as high up in the mafia as he claimed. That he was a drunk who never killed anybody. That Russell Buffalino was nothing more than a small time player. That he wasn’t even in Detroit at the time of Hoffa’s disappearance. That there is no proof that the mafia, and especially Frank Sheeran, were at all involved in JFK’s assassination.
And some people disagree with the disagreement. Charles Brandt himself spends the last 80 pages or so of the book, in the 2016 edition at least, defending each of the major claims he and Sheeran have made with increasing rigor and fervor. When you’re reading those 80 pages, most of his defenses and corroborations come across as persuasive. It all seems to hold together. Although, honestly, the longer that defense went on, the less inclined I was to believe him, the more it just sounded like someone shouting ‘I’m right! You’re wrong!’ over and over again. But it never collapses completely. The more you look into it, the harder it becomes to determine who is correct and who is not.
However, after reading the book once and watching the movie twice, I could not tell you if all of that matters. Does truth matter in fiction? It certainly should matter in True Crime writing, just like it should matter in journalism, in law, in reality. (Should, of course, is unfortunately very different from does, but we’re not going to get into all that today.) Which I think is why Charles Brandt’s defense of his work is so different than Martin Scorsese’s. Brandt stands by his claims, he says he’s found the truth. Scorsese says it doesn’t matter. Both he and De Niro say, essentially, that the specifics of history and reality are secondary to the larger human truth they were trying to achieve.
I am pretty sympathetic to these arguments. Admittedly, there is some personal bias at play here as someone currently in the middle of an attempt to become a successful fiction writer, but my gut says the point of fiction isn’t to exactly copy reality. Instead, fiction is meant to help us understand reality. And The Irishman does help us understand a certain kind of reality, a certain kind of man; and the lingering, widespread costs of both. None of that understanding requires the explicit, factual knowledge of who killed or didn’t kill Jimmy Hoffa. If fiction had to stick to reality and nothing else then we would lose Sci-fi and Fantasy as viable genres. If fiction couldn’t tell us lies that told the truth then we wouldn’t have Fargo or Robinson Crusoe; both works of fiction that claimed to be ‘based on a true story’ but very much weren’t. Fiction, I believe, needs to be given room to explore beyond the bounds of immediate facts to help us make sense of our world and ourselves. The Irishman does just that and does it well.
But one of those dissenting articles I linked above, the one that links to the Lawfareblog, is written by the stepson of a man named in both book and movie as a conspirator in Jimmy Hoffa’s murder. His stepfather’s life was damaged in a significant way by the initial accusation in the 70’s, then damaged again by the release of the book in 2004, and has now been damaged one more time in 2019 by the release of the film. The stepson claims that his stepfather was on the other side of town when he was alleged to have picked up Hoffa and driven him to his murder. If that claim is correct then both book and movie will have caused serious pain, including depression and lack of career advancement, to an innocent man for nothing more than story or money or truth. It is hard, in the face of that, to claim that fiction has no obligation to reality.
So maybe there is no easy answer to the question of who is in the right and who is in the wrong with The Irishman and I Heard You Paint Houses. Just as there might be no viable easy answer to who really killed Jimmy Hoffa. I know, second blog post ever and I’m already going to end this on a shrug. But this has been something on my mind for a few days now and I believe it is something worth thinking about. What does fiction owe to reality? And what do those who consume that fiction owe to the lives it may have touched? It’s tough to say but worth considering. Which maybe proves Scorsese’s point, in the end. The best fiction makes you think after all.
Right?
