I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa »

CHARLES BRANDT is a former prosecutor and Chief Deputy Attorney General of the State of Delaware. A past president of the Delaware Trial Lawyers Association, Brandt is also listed in Best Lawyers in America. He is a frequent speaker on cross-examination and interrogation techniques for reluctant witnesses. He lives in Lewes, Delaware, with his wife and has three grown children.

Corroboration that emerged following publication of the hardcover edition of this fascinating account of a dark side of American history confirms that Charles Brandt has finally solved one of the greatest and most enduring mysteries of our time, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, and created a real-page turner that is sure to become a true-crime classic.

The book’s title comes from the first words Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran. To paint a house is to kill a man; the paint is the blood that splatters on the walls and floors. In the course of nearly five years of recorded interviews Frank Sheeran confessed to Charles Brandt that, among the twenty-five to thirty other hits he handled for the mob and the Teamsters, Sheeran shot Hoffa behind the right ear in the vestibule of a house in Detroit. Just prior to the book’s release a forensic lab team went into the house. Luminal sprayed on the floorboards revealed eight separate spots where blood had been, the pattern and location an exact match of Sheeran’s confession. Over the years the public’s most-asked question about the Hoffa disappearance has been: “Where’s the body?” Thirty years of outlandish speculation has included burial in the end zone at Giants Stadium. Sheeran revealed that after he killed Hoffa, mob boss Russell Bufalino, the man who ordered the hit, told Sheeran that Hoffa’s body was cremated at a funeral parlor in Detroit within an hour of his death. Sheeran also provides stunning new information – information that has been corroborated since the book was published – on two other notorious mob hits: Joseph “CrazyJoey” Gallo, blown away as he celebrated his forty-third birthday in New York’s Little Italy, and Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio, long suspected of being a player in the kill-Hoffa plot. And Sheeran explicitly implicates Hoffa, for the first time, in personally ordering murders in order to retain his own hold on the Teamsters Union while serving as its president.

The New York Times - Bryan Burrough

Houses' is a cut above the usual Mafia memoir. 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. The story is told mostly in Sheeran's voice, with Brandt intervening to provide chapters on Hoffa's career and the legal troubles that sent him to prison. Sheeran doesn't have the eye for detail of a Henry Hill, the oily suburban Judas whose memoir served as the basis for the movie ''Goodfellas,'' but he makes up for it with cool, silencer-smooth prose.