Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran

Sheeran was a Teamsters official in Wilmington, Delaware, an associate of the Bufalino family, and at the end of his life the source of a confession that would have closed the most famous missing persons case in America if any part of it could be corroborated.

None of it has been. That is the whole difficulty of this page, and pretending otherwise would make the archive worse.

What the record establishes

He was born in Darby, Pennsylvania, in 1920 and served in the 45th Infantry Division through Italy and Germany, in a division that saw as much combat as any in the American army.

He came home to truck driving, moved into a Teamsters local, and became its president. He was close to Russell Bufalino, whose family's business ran through freight, and he knew Jimmy Hoffa well enough to appear beside him in photographs.

At the start of the 1980s he was convicted in a federal labour racketeering case and spent most of that decade in prison. He was released on health grounds and died in a nursing home in December 2003.

What he said

In interviews with the writer Charles Brandt, conducted in his last years, Sheeran said he had killed Jimmy Hoffa in a house in Detroit on 30 July 1975 on Bufalino's instruction. He also said he had killed Joseph Gallo in Umberto's Clam House in 1972.

Why the page exists anyway

A man who confesses to unsolved murders at the end of his life is a documented phenomenon and a poor witness, and it would be easy to leave him out of the archive on that basis.

He belongs in it because everything around the confession is real: the Teamsters local, the Bufalino connection, the racketeering conviction, and the fact that he moved for thirty years in the space between a union and an organisation that needed one. The film made him the man who killed Hoffa. The record makes him something less dramatic and better attested, which is a man who was close enough to the people who might have known.