Russell "McGee" Bufalino

Bufalino ran a family of perhaps fifty men from a Pennsylvania coal town and was consulted by organisations twenty times its size. The explanation is not charisma. It is that he controlled the trucking between the New York garment district and the sewing shops in the anthracite valleys, and that he had held that position since before most New York bosses held theirs.

Where the influence came from

He was born in Sicily, raised in Buffalo and western New York, and settled in the Pittston area, where the family had operated since the coal years.

The garment traffic was the durable asset. Manufacturers in Manhattan sent cloth to Pennsylvania to be sewn by non-union labour and needed it back on time. The family did not touch the factories. It moved the freight, and a manufacturer who wanted predictable delivery dealt with the people who provided it.

Apalachin and after

The 1957 meeting at Joseph Barbara's house was in this family's territory in all but the state line. When it broke up and state police took names, Bufalino's was among them.

He succeeded Barbara and spent the next two decades as one of the most frequently surveilled men in American organised crime who nonetheless remained almost entirely absent from the public record.

The convictions

In 1977 he was convicted of extorting a debt, on the evidence of a jeweller he had threatened. After his release he was convicted again, in 1981, of conspiring to have the same witness killed.

He was in his seventies for the first and close to eighty for the second, and the second effectively ended his control of the family. He died in a nursing home in Kingston, Pennsylvania, in February 1994, aged ninety.

The Irishman

Bufalino is the second lead of a film that treats him as the man who ordered the killing of Jimmy Hoffa, on the account of Frank Sheeran. No charge was ever brought against him in connection with Hoffa, and nothing outside Sheeran's account places him in that decision.

What is documented is narrower and more interesting: he knew Hoffa, the Teamsters mattered to his business, and he was one of a small number of people in the country whose opinion on Hoffa's return to the union would have carried weight.