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Local boss allegedly ordered Hoffa hit

By Justin J. Henning TRIBUNE REGIONAL STAFF 03/18/2004
Northeastern Pennsylvania-based mob boss Russell Bufalino ordered the July 1975 killing of Jimmy Hoffa, according to a confession.

An undated confession purportedly written by the late Frank “Big Irish” Sheeran, a former official and a longtime Hoffa loyalist, claims he disposed of Jimmy Hoffa’s body on orders of Mr. Bufalino, a Kingston resident who died in 1994 and had been head of what authorities said was a powerful crime family.

Mr. Sheeran, who died in December at age 83 in a nursing home in Chester County, said in the confession he got rid of Mr. Hoffa’s body in a Detroit-area incinerator.

Moscow resident James Kanavy, who worked for the Pennsylvania Crime Commission from 1973-94, said the new confession could be plausible.

“Frank (Sheeran) was close to Bufalino and people up here,” Mr. Kanavy said. “He knew Jimmy Hoffa, he knew all these people who know. But only a few people really know what happened, and they’re dead.”

The only person to have heard Mr. Sheeran confess was his onetime agent and manager, Harry Jay Katz, 63, who said Mr. Sheeran told him in 1996.

According to Mr. Katz, Mr. Sheeran said he “shot Hoffa in the car and took him to an undisclosed location” in the Detroit area where the body was destroyed.

Yet a cloud of skepticism still hangs over the claim. Mr. Sheeran’s daughter, Dolores Miller, of West Chester, said she thought the document was created by Sheeran biographer John Zeitts of Omaha, Neb., to upstage a book to be published in June by another biographer.

KNIGHT RIDDER TRIBUNE wire service contributed to this report.
�Scranton Times Tribune 2004

tags: regional