I Heard You Paint Houses


I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa is a 2004 work of narrative nonfiction written by former homicide prosecutor, investigator and defense attorney Charles Brandt that chronicles the life of Frank Sheeran, an alleged mafia hitman who confesses the crimes he committed working for the Bufalino crime family.
The book contains 71 pages of back matter largely detailing independent corroboration of Sheeran's confessions that came to light after the book was first published. The book is the basis for the 2019 film The Irishman, which was directed by Martin Scorsese and starred Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran.
Sheeran's supposed confessions to killing Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Gallo have been disputed by "The Lies of the Irishman", an article in Slate by Bill Tonelli, and "Jimmy Hoffa and 'The Irishman': A True Crime Story?" by Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, which appeared in The New York Review of Books. Chip Fleischer, the book's publisher, wrote a detailed reply to Tonelli's piece, calling it "irresponsible in the extreme, not to mention damaging," which Slate also published. The title is in reference to, according to Sheeran, the first conversation he had with Hoffa over the phone, where Hoffa started by saying, "I heard you paint houses"—a mob code meaning: I heard you kill people, the "paint" being the blood that splatters when bullets are fired into a body.