Jimmy Hoffa’s love life will be addressed in Martin Scorsese’s heavily-anticipated mob “supergroup” movie The Irishman, currently filming and chronicling the relationship between the iconic slain labor union boss and east coast mafia hit man Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran. Hoffa’s been missing since the summer of 1975, a victim of a beef with his one-time benefactors in the underworld.
According to recent reports from the set announcing the casting of Academy Award winning supporting actress Anna Paquin as Sheeran’s rebellious daughter Peggy, a subplot of the story will revolve around the Peggy character’s growing attraction to Hoffa. Whether Hoffa, a frequent adulterer despite his public image at the time as a staunch family man, and Sheeran’s young daughter ever carried on a romantic relationship in real life is unknown.
Paquin, 35, is best known for her starring role as Sookie Stackhouse in the HBO vampire drama True Blood and for her work in films like The X-Men franchise, The Piano, She’s All That and Almost Famous. She won the Oscar for The Piano in 1993 at just 11 years old and the 2009 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Drama for True Blood.
Robert De Niro is playing Sheeran and Al Pacino is cast as Hoffa in the $100,000,000 megawatt Netflix production gunning for a late 2018 or early 2019 release. Based on the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charlie Brandt in which Sheeran claims to have been the man responsible for shooting Hoffa to death 42 years ago, the movie will also include Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel as the pair of Pennsylvania mob dons – Russell Bufalino and Angelo Bruno, respectively – Sheeran worked for out of his Delaware Teamsters branch. The FBI and most experts and historians don’t give Sheeran’s admission much weight.
The 62-year old Hoffa, president of the mammoth Teamsters union from 1958 until he stepped down while in prison in 1971, disappeared from a Bloomfield Township, Michigan restaurant parking lot on the afternoon of July 30, 1975. His body has never been found. At the time of his kidnapping and murder, Hoffa was feuding with his former allies in the mafia. The day he vanished he was on his way to a lunch meeting with mob powers Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone of Detroit and Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, representing the Genovese crime family in New York.
Anna Paquin
Hoffa married his wife Josephine in 1936 and the pair had two children – their daughter Barbara is a retired judge and their son James P. Hoffa has been the president of the Teamsters for the past two decades. The role of Josephine Hoffa in The Irishman will be played by Welker White, best remembered as Lois the superstitious babysitter in Scorsese’s classic Goodfellas.
Those once close to Hoffa describe him as a loving husband and father, but a rampant womanizer as well. Around the time he wed Josephine, Hoffa was having a love affair with infamous Midwest gun moll Sylvia Paris, an aspiring actress and model known to have dated multiple gangsters in Detroit, Kansas City and Chicago. Tony Giacalone had an affair with Paris too. Both Hoffa and Giacalone served as surrogate father figures to Paris’ son Chuckie O’Brien, who followed Hoffa into the Teamsters and may have been involved in the conspiracy to murder him, however has never faced any charges.
According to a Michigan State Police report from the 1960s, one of Hoffa’s girlfriends in Florida was instructed by Giacalone to rob Hoffa’s safe located in a luxury high-rise Miami apartment building and bring the items retrieved from the theft back to him in Detroit. Giacalone is considered the No. 1 suspect in the still-ongoing Hoffa homicide investigation despite having died himself of cancer in February 2001 while under indictment for racketeering.
It wasn’t only Hoffa himself partaking in extramarital activity. Per FBI records, in 1966 Hoffa sought permission from then Detroit mob don Joe Zerilli to have local mafia figure Anthony (Tony Long) Cimini killed for having an affair with his wife Josephine. Cimini was a button man with deep ties in the Teamsters. Zerilli denied Hoffa’s request to bump him off and Cimini died of natural causes in 2005.
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