“The Irishman”: An Interview With The Author (Spoiler Alert: He’s A Lawyer)

August 19, 2020

By design, the mystery surrounding the disappearance and murder of Jimmy Hoffa was hard to unravel. Even with its vast resources, the FBI spent more than a quarter-century trying to close the case, but to no avail.

The secrets connecting decades of leads and evidence were locked away in the memory bank of Frank Sheeran, until Charles Brandt discovered the key.

You may not recognize the names of Frank Sheeran and Charles Brandt, or Jimmy Hoffa for that matter. But you probably will recognize the names of director Martin Scorsese and actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, whose 2019 movie “The Irishman” garnered 10 Academy Award nominations.

“The Irishman” is based on the confessions of Sheeran, the real life “Irishman” who executed the hit on Hoffa, his longtime friend and notorious union leader, on July 30, 1975.

Brandt wrote the book upon which the movie is based. Originally titled “I Heard You Paint Houses” and published in 2008, it was renamed “The Irishman” to coincide with the name of the movie. More specifically, Brandt used his skills as a lawyer, investigator and former state prosecutor to extract the full and final confession from Sheeran during the years leading up to his death in 2003.

For those reasons in particular, it was assumed that the members of the North Carolina Bar Association might find it interesting to see how this accomplished author and attorney navigated the perils of the underworld to produce this remarkable story.

Please allow me to introduce Charles Brandt, speaking from his home in Sun Valley, Idaho.

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Where did you grow up?

I have lived in about every part of New York City except the Bronx. I was an adamant anti-Yankee fan; I would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Bronx. I was a Brooklyn Dodger fan as a kid, but I was born in Staten Island. We lived in Staten Island until I was about three and a half years old. My kid sister had developed some respiratory problems, so we had to move from Staten Island because it was conducive to respiratory problems. It was wet and swampy.

We moved to a place on the Brooklyn-Queens border. We were literally in Queens about a block from Brooklyn, but everything was oriented toward Brooklyn. Then I went to four years of high school in Manhattan, commuting from Queens. It was a special school and you had to take a test. It is still in existence. If you passed the test you got to go to this school that emphasized science.

I wasn’t really interested in science, but I had an 11th grade teacher who noted that I had some ability as a writer, and he encouraged me. His name was Mr. Herts, and I acknowledged him in the book. It was because of him that I became an English major in college. I left the city to attend the University of Delaware, which was about a couple of hours south.

How did you learn about the Mafia?

When I graduated from college, I moved to Queens in 1963 and became a junior high school teacher. I did that for a year, and there was slightly more money in being a New York City welfare investigator. I was stationed in East Harlem, and that is where I literally hung out with Mafia types. East Harlem is one of the principal areas, at least in those days, of the Mafia. The other of course was Little Italy in lower Manhattan and Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. There is another area that I shouldn’t leave out, Corona in Queens. There were about four pockets of Italian Americans in New York City and each one of those pockets has Mafia members.

In the meantime, growing up in the Brooklyn-Queens area, we spent every weekend at my grandparents’ house in Staten Island. They had a little farm, and my grandfather had a horse and a wagon, and he peddled produce to the Americans who came to Staten Island for the summer. My father was not Italian, but his family was gone before I was born. Both of his parents had died, so I really did not know his family to the extent that I knew my Italian family (on his mother’s side). As a child I understood Italian when my grandparents spoke to me but as I aged I lost that ability.

Every Sunday in Staten Island was like Christmas. My grandmother made a feast every Sunday. And we had a particular man named Al Alfie who was what they called mobbed-up. He was the head of a restaurant workers union. He would come to the house every Sunday to have that glorious feast, and nobody cared. Well, my father cared (laughter); my father really didn’t like him. But nobody else cared, and it was a rather large family.

I remember my Uncle Al telling us how he got rid of the troublemakers in the union – those who protested what the union was up to. What they would do is they would plant utensils – knives and forks – in the lockers of those people that they wanted to get rid of, and they would find these stolen utensils and fire those people who they wanted to get rid of for cause, for being thieves. I was horrified, and I said to him, “Do these people go to jail?” And he said, “No, we were just trying to get rid of the big mouths, the troublemakers.”

Many years later, when I wrote my first book in 1988, it was a novel called “The Right to Remain Silent.” It was a detective story about a gifted detective when it came to interrogation named Lou Razzi, and Lou got framed. They got some counterfeit money and put it in his locker, and I got that from Uncle Al.

How did you end up going to law school?

I was working in the New York City Welfare Department in East Harlem – a hotbed of Mafia activity. I was a welfare investigator, and at the same time I became friendly with local Mafia people in East Harlem. They have a thing in New York called a candy store. It is a newsstand basically, but it also sells candy and sodas and that sort of thing. That particular candy store was on the corner of my welfare center – it was called Sonny’s – was a Mafia candy store. I would go in in the morning to get a cup of coffee or something and I would hang out with Moe and Sonny and the boss of that block.

I got a bug to go to law school primarily from a girlfriend I had worked with in the welfare department. She was taking the courses she needed to take to get into medical school, and she got in and became a doctor and is still practicing in New York City. She started getting on me that I was not doing anything with my life. I was playing softball for the welfare department team and having a lot of fun, and she would say, “Isn’t there anything that you think you want to do with your life?” And I said that I admired Abe Lincoln as a lawyer, and that from time to time I had thought about going to law school.

The next day she brought in a book on how to take the aptitude test to get into law school. So I said I would take the test to shut her up, and I aced it. I scored in the 97th percentile, so it was like I had no choice: I have to go to law school now. I applied to St. John’s, and a fellow who was going to St. John’s said to me that with my law school aptitude scores that I could get into Brooklyn Law School, and I had never even heard of it. He said it was a much better law school than St. John’s.

Some of the guys I worked with in the welfare department, they were all going to St. John’s, and none of them had gotten into Brooklyn. It was late in the season, and I called the school to find out if I could still apply. I will never forget this conversation with this lady who turned out to be the dean’s secretary. She was not an official of the school, she was an older lady, and I asked her if it was too late to apply to law school. And she asked me, in an Irish brogue accent, “Did you take the law school aptitude test?” And I said yes and that I had scored in the 97th percentile, and she said, “It’s not too late. What’s your address?” She accepted me over the phone!

What led you back to Delaware after law school?

As I was graduating law school (1969), I had friends in Delaware where I had gone to college at the University of Delaware who were now lawyers. They buzzed me and I said I should come to Delaware, where I would have a much better career than in New York City. I was very oriented in law and order, and my friends who were practicing in Delaware assured me that the prosecutor’s office in Delaware always had vacancies.

The law in Delaware is pretty lucrative for corporate lawyers, but they always have vacancies in the Attorney General’s Office. They don’t have district attorneys in Delaware, so all of the law and order stuff comes through the AG’s office. So I decided to take the Delaware bar exam, and moved to Delaware to start a legal career. I got a job in the Attorney General’s Office, and then I was promoted to Chief Deputy Attorney General, and I showed a knack for interrogations. I guess, from growing up in New York City, I had street smarts. It was the gift that was responsible for my career basically. I went from cross-examining criminals to interrogating criminals as Chief Deputy Attorney General in Delaware to, in no time at all, police detectives were turning over the chore of investigations to me because I have this gift. It may have something to do with growing up Italian in New York City, where people talk with their hands a lot. I don’t know where it came from but I had it, and I was renowned for having it.

I worked with the police solving crimes, solving murders, and in no time the police in Delaware were deferring to me. So I was leading the investigations and had a wonderful career at that, but a career that only goes so far. Then I left the office to start my own law practice (1976), and it was a big success. Ultimately I became a medical malpractice lawyer for patients who were injured by the negligence of doctors and hospitals. At the same time I still had a yen for the criminal aspect. While I was practicing law in Delaware as a medical malpractice lawyer, in my spare time I wrote a book called “The Right To Remain Silent.” I had some success with it. It was published by St. Martin’s Press, but I was so busy as a trial lawyer that I didn’t write after that until I retired. When I retired, that is when I wrote the Frank Sheeran book.

How did you meet Frank Sheeran?

When I was practicing law, medical legal issues were my specialty, and Frank was in jail. As a suspect in the Hoffa disappearance, and ultimately as the prime suspect, the FBI went after him and got him for some federal crimes. He was sentenced to long jail time, about 30 years, and while he was in jail serving time in federal prison and state prison, he developed health issues.

By then I was a medical malpractice lawyer dealing with health issues. I already had background in the criminal law as a criminal lawyer, a prosecuting attorney and a Chief Deputy Attorney General in Delaware, but all of that was criminal law against the criminal. Now here I was being contacted by a Mafia figure on behalf of Frank Sheeran to see if I could get him released early from prison on medical grounds.

I agreed to represent him because he did have severe medical problems, and I got him out of jail. He had served about half his sentence when he got out of jail, and he took me and my administrative staff to lunch with eight guys named Rocco who were his cohorts.

He took me aside after lunch with my office paralegals and law partner and said he was tired of being written about as the prime suspect in the Hoffa case and he wanted to tell his side of the story, and he wanted me to tell it.

By then I had written “The Right To Remain Silent” and had a reputation in Delaware as writer, and Frank of course had a reputation in Delaware as a killer. We agreed to meet. He was tired of being written about in all of the books on Hoffa, and he wanted to tell his side of the story, and I knew he had something that he wanted to get off his chest. The prosecutor and interrogator came out in me, and I agreed to meet him in his apartment in Springfield, Pennsylvania.

How did your first interview go?

In no time I had gotten 80 percent of what had happened to Jimmy Hoffa, and I knew I was going to get the rest of it out of him at our next meeting. But something happened in the course of our conversation. I spent five hours with him, and we were coming near the end of my questioning with him, and one of the things I had learned is that the longer you keep a guy talking the more likely you’re going to get new stuff from him. I wanted to keep him talking, and I asked him what was intended as an innocent question: I asked him why there were so many people involved in Hoffa’s disappearance and murder, because he had named them. He said it was because if you go bad, if you begin to turn state’s evidence, that you only know so much of the story. You don’t know what the ones before you did and you don’t know what the ones after you did.

So to keep him talking, I said, “like Lee Harvey Oswald.” He turned to stone when I said that, his voice deepened, and he said, “I’m not going anywhere near Dallas.” Whoa! Neither am I! I knew the Mafia would bug their own people, just to keep them honest, and you don’t want the Mafia to know you know something that could lead you to being killed.

Immediately after that comment, I knew that I needed to change the subject, and I did. “So you only know what you did up to a point?” He just glared at me, and we wrapped it up for the night, and for eight years. I wrote up a treatment, a few pages of it, and he read it in my presence. He turned to stone and said, “You can’t talk about this stuff. There are people who are still alive.” The boss of the crime family, Russell Bufalino, was still alive. And he took it from me, the few pages I had written up, and said, “You can’t talk about this stuff.” And I said that if you change your mind and want to talk some more, give me a call.

Then you waited eight years to interview him again?

Frank continued to have contact with my office. He would call to talk to me from time to time, but I would rarely take his call. I was very satisfied that I was on dangerous ground with him, that if somebody found out what he had told me, and he had named the names and described the roles of all of these people, that I was in jeopardy. Eight years passed, and during that time Russell Bufalino died and some other people who had been involved – names that he had given me – died or had gone to jail.

Most significantly a gangster by the name of Billy D’Elia, who was Russell Bufalino’s nephew and who after Russell Bufalino had died took over the Bufalino crime family, had been arrested for money laundering. He was in the process of becoming a cooperating witness to the FBI in order to have his sentence reduced. Billy got a big chunk off his sentence and publicly now was a cooperating witness with the FBI.

By this time the Mafia was losing its stamina in America, so he began cooperating with them and got a big chunk off his sentence, but he was no longer somebody I had to worry about. So I allowed Frank Sheeran back in, and we began a five-year interrogation in 1999. It ended in 2003 – it was almost five years. He was not in failing health in the beginning, but as time went on his health began to fail. In the beginning we did things together, we had a social life together. He had a girlfriend, and I would take them to dinner, and then I would out of the blue ask him a question. A question here, a question there, and he knew I was going to write a book about it, and he was OK with it.

He clearly wanted to get it off his chest. He loved Jimmy Hoffa and hated what he had to do. But he said to me, “If I ever said no to Russell, Jimmy would have been just as dead, and I would have ‘gone to Australia’ with him.”

To say it was a fascinating experience doesn’t even begin to describe it. But I was satisfied enough people were dead or in jail. One in particular was the head of the Chicago outfit who would call Frank when I was with him and talk to him, and that was Joey “The Clown” Lombardo. He was still out there but under indictment and ultimately he was convicted and went to jail.

Were there ever times when you felt your life was in danger?

Yes – two of them. In the very first meeting that I had with Frank at his apartment in Springfield, Pennsylvania. While I was there he introduced me to a lawyer named Jimmy Lynch “the Catholic.” When I met him my heart sank because I wanted to have Frank alone; that is how you interrogate him. After I while I went to the bathroom, and the phone rang. Frank was on the phone with his head bowed and obviously was talking to someone in authority. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, and another “yes.” He hung up and turned to Jimmy Lynch “the Catholic” and said, “That matter, we have to deal with it now. We’ve got to go downtown,” meaning downtown Philadelphia, where the Mafia was.

And Jimmy says, “What are we going to do with Charlie?” I said, “Guys, I’ve got work to do in my car, I can sit here and do my law work while you’re doing whatever you have to do.” And Frank said, “No, we’ll take him with us. This will be good for us.” Whoa! I felt what the hell, how many opportunities am I going to get to go to some kind of a Mafia meeting? The Mafia was still strong at that point, not as strong as it had been, but it still had some notoriety and strength. We got in Jimmy Lynch’s car, Frank in the front in the passenger’s seat, me in the back seat, and Jimmy is driving. We get to an area in south Philadelphia known as the Mafia area and we pull up across the street from a restaurant called the Mona Lisa.

You have to remember by this time I had been a medical malpractice lawyer for many years. I wasn’t even doing murder cases anymore. I figured out from memory that I had participated in over 50 homicide cases as a prosecutor and could give you the names. This led me to write the first book, “The Right to Remain Silent,” because of all this material from the cases I had solved. To say I was beloved by the police doesn’t come close; they didn’t reluctantly defer to me, they came after me. “We need you!” But I had been around enough crime early in my career that walking into a room full of Mafia people was not unknown to me. I had hung out with the Mafia street boss in East Harlem in his candy store. But there was something about this meeting that made it very different.

I’m sitting in the back seat of the car with a man recently out of prison, and I am aware that those kinds of people often get suspected of cooperating, of exchanging information for an early release. And they often end up dead. So I am sitting there and there is a tap on the window from an obvious gangster, and he says to Jimmy, “you’ll get a ticket here, park over there, across the street.” And while it’s funny now, at the time I nearly jumped out of my skin when he knocked on the window. Jimmy pulled into another parking spot and the three of us get out with me in the rear and Frank in front and we go into the Mona Lisa, just off of South Street. A gangster unlocks the latch to let us in, and I am looking into a room full of Mafia characters right out of central casting. Most of them are sitting at a table and some of them are standing at the bar; there is a room full of them.

As I walk in the doors close behind me and snap shut, and that went right through me. That was about as scared as I have ever been, and I had been very active as a gun-toting Deputy Attorney General. I had made many arrests. I had been in mixed company often, but this was different. I was walking into their world, and I had no reason to know why. What were we doing there? Was it a set-up? Was Frank being suspected of cooperating? Was he suspected of having jailhouse meetings with me, because as I was gaining his release I had to meet with him in jail? Did he get out of prison because he was suspected of giving up information? All of these things raced through my little feeble brain, wondering what the hell am I doing here? And Jimmy Lynch says let’s sit at the bar, and we ordered a couple of drinks. Sitting at the table are Frank Sheeran, “Big Billy” D’Elia whom I did not know at the time, and John Stanfa, the head of the Philadelphia crime family from Sicily, who is sitting at the head of the table as the man in charge of what turned out to be a trial.

What happened was when Frank Sheeran went to jail, he had what they called “money on the street.” There were people out there who had borrowed loan-shark money and they owed it to him. Two members of the Philly family, over the course of 10 years that Frank had been in jail, had been collecting the money on Frank’s behalf. When he got out of jail thanks to me, they claimed they had given that money to the prior boss of the Philly crime family, Nicky Scarpo. Scarpo was in jail for four murders, and he sent word from jail that they did not give the money to him, Frank’s share. He said they gave him half of it and kept half of it for Frank Sheeran. They were on trial now for not coughing up Frank’s share. It was fascinating. I was listening but trying not to look like I was listening. Five hours it took – they had food to eat – but in the end, I felt my grandparents would have put out a much better spread than this stuff.

We get into the car and I am in the back seat again, and Frank says to Jimmy Lynch, “You see the respect I get? They only do this for Italians. Look what they’re doing for me here.” Those two who had been collecting money from a restaurant owner on a loan shark debt and claimed they gave all of it to Nicky Scarpo, this was a trial to decide whether Frank was entitled to half of that money that had been collected for 10 years. And he won. He won his lawsuit. “Look at the respect they give me. Those two have been ordered to pay me my money, $1,500 a week until I tell them they can stop.” I am in the backseat listening to this, and ‘wow’ doesn’t begin to describe it. I entertained myself by thinking as a lawyer, I get a third of that! I was ready to get the hell out of there.

What about the other incident that scared you?

When I wrote the book, I left a lot out because I didn’t want people like Billy D’Elia to know what I knew. Billy did not like me or trust me. The book came out on Memorial Day Weekend of 2004, on Memorial Day. The book had been delivered and was embargoed in bookstores, and was coming out on the shelves that Monday. That Friday before it came out, Billy got a message to my wife: Billy is not happy with Charlie was the message. That is as much as you need to hear to know you’ve got a problem. You mean Billy, the boss of the Bufalino crime family now that Russell is gone, the sole boss, is not happy with me. I said to my wife, “Honey, Billy doesn’t know what is in that book; the book’s been embargoed, he hasn’t seen it. He will read the book and discover that his name is not mentioned a single time, not even a hint of it.” In fact, and I did not report this at the time, Frank Sheeran cautioned me not to mention Billy by name or nickname in the book, and that applied to a couple of other people he said were not pussycats either.

Once Billy became a cooperating witness and was being interrogated by the FBI, the first question they asked him was what happened to Hoffa. And while he did not like me, his answer was, “Read the book.”

Your Staten Island roots came in handy when you met Martin Scorsese?

This is an amusing story. When Scorsese and De Niro read my book and decided to buy the rights to it and make the movie, there was a long delay. The book arrived in 2004 and they bought the rights effectively in 2008. Actually in August 2009 it was Paramount who owned the rights, but they later gave them up to Netflix.

Anyway, they scheduled a meeting, at the time I was living in Delaware. I had graduated Brooklyn Law School and gone to Delaware to have my career as a lawyer. Here I was practicing law in Delaware and the rights to my book were bought by Paramount and De Niro and Scorsese.

Paramount scheduled the meeting with De Niro and Scorsese in Manhattan, and they sent for me to come to New York for this meeting. DeNiro was the prime mover, and he asked me, “Do you have anything else? Do you have any more stories?” And I said, “Yes, I have plenty of them.” They could not be told before because certain people were still alive and active. Billy D’Elia was the biggest problem for me. He took over for Russell, and he didn’t like me even a little bit. Sheeran told him I was OK, all the while Sheeran knew he was serially confessing to me on tape, 25 to 30 homicides.

So we’re at the meeting in New York and they wanted to know about me, my relationship to New York City and my Italian-American heritage. And at one point, Scorsese said, “I lived in Staten Island. My family lived in Staten Island in a place called New Dorp. I have asthma, so the doctor advised that we move off Staten Island because it was aggravating my asthma.” This was similar to my sister’s problem; she had chronic croup, so we had to move off the island because of her chronic coughing.

Then Scorsese says, “My parents loved Staten Island, and my parents were staunch Catholics, and I mean staunch. Nevertheless, when they died, they insisted on being buried in a protestant cemetery in Staten Island, and I could never figure that out.” And then I said, “Let me explain it to you. My grandparents are buried in the Moravian cemetery, that same cemetery that your parents are buried in. The reason for that is when the paisanos came to America, and they came to wherever they came to, the Bronx, or in my case my family arrived in Brooklyn.

“When they wanted to own some land – in Italy they could not own land. Only the padrones, which Russell Bufalino was, could own land. The women could work in the house is a madam, but the peasants could own no land at all. But in Staten Island you could afford to buy land; you could by a small farm for $500. When my family put together enough money, they bought a little farm in Staten Island and they worked it. When they arrived in Staten Island, Father Barletta of the Moravian Church greeted them and spoke fluent Italian, whereas the Irish priest in New Dorp didn’t speak a word of Italian. So their world centered around that church. My grandmother used to take me to see Italian operas with subtitles upstairs in the auditorium at the Moravian church.”

Well Scorsese slapped his knee and said, “Oh my god, you have cleared a family mystery for me.” And I thought to myself, “He’s going to make my movie! This is a gift from God.” And that story made it into this ever-expanding book of mine, “I Heard You Paint Houses.” I say ever-expanding because as new material came in, I would write more and add it on to the book, to the point where it started out at about 300-320 pages and ultimately it is now on sale with close to 400 pages because we kept learning stuff. Anyway, I had that meeting with them in 2009 and they had bought the rights in 2008, but they didn’t release the movie until 2019.

Were you involved in making the movie?

That is another little anecdote that I will tell you. When they started working on the movie, they engaged me as a participant in the script meetings. They put me in a hotel on Broadway and 54th Street. In the mornings when we were having meetings, and we did not have meetings every day, I would walk from the corner of 54th and Broadway and head to the east side of Manhattan to the other side of Central Park to Marty’s house where we would have meetings: Marty (Scorsese), Bob DeNiro, and the screenwriter Steve Zaillian. I was honored because by and large when a writer sells a book to the movies, that is the last time he has anything to do with the movie. He sells it and he pays his way – the price of admission – to see it when it comes out. They don’t want him participating in the movie, for whatever reason, but Marty wanted me in the movie … and he got me.

When I would leave in the morning for a meeting over on the East Side, I would look to the left and say a little prayer because I would look to the left straight down 54th Street and see a tall building that used to be owned by the phone company in New York. In the summer of 1960, I worked in that building as a timekeeper for $65 a week. I would have to walk the beams – five stories to my death if I slipped – for a concrete construction company. I would always say a little prayer of gratitude because I went from making $65 a week risking my life as a young man to having a meeting at Scorsese’s house. I spent a good part of that summer working on the script with them.

Why did it take so long to produce the movie?

Primarily it was the finances. There were so many things that Marty wanted this movie to have, and Paramount was putting up the money. But Paramount was having struggles of its own and they decided to drop the making of the film. And almost immediately Jane Rosenthal, who is Bob DeNiro’s partner, called Netflix and told them what was happening, and that Paramount was dropping out, and they made the deal over the phone.

They were immediately interested. The movie itself is a three-hour movie and it took a lot of work to make, and they had me available. Once the script was done, the last script they gave me, I told them it was perfect, and that I was heading back to Idaho to be with my family. They assigned a researcher to me, and while I was in Idaho they had me continue to work with them on the script over the phone. It was a wonderful experience. There was a lot more that they needed, smaller things mostly that were specific to the material, but it ranged all over the place.

How did the title change come about?

A movie or a book often has what they call a working title, and then there is a more legitimate title. In this case, almost from the beginning of the involvement of the movie people, they began calling it by the working title, “The Irishman.” I had called it “I Heard You Paint Houses” because my agent, when he got to that part of the proposal, said “there’s your title: I Heard You Paint Houses,” which I had explained in the book (paint houses = kill people). But for the movie people the working title was “The Irishman.”

So one day at one of our meetings, I said to Marty before the meeting started, “What are you guys going to call this?” And Marty said, “Steve likes the title ‘The Irishman,’ but Bob and I prefer the title ‘I Heard You Paint Houses,’ the title of the book.” At that moment the phone rings and Steve leaves the room; he had to take the call. And Marty continues in Steve’s absence, “Don’t go by what Steve says. It’s what Bob and I want, and we prefer ‘I Heard You Paint Houses.’ ” And I said, “I hope you stick to that, because it will mean millions to me.” Marty says, “It’s what we want that counts,” and Bob is shaking his head.

But at some point as we got closer to having a movie, Netflix said they wanted it called “The Irishman” because that is what it had been called for so long as a working title and every article that had been written about it had that title. So I left that meeting thinking this will really be good for sales, and my publisher and agent thought the same thing, but as we got closer to having the movie I got word the people at Netflix had prevailed and they were using the title “The Irishman.”

Marty’s producer, a woman by the name of Emma Tillinger, calls me because my credit at the beginning of the movie reads “Based on the book ‘I Heard You Paint Houses’ by Charles Brandt,” and they want to know if they can remove “I Heard You Paint Houses” and just say, “Based on a book by Charles Brandt.” And I said, “Of course, whatever you guys want to do. All I want from Marty is that he create a masterpiece here.” And then she says, “Well, he has.” They considered it a favor on my part. And then she says to me, “You’ll see that the movie has two titles, ‘I Heard You Paint Houses’ and ‘The Irishman.’ ‘The Irishman’ is the official title, but once you see the movie you will see that it begins with the title ‘I Heard You Paint Houses,’ and you’ll see that the spirit of the original screenplay is ‘I Heard You Paint Houses.’ ” We ended up doing very well with the titles, and I thank Marty and Bob and Emma and whoever decided to get us in the title anyway, and that is essentially what happened. The movie is called “The Irishman” and it is billed as “The Irishman,” but when you go to watch it the first thing that you see is the movie is called “I Heard You Paint Houses.”

It actually ended up being two releases. We had the book, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” and in the book business that is called the classic edition of the book. It is red in color, and in black is “I Heard You Paint Houses,” and in a black circle is “‘I Heard You Paint Houses,’ directed by Martin Scorsese.” And there is what is known as the movie tie-in edition. It is the same book word for word, only this one has the three movie stars on the cover. That is the one called “The Irishman,” and we’re selling more of “I Heard You Paint Houses” by the way. We were at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, then we went off the list, the top 15, and now we are back on the top 15. We’re on it as “I Heard You Paint Houses,” and my publisher believes we’re not getting credit for sales of “The Irishman.”

In your wildest dream, did you ever imagine such success?

My wife and I are still on cloud nine about the success of it. Every day there is some reminder. For example, yesterday we went back on The New York Times bestseller list, no doubt from the notoriety of The Oscars. Even though we didn’t win any, we were nominated, for 10 of them.

I am personally very grateful to Netflix. They’re the reason this book is a movie, them and Bob. He actually led the way, right from the beginning. He was making another Mafia movie called “The Winter of Frankie Machine” and the screenwriter gave him a copy of my book, the first edition, which was a hardback. It was much smaller because a lot has been added because I uncovered more information.

So this guy named Eric Ross – I’ve never met him yet – he gave the book to Bob for research for his Mafia movie: You might find some stuff in here. And Bob did, and he gave the book to Steve Zaillian, and Steve did. And the two of them, they gave it to Marty, and he and Bob and Steve decided it was going to be their next movie, and they dropped “The Winter of Frankie Machine.”

Even though there were problems, from that first meeting in 2009 and we did not see a movie until 2019, but oh my god, it was worth the wait.

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Russell Rawlings is director of communications and external affairs for the North Carolina Bar Association.

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This article is part of the August 2020 issue of North Carolina Lawyer. Access a curated view of NC Lawyer or view the table of contents.