Charles Brandt Audiobooks

The Irishman: the deathbed confession behind Scorsese's mob epic

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Who is Charles Brandt?

Charles Brandt spent his career on the other side of the tape recorder. Before he wrote anything he was a homicide prosecutor and then Chief Deputy Attorney General of the state of Delaware, a job that involved a great deal of listening to men explain what they had done. Born in 1942, he came to writing late and through the door of the interview room rather than the writing school.

His subject found him in the shape of Frank Sheeran, a Teamster official and enforcer dying in a Delaware nursing home. Across nearly five years of recorded conversations Sheeran confessed to Brandt that he had carried out more than twenty five killings for the mob, and that he had shot his friend Jimmy Hoffa. The resulting book, I Heard You Paint Houses, takes its title from the first words Hoffa ever said to him.

Whether Sheeran told the truth remains fiercely disputed by journalists and historians. What is not disputed is that Brandt got him to talk. He died in 2024, aged eighty two.

Charles Brandt in audiobooks

Published here under the film’s title, The Irishman is the Sheeran confession in full. Fifteen hours of it: the union politics, the Bufalino family, the Kennedys, Hoffa’s disappearance, and the flat, unrepentant voice of a man setting his accounts in order before he dies. The film compresses; the book does not.

Scott Brick narrates, and he is the right man for it: a specialist in American true crime who knows how to let a monstrous sentence pass without editorialising. Coming to it after Scorsese’s film is a strange and rewarding experience, because the book gives you the raw testimony without the elegy.

Take it as testimony rather than verdict, and it becomes one of the most gripping crime listens on our shelves. Judge it for yourself below.