Clara’s Verdict
I started The Irishman on a damp Sunday afternoon and finished it, bleary-eyed, well past midnight. Charles Brandt’s account of Frank Sheeran’s life is one of those books that makes you forget you are listening to a document assembled from recorded interviews. It reads as a novel in its pacing and its revelation of character, but the weight of what is being claimed presses through every page. This is the true-crime account that Scorsese turned into his final great film, and the source material is every bit as compelling as the adaptation, and in some ways more troubling, because the moral architecture here is real rather than constructed.
Published by Hodder and Stoughton and rated 4.4 out of five across thirteen Audible UK reviews, this is a substantial listen at fifteen hours and twelve minutes. It earns its length, partly because the Hoffa mystery is only one strand of a much larger story, and the larger story is what gives the Hoffa confession its full meaning.
About the Audiobook
Frank Sheeran was, by his own account, a man conditioned for violence by his service in the Italian campaign of the Second World War. He describes killing in combat with the same matter-of-factness he later brings to his work for the mob, and Brandt, to his credit, does not soften that continuity. What drew Bufalino to Sheeran was precisely the quality that made him dangerous: a capacity for controlled violence without emotional residue. Sheeran rose to become one of only two non-Italians named in a major RICO suit against the Commission of La Cosa Nostra, alongside figures like Anthony Provenzano and Anthony Salerno. That distinction speaks to the extraordinary trust he had earned within an organisation that was deeply suspicious of outsiders.
The central revelation is Sheeran’s claim that he was responsible for the death of Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters boss whose disappearance in 1975 remains one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in American criminal history. Brandt spent nearly five years in recorded conversation with Sheeran, and the account he has constructed is meticulous in its specificity. The location, the method, the chain of authorisation: Sheeran names names and provides details that cannot be independently verified but are consistent with what investigators had already established. Whether you find the confession entirely credible will depend partly on your prior understanding of the Hoffa case and partly on your assessment of Sheeran as a witness to his own life.
But the book is richer than the Hoffa revelation. The picture it paints of postwar American organised crime, with its tentacles reaching into the Kennedy administration, the Bay of Pigs, the labour movement, and the corridors of mainstream political power, is genuinely staggering in its scope. Brandt is careful throughout to distinguish between what Sheeran told him, what can be corroborated by independent sources, and what remains assertion. That rigour is part of what gives the book its authority.
The Narration
Scott Brick is one of the most reliable voices in American audiobook narration, and his work here is exactly what this material needs. He captures Sheeran’s working-class Philadelphia register without caricature, and handles the moral weight of the confessions without editorialising or imposing a judgment that the text itself withholds. There is a deliberate flatness to Brick’s delivery of the most violent passages that mirrors Sheeran’s own emotional detachment, and that formal choice turns out to be deeply effective. By not emphasising the horror, Brick allows it to accumulate in the listener’s imagination instead, which is the more powerful approach.
What Readers Say
UK listeners are largely enthusiastic. One reviewer described it as absolutely excellent, full of facts and real occurrences, remaining fascinating throughout for anyone with any interest in organised crime. Another praised the way it illuminates connections between the mob, the Kennedy era, and the labour movement, calling it an intriguing look at one of the most interesting periods in American history. The one significant dissent, a three-star review, found the book slow and disjointed, particularly in its handling of Hoffa’s murder, which occupies surprisingly few pages relative to the build-up. That is a fair observation: if you come purely for the Hoffa revelation you will spend most of your time in the broader history of the mob, which is itself the richer subject but may not be what you came for.
Who Should Listen?
Essential listening for anyone with a serious interest in American organised crime, the Kennedy era, the US labour movement, or the mechanics of how power operates outside official channels. It is not a light listen: the moral universe here is genuinely dark and the violence is reported without sentimentality. But for those willing to spend fifteen hours inside that world, it offers something that few true-crime books manage, the genuine texture of a life lived in the shadows of American history, told by a man who had every reason to lie and chose, in the end, not to.
