Robert De Niro Was Warned about ‘The Irishman’s’ Authenticity: “Bob, You’re Being Conned”

The Irishman is a big deal for Netflix. It’s an Oscar-buzzy movie from legendary director Martin Scorsese starring the equally legendary Robert De Niro. Of course it’s a big deal! But, as new reporting from The Daily Beast reveals, it may also be a big lie.

The Irishman tells the supposedly true story of Frank Sheeran (played by Robert De Niro), a truck driver turned mob hitman who took credit for the murder of Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino). Sheeran made those claims, including one that he himself shot Hoffa twice in the back of his head, in the nonfiction crime book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt.

But according to an investigative reporter that literally wrote a book on Hoffa and a number of FBI agents, Sheeran’s story is completely false. The Daily Beast spoke to reporter Dan Moldea, author of The Hoffa Wars (and familiar to anyone who listened to the RFK Tapes podcast), who says that not only has Hoffa’s body never been found, no blood was ever found in the house where Sheeran claims to have done the deed. Moldea posits that Sheeran likely fabricated this story for money, so he could leave behind something for his family (Sheeran passed away in 2003, a year before the publication of I Heard You Paint Houses).

This Daily Beast interview is far from the first time Moldea’s tried to combat the story told in Brandt’s book. He actually warned Robert De Niro, who had been trying to get The Irishman made for years, against making the film. The interaction came in December 2014 at a dinner in Washington D.C. where Moldea says he told De Niro that he’d been duped by Sheeran’s story.

“De Niro couldn’t have been nicer,” said Moldea, who has a photo of himself with De Niro at the dinner to corroborate the story. “Terrific guy. [But] I was very aggressive. I knew I had a finite period of time with this guy. I had to get to the point. I told him, ‘Bob, you’re being conned.'” Moldea says he “talked to [De Niro] the way he talks to people in the movies.”

De Niro, according to Moldea, took the assertion that he was being conned by a dead man’s story about as well as you’d imagine, and he (obviously) didn’t drop The Irishman. It’s in theaters now and comes to Netflix on November 27.

Moldea has his own theory about what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. He posits that Hoffa was actually killed by Sal Briguglio, an associate of Jersey mobster Anthony Provenzano (played by Stephen Graham in the film). Moldea believes Briguglio had help from with his brother Gabe and Thomas Andretta (played by Jeremy Luke in the film). There’s no way to know for sure, though, as Briguglio was murdered in March 1978, right around the time it was rumored he was about to talk to the authorities about Hoffa.

The Irishman hits Netflix on November 27.

Stream The Irishman on Netflix starting November 27