Saturday, August 17, 2019

The Publisher Of 'I Heard You Paint Houses' Responds To “The Lies Of The Irishman” And The Author Of Slate’s Story Replies.


In a previous post I linked to Bill Tonelli’s debunking of I heard You Paint Houses, the book that is the basis for the upcoming Martin Scorsese and Robert Di Nero crime film, The Irishman, on Netflix, at Slate - www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2019/08/the-lies-of-irishman-netflix-and-martin.html 
Like Tonelli, I don’t believe Frank Sheeran murdered Hoffa or Crazy Joe Gallo. I don’t believe most of the book and although I’ll watch the Irishman when it comes out, I’ll watch it as fiction.
Slate published the publisher’s response to Bill Tonelli’s piece, and Tonelli responded to the publisher.    
Chip Fleischer, the publisher of Steerforth Press, sent the following letter in response to Slate’s Aug. 7 cover story,“The Lies of the Irishman.” Slate is running the letter as it was submitted, followed by a reply from the story’s author, Bill Tonelli. Slate stands by the story. 
To the editors: 
Bill Tonelli’s August 7 write-up for Slate on I Heard You Paint Houses, Charles Brandt’s book about Mafia hit man and Teamsters official Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, is a hit job. It is not journalism in the traditional sense, but rather a glib, intellectually dishonest taunt. Its author, Bill Tonelli, chose to set aside the overwhelming majority of evidence and information contained in the book and provided to him by its author and publisher. Slate’s decision to run the article under the headline, “The Lies of the Irishman” and to add in the subhead “the guy made it all up,” despite the fact that Tonelli’s piece does not contain details of fact in support of such conclusions, is irresponsible in the extreme, not to mention damaging.  A longtime reader of Slate, I expected better. Charles Brandt and I focused on providing Tonelli with evidence and corroboration in response to his agenda-driven questions. His write-up is built upon a base of ad hominem attacks and larded with strong opinions and assertions that, while from experts in many cases, are not supported by facts, and certainly do not disprove anything published in our book. Since publishing I Heard You Paint Houses 15 years ago, we have received substantial independent third party corroboration of its revelations and conclusions, so much in fact that we added a 57-page Conclusion to the current edition to go along with a 14-page Epilogue that was added to the first paperback edition in 2005 detailing much of that corroboration. 
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

No comments:

Post a Comment