Joe Coffey, who inherited the Gallo case from original investigators, reported that based on eyewitness testimony and crime scene reconstruction police always believed the Gallo shooter was a lone man. Coffey also asserted that police circulated a false story about three shooters to help screen information from supposed witnesses or informers: anyone who reported three gunmen rather than one was immediately deemed unreliable. Author Charles Brandt notes that "[Luparelli's] statement was never corroborated in a single detail" and resulted in no arrests. Brandt further speculates that Luparalli's confession was most likely disinformation ordered by his Colombo family superiors intended to defuse tensions after the Gallo shooting. Umbertos was owned by associates of the Genovese crime family, which would normally imply the Genovese family had given their blessing to a killing on their territory. But Luparelli's account, that the shooting was a spontaneous unplanned act without approval from high-ranking mafiosi, took pressure off the feuding Colombo and Genovese families. A differing but equally disputed<ref name="esq">[https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a30061890/joseph-crazy-joe-gallo-the-irishman-true-story/ The Irishman'''s Joe Gallo Was One of New York's Most Famous Reputed Mobsters], Esquire</ref> account of the murder was offered by Frank Sheeran, a hitman and labor union boss. Shortly before his death in 2003, Sheeran claimed that he was the lone triggerman in the Gallo hit acting on orders from mobster Russell Bufalino, who felt that Gallo was drawing undue attention with his flashy lifestyle. Coffey and several other New York police officers are confident that Sheeran killed Gallo. Furthermore, an eyewitness at Umbertos on the night of the incident, later a New York Times editor who spoke on condition of anonymity, also identified Sheeran as the man she observed shooting Gallo. Jerry Capeci, a journalist and Mafia expert who was at Umbertos shortly after the shooting as a young reporter for the New York Post, later wrote if he were "forced to make a choice" about who shot Gallo, Sheeran was the most likely culprit. Bill Tonelli disputes the truthfulness of Sheeran's claim in his Slate article "The Lies of the Irishman", as does Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith in "Jimmy Hoffa and 'The Irishman': A True Crime Story?" which appeared in The New York Review of Books. Former Colombo family capo Michael Franzese, also disputes that Sheeran was the killer when reviewing the scene depicting the assassination in The Irishman, claiming that 'he knows for a fact what happened there' based on