This article contains spoilers for the events depicted in “The Irishman.”

“ The first words Jimmy ever spoke to me were, ‘I heard you paint houses,’” said the man now known as “The Irishman” shortly before his death.

The man was Frank Sheeran, and besides being an Irishman, he was also a bagman and hit man for the mob. Jimmy was James Riddle Hoffa, the Teamsters union president whose 1975 disappearance has never been solved, and the paint was not paint at all.

“The paint is the blood that supposedly gets on the floor when you shoot somebody,” Sheeran helpfully explained in the book “I Heard You Paint Houses" (2004), written by a lawyer and former prosecutor, Charles Brandt, based on deathbed interviews with Sheeran and released posthumously.

With the long-awaited arrival of the Martin Scorsese drama “The Irishman” on Netflix on Wednesday, it’s a good time to explain who’s who in the crowded story and to try to answer a question Sheeran himself asks in the film:

“How the hell did this whole thing start?”

The book’s account of Hoffa’s demise has been challenged by experts on the mob and Hoffa, and by journalists who have written about the case. It has been speculated that Sheeran enlarged his role for the sake of a last payday for his family, although most agree that Sheeran’s telling of the buildup to the climax is credible.