AP Photo Alger Hiss, Former State Department official, is interviewed by newsmen after he was released from the Federal Penitentiary, background, after he served 3½ years of a 5 year sentence for perjury in Lewisburg, PA., Nov. 27, 1954.

By ERIC SCICCHITANO

The (Sunbury) Daily Item, via AP

LEWISBURG, Pa. — The Lewisburg federal penitentiary plays a supporting role in the recent hit mob movie, “The Irishman.”

The film, by Martin Scorsese, was released Thanksgiving Eve on Netflix, with the company announcing on Twitter that it had been watched by 26.4 million accounts in just its first seven days.

“The Irishman” tells of the ties between the mafia, the federal government and the country’s most famous missing man, Teamsters Union president James “Jimmy” Hoffa.

AP Photo Teamsters Union President James R. Hoffa, center, shakes hands with one of the Federal marshals who brought him to the Federal penitentiary before being led away by the prison guard, right, at Lewisburg, Pa., March 7, 1967. Hoffa, facing an eight-year sentence for jury tampering, was brought here after surrendering in Washington.

Based on the novel “I Heard You Paint Houses,” the prison is the setting for several scenes featuring actor Al Pacino as Hoffa — eating ice cream and eating punches from another jailed union leader. Hoffa served nearly five years at the penitentiary for jury tampering and fraud, released after his original 13-year sentence was commuted by President Richard Nixon.

Hoffa ranks among the lockup’s most infamous residents. Hoffa was famous before being sent to prison. Others gained notoriety solely because of their crimes.

John Gotti, “Teflon Don” and reputed boss of the Gambino Crime Family, served there. Whitey Bulger served there, too. His own exploits are the basis of several films and TV shows, including “Black Mass” starring Johnny Depp and “The Departed,” a Scorcese movie in which Jack Nicholson depicted “Frank Costello,” reportedly loosely based on Bulger.

Enoch Johnson and Dutch Schultz, central characters to the show “Boardwalk Empire,” were also inmates at Lewisburg.

Paul Vario and Henry Hill are among those depicted serving in “Mafia row” at Lewisburg in yet another Scorcese film, “Goodfellas.” There’s a famous scene from the 1990 flick in which Vario and Hill, portrayed by Paul Sorvino and Ray Liotta, respectively, are among a small group living lavishly by prison standards — drinking wine, cooking steaks, receiving lobsters on ice, slicing garlic with a razor blade.

Here’s a look at the time some famous spent in the Lewisburg penitentiary since it opened in 1932 — one of four federal prisons operated by the Bureau of Prisons after it was established in 1930, but the first built specifically for the government agency.

Jimmy Hoffa

Hoffa arrived at the front gates of the Lewisburg federal penitentiary on March 7, 1967. Dressed in a two-piece suit, the 54-year-old Teamsters Union boss carried a topcoat over his hands to shield the handcuffs clasping his wrists together. He was described as “visibly shaken” but also said to smile and nod to reporters and photographers gathered to observe his entrance.

The warden at the time, Jacob J. Parker, was nonplussed, saying he had no plans for a special meeting with Hoffa.

“We get about 1,000 admissions a year here,” Parker told The Daily Item. “I can’t have a personal meeting with each man when he arrives. I’ll see him when I float through the institution.”

On March 25, 1967, the front page of the Sunday edition carried a story telling of Hoffa’s description as a “model prisoner” and his assignment to the lockup’s mattress factory.

“I think I could only make about three of these a day,” Hoffa reportedly said, according to a newspaper source. The average output was one mattress daily.

In September 1967, The Associated Press reported about Hoffa’s attitude in prison, namely, that he was getting along fine. His main gripe? A bright light outside his cell, sources told the AP.

“If I can get that licked, I’ll be all right,” Hoffa reportedly told a source after a visit to the penitentiary.

The AP reported on his first Christmas behind bars. Thousands of Christmas greetings were reportedly received for Hoffa at the prison. He was allowed only the most basic with printed greeting and signatures. The others were tossed.

The former warden, Ed Brennan, who died in October, was interviewed for a documentary that aired on History Channel, “The Big House.” Available on YouTube, Brennan spoke of his time as a young guard when Hoffa arrived at the penitentiary. He talked about Hoffa’s assignment in mattress manufacturing.

“He came to and from his housing unit just like any other inmate; worked like any other inmate. It was no big deal that he was here. He was just another member of the clientele,” Brennan said in the film.

Hoffa was restricted from conducting any union business. The Teamsters Union aggressively denied Hoffa was working through his attorney. But Hoffa remained president of the organization and his family continued to receive his $100,000 salary — a sum often cited in reports about Hoffa at the time.

On at least three of Hoffa’s birthdays, an airplane flying a sky banner circled above the penitentiary. Twice, The Daily Item captured a photo of the plane in the sky with the banner: “Birthday Greetings Jimmy Hoffa.”

In 1969, reporters watched as Hoffa’s wife, Josephine, and a priest witnessed the plane take off from the Lewisburg airport. They then drove near the penitentiary to look on again.

In 1971, the message changed. Rather than a birthday greeting, the plane toted a banner reading: “Free Hoffa Now, Write President Nixon.”

Maybe it helped.

Nixon commuted Hoffa’s sentence later that year, after Hoffa stepped down as union president. On Dec. 23, 1971, Hoffa left Lewisburg after serving four years, nine months and 16 days.

“Goodbye and have a Merry Christmas,” Hoffa called to fellow inmates as he left, The Daily Item reported in its edition of Dec. 24, 1971.

Hoffa told reporters gathered at the penitentiary that prison life was a challenge. He had a challenge for them, too: “Try and serve 30 days if you don’t think it’s hard.”

Hoffa disappeared outside Detroit in July 1975. Martin Scorsese’s film and the book on which it’s based says he was shot, killed and disposed of in a mob killing. Whether that’s his actual fate remains a mystery still fascinating the public four decades later.

‘Scarface’

Al Capone didn’t spend two full hours in the Lewisburg penitentiary, but it was long enough to pull the prison’s name into headlines the day “Public Enemy No. 1” was set free.

Capone spent years at a federal prison in Atlanta and later, Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay, following his conviction on tax evasion charges. The notorious gangland boss never was brought to justice for the murders tied to his crime syndicate. When he was released early for good behavior on Nov. 16, 1939 — he served 7 years, 6 months, 15 days — he had been spirited across the country for a stealthy exit in Union County, Pennsylvania.

“Scarface Al Capone, freed at Lewisburg; whereabouts Mystery” was splashed above the fold in the Nov. 16, 1939, edition of The Daily Item. Similar headlines were printed across the front pages of newspapers coast to coast.

That day’s report in the Daily Item and elsewhere focused largely on the elusiveness of Capone’s release. There were few photos initially. No interviews at the prison gates. An estimated 50 reporters and photographers from metropolitan newspapers gathered there, many arriving late. Capone was gone and there wasn’t much communication with prison officials or law enforcement, save for a brief official statement from the director of federal prisons.

“He disappeared as though swallowed by the earth following his release and a relentless search by newspapermen spread out from Lewisburg to a number of possible hide-outs,” the article stated.

Three days of reporting found that Capone traveled cross-country by train following his release from Terminal Island Prison in Los Angeles. He was taken through St. Louis, south of the city of Chicago where he once ruled the criminal underworld, and onto Harrisburg where he arrived at 3:54 a.m.

Members of the train crew told the Harrisburg Telegraph they hadn’t a clue Capone was onboard. Reports are that a photographer’s camera was knocked to the ground by a federal agent, though a photo at the train station would surface in The Daily Item on Nov. 17, 1939 — Capone walking with an agent’s hand on his shoulder. The New York Times had a photo that day, too, of a grinning Capone seated inside an automobile at the station.

Capone arrived at the Lewisburg penitentiary at 5:10 a.m. It was still dark. Nearby that same morning on campus at Bucknell University, famed composer Irving Berlin attended chapel before eating lunch with university students and eventually giving a concert. Their separate arrivals in Lewisburg were met with side-by-side headlines in The Daily Item on Nov. 18, 1939.

Berlin didn’t get an escort into town by the penitentiary’s warden. That was reserved for Capone, who arrived at the prison in the personal car of Warden Henry C. Hill. Traveling with Capone and Hill were two federal agents and a doctor. He left undetected at 7 a.m. with his brother, Ralph Capone, through the penitentiary’s back gates in a large black sedan.

The next day on Nov. 18, 1939, Capone was staying at a Baltimore hospital receiving treatment for paresis, a condition caused by his late-stage syphilis. Capone’s mental capacities deteriorated over the years before his death in 1947. He never returned to gangland politics, as described by the FBI’s website.

Soviet spy, ‘Real McCoy’

Other famous inmates include Alger Hiss. He was a State Department official credited for his role in helping establish the United Nations following World War II. It wasn’t long before he was accused of spying for the Soviets, implicated in a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation at the beginnings of the age of McCarthyism.

Hiss’ testimony before the committee was a star turn for a future president, Richard Nixon. Hiss was forced to resign from the State Department in 1946. A hung jury ended Hiss’ first trial in 1949 but the next year he was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to serve five years. He arrived on March 28, 1951, and served 44 months at Lewisburg.

“I’m very glad to be out but I want to reassert my complete innocence,” Hiss shouted on the day of his release, as published Nov. 27, 1954, in The Daily Item. Hiss maintained his innocence until his death in 1996 at age 92.

Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin served part of a three-year sentence at Lewisburg. He was a conscientious objector and refused to report for a physical examination after being drafted into the military in 1943. He was released from prison in 1946, organized the First Freedom Ride into the South the following year challenging segregation laws and helped organize the March on Washington in 1963 where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his speech, “I Have a Dream.”

Author Ralph Ginzburg served at Lewisburg on an obscenity conviction. He is pictured in The Daily Item reading from a copy of the Bill of Rights outside the prison gates on the day he entered the prison, tossing the paper into the trash on his way inside.

John Wojtowicz served five years for his aborted bank robbery in 1972 that inspired the movie “Dog Day Afternoon.”

Airplane hijacker Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., also suspected of being “D.B. Cooper” in the famous unsolved airplane ransom case, commandeered a garbage truck with three other inmates and rammed through the prison’s front gates. McCoy was later killed by FBI agents as they attempted to take him into custody.

“They left water for us on the table and said I had to take a heart pill,” Frank Whittle told The Daily Item in its story about the escape on Aug. 10, 1974. The men carjacked Whittle and tied up he and three women inside a home in Forest Hill.

McCoy was the subject of an investigative book, authored by former FBI agents, published in 1991: “D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy.”