Through hours and hours of surveillance, Egan and the boys from SCU began to amass an updated West Side dossier. Not only were they getting a sense of the key players, but also of their daily routines and where they conducted their business. Although the cops heard plenty of barroom gossip about the recent rash of killings—all of which they passed on to local Homicide detectives—their own focus was much broader. The strategy was to keep methodically collecting details until events kicked the investigation into a higher gear.
Each day, after a long surveillance, Richie Egan would return to Intelligence headquarters on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan and fill out his daily log. Traditionally, an investigation is given a name by one of the detectives involved. Sometimes, there’s even a friendly competition to see who can come up with a name that sticks. This time, however, there was little argument. WEST SIDE STORY was the name Egan wrote down on the top of his surveillance report, and the other detectives immediately followed suit.
The first big break came in February 1978. Through Frank Hunt, a police officer at the Midtown North precinct who was well connected in Hell’s Kitchen, Intell got a lead on a possible confidential informant, or “C.I.” Hunt tipped them off that there was a kid in his late twenties who was up to his neck in debt with three or four neighborhood loansharks, including Tommy Collins, Tony Lucich, and a free-lance operator named Harry “the Hat” Wedgemont. The kid was soft, Hunt thought, and might be willing to cut a deal if the right pressures were brought to bear. When the kid got arrested for beating up his girlfriend, Intell made its move. They pulled the kid out of arraignment and gave him an option: He could take his chances back in the neighborhood, where he might wind up dead. Or he could go in with them.
The only way he would cooperate, the kid said, was if they could give him twenty-four-hour protection. “That,” replied Sergeant McCabe, “is definitely out of the question.” After further prodding, the kid caved and reluctantly agreed to make a $100 loanshark payment, with cash provided by the cops, while wearing a body recorder.
Over the next few weeks, the C.I. made many more recorded loanshark payments. Lieutenant George Ahrens, McCabe’s supervisor, passed the recordings along to Michael Carey, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Carey thought they might constitute the beginnings of an indictment. He made a call to the FBI, which also thought the investigation looked promising.
To McCabe, Egan, and the others at SCU, it was an exciting development. The trick with any Intelligence investigation is to acquire enough data to lure one of the big operational agencies into the picture. That’s when the arrests get made. If the FBI was going to come on board, as they were now indicating they would, it meant the case would go federal—a feather in everybody’s cap.
The decision was made to take the investigation to the next stage. The Intelligence Division, now working with the U.S. Attorney’s office, felt their C.I. should open a candy store in the neighborhood, which they could then use as a virtual intelligence headquarters. The regional FBI contact liked the idea—an important approval since it was the FBI that would be funding the operation. An application was filed at the FBI headquarters in Washington for approximately $3,600 to set up the candy store—a relatively small sum for such potential big returns.
Meanwhile, Egan and the other Intelligence cops on the street were running their C.I. ragged. They would follow him to places like Fran’s Card Shop, a candy store at 746 9th Avenue owned by Tony Lucich’s wife, where he would make loanshark payments and settle gambling debts. Another frequent drop-off spot was the Westway Candy Store on 10th Avenue, run by Donald Mallay, who was beginning to figure more and more prominently in their surveillances.
Before long, the C.I. started to get nervous. The plan was to have him make his payments regularly at first, then act less and less able to come up with the money. Presumably, this would anger the loansharks and set events in motion. Things had, in fact, proceeded as planned, which is exactly why the C.I. was scared.
“You don’t understand,” he said to Egan after one loanshark warned him that he’d have Mickey Featherstone take care of things if he didn’t get his money. “These guys’ll cut my nuts off if they find out what I’m doin’.”
The C.I. operation came to a crashing halt one afternoon when Egan and Ocasio spotted Featherstone with his newborn baby in a neighborhood park near St. Clare’s Hospital. The detectives had information that Featherstone was selling marijuana out of a baby carriage on the street. While they watched Mickey from an undercover taxi, the detectives told the C.I. they wanted him to attempt a drug deal with Featherstone while wearing the body mike.
The kid became apoplectic. “There’s no fuckin’ way you’re gonna get me to go near that guy with a wire,” he stated emphatically. “No fuckin’ way!” When the cops insisted, the C.I. ripped the wire from his chest, taking off some flesh in the process. When the cops still insisted, threatening to expose him as an informant if he didn’t cooperate, the C.I. wet his pants in the backseat of the cab.
Shortly after that the kid fled the neighborhood. Then word came down from FBI headquarters in Washington that the request for $3,600 had been inexplicably denied. As a result, the FBI dropped out of the investigation and the U.S. Attorney’s office lost interest.
For the time being, things had stalled. But with such a “glamorous” investigation, one that included murders, extortion, and old-time racketeers, Richie Egan and the other Intelligence cops knew it wouldn’t stay that way for long.
Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey walked into Paparazzi, an elegant restaurant/saloon on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and took his favorite seat at the bar. The commanding officer of an elite, citywide unit known as the Organized Crime Homicide Task Force, Coffey was the living embodiment of the cop as celebrity. In recent years, through his association with many high-profile crime cases, he had become a familiar figure on the local TV news. But even without this, Coffey was the kind of guy you noticed when he walked into a room. With his impeccably tailored suits and six-foot-two-inch frame, he looked like the kind of detective you might see on an NYPD recruitment poster.
On this particular October evening business was the last thing on the Sergeant’s mind. Along with his chauffeur, he had stopped into Paparazzi looking to unwind after a long day’s work. But while there, he met a boyhood acquaintance he hadn’t seen in years. They got to talking about the old neighborhood in Queens, where Coffey’s family had moved from an apartment in Manhattan when he was a kid.
“Hey,” said his old neighborhood buddy, “did you hear about Toby Walker’s kid?” Toby Walker was a mutual acquaintance from the old days.
“What about him?”
“He got murdered on the West Side.”
Something in Coffey’s mind clicked. He had seen a homicide report a few days earlier in Chief of Detectives James Sullivan’s office about somebody named William Walker, whose body had been found at the West 79th Street Boat Basin on October 3, 1978.
“Was that Toby’s son?”
The acquaintance nodded. “And what makes it worse, everybody knows who did it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He was playin’ shuffleboard in a West Side gin mill with this kid McElroy. Jimmy McElroy, West Side Irish. They had an argument. He left the place with this McElroy. That’s the last they seen him.”
“No shit?”
“Ask around, Joe, you’ll see.”
“I might just do that.”
The next day Coffey pulled the file on the Walker homicide. Just like the guy said, Walker had last been seen at the Sunbrite Bar with James McElroy. There was also a notation that McElroy hadn’t been spotted in the neighborhood for a week; he’d apparently gone on the lam. At the time, the focus of Cofffey’s Homicide Task Force was almost exclusively La Cosa Nostra. But he told Chief Sullivan, “Look, I know it’s not mafioso, but let me take a look at this one. I got a personal interest.”
Joe Cofffey knew a thing or two abo
ut the Irish Mob. Most of it he’d learned from his old man, who drove a beer truck during Prohibition and was a boyhood chum of Eddie McGrath. After Prohibition, McGrath took over the West Side docks, but Joe Coffey, Sr. forswore his criminal contacts and drove a delivery truck for Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and some of the other large department stores. In 1946, he co-founded Local 804 of the Teamsters Union.
Coffey had grown up hearing stories from his father about the West Side Irish Mob. In fact, in the late 1940s the murderous John “Cockeye” Dunn, McGrath’s triggerman, had made efforts to take over Teamsters Local 804 by threatening the life of Joe Coffey, Sr. The only thing that saved Coffey was that he knew McGrath, who intervened on his behalf. Joe Jr. always remembered this story. He remembered how the gangsters were always trying to intimidate legitimate working people. It was one of the reasons he had become a cop.
After seven years as an investigator in Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan’s office, Coffey was selected to head the city’s first Organized Crime Homicide Task Force. When Chief Sullivan approached him to form the unit following a rash of gangland slayings in February and March of 1978, he was told he could handpick his own team. Not surprisingly, he turned to cops like himself—high-rolling, streetwise operators who didn’t mind if their names or pictures wound up on TV or in the newspapers. They had citywide jurisdiction to go anywhere and do whatever it took to crack the Mob, and they behaved with the sort of brashness you’d expect from superstar cops.
Among other things, Coffey didn’t hesitate to use the press in his investigations, a technique that earned him the nickname “Publicity Joe.” He knew that many cops and prosecutors didn’t care for his methods, but he wrote that off as jealousy. “The fact is,” Coffey used to say to anyone who would listen, “if properly used, the press can play an important role in the investigative process”—and if they doubted him, they could just look at his record. It had worked in the infamous “Son of Sam” serial murder case when Coffey made a direct plea to the public for information. In fact, it worked a lot. (In seven and a half years of existence, the Organized Crime Homicide Task Force helped solve over eighty murders.)
Coffey chose Frank McDarby and John McGlynn as his partners in the West Side investigation. He’d first worked with these two detectives twelve months earlier on a case involving a terrorist bombing at Fraunces Tavern, a historic landmark in Manhattan’s Wall Street area. Like Coffey, McDarby and McGlynn were Irish Catholic, and they shared Joe’s outrage that these West Side toughs were using their ethnic heritage as a framework for their criminal deeds.
McDarby and McGlynn shared another trait with Coffey: they were well over six feet tall. Together, the three of them looked as much like linebackers with the New York Giants as detectives with the NYPD.
The first thing Coffey and his men did was call the Intelligence Division, where McCabe was happy to provide them with all the necessary background material, including files on the murders of Paddy Dugan, Ruby Stein, Mickey Spillane, and a half-dozen others that were still unsolved. The most recent case, McCabe noted, involved a young neighborhood gambler named Rickey Tassiello. He was last seen leaving Tom’s Pub on 9th Avenue with Coonan and Featherstone. According to a recent police interview with Tassiello’s brother, Rickey Tassiello owed Jimmy Coonan money. There were rumors all over the neighborhood that Tassiello had been murdered, dismembered, and disposed of.
“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Coffey. “Are these guys fuckin’ monsters or what?”
McCabe just shook his head. “Joe, you ain’t gonna believe some of the things we been hearing.”
With Coffey’s unit on the scene, there was mild resentment among some members of the Intelligence team. No doubt the Homicide Task Force would be creating waves and making headlines, an approach that was antithetical to the very nature of intelligence work. And there was the matter of Coffey’s reputation—a “hambone,” one Intelligence cop called him. But McCabe was not one of the begrudgers. Sure, Coffey had led a charmed life as a member of the NYPD. But he was a cop after all, and a good one at that. Besides, said McCabe, “You can’t be an Intelligence cop and worry about that kind of crap.” As long as he had anything to do with it, Coffey’s Task Force would get everything they needed to pursue their investigation.
It didn’t take Coffey and his people long to make their presence felt on the West Side. Frequently, the Intelligence cops watched from their surveillance posts as the three strapping Irish detectives strutted into some well-known neighborhood hangout like the Market Diner and started asking questions. Within weeks, most of the area’s criminal element knew who they were—which was just the way Coffey and his guys liked it. Sometimes they would even walk right into a well-known neighborhood social club and place bets at the gambling tables.
Initially, there were attempts by certain West Siders to bring Coffey and his boys into the fold. When Coffey’s partner, Frank McDarby, was brought into the investigation, he was approached by an old friend named “Mike” who he had worked with years ago in the Metal Lathers union. In a neighborhood diner, Mike asked McDarby why he was messing around with “his own kind” when there were so many mafiosi at large in the city.
“Because these guys happen to be criminals,” McDarby said.
“Aw c’mon, Frank,” replied Mike. “They’re not bad kids. Maybe a little wild, but they’re on our side.”
“Mike, even if I believed you, it wouldn’t make any difference. Murder is murder. I gotta do my job.”
When Mike suggested he could possibly set up a meeting between the cops and Jimmy Coonan to straighten things out, McDarby said, “Hey, if you wanna set up a meeting, great. But there’s nothin’ to straighten out, Mike. It’s too late for that.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Frank, I really am. I’d hate to see anybody get hurt.”
McDarby unfurled his six-foot-two-inch frame and glared at his former friend. He knew this routine inside out. First they try to bribe you; then they try to intimidate you. “Hey, Mike, I got something to say to you and whoever else it is you’re talkin’ for. We ain’t scared of you fuckin’ guys, okay? We got a job to do here and it’s gonna get done. And if you or anybody else gets in the way you’re gonna get taken down just like the rest of ’em. You hear me, you little shit?”
After that, nobody from the West Side made any more attempts to “influence” the detectives from the Homicide Task Force.
As expected, not long after Joe Coffey and his boys began their own version of WEST SIDE STORY, the investigation entered a new phase. Egan and the other Intelligence cops on the street often found themselves following in Coffey’s wake as he stormed around the neighborhood. Occasionally, his antics captured the attention of the local press.
Such was the case one evening in late October of ’78. It seemed that Coffey, on a tip from an informant, had learned that the old New York Central railway tracks between 10th and 11th Avenue were being used as a dumping ground for West Side murder victims. Specifically, he’d been told the heads of Paddy Dugan and Rickey Tassiello were buried near the mouth of the West 50th Street underpass, directly behind the Skyline Motor Inn.
Coffey immediately called in an Emergency Service Unit to begin excavation on the fourteen-block stretch of track. Then somebody tipped off two reporters from the New York Daily News, who jumped on the story. That morning, an article in the paper stated that while raking through mounds of debris scooped from beneath the underpass, “police discovered bone fragments which they hope will substantiate reports that a Manhattan railroad cut has been used as a burial ground by a Hell’s Kitchen gang of hitmen and racketeers.”
When McCabe, Egan, and the other Intelligence cops first heard about the diggings, they had to chuckle. Nothing like a dramatic operation involving lots of manpower to make sure everybody knew what you were up to. It was vintage Joe Coffey.
But like many of Coffey’s more outlandish efforts, it had its residual value. High-profile activities sometimes brought about h
igh-profile reactions. Already the diggings had attracted a wide spectrum of interested observers, including neighborhood people and, according to a telephone call the boys from Intell received from Coffey that morning, some rather ominous-looking black sedans driven by well-dressed Italians from Brooklyn.
Intell had been hearing a lot lately about Jimmy Coonan’s Italian connections. The word was out that since Spillane’s murder, Coonan had established contact with either the Genovese family, based on Pleasant Avenue in Spanish Harlem, or the Gambino family, located primarily in the Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst sections of Brooklyn. Intell stepped up its surveillance schedule—there were now four two-man teams working around the clock—but they hadn’t been able to land any solid intelligence on the alleged Mafia connection. The diggings could be the break they needed.
When they arrived at the site, Egan and his partner for the night, Detective James Tedaldi, could hardly believe their eyes. Not only were a dozen cops from the Emergency Service Unit, a half-dozen plainclothes detectives, and about twenty neighborhood onlookers there, but so was a local television crew. It was late at night, and there were mounted klieg lights all over the place, making the site look like a movie location. Dressed in a dashing trenchcoat, Coffey was holding a press conference, supposedly to downplay some of the more outrageous claims that had been appearing in the papers since the diggings began. (One Daily News report quoted a source “close to the investigation” as saying there were “60, 70, maybe 80” bodies buried near the railroad tracks.)
Egan listened as Coffey explained to the press that “there might be at least two bodies or parts of bodies” buried in the soil near the railroad tracks. He said that the remains they were looking for belonged to two recent murder victims of a Hell’s Kitchen gang known as “the Westies.”
Egan did a double take when he heard that. The Westies? It was a new one on him.
For days afterwards, the West Side diggings were an ongoing item in the New York press. The notion of a Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob proved to be an irresistible angle, evoking as it did innumerable gangster movies from the 1930s. One TV report used footage from Prohibition days as the lead-in to their story.
American Gangsters Page 40