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The Coffey Files
One Cop’s War Against the Mob
Joseph Coffey and
Jerry Schmetterer
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
TO JOSEPH COFFEY, SR., MY WIFE PAT, AND CHILDREN, KATHLEEN, STEVEN, AND JOSEPH
JC
TO EMILY
JS
CONTENTS
Preface
I. THE COFFEY GANG
II. THE IRISH MAFIA
III. COFFEY, JOE COFFEY
IV. THE FIGHT
V. TERROR
VI. SAM
VII. THE RAT SQUAD
VIII. THE RULING COMMISSION
IX. THE NEW GANG
X. TEFLON GONE
Image Gallery
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PREFACE
It was one of those things you register in the back of your mind to check out the next day. Then, when the next day comes, you can’t remember who told you about it or how important it was. Reporters run into that a lot. Usually, because you’re afraid you will miss a good story if you don’t check it out, you start from scratch.
In this particular case I knew I had heard something about a big time hit man being busted as part of a Mafia drug ring. I was the police headquarters bureau chief for the New York Daily News. As part of my routine, every day, I called several contacts in the department who I knew would share information with me. It was a system that served both sides well. They knew I would give them a good write-up when they did something they wanted publicized. I mentioned, to one of them, my tip about the hit man. My contact told me she heard something like that. She suggested I speak to Joe Coffey.
“Joe Coffey? The Son of Sam Joe Coffey?” I asked. “Where is he these days?” My friend said Coffey was working in the chief of detectives’ office. She said I’d be very interested in what he was doing.
It seemed I was always interested in what Joe Coffey was doing. My last contact with him was during the Son of Sam manhunt in 1977. Coffey was the detective sergeant coordinating the nighttime operations, which centered mostly around the borough of Queens. I was a reporter assigned to the paper’s Queens bureau and trying every day to make contact with Coffey to find out if any progress had been made on the case the night before. Sometimes he was helpful. Most often the frustration that case was causing everyone was reflected in his “No comment” or “Why don’t you ask Jimmy Breslin?”—a reference to the News columnist who received a personal message from the serial killer and was, daily, breaking the department’s collective chops for the lack of progress. But I knew that if there was anything to know, Joe Coffey knew it. We had crossed paths many times before over the years. Joe was a favorite of many reporters. Some accused him of being a publicity hound.
I first heard about him in 1972. He was the young detective from District Attorney Hogan’s office who connected a Little Italy thug named Vincent Rizzo to an international counterfeiting and robbery network. It was a complicated case that eventually involved the U.S. Justice Department and would leave loose ends and unexplained mysteries for the next two decades. The case became known as the Vatican Connection. It is one of the most spectacular detective stories of the twentieth century. Joe Coffey started it all.
We met again a couple of years later when a cop named Angel Poggi, on his very first night out of the Police Academy, walked into a booby trap set by the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN. Coffey was a patrol sergeant. He was the first cop on the scene and held Poggi in his arms until medics arrived. I was assigned to check out the report of an explosion the city desk heard over the police scanner. I got to the scene in time to see Sergeant Joe Coffey removing his blue police shirt, which had been stained with Angel Poggi’s blood.
Coverage of terrorism took up a lot of my time over the next few years. In addition to the FALN, the Black Liberation Army was busy shooting police officers. My first genuine scoop involved the BLA. I learned that they were responsible for a $350,000 armed robbery of a Brooklyn department store. They needed the money to fund their war chest. Joe Coffey had a shoot-out on the Harlem River Drive with the BLA.
International groups like the Croatians and Omega 19 were also surfacing in New York in the early seventies, bombing airports and train stations. Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey was in the middle of that, too, as a supervisor in the Arson and Explosion Squad, the forerunner of the Anti-Terrorist Task Force. As a reporter I wanted to be where the big stories were. As a cop Joe Coffey, whether it was for the publicity or a genuine desire to serve the public, wanted the big cases. We both seemed to be having a run of good luck.
Then in 1976 David Berkowitz began his eighteen-month reign of terror. Every reporter wanted in on that story. And there was Joe Coffey once again in the middle of the action.
Now I was chasing him down again. I hoped he was in a better mood than he was during the “Sam” days, and I hoped he trusted me enough by now to let me in on this hit man story. I found him in a corner of the chief of detectives’ office. He was in a good mood, and he gave me a great story.
The next day’s paper had the headline “Cops Probing Mob Bust 500M Cocaine Ring.” I reported that a special task force designated “Operation Rattle,” because its mission was to “shake up organized crime,” had broken up a ring that had smuggled cocaine worth $500 million from South America and through Kennedy Airport in the past year. In the process a “senior mob hit man” named Marco “Tony Ugly” Mucciolo, 61, was arrested for two murders.
The article contained the first news of a handpicked squad of detectives that had been formed to investigate a rash of mob murders. Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey was commander of the special unit. I wanted to know more about the work those guys were doing. Coffey assured me the police department’s attitude towards organized crime was changing. He said I would get a lot of good stories out of his office in the next few years. He was right.
JERRY SCHMETTERER
March 3, 1991
I
THE COFFEY GANG
During the early days of 1978 the streets of New York ran red with Mafia blood. From January through March thirty Mafia hoodlums at all levels in the hierarchy of organized crime were murdered.
They had names like “Patty Mack” and “Sally Balls” and hung around with guys called “Tony Ugly” and “Matty the Horse.” Their bodies were found twisted and jammed in the trunks of luxury cars in the parking lots of Kennedy and La Cuardia airports.
Sometimes they were stuffed into plastic bags and discarded along dark roads in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Occasionally, depending on the personal style of the individual hit man, they were dismembered, mutilated, and strewn about local garbage dumps. Once in a while, the victim was gunned down or stabbed to death in public. Those bodies were left where they fell to deliver messages in Mafia code.
The city’s tabloid press lovingly described every hit. Each time a body was discovered, headlines screamed of blood feuds and brutal killings as Mafia families turned the sidewalks of New York into their private battlegrounds.
These murders were rarely solved. The New York police did not have the resources or the inclination to chase hit men who disappeared into the night to be protected by the Mafia code of silence. With a conspiratorial wink police officials told reporters the mob was doing the city a favor. “It’s nothing but vermin killing vermin,” they would say, asking not to have their name appear next to the quote.
Detectives would spend a few hours talking to the usual suspects, and the file would be put on the back burner. Attention could t
hen be paid to crimes committed against honest citizens. Gangland rubouts were part of the folklore of America.
But in those early days of 1978 a shakeup was taking place on the upper floors of One Police Plaza, New York’s Police Headquarters. A new police commissioner named Robert McGuire was in place. In his short time in office, he had already made it clear that he would push for changes in attitude and politics within the department.
Though never a cop himself, his father was a police deputy chief. McGuire grew up in a household that held firmly to the tradition of law and order and public service. He had been an assistant U.S. attorney and also served as a counsel for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, defending cops who got into trouble.
McGuire demanded excellence. Instead of apologizing for flaws in the department, he set about to repair them.
He chose as his chief of detectives a cop with a broad range of police experience named James Sullivan. A veteran of the uniformed Tactical Patrol Force, Sullivan had a master’s degree in management and had commanded detectives in the Narcotics Division. He had also for a short time served as executive officer, second in command, of the Detective Division. The average cop thought Sullivan, a man with a broad Irish grin when he chose to show it, was as comfortable in the commissioner’s boardroom as he was on the front lines of a riot. They believed that he presented a good image for the department.
Both Sullivan and McGuire resented the popular belief that organized crime could get away with murder. While both also knew the realities of the situation, they agreed the department should make some special effort—even a short term effort—to try to stem the organized lawlessness that was the Mafia’s way of doing business in the early months of 1978.
Typical of their problem was the murder of Pasquale “Patty Mack” Macchiarole. His body was found stuffed into the trunk of his brand-new Cadillac on a gravel road alongside Rockaway Parkway in Brooklyn. He had been shot three times in the head with a .25 caliber pistol.
The precinct detectives went through their usual drill. They investigated the crime scene and, failing to find any obvious physical evidence that would finger the killer, filled out the proper forms. They told their supervisor it seemed to be a mob hit. The department’s Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB), which investigated any crime that appeared to be the work of a gang, reported that “Patty Mack” was a capo in the Genovese crime family. The OCCB’s records indicated he was in charge of a gambling and loan-sharking crew, and their experts theorized that “Patty Mack” had gotten caught skimming some profits and had to pay the ultimate penalty.
There was no real hope of solving the case through investigative procedure. Maybe someday an informant looking to save his own skin would squeal on the killer and explain why the hit was necessary. The case would be considered solved, even if no arrest was ever made.
Sullivan and McGuire were both very aware that unsolved Mafia homicides lowered the department’s ratio of “cleared” cases. This made it appear that their detectives were not as good at solving homicides as they really were.
Sullivan told McGuire he had a plan. He thought it would improve the homicide clearance rate while at the same time working toward changing the attitude of the police toward Mafia hits. He wanted to set up a special unit, working from his office on the thirteenth floor of police headquarters and reporting directly to him.
The unit would be called the Chief of Detectives’ Organized Crime Homicide Task Force, specializing in solving murders attributed to organized crime. At the least, such a unit would give the impression that the department was trying to do something to destroy the myth of Mafia impunity. McGuire, thinking along similar lines, agreed with the concept. He would give the unit thirty days to see what it could do. He also agreed with Sullivan’s idea of who should command such a unit.
On April 3, 1978, the chief of detectives placed a call to Detective Sergeant Joseph J. Coffey, executive officer of the Robbery Unit in the borough of Queens.
Sullivan had known Coffey since he was a captain on the elite Tactical Patrol Force and Coffey was a rookie under his command. Over the years, the two had maintained a friendly relationship, although not often working directly together. Other cops remarked on the physical similarities between the two men, although Coffey at six-foot-four was about six inches taller.
Commissioner McGuire also knew Coffey. They first met when McGuire was an assistant U.S. attorney and they developed a social relationship, sharing a drink or two after work.
They met officially one night when McGuire was working for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. Both had responded to an incident in which a police officer shot and killed a New York City housing patrolman after the housing officer shot and killed the city cop’s partner in a wild shoot-out on Lexington Avenue. Coffey was the highest-ranking detective on duty that night and was sent to the horrifying scene.
While technically on different sides of the investigation, Coffey trying to decide if the cop had acted without justification, McGuire on the scene to protect the rights of the cop, their mutual respect helped bring some order to the chaos surrounding the incident. It was eventually ruled that the cop fired with due cause. The housing police were in civilian clothes and had started a drunken brawl with the cab driver, and the dead housing cop had shot the city patrolman when he responded to the brawl.
McGuire remembered the incident when he okayed Coffey for the new position.
“Joe, I have an interesting proposition for you,” Sullivan said on the phone, “something I think you can sink your teeth into. Could you stop by my office on your way home?”
On the other end of the phone Joe Coffey was secretly pleased. He had been in the Queens Robbery Unit for a little more than eight months. He was sent there after heading up one of the units that captured the serial killer known as Son of Sam. While he enjoyed the duty—which often included leading shotgun-toting cops through barricaded doorways—it was not ideal for him. And he was a little bitter and disappointed that his work on the Son of Sam case had not resulted in a better reward. Homicide was his first love and the Mafia his favorite target. He did not run into either very often on the robbery beat. He had become constantly grumpy and was giving other cops a hard time.
“Chief, I’ll be there forthwith,” Coffey responded, using the police jargon for “immediately.”
Within an hour he was in Sullivan’s office listening to the plan for the establishment of the Homicide Task Force. “At first, while the chief was telling me about the idea, I was expecting him to offer me a spot as a detective assigned to the new unit. I was thrilled and I certainly would have agreed,” Coffey remembers.
“Then the chief got very serious. ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘the commissioner and I agree that with your background in District Attorney Hogan’s racket squad and your organized crime and homicide experience, you should be the man to command this unit. You’ll have my total support and the backing of the PC. We’re going to give you thirty days and eight detectives to see what you can do.’”
April 3 was Coffey’s fortieth birthday, and Chief Sullivan had handed him the best present he could imagine. But while he was intrigued by the offer, he managed to measure his response carefully.
“Chief,” he responded, “I’ve been beaten down by department politics too many times to jump into something without first making sure my back is covered. I want this assignment, there’s no way I could fool you about that, but I have to pick my own team. I want to select the eight detectives.”
Sullivan was a little surprised by the request but understood Coffey had not built a record of success by being careless. “On what basis would you pick your men?” he asked.
“Loyalty,” Coffey said bluntly. “We’ll be stepping on a lot of toes in this assignment; a lot of noses are going to be out of joint. There will be enough pissed-off detectives and bosses around the city trying to sabotage me. I want to make sure I can trust my own men. If some jealous desk jockey or even some desperate
hood is going to go after me, accuse me of corruption or dereliction of duty, I want to be sure he won’t get any help from my own squad.”
Sullivan too was a careful man and understood as well as Coffey the pitfalls of department politics. But he was also a skilled manager, so he asked why competence on the team wasn’t the most important issue.
“I can teach competence. Loyalty is earned over years of sharing risks and rewards. I know the men I can trust. If I’m not working with them, this thing won’t hold together even for thirty days,” Coffey replied, hoping he wasn’t letting the opportunity slip from his hands.
Sullivan considered the sergeant’s words for a few moments, then nodded in agreement. “Okay, we’ll give it a shot your way.” He understood where Coffey had been and where he would have to go to make the assignment anything more than window dressing. You’ve got a week to get your team together. Pick anyone you want. If any squad commander gives you a hard time tell him to call me.”
Joe Coffey was the kid who had just been handed the keys to the candy store. He had been waiting for this assignment for more than thirty years.
During the fall of 1946, when Joe Coffey was eight years old, his family and many of their neighbors in the tenements that lined Third Avenue in the gritty shadow of the elevated subway were caught up in a dangerous struggle for control of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 804. The local represented drivers of United Parcel Service, a company that delivered packages for most of the city’s department stores, including the giant Macy’s, Gimble’s, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Joe’s father and a few of the other drivers had founded the local.
Joseph Coffey, Sr., had grown up on the Lower East Side in the years around World War I. He lived in an area known as the Gashouse District and personified the Dead End Kids. In fact, a close friend in the those days was Huntz Hall, who achieved fame as one of the Bowery Boys, a group that could have very well been Joe’s father’s crowd.
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