Another of his group, Eddie McGrath, left the Lower East Side to become the boss of the city’s Irish gangs.
In the 1920s, Joseph Coffey, Sr., supplemented his income by occasionally driving truckloads of Prohibition booze for the gangsters Dutch Schultz and Owney Madden.
But the Local 804 leadership group was as honest as it was tough. In the early forties their success in organizing UPS’s employees made the local a lucrative target for New York’s organized crime groups. The Mafia saw the local as an area of easy pickings with dues money and other funds set aside for workers’ benefits waiting to be siphoned off. It was also seen as a mechanism for getting their hooks into the legitimate dealings of the department stores.
Joe, Sr., and his best friend, the union president, Lenny Geiger, began receiving regular visits from tough-talking labor racketeers offering favors. A typical request was for Geiger to okay the turning over of cash set aside for retirement funds to be used by the mob as collateral in a big construction deal. It would be worth big bucks to Geiger and anyone else he had to let in on the scam. Or they would be asked for a percentage of the dues paid by the drivers in exchange for allowing the trucks to go about their business undisturbed.
But Coffey and Geiger and the other officers refused the offers. At strategy meetings around the kitchen table, young Joe would listen in wonder as these honest men talked about the threats against them and described the characters who were attacking their honest way of life. He heard about trucks being set on fire, tires being slashed, and even drivers being beaten. He wondered about the cost of being honest and wondered if he could be as brave as his father and the others if he was ever put to the test.
One night Joe heard his father say he would refuse to even talk to an old friend of his, John “Cockeye” Dunn, a waterfront enforcer who thought because he was more willing to fight than work he deserved a share of the drivers’ union dues. Dunn, who would eventually die in Sing Sing’s electric chair, was known throughout the neighborhood for his cruelty to victims. Joe’s admiration for his father grew as he realized he was not the least bit afraid of a monster like Dunn.
“I was totally fascinated by what was going on and knew instinctively that my father and his friends were fighting some kind of evil. I wanted to help them, but being a little kid I was usually told that if I wanted to be allowed to listen, I would have to keep my mouth shut,” Joe remembers.
The kitchen of the Coffeys’ third-floor railroad flat became Joe’s college of criminal justice. His teachers were the union organizers who jammed into his mother’s home planning their strategy to battle the labor racketeers. He was an eager student. He learned while still in grade school how an efficiently run organized crime gang could disrupt legitimate businessmen. The pressure of constant physical threats and the lure of big payoffs in return for a little larceny was sometimes impossible to resist.
He also learned that in those days of the union movement in New York City there was a thin line between being a legitimate union organizer and a labor racketeer. Sometimes the tactics of his father and Geiger were as tough and desperate as those of the out-and-out hoodlums. Their justification, they argued, if they threatened a truck driver in order to get him to sign on with the local, was that they had the good of the driver at heart. They were not organizing a local so that they could rape its pension fund for their own profit.
Then, on a chilly October night in 1946, Joe learned the real meaning of those threats. He was doing homework in the kitchen while his older sister, Pat, was babysitting their four-year-old brother. Suddenly they heard two loud bangs echo through the building’s stark hallway.
“Somehow I knew they were shots. I can hear them today with the same clarity,” Coffey says. “I also knew instinctively that my father was in trouble.”
What he did next was also instinctive and is the single action that sets good cops apart from the rest of society. He ran towards the trouble. He charged out his apartment door and, three steps at a time, barreled towards the lobby of the building. As he bounded down the stairs, he feared most for his mother, pregnant with her fourth child, whose screams for help ricocheted through the tenement’s winding stairwells.
The scene at the bottom of the stairs was permanently etched in Joe’s memory. He saw his father bending, over his distraught mother, whispering soothing words of comfort. With an eye for detail that would serve him well for the rest of his life, he noticed that the glass in the doorway behind his parents was shattered. The subway was going by on the elevated tracks outside, but Joe thought he heard the door to the roof being slammed.
Frightened, and as near to sobbing as he would allow himself to be, Joe led his terrified mother back to their apartment. They were hardly inside before the senior Coffey, fighting to control his temper and not showing an ounce of fear in front of his children, phoned his friends and the police for help.
Later that night Lenny Geiger (who ten years later would be found dead in his car the evening before he was scheduled to testify before a Senate committee investigating organized crime’s ties to unions) called the leadership of Local 804 together in the Coffey kitchen.
The police told Joe’s parents they had been saved by an illusion caused by the single bare light bulb in the hallway. The harsh light made it appear that anyone on the stairs between the light and the door was actually standing just inside the door. The hidden assassin actually fired at the couple’s image on the door. But it was close enough to frighten Joe’s mother to the point of fear for her unborn baby.
Word of the attack spread quickly through the Irish neighborhoods of Manhattan. The Coffey phone was constantly ringing with information and offers of help. The word was that “Cockeye” Dunn was the shooter. More distressing was the news that Joe’s uncle had fingered the Coffeys. The uncle was a close associate of mob bosses Meyer Lansky and Eddie McGrath. He had let Dunn know the Coffeys were out shopping and what time they would return.
Young Joe stood at the apartment door taking this all in. He was outraged that anyone could want to do this to his father. He did not understand the lure of money. He was confused to learn how many criminals there were and that they worked as hard at their illicit undertakings as honest men worked at their businesses. All his father and their friends wanted to do was earn an honest living. He was amazed that this actually offended some people.
Despite the ordeal, Joe’s father stayed calm. He urged restraint, wanting to wait and see what might develop. But Mrs. Coffey saw things differently. She feared that any time wasted in going after the assassins would encourage them to try again. She did not expect the police to be of any help. Out of patience with the brave men in her kitchen, she took the only sensible course of action. She called the Coffeys’ old friend, the kingpin gangster Eddie McGrath, who had of course already heard about the incident. Mrs. Coffey appealed to the hoodlum on the basis of their long-standing friendship to intercede with the gang putting the pressure on 804. In doing so, she told McGrath, he would be saving his friend’s life.
About three days later, during the afternoon, when Mrs. Coffey and the toddler Edward were alone in the apartment—Joe and Pat were in school—she had a visitor. A McGrath henchman came by to say that his boss wanted her to know there was nothing more to worry about. The contract on her husband had been canceled. There would still be pressure on Local 804 to bend to the mob—after all, even Eddie McGrath could not understand why they resisted—but there would be no more gunplay.
That incident in the tenement hallway changed the life of Joe Coffey, Jr., forever. “I made up my mind that night that I would be an FBI agent—that I would find a way to help people like my father and Lenny Geiger stand up against organized crime.”
He had learned a lot around his own kitchen table. Now the grade-school student began hunting down books. He read all he could find about the Italian Black Hand and the Mafia, the Jewish gangs, the Chinese Tongs, and Murder Incorporated. If the subject of a book was crime, Joe Coffey sought
it out, read it from cover to cover, and read it again. He devoured the newspapers, searching for accounts of rubouts and arrests, and he was the biggest fan of crime movies and radio programs. But, as much as the media often glamorized the life of a criminal, Joe never wavered from his desire to be on the right side of the law. His favorite stories were the ones that proved crime doesn’t pay.
When he joined the police force in 1964 he was determined to use his career to bust the Mafia. It might have been a thought shared by many eager young cops: but how many of them had seen their fathers survive an attempted hit?
While working for the Manhattan district attorney’s Rackets Bureau, he got his first taste of what a determined detective could do. There he investigated the criminal takeovers of legitimate businesses. He saw up close how mob tentacles snaked through people’s everyday lives, from the restaurants they ate in to the churches where they prayed. He also helped solve such notorious cases as the barbershop assassination of Albert Anastasia and took part in the breaking up of the biggest loan-sharking and gambling ring in the nation. Now, five years after leaving the DA’s office to track down terrorists and a serial killer, he was back on the beat he was born to walk.
Joe was very happy that evening sitting around his own kitchen table in the Long Island suburb of Levittown with his wife Pat and their three children, Kathleen, Steven, and Joseph III. He called his closest friends with the news and ignored their cynical remarks about the assignment’s being window dressing to appease the press. Everyone was sure nothing could really be done in thirty days. They told him Sullivan and McGuire were playing a political card for Ed Koch, and after thirty days he would once again face the frustration that dogged his career. However, to Joe Coffey his new post as commanding officer of the Chief of Detectives’ Organized Crime Homicide Task Force was a dream job.
The next day he began assembling his team. Using a desk set aside in a corner of Sullivan’s headquarters office and surrounded by the statisticians and analysts whose work measured the effect, or lack of effect, of the chief’s orders, he worked the telephone.
By late afternoon he had made eight calls and lined up the team he wanted. “We’re going to have a gang of our own,” Coffey told them, “and we’re going to kick ass.” As he knew they would, the eight detectives Joe enlisted for the Coffey Gang all jumped at the chance for a piece of the action—even for only thirty days. They all agreed to drop their current cases and report to One Police Plaza the following Monday morning.
The founding members of the Coffey Gang were detectives John O’Connell and Jerry Maroney from the 17th Homicide Zone, Jack Cahill and Dick Joyce from the 1st Homicide Zone, Joe Lyons from the 16th Homicide Zone, John McGlynn from the elite Major Case Squad, Frank McDarby from the tension-packed Anti-Terrorist Squad, and John Meyer from the Manhattan Burglary Squad.
Joe Coffey loved these men. Like him they had grown up on New York’s tough streets and had lifelong contacts on both sides of the law, which proved invaluable over years of police work. Joe had spent countless hours with them sitting in dark cars on dangerous streets, chain smoking and trying to stay awake by drinking countless cups of coffee or, in his case, tea. He knocked down doors with them when they knew cold-blooded killers waited on the other side. Their loyalty to each other was similar to the family ties of the Mafia. But it was stronger and not in need of blood oaths and macho posturing. They were the Coffey Gang, ready to take on all comers—Mafioso, Westie, Chinese Tong, whatever.
Within a week of receiving Jim Sullivan’s marching orders, Coffey had his gang gathered at headquarters. They were sitting around a big conference table. All were in their shirtsleeves. Some wore shoulder holsters, but most opted for the newer style of carrying their guns in ankle holsters. Joe’s .38 caliber Smith & Wesson detective special was, as always, in a holster on his hip.
In the middle of the conference table was a pile of detective forms detailing more than twenty homicides that had occurred since January 1. They were classified mob hits. Hidden among the police jargon and grotesque pictures of victims contained in that pile of paperwork, Joe Coffey believed, were the clues that would get his group rolling not only toward Sullivan’s thirty-day deadline but toward a new attitude for police.
He locked the door to the conference room, and conversation came to an abrupt halt. The men sitting around the table were about to find out what they were there for. Joe reached into the pocket of his white button-down shirt and took out his ever-present pack of Marlboros. Purposely drawing out the moment for dramatic effect, he slowly lit the cigarette.
Carefully he circled the table and began the short speech he had mentally prepared while driving to police headquarters that morning. He told his gang, “I know as well as anyone here that we can’t do much in thirty days. But I truly believe that if we show real progress, the deadline will come and go and no one will want to break us up. As far as I’m concerned, we’re here to stay.”
This particular group of detectives was used to hearing Coffey talk like that. They knew that through the force of his own will he had a unique ability to get the giant bureaucracy of the New York Police Department to bend. Coffey did not hesitate to break from tradition, to force issues within the department, or to serve notice on criminals from Wall Street to Mulberry Street that if he was on the job they shouldn’t count on the old rules. It was an attitude that won him admiration from his peers but caused his superior officers to regard him as a pain in the ass—but one who got things done.
After reading all the reports, the group agreed on two things. First, despite what the newspapers were saying, this rash of murders was not the result of a Mafia gang war. Rather, they believed, the mob was taking advantage of the public hysteria by settling some old debts. The godfathers realized that the appearance of a gang war would discourage any genuine effort by the police. They reasoned that the police brass would follow their old traditions and let “vermin kill vermin.” They did not know about Joe Coffey’s new assignment.
Secondly, the group decided to pick two cases that they thought could be solved quickly, in order to prove their effectiveness before the thirty-day deadline. They selected cases where there appeared to be a weak link. Either the victim was a fringe player dealing on the edges of organized crime whose associates might be more willing to talk than the colleagues of a “made” member of a family, or there were a lot of witnesses, honest citizens who might be willing to help the police.
Coffey chose two murders, both committed during the last week of March. The first involved Leo Ladenhauf, whose body was found stuffed into the trunk of his Oldsmobile in the parking lot of Kennedy Airport. He was a roofing contractor whom organized crime experts believed to be a loan shark involved with the roofers’ union and construction industry—a classic fringe player. Coffey assigned Jerry Maroney and John O’Connell to find out who killed Ladenhauf.
The second case was the kind of gangland hit Hollywood loved to recreate. It involved the murder of Salvatore “Sally Balls” Briguglio.
Joe Coffey has always believed there is a special place in hell for Mafia killers. If these dead mafiosi can find some time in their torturous days to sit around telling war stories, “Sally Balls” has bragging rights to some of the most glorious claims to fame in Mafia history. He was the man the FBI believes abducted and murdered the notorious one-time head of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa.
“Sally Balls” had the additional claim that he was set up for his own death by two Mafia superstars: Matty “Matty the Horse” Ianiello, the man who ran Times Square vice for the Genovese family, and Tony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, head of Teamsters Union Local 560, the only union local ever taken over by the federal government because it was so corrupt there was no other way to clean it up.
There were a lot of witnesses to the “Sally Balls” hit. It was carried out on a crowded Little Italy street at 10:30 in the evening, March 21, 1978. Coffey assigned Dick Joyce and John McGlynn to find a witness who would be willing to co
operate.
Coffey handed out a few more cases and ordered two pairs of detectives to begin a search of police files throughout the city to see if there was anything overlooked in any of the 1978 cases that could be helpful. Coffey himself would serve in a supervisory role, available to jump in and help any of the gang if they needed him.
Before dispatching the Chief of Detectives’ Organized Crime Homicide Task Force on their first day of duty, Coffey made a short speech. He told them, “I know you guys are going to get a rough time from some precinct detective squad commanders. They are going to think we’re stepping on their toes. They are right. But if they were doing their jobs, we wouldn’t be necessary. We have a job to do and the police commissioner is behind us. No one else matters. If you have any trouble with anyone, anytime, don’t put your own necks on the line. Reach out for me. I’ll take the heat.”
Within three weeks it was clear that Coffey had selected two good cases to run with. He was able to report to Jim Sullivan that the Ladenhauf hit was nearly solved and that it had a connection to the don of the Genovese family, Funzi Tieri. The Briguglio investigation offered greater potential. Coffey told Sullivan about the Jimmy Hoffa connection and the hopes of bringing down Provenzano and Ianiello. Progress was also being made on other cases as well. Sullivan heard Coffey out and told him to keep his gang working. Neither man mentioned the thirty-day deadline.
The Ladenhauf case was relatively simple to get a handle on. Maroney and O’Connell started their investigation by going out to the Ladenhauf house to speak to his family. They brought with them a subpoena ordering the dead man’s son to appear before the grand jury assigned to the case.
Steven Ladenhauf was not happy to see the detectives and refused to let them into the house. O’Connell and Maroney left without pressing the issue. Instead they went over to the Ladenhauf contracting offices, where they learned that the last time Ladenhauf’s employees had seen him he had left for an appointment with a Long Island restaurant owner named Peter Ranieri.
The Coffey Files Page 2