The Coffey Files

by Coffey, Joseph; Schmetterer, Jerry;

  What they did do was try to question other witnesses. But people who encounter a murder on Mulberry Street at 10:30 at night are usually smart enough not to cooperate with the police.

  “I would have loved to be in the place of those two cops, but they apparently just took it as vermin killing vermin and did nothing useful,” Coffey reflects.

  So Joyce and McGlynn had to start from scratch. The first thing they did was make appointments to talk to Ianiello and Provenzano. Joe went along for the interviews but got the same answer from both: “See my lawyer.”

  Next Coffey’s gang set out to canvass the entire area again. Going back at 10:30 at night, the time of the shooting, they scoured the crowded sidewalks for four square blocks around Benito’s. The hope was they would find someone who was usually on the street at that hour.

  After about two weeks of returning to Little Italy every night, Joyce and McGlynn hit pay dirt. They stopped a Chinese teenager and asked him if he had seen anything unusual on the night of March 21. The young man, whose identity is being protected to this day, said he did know something about the murder.

  He recalled that he was on Baxter Street, around the corner from Mulberry, returning home from his classes at St. John’s University when a car skidding to a halt almost ran him down. Two men jumped out of that car and jumped into another waiting at the curb. Both cars then sped off. He said that he came face to face with one of the men.

  “Would you recognize him again?” the detectives barked in unison.

  “I’m not sure I would,” the young student responded.

  Neither McGlynn nor Joyce bothered asking why he had not come forward before. The formula for survival on the streets of New York did not include talking to the police about the Mafia hit you just witnessed. However, the detectives reported to Coffey that the teenager appeared to be willing to help.

  He turned out to be very helpful. First from mug shots provided by Coffey’s gang he picked out a Genovese button man named Joseph Scarborough as the guy who almost knocked him over. Scarborough’s description matched the one provided by the two Intelligence cops. Coffey believed Scarborough was the one who gave the coup de grace to “Sally Balls.”

  The young Chinese student also agreed to be hypnotized to help develop further descriptions. Under the spell of a police hypnotist he remembered the type and license plate of the second getaway car. It was a 1978 Lincoln Versailles that was eventually found in a small town in Georgia.

  So now they had a description of a hit man and a motive for the murder. “Tony Pro” was afraid Briguglio was going to sing about Hoffa. Coffey took the information to the district attorney.

  “The DA threw us a real curve ball here. He would not go with the kid’s ID. He said it was too unreliable because he did not come forward right away. He said there was not enough evidence to seek indictments against the shooter or Provenzano,” Coffey remembers.

  “I was upset, but not too angry. After all, as far as the police department was concerned the homicide was solved and we could clear it from our records. We had solved two mob hits in a little over a month, we proved the effectiveness of the task force concept, and I was fulfilling a dream.”

  By the end of the summer of 1978 the Coffey Gang had become an integral part of the workings of the chief of detectives’ office. They began to overcome some of the initial resistance of precinct detectives and some of the organized crime experts in the five New York City district attorneys’ offices and in the department’s Organized Crime Control Bureau. “We kept turning new informants and every day it seemed one of my men was testifying before one grand jury or another. We were even able to solve some very old homicides like the rubout of ‘Crazy’ Joey Gallo in 1972. Gallo was gunned down as he was celebrating his birthday over a plate of clams in Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy.”

  A button man named Joseph Lupurelli who took part in the hit turned informant. He laid the blame on his partners in crime, Carmine “Sonny Pinto” DiBiasi and Phil Gambino. Lupurelli said Matty Ianiello, who owned Umberto’s, recommended it to Gallo to set him up for the hit. It was done as a favor to the Colombo family.

  The Coffey Gang was even able to clear one of the most notorious rubouts in Mafia history from the department’s unsolved files when they linked the 1957 murder of Albert “The Earthquake” Anastasia to a New Jersey hit man. “This was very important to the department’s overall morale. We were actually beginning to change the perception that the Mafia could do anything they wanted and get away with it,” states Coffey.

  Coffey was also becoming somewhat of a police department ambassador of homicide information. He set up an information sharing network between his own gang and their counterparts in the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and New York State’s Organized Crime Task Force. Traditionally there was little spirit of cooperation among various agencies. Five years later these early contacts would play an instrumental role in bringing down the heads of New York’s five crime families in an enormous case known as the “Ruling Commission.”

  On July 12, 1979, something else happened that would eventually play a major part in that case and haunt the godfathers of New York.

  It was a warm, typical July day. There was a calm and peaceful feeling on the streets of the Ridgewood section of Brooklyn. The three- and four-story row houses, separated occasionally by an ancient wooden frame home, gave the neighborhood a deceptive feeling of small-town America that belied its connection to the surrounding city.

  In the backyards of Ridgewood, Italian grandfathers, retired after years of back-breaking construction work, nurtured gardens of tomatoes, eggplant, and squash that rivaled the Sicilian fields of their youth. Some even found success with grapes that fed the family’s personal wine cellars.

  Joe and Mary’s Italian Restaurant was a Ridgewood landmark known for its old-world home-style cooking. It was also a favorite dining spot for members of the Bonanno crime family. On that summer day in 1979 Carmine Galante, a Bonanno capo, decided to have lunch at one of the backyard tables at Joe and Mary’s. He was joined by Cesare Bonventre, a cousin of Bonanno, and Baldo Amato, one of the Bonanno family’s top earners. Both men had very close ties to the Sicilian Mafia. Although in the United States for many years, they still spoke in broken English with thick Italian accents.

  Also present for lunch were two of Galante’s closest associates, Leonardo Coppolla and Guiseppe Turano, owner of Joe and Mary’s. Coppolla was a major drug dealer. Except for Turano, none of these men had ever done an honest day’s work in their lives.

  In this group only Galante enjoyed public notoriety. The press mistakenly believed he was the godfather of the Bonanno family, thanks mainly to the fact that the real godfather, Phil Rastelli, had been constantly in and out of jail since taking over the reins from Joe Bonanno himself. He wisely allowed Galante to get the publicity and take the heat from the other families when he tried to expand his drug business against their wishes.

  Despite the fact that he had spent more than half of his sixty-eight years in prison, Galante made the most of his time on the outside. He was first arrested at age sixteen for stealing trinkets from a store counter. That sentence was suspended. When he was twenty he was charged with killing a police officer during a payroll robbery. Those charges were eventually dropped. Four months later he was caught fleeing the scene of a Brooklyn brewery robbery, and that time his luck ran out. He was sent to Sing Sing for twelve years. Behind the Big House walls he stayed in shape playing handball with other inmates who were under orders from Galante henchmen not to win the game. Carmine did not like to lose.

  In July of 1979 Galante had been out of the federal prison in Atlanta for three years after serving a fourteen-year term for drug conspiracy. The conviction grew out of his activities in Montreal, where he had established the Mafia in the early 1950s. In fact, Galante was somewhat of an international don, with hoodlums in Canada, France, and Italy following his orders. But because of his incl
ination to deal in drugs, he was never seriously considered to take the place of Joe Bonanno as don of the family.

  Galante was the most brazen of all the city’s capos. He spurned bodyguards, and his chauffeur, usually a job reserved for a loyal gunman, was his daughter Nina.

  He had called the luncheon meeting to discuss his plans for expanding the Bonanno family’s involvement in selling drugs on an international level. It was historically the Mafia’s strategy to contract out most of its drug dealing operations. The godfathers like Bonanno, who in 1979 had already retired to Arizona, leaving his operations in the hands of Phil Rastelli, liked to give the impression that they would not dirty their hands with narcotics profits.

  “They winked at drug dealing,” Coffey says. “They wanted only their lowest-ranking soldiers involved in drug deals. Instead they allowed black organized crime gangs to deal in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, as long as they paid tribute to the Italian Mafia. So the upper-level mafiosi may not have been dealing directly, but they were raking in huge profits.”

  Galante, though, was bending the rules. He was personally setting up drug deals with Latin gangs. His own crew, the thieves and killers aligned with the Bonanno family that reported to him, was known to be running their own drug network. His greed regarding narcotics profits had finally put him in disfavor past the point of saving himself.

  With Joe Bonanno himself enjoying the benefits of an Arizona retirement, the family was being run by Rastelli, who, while Galante was digging into his meal at Joe and Mary’s, was taking his lunch at the Metropolitan Correction Center, the federal lockup adjacent to the Federal Court House in Manhattan. Rastelli was not only feeling the heat of the government at the time. He was also under pressure from the godfathers of the Gambino, Lucchese, Genovese, and Colombo families to do something about Galante’s ambitions, before people began to believe the Mafia dealt drugs to school children.

  This is how the godfathers decided to handle the annoying Carmine Galante: As Galante pushed away his empty plate at the table in Joe and Mary’s backyard and placed his customary cigar to his lips, four Bonanno button men, including the father-and-son hit team of “Sonny Red” and Bruno Indelicato, swung open the small wooden door leading from the restaurant and entered the backyard. Without warning they opened fire with shotguns and automatic pistols. Galante never got to light his cigar.

  In less than one minute their work was done. As they escaped in a car waiting outside the restaurant’s entrance, Carmine Galante, Leonardo Coppolla, and Guiseppe Turano lay dead. They were blown off their chairs by the powerful blasts onto the patio’s hard floor. Galante landed in the midst of Joe and Mary’s prized tomato plants. John Turano, Guiseppe’s son, who worked in the restaurant, was critically wounded as he ran to hide in a refrigerator. Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato, unhurt, ran from the death scene before police arrived.

  Joe Coffey was off the day Galante was gunned down. He was at home when Jim Sullivan called, suggesting he travel to Joe and Mary’s to see if he could be of any help to the precinct and OCCB detectives at the scene.

  But before Joe and many of the other detectives arrived, the area around the restaurant was besieged by uniformed police; emergency medical technicians, who eventually saved John Turano’s life; and the media. Reporters and photographers from the city’s newspapers and television and radio stations were alerted originally by police scanner reports that four people had been shot in the restaurant. Knowing the neighborhood to be favored by the Bonanno family, the press rushed to the scene. Word that the powerful Carmine Galante had been hit was already thoroughly circulating throughout the city.

  Several photographers, refused entrance to the crime scene, made their way to a nearby rooftop that overlooked the backyard dining area. The pictures they took have since served as the model of a mob rubout. There, lying among the scattered dishes and toppled dining table in the middle of the crushed and twisted tomato plants, was Carmine Galante, his shirt drenched in blood, his cigar grotesquely clenched firmly in his mouth.

  By the time Coffey got to the backyard, Galante’s body had been photographed by the police and removed from the scene. “But that didn’t stop everyone from accusing me of putting that cigar in his mouth. The fact that the medical examiner determined he bit reflexively on the cigar when the shotgun blast hit him didn’t discourage the rumor either. To this day there are people who believe I put that cigar in Galante’s mouth to make him look ridiculous. It’s not a bad idea, but I did not do it,” Coffey swears.

  Thirty-five minutes after the shooting, a scene was photographed by detectives from the Manhattan district attorney’s office that changed forever the way law enforcement thought of the relationships between mob families.

  Sitting in an apartment across the street from the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy, Detective John Gurnee captured on videotape the image of “Sonny Red” and Bruno Indelicato being met in the street outside the club by Aniello Dellacroce, the underboss of the Gambinos, who reported only to Paul Castellano, the capo di tutti capi, the boss of all bosses in the American Mafia.

  From the apartment, which was rented by the Manhattan district attorney’s office for surveillance on the Ravenite, headquarters of the Gambinos, Bruno was photographed taking a pistol from his pocket and placing it under the front seat of the car. Then all three men embraced.

  Gurnee was surprised at what he had seen: two Bonanno button men obviously being greeted with great warmth by the underboss of the Gambino family. The detective had no way of knowing at the time about the massacre at Joe and Mary’s.

  But when he found out later that evening, one of the first things he did was call Joe Coffey.

  “Joe,” he asked, “is it possible that Galante was hit by his own crew and it was sanctioned by the Gambinos?”

  Coffey, by then fully briefed by his gang, which had been pressing their network of informants, replied that it was possible because of their anger over the drug dealing.

  “Well, when you see what I’ve got on tape you’re gonna believe it.”

  “When I saw the tape I reasoned that all the families must have been pissed off at Galante, but I didn’t think they would order such a hit without Rastelli’s okay. That would have gone against their code and would have resulted in just the kind of all-out gang war Jim Sullivan wanted me to prevent.”

  Coffey went to the Metropolitan Correction Center to find out who had been visiting Phil Rastelli. He learned that the day before the hit and the day after, Rastelli had meetings with capos of his own Bonanno family as well as high-level capos of the Gambino family.

  “In my mind the scenario was clear. All five families wanted Galante hit, and Rastelli agreed to have his men do it. What surprised the hell out of me was the level of cooperation that allowed the Bonanno hit men to report back to the Gambino underboss, Dellacroce. This was a kind of cooperation not often seen.”

  Shortly after the shooting, an eyewitness gave one of the first detectives on the scene in Ridgewood a description of the men she saw fleeing in a late-model Oldsmobile and the license plate of the car.

  The car was found a few blocks away and fingerprints were lifted but did not connect with any on file at headquarters. Five years later this car, too, would play an important part in bringing the Ruling Commission, the leaders of all the city’s Mafia families, to justice.

  But the descriptions and the subsequent knowledge provided by Gurnee’s tapes led Coffey to begin an all-out search for the Indelicatos and two men they were known to work with: Dominick Trinchera and Phil “Philly Lucky” Giacone. The Coffey Gang began meetings with all their reliable informants and set up their own surveillance on known Bonanno hangouts. After weeks of looking, though, it appeared that all four had vanished from the face of the earth. Dozens of hoodlums were called in for questioning but none had the nerve or personal motive to cooperate.

  “There was a rumor that Bruno Indelicato was totally stoned out on cocaine and running through the streets b
ragging how he was going to be a don in the Gambino family because he hit Galante. There weren’t even any rumors about Trinchera and Giacone.”

  In May 1981 a young boy walking his dog in a deserted area of Howard Beach, Queens, had trouble dragging the animal away from some kind of bone he found in the dirt.

  Closer inspection revealed the bone to be the right arm of “Sonny Red” Indelicato, which had risen through the twenty inches of dirt piled on his body.

  “A lot of young guys think the way to Mafia success is to carry out an important hit,” Coffey says. “But the Galante case proves them wrong. All the shooters came to an untimely end, and Cesare Bonventre, who set up the hit, was murdered in 1984. So my homicide investigation was pretty much at a dead end.”

  “But once again,” Coffey remembers telling Jim Sullivan, “we’re learning things about the mob that we never believed possible before. Even when we don’t make an arrest in a homicide we’re building intelligence that I know will pay off someday.”

  Throughout his career Joe Coffey was always a hunch player. This was one hunch that one day would prove correct in a big way.

  II

  THE IRISH MAFIA

  In early spring 1979, Joe and Detective Jack Cahill were sitting in the bar of a trendy East Side restaurant, the kind of place cops go to when they are trying to get away from other cops, sharing some off-time waiting for word on indictments in the murder of “Sally Balls” Briguglio.

  It appeared that the district attorney was not going to change his mind about not using the identities provided by the Chinese teenager to move for indictments against the hit men and Ianiello and Provenzano. The DA was concerned because the teenager had been hypnotized to get his evidence. That would not stand up in court. He also felt that Ianiello and Provenzano could not be considered accessories just because they were out with “Sally Balls.” No amount of arguing from Coffey or Jim Sullivan could change the DA’s mind.