The Coffey Files

by Coffey, Joseph; Schmetterer, Jerry;

  Mack knew it was time to deal with the issue. But he tried once more to avoid it. “Listen Joe, forget it. It’s over. It meant nothing.”

  “Walter, I haven’t gone senile in a month. Don’t tell me it’s nothing. I’m coming over to see Rudy.” Then he slammed the phone down on his friend.

  Driving as if he still had a light and siren on his car, Joe made it into the city in about thirty minutes, and during the trip he grew even angrier. He realized he must have been passed over for the job on Jim Harmon’s presidential commission because at the time he was supposed to be hired, he was under investigation by Giuliani. While he was chasing the Ruling Commission of the Mafia, his colleagues were chasing him. He knew from his own experience that they must have even been tailing him as he drove around pursuing homicide suspects.

  Coffey parked in the space reserved for U.S. marshals and barged past the lobby receptionist up to Walter Mack’s office.

  Again Mack asked Joe not to push. “Forget it Joe, please let it go,” he said.

  “Are you kidding? You think I can let something like this go?”

  “Joe, we had no choice. Last year—July of ’84—the FBI informed us that a reference to you was picked up on the bug in the Palma Boys Social Club. We had to check it out.”

  “That’s bullshit. What kind of tape? What was on some bullshit tape?” Joe demanded.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that,” Mack responded.

  “Fuck you. What do you mean you can’t tell me that? It’s bullshit and you know it. Get Rudy and Barbara Jones in here.”

  “Joe, they are not around today. Please let this thing drop. You have some powerful enemies over there. We understand you feel betrayed,” Mack said. “But believe me,” he continued, “we aren’t proud of what we had to do. We were working with you every day. We were taking everything you had to offer and all along we knew this day would come. We knew the FBI would have to clear you and we knew you would find out about the investigation. If it were me, you would have had to do the same thing.”

  Joe knew Mack was right. The Famous But Incompetents left them no choice. Now he understood why Giuliani threw the party for him and why Barbara Jones spoke so glowingly. Now he knew what “the other thing” was that Art Ruffles mumbled to Ken Walton one month earlier at the Ocean Club.

  Once more Joe asked Mack to reveal the specifics of the tape. He wanted to know what was on it that could make everyone so suspicious of him.

  “Joe, the only thing I can say is you made some powerful enemies along the way,” Mack said.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But it’s a bitch when you think you’re on the same side,” Joe sneered.

  With that Mack turned his palms towards Joe and said, “It’s a tough game, Joe, on both sides.”

  That signaled the end of the meeting. Mack rose and escorted Coffey from the office. On the way out Mack asked when Joe was going to start working for Ron Goldstock. “Not soon enough,” he replied. The two shook hands as Joe left the building.

  About a month after he began working for Goldstock, Joe learned that the son of an old friend, Detective Ron Cadieux, who worked the Castellano case, had been killed in a motorcycle accident. Joe attended the funeral on Long Island and saw many of his former colleagues there. After the services he and Ken McCabe were talking in the parking lot when they saw FBI agent Art Ruffles and Walter Mack.

  As Ruffles walked past, McCabe turned to Joe and said, “I couldn’t believe the feds chased that Palma Boys thing.”

  “You know about that?” Joe said. “Tell me about it.”

  “I thought you knew. Didn’t you get it from Walter Mack?” McCabe responded.

  “No way. He wouldn’t give me shit. Nothing but bullshit. I don’t know what the tapes said.”

  McCabe told him. There were actually two references to Joe Coffey on the tapes, and both times a Genovese capo named Tony Rabito referred to the fact that Joe Coffey was with him and that he could handle Coffey.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. You know who Rabito was talking about?” Joe said to McCabe.

  McCabe did know. Everyone involved in organized crime investigations in New York knew that there was a half-assed hood in the Bonanno family named Joe Coffey. They knew that he was a two-bit mob guy who ran errands for Rabito. Because he was half Italian and half Irish he could never become a “made” member of the Mafia and he was always looked upon with suspicion by the other soldiers. Rabito was constantly in the position of defending him, and it was a running joke among the NYPD that Joe Coffey’s namesake was a gofer for the mob.

  “The FBI insisted on pursuing the lead,” McCabe said. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  Coffey looked across the parking lot toward Ruffles, obviously furious. Ruffles noticed Coffey’s glare. He walked towards Joe and said, “Calm down, I’ve got your plaque in my car.”

  “Stick the plaque up your ass,” Coffey snapped back, as McCabe worked his way between the two crime fighters.

  The incident once again renewed Joe’s anger, and he vowed never to trust an FBI agent again.

  His bitterness began to grow, and he became more and more sarcastic whenever the subject of a joint investigation with the FBI came up. In November 1985, Joe’s friends from the NYPD threw a party for him at Antuns, the popular catering hall in Queens. Two hundred people showed up to honor the man who was responsible for solving eighty-two Mafia homicides. It was an interesting collection of people. There were friends from Joe’s old neighborhood, under the El on Third Avenue, some of whom had walked on the other side of the law and served time in prison. His father, having lived to see his son avenge him, was there with some of his friends, labor racketeers of the thirties and forties.

  There were gifts for Pat and Kathleen and more speeches and plaques. Even Art Ruffles had the nerve to get up to make a speech. This time he called Joe to the podium. Finally he handed him the plaque that he had been carrying around for nine months.

  “Joe, we’re sorry about what happened. Sometimes we go after the good guys,” he said as the place exploded in an outpouring of loving applause and admiration.

  IX

  THE NEW GANG

  In the middle of May 1985 Joe Coffey reported to work at the office of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force. He felt a tangle of emotions as he drove up the Bronx River Parkway to White Plains, the suburban city twenty miles north of New York where the OCTF was headquartered.

  This “city kid” felt a little uncomfortable on the tree-lined streets of White Plains. It was an affluent city where Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue operated stores. It had no Little Italy or Chinatown. Instead of the hustlers and scam artists Joe was used to walking past on the way to One Police Plaza, the streets were filled with suburban housewives and small-town businessmen.

  He also struggled with the bitterness he continued to feel over the treatment he received in his final days with the police department. He did not want his anger to get in the way of new relationships. Of course the parties and the awards brought warm, happy memories, but he still relived the moment he opened that letter from the telephone company, and he continued to be uneasy about how two-faced he thought Giuliani was. In a sense he had much more respect for Dick Nicastro, who replaced Jim Sullivan as chief of detectives, and Benjamin Ward, who replaced Bob McGuire as police commissioner. He thought neither man liked him very much. They were understandably concerned that his loyalty would remain with their predecessors, and they did not disguise their feelings.

  Coffey took some satisfaction in the fact that Nicastro, an excellent detective with a genius for coordinating large-scale investigations, continued the Organized Crime Task Force. But most of the original gang, like McDarby, McGlynn, O’Connell, and Maroney, were retired or transferred. Joe unabashedly felt that it was his desire to chase the Mafia that had been the driving force behind the success of the task force.

  An official police department memorandum written by C
offey on January 11, 1983, regarding the accomplishments of the Organized Crime Task Force reported that the unit was responsible for the indictment and arrest of more than 100 members of organized crime enterprises, going on to state that the Coffey Gang directly solved fifty-two organized crime homicides.

  The memorandum concludes that “prior to the formation of this Task Force … it was felt by some people in law enforcement that the successful investigation of gangland slayings was impossible because of certain myths perpetuated through the years. It has been shown by this group of police officers that nothing could be further from the truth.”

  At the time of the report, the cases had been closed in the murders of Leo Ladenhauf, Pasquale Macchiarole, Mauro Agnello, Michael Spillane, Louis Milo, William Walker, Dennis Curley, John Earle, Joseph Gallo, Irving Miller, Janice Drake, Augie Carfano, Willie Alston, John Manfredonia, Alphonse Indelicate, Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giacone, Salvatore Briguglio, John Quinn, Sherry Golden, John Alagna, Joseph Vescovi, William Maselli, Joseph Scorney, and Patrick Dowd. These were all notorious cases covered by the media.

  Coffey was welcomed warmly in his new office. He knew many of the investigators from joint operations dating back to the early 1970s when he was working in District Attorney Hogan’s office in Manhattan. In those days the state Organized Crime Task Force was not taken too seriously by other law enforcement agencies. It was considered an office created in order to pay off political favors by providing jobs for cops from around the state who were on the last leg of their careers.

  “The task force was a political toy until Governor Hugh Carey appointed Ron Goldstock to head it in 1981,” says Coffey.

  Goldstock was a prosecutor with a reputation as being eager to chase down powerful organized crime figures and capable of doing so. When he worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, under Frank Hogan, he was considered the office organized crime expert. Later, while a law professor at Cornell, he helped draft the RICO (Racketeering Influence and Criminal Organization) laws that were used to indict Paul Castellano in the auto crime and murder case and then to nail the rest of the godfathers in the Ruling Commission case. Castellano had not been brought to trial yet on either of those indictments when Joe reported to White Plains. Not only had Joe Coffey been a principal investigator in those cases, but his relationship with Goldstock dated all the way back to the Vatican affair and the investigations of the Jiggs Forlano and Ruby Stein loan-sharking and gambling rings.

  When Goldstock took over the task force he refused to be part of a “political toy.” He began to assemble a cast of first-class investigators with backgrounds in pursuing organized crime. By 1985 when Coffey came aboard, it was the only unit in the state, except for the gang Coffey had assembled in the NYPD, with the specific mission of investigating organized crime. With Goldstock’s expert leadership and investigators like the ones who planted the bug in Sal Avellino’s Jaguar, the task force made itself a significant part of organized crime cases from Buffalo to Brooklyn.

  Joe was determined to start fresh. No cynicism, no sarcasm would find its way out of his mouth. Sitting with Gold-stock that first morning on the new job, he was filled in on the major investigation the task force had going at the time. They were deeply engaged in trying to prove that organized crime controlled the carpenters’ union in New York City. The reason it cost 40 percent more to build something in New York than anywhere else in the country, Goldstock theorized, was that tribute had to be paid to the Mafia on almost every construction and renovation site in the five boroughs. The first indictments against Castellano, which included charges that the Gambino family operated a “club” that extorted construction companies and extracted a “tax” on everything from demolition contracts to laborers’ jobs, barely touched the surface of the overall problem. Coffey was assigned as the coordinator of the construction industry investigation.

  He would be working with Eddie Wright, another old friend from Hogan’s office. Wright was the detective whose badge was stolen fourteen years earlier as he helped lead Joe Frazier from the ring the night Coffey and the guys from the DA’s office protected the heavyweight against death threats.

  Coffey quickly caught up on old times with Wright, and was beginning to feel at home once again. Goldstock had given him a new gang to work with, and these guys knew what they were doing. He had known for years that the Mafia controlled New York’s construction industry. “Maybe,” Coffey thought, “I can still hurt them, even if my office is twenty miles outside the city limits.”

  Wright had some good news right away. He explained that one of the task force’s expert lock pickers had broken into the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Howard Beach, Queens, and a “bug” had been installed in the ceiling.

  Throughout his career Coffey marveled at the work of the cops who were better burglars than the mob. They consistently were able to break into and enter Mafia sanctuaries, even the kitchen of Paul Castellano’s mansion, to place bugs. The bug in Jimmy’s Lounge was crucial to the Vatican case, the bug in the Jaguar had become a legendary feat, and the one in the Palma Boys Social Club had almost cost Coffey his own career. He liked to tell reporters about how cheap the Mafia was. They never had twenty-four-hour security on the hangouts and never spent money on burglar alarms.

  The Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, not incidentally, was the headquarters of a Gambino capo named John Gotti who was thought to be behind the mob’s efforts to take control of unions with heavy membership among plumbers and carpenters.

  By the end of 1985, Joe was busy with major investigations into Carpenter’s Local Union No. 257 on East 25th Street in Manhattan, which had a predominantly Italian membership, and No. 608 on West 51st Street, the heart of Westie territory, which had predominantly Irish membership.

  He continued to maintain an interest in the two major indictments against Castellano and the rest of the godfathers. Giuliani’s office was busy preparing for trials, and Joe was often called into Manhattan to consult with the assistant U.S. attorneys. So his fears of being banished to the suburbs were pretty much behind him. He was spending as much time in the Dirty Apple as he always had.

  One day in November he ran into Castellano in Foley Square near the Federal Court House. By this time the law man and the godfather had developed a kind of mutual respect. Castellano asked Joe how his family was. Joe answered politely while thinking to himself about how Castellano had ordered the murder of his own son-in-law.

  The thing Joe remembered most from the conversation was Castellano’s complaining that he could not go to dinner in the area around the court house. The surrounding blocks, which bordered the area known as Little Italy, home to many capos and soldiers of the Gambino and Genovese families, contained a few of New York’s best Italian restaurants. Castellano was embarrassed that the owners of the restaurants would not take his money. They treated him like some kind of godfather or something, not like the millionaire meat wholesaler he and his lawyer, James LaRossa, said he was. He told Coffey he was starting to use the uptown steak houses for his dinner meetings. There they were used to millionaires and celebrities and everyone got a check. Joe left the meeting wondering how “Big Paulie” would like the food in the Big House.

  On December 2, 1985, Aniello “O’Neill” Dellacroce died of cancer at the age of seventy-two. When Joe heard about the death the next day he was disappointed that the underboss of the Gambino family, indicted as part of the Ruling Commission, had not lived to face the charges in court. He would rather see old capos die in prison.

  For more than fifty years Dellacroce worked as a Mafia soldier. He rose through the ranks to capo and finally underboss. He was greatly responsible for helping La Cosa Nostra evolve from a loosely knit collection of Sicilian immigrant gangsters running illegal booze to speakeasies to the $50 billion a year hidden government Rudy Giuliani charged it was in 1985.

  Before Carlo Gambino, the one-time henchman of Lucky Luciano, died in 1976 he declared that his place as don of the family tha
t bore his name would be taken by his brother-in-law and cousin Paul Castellano. Because the Gambino family was the largest and most powerful in America, with hundreds of gunmen among its assets, its don was automatically the capo di tutti capi—the ruler of all the mafiosi in America.

  The naming of Castellano angered quite a few of the longtime Gambino associates who had toiled many dangerous and evil hours for Don Carlo. They had hoped Dellacroce, the loyal underboss, would be handed the mantle of leadership. The general opinion of Castellano was that he was selfish, greedy, and not as smart as he liked people to believe. Dellacroce, they argued, was the real brains of the family. He deserved the top spot.

  There was much agitation for Dellacroce to reorganize the family by having Castellano hit. His associates suggested taking by force what godfather Carlo Gambino had denied him. But Dellacroce was an old-style mafioso. He would not think of going against the wishes of his godfather. He argued with his loyal henchmen and won. In the end they listened to him. In effect he was the man who really ran the family anyway, and that would not change. “Big Paulie” needed him, and all would prosper if they just stayed cool.

  Castellano did nothing over the next eight years to improve his status with the mobsters who worked for him. But they did prosper as Dellacroce continued to be the criminal mastermind Carlo Cambino had put his trust in for so many years.

  But no matter how much he relied on him, “Big Paulie” always resented Dellacroce’s authority and influence in the Gambino family. When the underboss died, the godfather decided not to go to his wake. He told his counselors that he was afraid it would bring too much attention to the family because he was being followed by a host of agents from several different law enforcement offices at the time.

  Following Dellacroce’s wake, law enforcement officials believe, Castellano contacted Jimmy “Jimmy Brown” Fialla, the long-time chauffeur of Carlo Gambino, who was a man trusted by all factions within the Gambino family. He told Fialla he would like to sit down with Dellacroce’s son Armand to offer his condolences in private and suggested that Fialla set up a dinner meeting at Spark’s Steak House.