Egan and Grosso were fascinating. They told me about the offhand manner in which they stumbled onto the case while off duty in a nightclub. They were opposite sides of the same coin. Egan was a big guy with curly red hair under a porkpie hat that he sometimes wore backward. His nickname was “Popeye.” Grosso was dark, wiry, and serious, a detail man. He was called “Cloudy.” Egan was intentionally funny. Grosso had a sense of humor as well, and they both had total recall about their most famous case. They took full credit for the case, even though there were dozens of New York City detectives and members of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (now defunct) involved.
When I met them, they were no longer partners. Eddie was in the Eighty-First Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Sonny in the Twenty-Eighth in Harlem; two of the most dangerous precincts in New York. They were admired by other street cops, but were resented by their supervisors and department heads for the publicity they received. They would remain friends for life, though Eddie’s ended in 1995 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where he died of cancer. Eddie was loud and boastful, while Sonny was low-key and totally supportive of his partner. To Sonny, Eddie was “The Man, the best street cop ever to put on a badge,” but he often had to hold him in check on the job. Eddie used to play games with a suspect, often asking unanswerable questions to throw the suspect off balance: “Did you ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?” While Sonny would confront the suspect with the facts: “We saw you sell that guy a nickel bag.” Together they led the narcotics bureau in collars, but often “the perp” would be back on the street that afternoon or the next day. And the beat went on.
American law enforcement had declared a “war on drugs,” but from what I saw in the early 1970s, at the side of two of New York City’s finest, the war was already lost. Dealers were flourishing across the country, and generations of young people were stoned. There are many origin stories of the French Connection case. The “official” one was Robin Moore’s, largely provided by Egan and Grosso, and is the one on which we based the film. This version has been disputed over the years and revised by Moore himself in a later book called Mafia Wife. Of course, the unvarnished truth is far more complex, involving a number of countries and a ten-month time frame. Our film was never intended to be a documentary but an impression of that period. But to this day, Sonny says the film is ninety percent accurate. Here’s Egan and Grosso’s version:
On a late October night in 1961, after two straight days on duty, they clocked out of the First Precinct in Lower Manhattan, headquarters of the Narcotics Bureau. Eddie (“Popeye”) coerced Sonny (“Cloudy”) to join him for a nightcap at the Copacabana in midtown, where Eddie was a regular and dated the hat-check girl. The headliner that night was Joe E. Lewis. There, they observed a party of known criminals and “junk connections” in the company of wives and girlfriends at a corner table, where a young guy they couldn’t identify was picking up tabs and “spreading cash around like the Russians were in Jersey.” On a “hunch,” Eddie persuaded Sonny to “give the big spender a tail, just for fun.” The big spender and the blonde in the car with him turned out to be Pasquale “Patsy” Fuca and his wife, Barbara. Patsy was a small-time hood with Mafia connections who had been arrested for armed robbery in an attempt to hold up Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue. He was also suspected of a contract killing, but the investigating officers didn’t have enough to indict him. Barbara, nineteen years old, had been arrested for shoplifting and drew a suspended sentence. Patsy’s uncle was Angelo Tuminaro, a Mafia don who had murdered his way to the top and was suspected of controlling the heroin traffic from Europe and the Middle East into the United States.
Patsy and Barbara left the Copa at 2:00 a.m., got into a late-model Olds. The two detectives followed at a safe distance in an unmarked maroon Corvair. Patsy made several stops along the way, in and around Little Italy. He was met by various men who appeared briefly out of the shadows. They would talk, Patsy would hand them each a small package, then drive to another location. Same routine until 5:00 a.m. Sunday morning, when the Olds stopped under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Patsy and Barbara got out, locked the car, and walked to a 1947 Dodge parked nearby, then took off again. This time they drove only a few blocks into Brooklyn, where they parked in front of a small candy store/luncheonette called Barbara’s, went inside, turned on the lights, and started to compile sections of the Sunday-morning papers. At 7:00 a.m., the luncheonette opened for business.
What was going on? A goombah, throwing money around like it was paper in an expensive nightclub, who turns out to be the owner of a luncheonette in Brooklyn? After surveilling Patsy for four months on their own time, Egan and Grosso got permission to wiretap his home and store. Known criminal “characters” were turning up, and packages were being delivered by UPS. At first their target was Patsy’s uncle, Angie Tuminaro, whose whereabouts were unknown. Ed Carey, chief of the City Narcotics Bureau, informed George Gaffney, his counterpart at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, about the surveillance, and Gaffney assigned Special Agent Frank Waters to accompany Egan and Grosso. From the outset there was friction between the feds and the city cops—personal as well as turf. The tail on Patsy and Barbara continued for two more months as the net began to widen.
Late in 1961 a visitor arrived in New York from France on an ocean liner, the USS United States. He was Jacques Angelvin, a popular French television star, host of a daily program called Paris-Club. In Paris, Angelvin had purchased a 1960 Invicta. He brought the Buick to New York at the request of a friend and benefactor, François Scaglia, a Corsican, aged thirty-four. Scaglia was known in France as “The Executioner,” having organized several contract killings. He was also big in the Marseille heroin trade, and when he heard his friend Angelvin was going to New York, he asked him for a favor: take the Buick. Angelvin later denied knowledge of the cargo embedded in the rocker panels of the Buick: 112 pounds of uncut heroin, street value in America, $32 million.
While these plans were under way, Sonny and Eddie heard from informants that there was a heroin drought, but a big shipment was arriving from overseas. The shipment was accompanied to Montreal and eventually New York by Scaglia and his partner, a Frenchman named Jean Jehan, boss of the world’s largest heroin network and known as the “Giant.” The tail on Patsy Fuca eventually led Egan, Grosso, and Waters to Jehan (Frog One), Scaglia (Frog Two), and Angie Tuminaro. In all, over three hundred state, federal, and international detectives were involved, as well as other criminal conspirators, but, taking Moore’s lead, we focused on Egan and Grosso, Jehan and Scaglia, with Waters reduced to a minor role.
The case followed a circuitous path: the impromptu nightcap at the Copa, the unexpected sighting of Patsy Fuca, the hunch that led to his surveillance, the arrests of the minor players, and the escape from justice of all the big shots.
Here was a canvas broader than anything I’d ever been involved with, from Marseille to Brooklyn and all over New York City. The underlying theme was the thin line between the policeman and the criminal: Jehan, the dapper gourmet with a daughter in a convent and a loving young wife; Scaglia, the ice man, who could kill without emotion; Patsy, the low-life dealer, with dreams of a score that would put him in the big time; Sonny, a confirmed bachelor, subservient to his partner, whom he idolized, but lethal in the street; Eddie, the ladies’ man, a braggart and a tough guy, obsessive, never without his porkpie hat or a policeman’s .38 Special strapped to his ankle. Popeye and Cloudy. Though they were assigned to different precincts when we met, they arranged to work together in their off time, so I could experience their dynamic firsthand.
For weeks, without permission from their chiefs, Eddie and Sonny took me on the job, to the Twenty-Eighth or Eighty-First Precinct. They took me to bars and “shooting galleries” in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where they were certain to find users and dealers. One night we broke into an apartment in Harlem, where a family of twelve, from young children to grandmothers, was lying around a living room floor with needles in their arms. “My G
od,” I said to Sonny. “This is ten minutes from where I live.” At the time, I was renting an apartment at Eighty-Sixth Street and Park Avenue on the east side of Manhattan. Similar scenes were happening across the city and the country. Every day, we’d go to African American bars, where Popeye would feel along the ledge under the bar, grabbing magnets filled with drugs that he tossed into a cocktail shaker, mixing them with stale beer. Cloudy would grab the perps and “lock” them in a phone booth near the entrance to the bar. I saw them do this at least a dozen times before I re-created it on film. As we entered the bars, Eddie would take out his .38 special and hand it to me. “Cover the back,” he’d say under his breath. I’d be standing there with a lethal weapon, which I’d never fired, hoping the perps wouldn’t bolt for the back door. Eddie and Sonny needed to know that if necessary, I had their backs. They’d take control of at least fifty of the baddest dudes I’d ever seen. Everyone had a record; everyone was “wrong,” as Eddie would say.
I went on stakeouts and busts until I knew what they said and did in every situation. While on the job or on a lunch break, they’d reveal more details of the French Connection case and the personalities of the other players.
D’Antoni and I had meetings at the major studios. We had no script, but we could talk through details of the story, and we added a chase scene. There was no interest.
National General was a small company, a kind of hobby for its three owners, who were millionaire investors and sportsmen in their day jobs—operating partner Irv Levin, who owned the Boston Celtics, and later the San Diego Clippers basketball teams; Sam Shulman, who owned the Seattle Supersonics; and Eugene Klein, who owned the San Diego Chargers football team. They liked the idea of The French Connection, though there was no script and no star attached, and they trusted D’Antoni because of Bullitt. I, on the other hand, was a question mark—“Too soft, too artsy-fartsy,” opined their head of production, Dan Polier. But D’Antoni believed in me and held out, even when they threatened to pull the plug if I was the director. Phil convinced National General to let us commission a screenplay.
Alex Jacobs had written Point Blank, a vengeance film that was becoming a cult favorite. We gave him Robin Moore’s book and our take on the story, emphasizing the chemistry between the two detectives. Alex worked for several weeks and produced a script that neither Phil nor I liked. We turned it in to National General and got the bad news from Polier: they were putting the project in “turnaround.” There are pictures that go into turnaround for ten or more years before they get made, or they never get made at all. “Turnaround” meant that if another studio decided to make the picture, they’d have to reimburse National General for the money they had invested in the script.
We schlepped The French Connection around for two years without a script we believed in. We took it to every studio, and were rejected by all. We pitched it to the head of MGM, a distinguished, white-haired gentleman named Bob O’Brien. He was cordial, but had no interest in what we were talking about. After the meeting, which we knew would be another pass, Phil and I left the MGM lot and stopped at a soft drink stand across the street. It was a hot summer afternoon, and Phil had to sit down. He had been smoking three packs a day and was short of breath. No studio believed I had the skills to deliver an action picture, especially one without a great script. I looked at Phil and felt his pain. I told him I would walk away and he could find another director who was acceptable to the studios. He insisted we were partners and would continue to be. We had to believe in ourselves and in the material because we had nothing else to believe in.
Phil and I continued to meet, but less frequently. We were each trying to get something else going. He gave me the galleys of a novel he had just read called Shaft, about a black private detective, that had a feel for the mean streets of New York. It was a first novel by a foreign news editor on the New York Times, Ernest Tidyman, who wanted to write screenplays and quickly accepted our offer to do a draft of The French Connection for five thousand dollars. We gave him the previous drafts, along with Robin Moore’s book, and met with him to lay out a structure and describe our experiences with Egan and Grosso. He produced a workmanlike script in less than a month. The Morris office sent the new draft to the studios, and again they all passed. Two years had gone by since I finished Boys in the Band, and I hadn’t shot a frame of film.
I was asleep one winter morning in New York when the phone rang at about 4:00 a.m. Ed Gross, my business manager. He told me my mother had died that day. She was walking on Walden Drive in Beverly Hills and dropped dead of a heart attack. I asked Ed to arrange to have her buried, no funeral service. I stayed awake crying that morning, remembering all my mother meant to me and how much I loved and valued her. She had sacrificed her life for me. She was in her early sixties when she died. Whatever goodness resides in me comes from her; and whenever I’ve strayed, I know that somewhere, she disapproves but loves me nonetheless.
That morning, it was snowing in New York. I booked a flight to Los Angeles and got to the airport early. Standing at a fence, watching the planes land and take off, was strangely comforting, but I was filled with anxiety. When I got to the Beverly Hills house, I arranged with Ed to donate my mother’s clothes to the poor and packed my own things to put into storage. I walked around the little house for the last time and tried not to lose myself in memories.
One day, after I had signed up for unemployment benefits for the second time in my life, Larry Auerbach called. Larry was D’Antoni’s agent at the Morris office and never gave up on The French Connection or us, though it seemed a lost cause. Larry said that Dick Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century-Fox, who’d previously passed on the film, wanted to meet with us. Phil and I went to Zanuck’s enormous office on the Fox lot, which once belonged to his father, Darryl, one of the storied Hollywood producers and studio heads. “Fellas,” Dick said, “I’ve got a million and a half dollars hidden away in my budget for the rest of the year. I’m on my way out. They’re gonna fire me, but I’ve got a hunch about that French Connection script. Can you guys make it for a million and a half dollars?”
Our own budget estimate was double that. Phil silenced me with a kick to the leg. He said, “Sure. I don’t see why not.”
“How soon can you start?”
Phil jumped in again, “Right away.”
“Who do you see in it?” Zanuck asked.
“What about Paul Newman?” Phil said.
Zanuck laughed. “You’ll never get Newman. He makes half a million a picture, which is a third of your budget. Who else?”
“I’ll tell you who I think would be great,” I offered. “Jackie Gleason, he’s a black Irishman, like Eddie Egan, a great actor—”
Dick cut me off. “I’ll never do another picture with Gleason as long as I’m at this studio.” He was angry. “Ever see Gigot? It was the worst disaster in the history of Fox . . . a silent movie about a clown. Can you believe it? And I let him make it.” He shook his head. “No Jackie Gleason—no way!”
I then suggested a new actor that Phil and I had briefly discussed: Peter Boyle, who’d just appeared as a murderous bigot in a successful independent film, his first, called Joe. Silence. Zanuck’s expression didn’t change, but he slowly nodded. “That’s not a bad idea.”
We met with Boyle. He was tall, heavy, broad-shouldered, with piercing black eyes and a bald head with a fringe. He had a threatening appearance, though he was actually kind and funny. He was caught up in sudden success, playing an unlikable character, but his performance was powerful, original, and real. We told him our story and gave him the Tidyman script. Two days later he called: “I appreciate your interest in me, but I don’t want to do characters like this anymore. I’d like to do a romantic comedy next.” He must have looked in the mirror and seen Cary Grant. Years later Mel Brooks saw Young Frankenstein.
But Zanuck was completely on board; we had a “go” picture after two years of no interest. “Listen,” he said, “you don’t need a star for this. Sto
p thinking about stars—you just need a good actor. It’s better for the picture if he’s unknown and can inhabit the character. You don’t need a name! I don’t want names—and you can’t afford them.” No studio head would say something like this today.
“Would you go with a guy who’s never acted before, but is totally right for this character?” I asked him.
“Who?”
“Have you ever heard of a newspaper columnist in New York, Jimmy Breslin?”
Zanuck smiled. “You think he can act?”
“I don’t know, but he’d understand what we’re trying to do, and he’s a fascinating guy.”
Dick thought it an interesting idea. “Why don’t you go back to New York and test him?”
We set up offices at the Fox Building on the West Side of Manhattan. Phil brought Egan and Grosso on as consultants. We started to put together a crew, and one of the first people we hired was a “casting director” recommended by Phil. Bob Weiner was not exactly a casting director. He was a theater and film reviewer for the Village Voice, opinionated to the point of abrasiveness but aware of every new actor on the scene. One of the earliest reviewers to praise Whoopi Goldberg, he saved every Playbill from every play he’d ever seen. He lived in a dark one-room apartment on West Fifty-Seventh Street that was stocked floor to ceiling with old newspapers and magazines, his research materials. In a short time, he brought me little-known actors Tony Lo Bianco, Roy Scheider, and Alan Weeks.
Scheider was an underemployed actor, mostly in off-Broadway plays. He had a small role in the film Klute, which hadn’t come out yet. The second he walked into my office, I knew he was perfect for Grosso; he was dark, lean, good-looking, and smart. “What are you doing now, Roy?” I asked.
The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir Page 14