by Robin Moore
Table of Contents
acknowledgments
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
epilogue
about the author
Table of Contents
acknowledgments
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
epilogue
about the author
T h e F r e n c h C o n n e c t i o n
T h e F r e n c h
C o n n e c t i o n
The World's Most Crucial Narcotics Investigation Robin Moore
Copyright © 1969 by Robin Moore This edition published by Barnes & Noble Digital, by arrangement with Robin Moore
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher.
2001 Barnes & Noble Digital
ISBN 1-4014-0126-0
c o n t e n t s
acknowledgments
vi
chapter 1
1
chapter 2
10
chapter 3
24
chapter 4
39
chapter 5
70
chapter 6
78
chapter 7
94
chapter 8
127
chapter 9
140
contents
chapter 10
173
chapter 11
190
chapter 12
207
chapter 13
218
chapter 14
232
chapter 15
251
chapter 16
276
chapter 17
309
chapter 18
324
chapter 19
337
chapter 20
350
chapter 21
358
chapter 22
382
epilogue
394
about the author
398
Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s
THE account that follows is a case history of what must qualify as one of the finest police investigations in the annals of United States law enforcement.
Almost certainly it represents the most crucial single victory to date in the ceaseless, frustrating war against the import of vicious narcotics into our country. Indeed, this investigation, and the information gleaned from it, eventually has led to the progressive breakdown of Mafia investment and proprietorship in the U.S. narcotics market.
This is neither a clinical study nor an emotional exposition of the ravages of narcotics addiction, of which so much has been written, although more needs to be told. Nor is it populated by the pitiful "junkies" who should and do frighten the anxious parents who are concerned about American youth. It is a rare view of the murky intrigue among the conscienceless ones who profit from the deadly subversion of dope addicts, young and old. If one parent is jarred by this story, or if one youngster can be saved from disaster out of disgust, then the long, lonely, often dangerous vigils of many police officers will have been rewarded, at least in part.
The detailed information that made this book possible derives from many cooperative sources, all of whom have my sincere appreciation and gratitude.
The New York Police Department's tireless Narcotics Bureau, under its former commander Deputy Chief Inspector Ira Bluth, and especially the bureau's elite Special Investigating Unit (S.I.U.) were constantly helpful and patient in supplying details necessary to make the narrative accurate. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics also was of valuable assistance, with its more than five thousand feet of recorded reports and radio transmissions.
The fact that one of the suspects in the case kept a fairly complete diary greatly assisted the author in presenting details not covered by police reports and interviews. The District Attorney's office of Kings County (Brooklyn), New York, particularly Assistant D.A. Frank Bauman, also contributed mightily, making available some twelve hundred pages of court testimony.
But always the primary informants were the two dedicated New York City detectives who stumbled upon, then directed, this extraordinary case to a successful conclusion: Detectives First Grade Edward Egan and Salvatore Grosso. It has been reported to police that even today the international dope-smuggling ring, whose operation was damaged so badly, refuses to believe that one of their own, a "stool pigeon," was not responsible for leading authorities to the unravelling of the massive conspiracy. The truth is that the New York police alone, aided by Federal agents, pursued the case to the end without help from a single betrayer.
Speaking of acknowledgments, I could go no further here were I not to make special note of the contributions of my writing associate and friend, Edward Keyes. Ed personally involved himself in every detail of preparing this book, from the essential research, and fieldwork with narcotics officers, to the actual writing and editing.
Together, we are proud to tell this story of The French Connection.
Robin Moore
New York, N. Y.
July, 1968
C h a p t e r 1
LATE on Saturday night, October 7, 1961, after twenty-seven straight hours on duty, New York Detective First Grade Edward Egan, thirty-one, and his partner, then Detective Second Grade Salvatore Grosso, thirty, decided it was time to have some fun.
There was no question where they would go. Comedian Joe E. Lewis was headlining at the Copacabana, and Egan's current romance, Carol Galvin, checked coats at the nightclub.
Eddie Egan was a burly Irish-handsome redhead once known as "Bullets" to his fellow cops because as a uniformed patrolman he had worn an extra cartridge belt. But his more recent Narcotics Bureau code name was "Popeye" — after his favourite mode of amusement, "popeying around," that is, looking over pretty girls, upon whom he would exercise his Gaelic charm at the merest hint of a blush.
Egan, the off-duty swinger, contrasted sharply with his solemn partner and best friend, Sonny Grosso, a pale-faced Italian-American with large brown eyes.
Sonny was a worrier who looked for, and frequently managed to find, the dark side of most situations, unlike the ebullient Egan. They were both six-footers, but Grosso was wiry and at first glance appeared to be slight, even somewhat vulnerable, for a policeman.
But Sonny had earned a black belt in karate, and, as a number of hoodlums had discovered, he was definitely not one to underestimate. His code name at the Narcotics Bureau was "Cloudy."
The previous evening the two had closed out a narcotics case in Harlem, their beat since 1959. They had arrested three pushers who had been under in
vestigation for several months, had stayed up throughout the night, interrogating, fingerprinting, and booking them, then writing out the endless official reports that are required. Finally, they escorted the prisoners to the old city jail called "the Tombs" in downtown Manhattan, and then appeared in early court to lodge the formal complaints. It was late Saturday morning before they were finished, but both were too tired to sleep, an occupational hazard among most undercover agents, who live with taut nerves and their senses alert during the long working hours. The two were rabid baseball fans, and because the Yankees were playing the third game of the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds that day, sleep remained far from their minds. They cruised around the city listening to the game on the car radio. Later, after the Yanks' close victory, having come from behind to win in the ninth inning on a home run by Roger Maris, the two felt more inclined to sustain the stimulation of winning than to curb it.
They went out to dinner, visited a couple of east midtown bars recommended by Egan for possible "action," and at last, fatigued but still restless, they headed across town to the Copa.
It was eleven-forty Saturday night when Egan parked his 1961 maroon Corvair on East 60th Street and he and Sonny stepped into the nightclub —unaware that they were entering upon an odyssey of intrigue and conspiracy that would obsess them night and day for the next four-and-a-half months and would not end finally for a year and a half. It was twenty minutes before the midnight show, and the Copa was filling up. Egan barely had a chance to murmur a smiling hello to Carol, who was disappearing behind coats and hats. She was a beautiful, stately girl, not yet twenty, with short blonde hair; to Egan's eyes she was a double for Kim Novak. He hastily said that he would see her later, and the two went downstairs to the main clubroom, where the headwaiter recognized Egan and directed them to a small table up on one of the raised terraces well in the rear. They ordered a rye and ginger for Eddie, Italian vermouth on ice for Sonny, and sat back quietly to watch the gay night-life scene and perhaps, finally, unwind.
Just as the drinks arrived, Sonny touched his partner's arm and nodded toward a crowded, boisterous table below their perch. The party of twelve really might have been transplanted from the set of a thirties' gangster movie: swarthy, sleek, dark-suited men accompanied by flashy, overly made-up women. The individual at the centre of attention would be particularly well cast as an archetypal Hollywood rackets' boss with black, cropped bushy hair, a dark complexion, and a pockmarked face, good-looking in a scowling way. He was about thirty years of age, and overly dapper in a shiny black suit with broad shoulders, a diamond stickpin glittering from a white silk tie against a white shirt with French cuffs. A showy, young blonde with a bouffant hairdo was at his elbow.
The man was the host and seemed also to be something of a celebrity at the club. As Egan and Grosso looked on, absorbed, a succession of obviously well-heeled and hard-looking types streamed by to pay their respects. Between times the host sent waiters scurrying with drinks to other tables around the room. During one noisy greeting, Sonny heard someone call the man Patsy.
"He spreads bread like there's no tomorrow," Sonny observed.
"Interesting," Eddie commented. "I make at least two junk 'connections' at the table. And I know a couple of those guys who dropped by are in numbers."
"I've never seen ‘Patsy' before, have you?"
"No. I wonder how we could've missed him?" Egan's tone was dry.
Throughout the floor show, which lasted an hour and a half, Eddie and Sonny divided their attention between Joe E. Lewis and the table of the big spender. When the lights came up and the orchestra started playing for dancing, Patsy and his retinue arose and went upstairs. The detectives looked at one another, paid their check and followed. The group congregated at the bar in the Copa lounge, where a rock-jazz combo was drowning any conversation.
Patsy had ordered nightcaps all around.
Standing near the checkroom while deciding what to do, Eddie and Sonny saw Patsy pull a huge roll of bills from his trouser pocket to pay the bar tab. Sonny whistled: "Check the bread!"
Egan nodded. "What do you say we wait and give him a tail, just for fun?"
Grosso shrugged in unenthusiastic accord and, as they went out, Eddie winked apologetically at Carol Galvin and threw her a kiss. They sat for twenty-five minutes in Egan's car near the corner of Madison Avenue, until, at 2 A.M., "Patsy" and the splashy blonde came down the steps of the Copa alone. The uniformed doorman brought up a late-model blue Oldsmobile compact, and they pulled away toward Fifth Avenue. Driving slowly behind them, Egan speculated: "I'll lay odds he takes us to Mott Street."
Patsy drove all the way down Fifth Avenue to its Broadway intersection and turned toward a tenement section of Manhattan that has become infamous in America, the Lower East Side. Narrow Mott Street, where Patsy indeed went, is only eleven blocks long, from Bleecker Street near the edge of Greenwich Village at its northern end, down past the Bowery to Chatham Square in the south. But to the police it long has been viewed as an aorta to the heart of every illegal activity in New York. Though Mott touches Chinatown, it is mostly in the area known as Little Italy, which for generations has provided a private crime greenhouse for Mafia families.
Patsy did not confine his tour to Mott Street, however.
During the next two hours, he made stops on Hester Street, Broome, Canal and Delancey. As Sonny and Egan watched from discreet distances, the Olds pulled to the curb from time to time, and Patsy got out. One or more men would materialize from doorways or out of the shadows of quiet buildings, and they would talk for a few minutes before Patsy returned to his car and drove slowly off. The blonde always stayed in the Olds.
It was nearing 5 A.M. Sunday when the blue compact finally headed east on Delancey Street toward the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn. The two detectives, never far behind in the maroon Corvair, had been active for thirty-two consecutive hours.
Patsy led them off the bridge and into Meeker Avenue beneath the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He parked and locked the car. Then the two walked a few steps to a battered white 1947 Dodge, and drove off again. The puzzled detectives followed.
This time the pursuit took them only a dozen blocks. Patsy drove to Grand Street, then west to Bushwick Avenue, turned right a short block and right again on Maujer Street, where he parked just beyond the corner. Egan went past Maujer, made a U-turn and came back and stopped on Bushwick. He and Sonny watched the expensively dressed couple unlock a darkened candy store-luncheonette, called Barbara's, at the corner. While the girl waited outside, Patsy switched on the lights and walked to a small room in the rear, where he filled a coffeepot and placed it on a hot plate. Only then did he return to the street door and motion the blonde inside. The detectives saw her take a gray apron-coat from a wall hook and slip into it, while Patsy removed his suitcoat and pulled on a gray jacket. Patsy then went outside and around the corner to the Dodge to get an armload of newspapers, which he lugged into the store. Then the two set to work fitting together the various sections of the Sunday papers. Across the intersection, the pair of veteran police officers looked at each other in further wonderment.
About 7 A.M., Patsy pulled up the blind masking the glass door to announce that they were open for business. A few customers began to drift in, mostly white-clad medical personnel. Egan and Grosso then realized they were parked in front of St. Catherine's Hospital, which stood on a corner diagonally opposite the luncheonette at the intersection of Bushwick Avenue and Maujer Street. It was a drab area of weather-beaten three-story residential dwellings, but directly across Bushwick there was a modern apartment project with several stores on its ground level, including another luncheonette.
Knowing that they would be conspicuous sitting there in the daylight, Sonny went into the hospital and persuaded a security guard to open an unused ground-floor X-ray room, whose windows offered a good view of Patsy's store. By 8 A.M., Sonny and Eddie were ensconced more or less comfortably, watching the comings and go
ings around the luncheonette, taking short breaks to nourish themselves with coffee and a Danish or to seek out a men's room.
Patsy and the blonde had been joined in the store by a short, heavyset, dark-haired man wearing a lumber jacket, who appeared to be a helper. Otherwise, nothing noteworthy had happened, nor had any of the three left the premises.
The detectives maintained their surveillance with increasing weariness until shortly after 2 P.M., in their forty-second hour of continuous duty, when they saw the suspects come out of the luncheonette, dressed for the street. Patsy locked up, and he and the girl said goodbye to the stocky fellow who walked the other way on Bushwick, while the couple went around the corner to their car. Egan and Grosso hurried to the Corvair.
They tailed the old Dodge west on Maujer Street, over to Grand and up onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Patsy sped south, into the Gowanus Expressway toward southern Brooklyn. He exited at 65th Street after about an eight-mile run. In a few minutes the Dodge pulled into a driveway a third of the way into the block on 67th Street. Egan halted his car back at the corner of 67th and Twelfth Avenue.
Sixty-seventh was a neat, sedate, tree-shaded street lined with two- and three-story private houses. After ten minutes, when the detectives felt sure that Patsy and the blonde were settled inside, they turned into 67th and rode slowly past where the Dodge was parked.
The house was the right-hand one of a pair of identical attached two-story red-brick houses, built over two-car garages. The common stairway from the sidewalk was divided by a white wrought-iron railing and led to a cement porch and separate entrances. As the Corvair cruised past, Sonny scribbled the address of the house on the inside of a matchbook: 1224 67th Street.
Though seriously fatigued at the moment, they decided the odd situation merited serious investigation after a night's rest. Since when does the proprietor of a luncheonette and newsstand receive red carpet treatment at one of New York's most glamorous and expensive nightclubs?
C h a p t e r 2
Sonny Grosso was an aggressive and uncompromising detective, but what private life he would permit himself was restrained and for the most part uneventful. At thirty, he was basically as withdrawn as he had been as a shy child. Introspective and stern, unlike his partner Eddie Egan, the sallow-complexioned Sonny dated infrequently and in fact had never had a really serious romance. Egan was the lover of parties and girls, and if he wasn't always successful in finding a good time the fiery-haired detective invariably found enjoyment in the hunt itself. Grosso, on the other hand, respected women and treated them more seriously, almost with the deference of a gentleman from an earlier era.