by Robin Moore
Sonny was an only son with three sisters. When his father, a truck driver, died suddenly at the age of thirty-seven, Sonny, the eldest child, became the head of his family at fifteen. He treated his sisters with fatherly care.
Sonny was raised in East Harlem, which he remembers as a shabby but safe and warm Italian neighbourhood where everybody knew everybody else and the families were close and reasonably happy. He remembers how his mother, a gentle, indefatigable woman, would leave their tenement apartment "to get a quart of milk" at the local grocery and not return for two hours because she had to stop and talk along the way with neighbours. To Sonny, East Harlem had always meant a friendly community with big families. The schools were crowded, and streets swarmed with more than enough kids to get up a game of stickball or "association" (wide-open, one-handed touch football) at any hour of the day. When Sonny was still in his teens, the Grosso family moved across Manhattan to the west side of Harlem to an Irish enclave called "Vinegar Hill," where they were suddenly immigrants among immigrants. Despite his dark, brooding Latin features, it did not take Sonny long to assimilate among the bright-faced, garrulous, suspicious Irish: he was quiet, sincere, physically rugged and a good street athlete. After a while, he ceased to miss the old neighbourhood.
When he did return to East Harlem after almost ten years, the area had changed radically, and so had Sonny. He was a policeman. After high school at the start of the Korean War he was drafted into the Army, where he spent two years as a radio operator. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1952 after injuring his knee. Then he drove a mail truck for two years, mostly in the Times Square area, still providing the main support for his widowed mother and the younger children. In 1954, he and several friends took the Civil Service Police Academy examination, and out of some 50,000 applicants tested that year Sonny scored among the top three hundred. From the Academy, Sonny was sent on his first assignment to the 25th Precinct in East Harlem. It was different: his old neighbourhood had deteriorated from a relatively cohesive immigrant community into a vicious ghetto, populated now by a new generation of divisive elements who existed more by muscle and intimidation than by ambition. In a few years, the East Harlem of Sonny Grosso's boyhood had earned the grotesque distinction of spawning as much vice and degradation per square block as any sinkhole in America.
The most serious depravity was the growing illicit sale, and use, of addictive narcotics. Sonny had not before been exposed to the ravages of heroin, and it revolted him. He hated what it had done, and was doing, to the Puerto Rican and Negro people who now crowded in among those Italians still left in his old neighbourhood.
There were still some there who remembered him, and he soon realized that many now looked upon him with unfamiliar mistrust and even contempt. (This, too, was different from the old days, when his father had set a typical standard of proper relations with the police: "Tell them nothing? Okay. But hate them? No.")
Sonny could not really despise these wretched people in return; only their situation. Drugs, he saw, were at the root of their afflictions but were not the cause of their misery. Drugs, or "junk," were but a symptom of a deeper disease in their urban society. But in his four years as a patrolman in the 25th, he learned enough to focus his hatred upon this most obvious despoiler, narcotics, and on those who pushed it and profited so inhumanely.
In 1958, Sonny applied and was accepted for a post as detective in the Police Narcotics Bureau. After training downtown, they asked if he would be interested in plainclothes work; he said he would. Where did he think he might do the most good? East Harlem, he replied. And so Sonny was assigned to the Sixth Detective Division, which included the 25th Precinct, and returned again to East Harlem.
Eddie Egan had never thought of being a city police officer before he was twenty-five. He wanted to be a professional baseball player. And he came literally to within an arm's length of making it to the New York Yankees.
Egan learned his baseball the hard way, as most city boys must, in the streets (punchball on the sidewalks; stickball, manhole cover to hydrant in the gutters) and on the debris-strewn lots of Brooklyn with a mushy softball or a taped, leaden "Rocket." Eddie's playmates were frequently reminded that he had a temper as fiery as his thatch of auburn hair.
By the time he left high school at seventeen, professional scouts were eying him. And after a two-year enlistment in the Marine Corps, in which he played service ball while growing bigger, stronger and more agile, he was offered a modest contract by the Washington Senators. In 1950 he was traded to the New York Yankees, and with their Class-B Norfolk farm club he was the regular centre fielder and batted an impressive .317. The parent organization began to show special interest in him.
The Yankees about that time were starting to search for a bright prospect to be groomed against the inevitable retirement of their aging superstar, Joe DiMaggio. Egan was marked as one of several youngsters who showed promise. Another was a slugging shortstop from Oklahoma who, nineteen years old, had been breaking minor league distance records for home runs — Mickey Mantle.
After the 1950 season, Eddie Egan looked forward to the following spring, when he hoped to be advanced to the Yankees' Class A Binghamton club. And from there — who could tell? That October his dreams were shattered when he was recalled by the Marines. But the doctors learned that he had broken an arm in a training accident during his earlier enlistment and were undecided whether to accept him. They indicated, however, that he might expect to be called up again within three months.
At loose ends, to keep himself occupied while awaiting reactivation Egan passed a competitive exam and became a patrolman with the semiprivate police force of the Port Authority of New York. When January, 1951, passed, without a word from the Corps, Eddie had to choose between leaving the Authority and taking his chances at the Yankees' Florida training camp or holding on to his good job and sweating out his Marine Corps recall at home. He elected to stay on as a cop, and was sure he had made the right decision when that spring the Yankees brought rookie shortstop Mickey Mantle up to the big club and made him an outfielder.
The Marines kept him dangling — they never did call him back — and Egan wound up staying with the Port Authority police for four more years. A truce was reached in Korea, but by then, of course, it was too late for him to dream of a baseball career.
But it didn't bother him anymore. He liked being a cop, but didn't like the slim prospects for advancement with the Port Authority. The organization was still so new that none of the senior officers had enough duty time for retirement, thus an ambitious patrolman had little opportunity to climb the ladder of command. So in 1955, having twice passed tests for sergeant without promotion, Egan took the city police exam and placed 361st out of the almost 60,000 applicants, ten thousand more hopefuls than had taken the tests with Grosso the previous year. Eddie set an ambitious goal for himself: to make detective within one year.
Since the age of twelve, Egan had always considered himself to be very independent. He never knew his real father, and he never had been close to his stepfather, a New York fireman. His mother died shortly before his graduation from parochial school, and he boarded with grandparents. So, he had learned early how to make his own decisions — which he illustrated his first morning as a Police Academy recruit. Reporting an hour early to a gym in Flushing Meadow Park, Queens, he captured three girls hiding in the shrub-bery who proved to be escaped prisoners with no less than thirteen felony charges against them.
To set an example for the other rookie cops, the Police Commissioner rewarded Egan by giving him the weekend off. Thus rewarded, Egan attempted to earn every weekend free. He rushed home from the Academy at 4 P.M. each day, changed clothes, and by 6 P.M. was back in Manhattan, either in the perversion-ridden Times Square area or around the Port Authority Bus Terminal, with which he was familiar from his service with the Authority police corps. He only had four hours each night — Police Academy rules require probationary police officers to be home by 10 P.M. —
but he knew when and how to look for perverts, prostitutes, purse snatchers and narcotics pushers. His record of arrests, ninety-eight, was so extraordinary that within a month, while still officially an Academy trainee, he was pulled from his class and assigned to a special unit of veteran detectives covering Times Square. But when he refused an offer to become a "shoofly" (one of the commissioner's Confidential Squad that spies on other cops), even though it probably would have meant sure promotion to detective, Egan was returned to the Academy.
He finally graduated and was sent to a beat in Harlem where, within two weeks, he made thirty-seven arrests, including one which led to the well-publicized indictment and subsequent conviction of singer Billy Daniels in a shooting. He was recommended for detective, and almost a year to the day after joining the department, in the summer of 1956, Eddie Egan exchanged his silver shield for a gold one.
Detectives either are dispatched to precincts around the city or may apply for special assignment squads, such as Burglary, Homicide, Safe and Loft.
Egan knew what he wanted while he was still a rookie patrolman: Narcotics. A single personal experience with the bestiality of junk had left him with a permanent purpose in life, to interdict the drug traffic in any way he could.
One day in Brooklyn, while Egan was on his Harlem tour of duty, his six-year-old niece came home late from first grade to find her friends roller-skating. Her mother, Egan's sister, was sitting on the front stoop of their apartment house waiting for the child, and told her to go upstairs and get her own skates. The little girl clambered up the six flights excitedly, threw her plaid schoolbag down on the kitchen table, and ran to her bedroom to get her skates. Four dark, Spanish-looking young men huddled there, staring at her, one clutching her piggy bank. The child screamed. Two of them grabbed her, and a third grabbed her skates from the shelf and proceeded to beat her face and head with them. She slumped to the floor, bleeding and swollen, semiconscious, as the men ran out with her piggy bank. The mother soon found the girl, and in near hysteria she telephoned Eddie who raced out to Brooklyn. In a fury, he tore through the neighbourhood, with the help of the local precinct, digging up every known degenerate or suspected felon from the bars and loitering spots. Within two hours the four men were in custody. They were junkies, desperate for a fix. Egan was barely able to restrain himself from destroying them. He never forgot it.
Eddie had been in the Narcotics Bureau for three years when he was teamed with Sonny Grosso. They were different in nature, but they complemented one another: brashness dovetailing with reserve, ingenuity modified by scepticism; and always in common, an abhorrence of the ugly ruin wrought by narcotics.
Together, they terrorized the subworld of East Harlem. At the same time, they realized that their enthusiasm was provoking resentment within the Police Department and even within their own bureau. They made too many arrests; they were making certain others look slovenly. Eddie and Sonny shrugged off the sniping. They wanted to do a job.
Late Monday morning, October 9, 1961, after a good night's sleep, Egan drove back to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and parked behind St. Catherine's Hospital, opposite the luncheonette at the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Maujer Street. He went into the hospital and identified himself to the chief of security, who gave him permission to use the vacant X-ray room again as an observation point. He didn't explain what or who was to be observed; it was already obvious that many hospital personnel patronized Patsy's store, and any leak about police surveillance could abort the case before it even opened.
In the middle of the afternoon, Sonny arrived. Most of his day had been spent checking out Patsy. It was supposed to be their day off.
"I think we got something," Sonny exclaimed, betraying an enthusiasm unusual for him.
"What did you find out?"
"Our friend Patsy's name is Pasquale Fuca. The blonde he was with is his wife. Her name is Barbara. Barbara Desina, it used to be. She's only a kid, nineteen or so according to the marriage license they filed."
"Yeah, yeah. What else?"
"Barbara has experience. She drew a suspended for shoplifting a year ago. And Patsy" — Sonny's dark eyes gleamed in the pale face — "he's a sweetheart. He was brought up on suspicion of armed robbery. Tried to hold up Tiffany's on Fifth Avenue! Could have got two-and-a-half to five. But they couldn't hang it on him. Also, downtown they're sure Patsy pulled off a Mafia contract on a guy named De Marco. But it was a clean job. Couldn't touch him."
"Nice," Egan growled.
"Wait. Are you ready? I got this from the Feds. Patsy's got an uncle. Guess who? . . . Little Angie!"
Egan blew a low whistle of surprise. Angelo Tuminaro was thought to be one of the bigger Mafia "Dons" (key leaders), a man who was known to have clawed his way up to and through the high criminal echelons in New York the hard way, knocking over more than one rival en route, although the police were unable to prove it. Tuminaro's wife was Jewish, and her father was powerful in certain Jewish-dominated rackets. Consequently Angelo gained recognition as number-one liaison between the then equally strong Italian and Jewish wings of organized crime.
Finally, since 1937, the police were sure, Little Angie had enjoyed the choice responsibility of supervising all heroin traffic into the United States from Europe and the Middle East.
But in 1960 Angie Tuminaro entangled himself in a vice and conspiracy charge with two of the high criminal lords: Big John Ormento, a top-level Don, and Vito Genovese himself, suspected Mafia sub-boss of all United States crime under the deported but still-reigning "Capo," or chief, Lucky Luciano. The authorities had managed to arrest all three, but Little Angie jumped bail and dropped out of sight. Now, two years later, he was still holed up somewhere, presumably still calling the important shots in the narcotics racket. Both the federal and city police wanted very badly to locate him.
Egan looked away from the luncheonette across Bushwick Avenue. "We better go talk to the boss," he said.
An hour later, Egan and Grosso were seated in the office of Lieutenant Vincent Hawkes, second in command to Deputy Chief Inspector Edward F. Carey, at New York Narcotics Bureau headquarters in downtown Manhattan. They described how they had stumbled upon Patsy at the Copa, his strange tour through Little Italy in the early hours of Sunday morning, and his connection with the missing Angelo Tuminaro. Now they wanted to follow it up.
Hawkes, a tall, lean, balding man of stern demeanour, was known as an exacting but fair commander, and a sound cop. He made a stab at maintaining military detachment. "All that is great," he said, "but you guys work Harlem. You're not supposed to be in Brooklyn."
"Detach us," Egan quickly requested. "Let us have a shot at it, at least until we see if there's anything here or not. Everybody wants Little Angie, right?
Okay," he went on, not expecting a reply to the obvious, "so maybe here's a lead. We deserve it. We make this guy, this candy store owner, putting on a big show in a fancy nightclub, with known connections all over him. Then, on our own, after working the whole day and night before, we tail him downtown and out to Brooklyn and sit on him all day Sunday practically, and who do we come up with? None other than Angelo Tuminaro."
He leaned forward earnestly. "You got to let us have it."
Hawkes held up a hand, cutting Egan short.
"Christ, if talk was money! . . . " Outmatched and knowing it, he finally rose. "Wait here," he said.
The lieutenant went outside his office and tapped on the adjacent door. A gruff voice said to come in. Even seated at his desk, Deputy Chief Inspector Edward Carey was a massive man, with a round Irish face and huge hands. He had been a police officer in New York for almost thirty-five years, first as a state trooper, then as an investigator for the State Liquor Authority, a city patrolman, then a detective in Brooklyn's decaying Bedford-Stuyvesant section and eventually as commander of detectives in the Brooklyn North Division. Named by Commissioner Stephen Kennedy to run the Narcotics Bureau in 1958, he had instilled renewed enthusiasm and purpose int
o the unit. Chief Carey was highly regarded by his men, whom he unhesitatingly backed in any dispute over "regulations" so long as they were producing information, arrests and convictions.
He listened, hunched over his desk top, hands folded, expression blank, as Hawkes concisely described the two detectives' experience and their request to pursue the matter. Carey nodded at last.
"It's the first lead we've had on Tuminaro in six months." He looked up at his second in command.
"Egan and Grosso — they're about the two best detectives we've got, aren't they?"
Hawkes allowed a small smile. "They are."
"Let them go. Give them what they need."
Hawkes returned to his office and sat down. He eyed the pair across his desk for a moment. "Okay," he said finally, "what'll it take?"
"First a wire," Sonny answered.
" Two wires," Egan interjected — "one on the store and one on his house."
Hawkes scratched at his neck again. "You know I have to get a court order for wiretaps. I don't know — a couple of Harlem cops wanting plants in Brooklyn, it won't be easy."
"Try, okay?" Sonny asked.
"We know you can do it, Vinnie," Eddie grinned.
C h a p t e r 3
The Narcotics Bureau of the New York Police Department is the largest counternarcotics unit in the world and widely regarded as the finest. It is also chronically short of almost everything it needs to function at top effectiveness: money, equipment, extent of jurisdiction, and of course, to those in its command, manpower. But one of the few material advantages the bureau has over the comparatively affluent Federal Bureau of Narcotics, with which it works closely, is the legal wiretap. Both agencies have courageous investigators with experience and ingenuity; both make good use of informers, or "stools," who are recruited for pay or other extrajudicial considerations to perform as undercover agents without portfolio; but one of the prime tools of gathering information pertinent to law enforcement and crime prevention, particularly in the murky world of illegal narcotics, is the monitored telephone. Federal law prohibits government agencies from employing this tool; not so New York State.