The French Connection

by Robin Moore

  Giant must have pulled the other two Frenchmen together, because by Monday they were back talking about unloading the Buick the next day. Patsy actually still needed a few more days, but he had to go along. If he still didn't have all the bread by the time the car was clean, he would pay for as much as he could handle and try to make some kind of deal for the rest . . . . Monday, he confirmed arrangements with his brother Tony to line up that garage in the Bronx where they would make the transfer, and with Tony Feola downtown at Anthony's Auto Shop to put the Buick back together after it had been stripped, just as he had back in November. That night he drove Nicky's Caddy — the cops wouldn't be watching for him in that — up to East End Avenue again to double-check the layout. Mouren met him there, and they rehearsed the schedule for Tuesday. Mouren even gave him a sample of the stuff — madonna! It was top quality! — which he magnanimously passed along to Tony back at the store. His brother deserved to make a few extra bills for himself.

  Staring out the bedroom window into the shadows beyond the streetlights, he wondered if there were cops out there watching the house. In two more days he would have disposed of the largest single load of heroin ever brought into the city. This had been the most dangerous day, he thought.

  Putting on sturdy work clothes early that morning, he had left home in Nicky's car and driven up the Expressway all the way to the Grand Central Parkway and then across the Triborough Bridge into the Bronx. Tony met him at Shulman's garage near Crotona Park. Everything was set there: they would have a nice secluded spot in the back to work on the Buick. Mouren would meet them there between twelve and one.

  He drove downtown to the garage at No. 45 East End Avenue and parked the Caddy deep in the hole. Then had come the snag: the French Buick was there all right, but Patsy didn't have a ticket for it, and the attendant insisted that only the boss, Feinberg, could release the car. Feinberg had stepped out for a few minutes with the keys to the Buick in his pocket. Patsy stewed in mounting impatience as he paced the cubicle office.

  When that red-haired cop walked in showing his badge, Patsy almost fainted. He couldn't tell whether the guy recognized him. The cop had stared for a second like he had, but then it could have been because Patsy himself must have looked so startled. He relaxed when the attendant who had trailed the cop outside came back and confirmed that he was going to the different garages on the block looking for a holdup car. Still, it was no time to get careless. When Feinberg returned a few minutes later, Patsy drove out in the French Buick and headed straight uptown to the Bronx. He didn't see the cop again.

  Tony and Mouren were waiting at Shulman's garage. Tony had a big steamer trunk that he had taken from the basement of his apartment house.

  Inside were two well-used suitcases. Mouren had a blue valise. Patsy himself had brought a black leather tool kit. Under an overhanging light far back in the garage, Mouren produced a single set of plans, which lie spread out on the hood of the Buick.

  It took them three hours to remove all 110 one-pound plastic-wrapped packages of white powder, plus a couple of dozen smaller packets, from the narrow cavities in the frame and underside of the Buick — in all, over fifty kilos of pure heroin. Tony kept stuffing the bags into his suitcases until at last Patsy, his face grimy, hands and forearms etched with red nicks and welts, stood and brushed himself off. Mouren checked the contents of several bags. The quality seemed to be excellent, as promised.

  Then he and the Frenchman talked money. From his tool bag, Patsy removed $225,000 in large denomination bills. He said he could make the full payoff by Thursday. How much could he handle now? Patsy calculated that he could take about forty kilos. They counted out eighty-eight half kilo (one pound) packages and a dozen of the little bags from the piles in Tony's suitcases; then Mouren transferred the remainder, twenty-three half kilos and a dozen more of the ounce-size packets, plus the neatly stacked cash, into his blue valise.

  You know, said Patsy thoughtfully, staring at the blue suitcase, that bagful would be nice right now as working merchandise. The larger quantity could be stashed away as inventory for later use. Couldn't they trust him? The Frenchman said he would talk to Giant. Tonight, after Patsy had disposed of the Buick, they could meet — 9 P.M., on 82nd Street? Patsy agreed to pick Mouren up after he returned to the garage at No. 45 for Nicky's Cadillac.

  Meanwhile, Mouren wondered, where did Patsy plan to store the goods on hand? That's our business, Patsy winked at his brother.

  Tony stowed the steamer trunk containing the two packed suitcases in the back of the Buick, and Patsy threw in the tool kit. It was close to 4:30 P.M. when they backed out of the garage. Patsy dropped Mouren off on busy Westchester Avenue, and he and his brother watched as the Frenchman, carrying his blue valise, hailed a taxi and sped away. Then they drove the six blocks to Tony's apartment house on Bryant Avenue.

  In gathering dusk, the two lugged the trunk down a flight of concrete steps into the basement and on into an enclosed storage room. They cleared a space on a shelf deep against the rear wall and heaved the trunk up onto it. Tony found a piece of children's chalk and marked the black trunk in block letters: A. FUCA —5/C. Then they went upstairs and had a drink with Tony's wife, Margaret, and Patsy played with their two children. At 7 P.M., he was in the Buick, on his way downtown to Anthony's Auto Shop.

  He parked on East Broadway near Anthony's, leaving the key under the floor mat. The shop was already closed. Tomorrow, Wednesday, Feola would do his welding job, replace the splash pans and other panels removed from the underside, and leave the Buick back on the street for Patsy to pick up. There was even a jar of mud from France to be smeared over the reassembled frame. He would drive the Buick back uptown to No. 45 East End Avenue and deposit it in the garage, and on Thursday the actor, Angelvin, would come to retrieve it, and it would be all over.

  Patsy had hailed a cab at East Broadway and Pike Street and directed it to 79th Street and York Avenue.

  From there, he walked over to East End and up two blocks to No. 45. As he drove out of the garage in Nicky's Caddy, he wondered again about the cop who had been nosing around earlier. He still had five minutes before he was to meet Mouren; so he wheeled northward to 96th Street and down the Drive to 73rd, just to make sure no fuzz were sticking to him. All looked clear. On 82nd Street, Mouren was waiting.

  They cruised a few blocks while the Frenchman told him that Giant might indeed turn over the withheld goods if on Thursday Patsy could produce at least the balance of front money. After all, he and his organization were valuable customers. Patsy dropped Mouren off at 79th Street and York and started home in high spirits. The bonanza was within reach.

  Just one more day to go now. Patsy turned from the window and padded across the dark room to his bed. One more day. What could go wrong in one day?

  After an interminable, cold, uncomfortable night in their respective cars outside Patsy Fuca's house, Detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso and Agent Frank Waters bitterly watched the sun climb in the frosty blue sky over Brooklyn on Wednesday, January 17. Aside from sporadic grunts, wheezes and blasphemies, none of them said much. Sonny's dark beard felt raw on his throat; he could smell himself, and with a grimace he opened a window. Waters contacted base, but there was no news. Egan's own radiophone speaker sounded wan, and Sonny commented idly, "You better get that juiced up." Egan muttered,

  "I'd be better off getting myself juiced up," and his voice trailed off into mumbled obscenities.

  With the aid of Waters's ever-handy "burglar's tool," they had rifled Patsy's Oldsmobile during the night but found nothing. Now it was past eight, a clear sunny morning, and chattering schoolchildren, books in mittened hands, were coming out of the neat houses on 67th Street, walking or skipping toward Twelfth Avenue. The three officers slouched down in their cars, feeling very much like derelicts.

  Patsy emerged alone from No. 1224 about eight-thirty, dressed in a thigh-length woollen car coat, and got into his Olds. "Why don't you two take him?" Egan suggested into
his radio to the others. "I'll go up around the luncheonette and be there in case he shakes you."

  But Patsy didn't go directly to his store. Instead, he drove across the Manhattan Bridge to New York and went to a wholesale supply centre at Houston and Forsyth streets. As Sonny and Waters waited outside, from a few minutes past nine until 12:35 P.M., Patsy rummaged the warehouse, purchasing non-perishable goods for his store — cigarettes, soda straws, paper cups, napkins, hard candies, stationery. He made several trips out to his car with bundles, and the rear seat was filled by the time he started back to Brooklyn.

  Arriving near the luncheonette just before 1 P.M., Sonny and Waters rejoined Egan at St. Catherine's Hospital across Bushwick Avenue and watched as for the next forty-five minutes Patsy and his brother Tony, who had made his appearance about eleven, leisurely unloaded the stores from the Oldsmobile.

  At two o'clock, Patsy came out and again drove alone toward New York. This time he took the Williamsburg Bridge; he turned off Delancey onto Allen Street and then left onto East Broadway. Egan and Sonny, together now, watched him slow midway in the block and make a U-turn, pulling up before an auto repair shop whose sign over twin double-width overhead doors proclaimed the place as Anthony's.

  The detectives looked at each other in dawning interest. This was the same spot where that night in November Patsy, his wife and the girl Marilyn had stopped and Patsy had driven off in the Canadian Buick which he later left parked on Cherry Street.

  Patsy stayed in Anthony's about twenty minutes.

  When he returned to his car at two forty-five, he was carrying what appeared to be a black leather satchel, like a doctor's bag, or a tool kit of some kind. Then, with the curious officers a safe distance behind, Patsy drove back to Delancey Street and onto the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge.

  Mid-afternoon traffic was heavy toward Brooklyn, and Patsy's Olds became separated from Egan's Corvair by several vehicles. As they crawled along, Sonny had the right-hand door partly opened and, half-standing, he tried to keep the blue compact in view. When the flow slowed almost to a standstill, with a snort of disgust he threw the door fully open and jumped out. "I'll run up ahead and make sure we're still on him," he yelled to his partner. But in a minute or two, the cars began to move again, and Egan came upon Sonny jogging forlornly near the midpoint of the bridge. "We'll never keep up with him," Sonny puffed as he scrambled back into the Corvair. "He was five or six cars ahead, and the way he drives, he'll be off the bridge and gone by the time we get across."

  "Well, let's hope he's headed back to his store,"

  Egan said, and he radioed the stakeouts at the luncheonette and at Patsy's house to watch for the subject.

  They themselves proceeded toward the luncheonette; and before they were within eight blocks of Bushwick Avenue, Frank Waters reported by radio that Patsy had just returned and was inside now with both his brother Tony and Barbara's father.

  The detectives resumed their watch from the hospital grounds. The visit to Anthony's roused their imagination, as did the black bag that Patsy had brought away with him. If they could lend any credence to Waters's conjecture that, as the previous November, an automobile, perhaps again a Canadian Buick, was an integral part of Patsy's current action, the auto shop certainly could represent a pertinent link. As for the contents of the satchel, their theories ranged from special tools for stripping the mystery automobile, to the junk itself, to a bagful of cash with which the ultimate exchange would be made.

  There were barely thirty-two hours left to the Narcotics Bureau before the search warrants expired.

  The fevered theorizing of the police was becoming more like wishful thinking than hard deduction. But they would have been stunned to realize how close their shotgun suppositions were to the truth.

  Emotion and primary instinct impelled them to hit now, hit Patsy before it really was too late — and still they held back. Perhaps it already was too late; in that case, it wouldn't matter much anyway. But essentially they clung to the hope, bolstered by well-practiced intuition, that the climax was yet to come; and a precipitous move, even if only an hour premature, could ruin what slim chances remained. They had to stay on Patsy and not let him out of sight for a moment.

  At 4 P.M., Patsy and Tony left the luncheonette together and entered Patsy's Oldsmobile. Again, Patsy drove out Grand Avenue toward the bridge into New York, but now, instead, he swung onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and raced south. A fresh pair of Federal agents having arrived to take over at the stakeout, Waters in his white Olds and Egan and Sonny in the Corvair all took out after the Fuca brothers. They followed them to Patsy's home neighbourhood. There, Patsy parked his car near his house, then the two walked around the corner of Twelfth Avenue — where they got into Nicky Travato's gray Cadillac, which was sitting at the curb, empty.

  Something's up now, the officers told themselves.

  Now Patsy and Tony retraced their route on the Expressway. At the Manhattan Bridge cutoff, however, Patsy exited toward New York. He came off the bridge at Canal Street, made another right at Pike, and drove straight down to South Street, along the river, where he swung around and stopped in front of the Pike Slip Inn. Tony got out and went into the bar. Patsy eased the Caddy back up Pike toward East Broadway.

  "He's going back to that Anthony's," Egan guessed.

  But a block before East Broadway, Patsy turned right into Henry Street.

  "This is where we sat on him the other night when he came to play cards," Waters said. "It's kind of early, though . . . "

  "Don't forget," Sonny noted, "his grandmother lives in this street, too."

  Not wishing to enter the congested street behind Patsy, Egan and Sonny continued up Pike past Henry before pulling over, while Waters navigated around on East Broadway, intending to circle the block and cover Henry Street from the other side.

  But by the time the three of them had positioned themselves at either end of Henry Street, the Cadillac no longer was there. While Sonny and Waters waited at each corner, Egan strode briskly through the tenement block from Pike to Rutgers streets. The Caddy just was gone. The only answer could be that while they'd been manoeuvring so cautiously, Patsy had either roared straight through Henry or turned off into yet another street. Now he could be anywhere. They dashed back to their cars and, first, radioed an alert, then sped around to East Broadway, converging on Anthony's auto shop. The gray Caddy was not in sight. Sonny went into the garage and looked around. Approached by an Italian-looking mechanic, he said he had a faulty gasket that needed fixing. The man told him they were just closing, to come back tomorrow. He came out shaking his head: Nicky's car was not there.

  Next they sped back to the Pike Slip Inn, and Sonny went in. He returned in a few minutes and slid in next to Egan, his expression doleful. "Tony's gone, too," he grumbled.

  They drove through Henry Street again . . . and East Broadway. Nothing. Patsy had slipped through their fingers once more. And, judging by the manner of his evasion, it could have been their last crack at him.

  At 5:30 P.M., Old Slip and the other narrow lanes girdling the 1st Precinct station house already were dark and fast becoming lifeless. The lower tip of Manhattan, at night, is one of the few sections of the pulsating city virtually devoid of motion. Now, on the perimeter of the area, along South Street, cars were still trickling out of all-day parking enclosures, and on the Viaduct overhead bumper-to-bumper traffic crept toward the Staten Island Ferry and the entrances to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel; but in a couple of hours solitude would settle over the streets below. Isolated footsteps would echo among blackened buildings, and the most noticeable sign of movement would be an occasional sweep of headlights. Even at five-thirty, on Old Slip itself, the only apparent outposts of activity were a yellowish glow emanating from the tall windowed doors of a fire station and, across Front Street, the pale green globes flanking the dimly lit entrance of the 1st Precinct.

  Inside, the police building was quiet. Clocks ticked and radiators hissed
and sometimes clanked. The uniformed desk sergeant sat alone behind his high desk, reading. Two young patrolmen, their collars open and without gun belts and shields, in plain blue from neck to toe, looked strangely out of place as they stood by a bulletin board talking in hushed voices. The four-to-twelve shift had only marched out ninety minutes before, and it would be hours before the midnight crew would begin straggling in for assembly. On the second floor, in the squad room, one detective wearing a sweater lounged in a swivel chair reading a magazine while another in a white shirt and brown tie hunched over a desk, writing scratchily on a lined pad.

  By contrast, on the floor above, there was an odd sense of purpose even without much more motion.

  There were only a few men at scattered lamp-lit desks in the big bullpen to the right of the stairway foyer, and they were quiet; most of the room was in shadows. Chief Carey's office in the far corner was dark, but light blazed from the one next to it. Hawkes was not at his desk, however. He and five other grim-faced men were seated around a conference table in a tiny room at the other end of the floor where the Special Investigating Unit operated.

  Also seated around the table with Hawkes, in various attitudes of weary tension, were Eddie Egan, Sonny Grosso, Agent Frank Waters, and Sergeant Jack Fleming and Detective Jack Gildea of S.I.U.

  The men were silent for the moment. Egan's drawn face was fuzzy with red bristles. He wore a blue and yellow plaid flannel shirt; his black, thigh-length leather jacket was hung over the back of his chair. Sonny tugged at the throat of his black turtleneck shirt; he too was unshaven, and his eyes were puffy and red-streaked. The others were dressed in ordinary shirts and ties, but all collars were open, ties loosened, sleeves turned up to the forearms. Suit jackets hung on doorknobs or lay rumpled on a desk top. It had been a long day.

  They were supposed to be reviewing the Fuca case, but there was little to say, really. The simple, nettling factor was that they had finally bumbled surveillance of Patsy Fuca.