by Robin Moore
"O.K.," Carey announced at last, "I've got the story. Two assistant D.A.'s, Bob Walsh from Brooklyn and Irving Lang from Manhattan, are waiting downstairs. We're going to present the case to them and see which one wants to prosecute."
Carey and the five officers went downstairs to the office where the district attorneys were waiting. It was almost midnight by now. For over an hour, they laid out their case in detail. After listening carefully, Irving Lang stated that he felt the case was not strong enough to be prosecuted in Manhattan. The policemen's faces dropped.
Robert Walsh, however, said that on behalf of Kings County District Attorney, Edward Silver, he would accept the case for prosecution in Brooklyn.
Elated, Egan, Grosso, Waters and their superiors went back up to the third floor and proceeded with the formalities of arresting the suspects, who until now had officially been "detained."
Since Sonny was a second-grade detective waiting to make first, it was decided that he should officially make the arrests of Patsy and Barbara Fuca and Egan officially arrest only Scaglia. Other detectives active in the case were assigned the official credit for Nicky Travato, Joe Fuca, Tony Fuca and Joe Desina.
Angelvin was held as a material witness.
It took the weary detectives all the rest of the night of the eighteenth and the morning of the nineteenth to finish questioning and booking the prisoners. The official forms were endless. In addition, for convenience's sake, each prisoner's booking had to be recorded in the section of the city in which each had been arrested.
At 10 A.M., Friday, the nineteenth, the arresting officers took six of their prisoners back to Brooklyn —all but Tony Fuca, who was returning to the Bronx, where he had been apprehended — where they were presented before Judge Ruben Levy in Kings County Criminal Session. For the preliminary hearing, a court-appointed counsel stood up for all the accused.
First, Detective Eddie Egan went before the bench and voiced his formal complaint against François Scaglia: conspiracy to smuggle into New York and sell illegal narcotics. Sonny Grosso then stated his complaint against Patsy Fuca: conspiracy as well as possession of narcotics. In turn, each of the arresting officers stepped forward and filed their charges: against Joe Fuca, accessory to a felony; against Nicky Travato, possession; against Barbara Fuca, accessory.
As for Jacques Angelvin, Brooklyn Assistant D.A. Walsh recommended to the court that for the time being he be held as a material witness in the case against Scaglia and the Fucas.
The arraignment lasted less than fifteen minutes.
Angelvin was committed to Civil Prison in Manhattan, notorious as the "alimony jail." Barbara Fuca was sent to Manhattan's Women's House of Detention in $50,000 bail. Patsy Fuca, his father, Scaglia and Travato were remanded to the Raymond Street jail in Brooklyn, all but the old man held in $100,000 bail. Joe Fuca's bond was set at $50,000.
Early Friday afternoon, their long hunt finally completed, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso went to their respective homes and slept through into Saturday.
C h a p t e r 1 9
On Saturday morning, January 20, Egan was requested by Chief Carey to accompany a police photographer to the Fuca house on 7th Street and assist in taking pictures of the basement where the heroin and arms had been found. To Egan's astonishment, the hopeless mess of rubble had been cleaned up so thoroughly that the only signs of the wreckage of two days before were the stripped walls and ceiling. The floor was spotless. Egan speculated that some Dons must have come by, looking to see if the police had missed anything. He cursed their negligence in not keeping a guard on the place.
Then, as the photographer was busy snapping pictures, in a dark corner of the cellar Egan noticed a large, square sheet of plywood on the floor which he had not seen before. He turned it over and found himself staring into an earthen pit about two feet deep, roughly the size of a grave. It was empty. But, it occurred to Egan, there was room in this excavation for a lot more heroin than the twenty-four pounds they had discovered in the ceiling. The detective began to wonder if in fact there wasn't one hell of a lot more heroin around someplace. This could have been the "bank" where it was scheduled to end up.
Since Thursday the investigators had been unable to shake a nagging scepticism that Patsy and the French narcotics overlords would have taken such risks for what amounted, in their league, to a paltry eleven kilos. Then there were the questions of how they had moved the stuff into the country, and how many other hands were involved. What was the role of this French TV performer, Angelvin — he had no criminal background; where did he fit in? And what about the two Frogs still unaccounted for?
And no money had been found. The police calculated that the going wholesale rate for "H" was about $10,000 to $12,000 per kilogram; so, presumably up to $120,000 was floating around somewhere, or in somebody's pocket, just from what had been intercepted so far. On the open market, after being "cut" (diluted) and turned over from dealer to dealer, by the time it reached the individual buyers eleven pure kilos could be worth thirty times the wholesale price.
And it was a sellers' market, crying to be exploited. It was reasonable to assume, then, that such a tempting potential would have prompted far more ambitious enterprise among this crowd than the mere twenty-four pounds confiscated.
But if there was more, where could they have stashed it? Had it already been distributed? That was a possibility. The subjects had had enough time, nearly a week, in which to parcel out quantities to various connections. Yet, on the basis of all their observation, information, and the judgment of experience, the investigators doubted that. Police informants had not come up with even a hint that any new junk had yet made it to the streets; the "panic" was still on.
If they could find out how the Frogs had brought the stuff in, that might offer a clue as to its present hiding place. And to be able to convict the foreigners along with Patsy and the others, it had to be proved that they had in fact participated in the illegal delivery. As it was, the two Frenchmen in custody, Barbier, now identified as Scaglia, and Angelvin, were being held on suspicion of conspiracy, a tenuous charge that might not stick unless the law could establish possession and intent-to-sell. Neither had been found with any heroin on his person. Both were continuing to insist that they were innocent.
On Monday, January 22, after two good nights of sleep, Sonny Grosso was sifting through the papers and effects he had confiscated from Angelvin's room at the Commodore. There were some copies of correspondence with the United States Lines. Angelvin had declared the weight of his Buick and baggage at 4,685 pounds. Shortly after his arrival at the Waldorf he had received a form letter from United States Lines requesting a confirmation of his return trip January 25 on the S.S. America and information on any new items to be declared on the homeward voyage. Although he had come over tourist class, Angelvin was planning to make the return trip in style: first class. His reply to United States Lines, of which he had thoughtfully made a copy, struck an immediate chord of suspicion in Sonny's now rested mind. Confirming his return reservation, Angelvin added that he had miscalculated the weight of his automobile and personal effects and that now the Buick would weigh 4,573 — 112 pounds less than he had originally stated. Ordinarily when a person takes his automobile with him on an overseas trip, he files just one shipping declaration covering both legs of the voyage. Now he requested a reduced freight charge for the eastward crossing. The weight differential amounted to a saving of about $33 .00 for the French TV star, Grosso estimated.
But why 112 pounds lighter? Didn't most visitors return home with additional poundage in purchases and souvenirs? Everything else on the manifest seemed to be the same as he'd originally declared. How could he have anticipated a reduction in weight more than a week before departure?
Sonny was stunned as he contemplated the possibility. If the 112 pounds represented the total weight of heroin that had been smuggled in, it would be the largest shipment ever attempted at one time in New York. And this meant that eighty-eight pounds, forty
kilos more of heroin — perhaps eventually worth, at retail, twenty-five or twenty-six million dollars more —were still to be found. The damage which could be done to the international dope network by the confiscation of such a load and the conviction of the principals could be extremely significant.
The vacant hole in Joe Fuca's cellar, added to the possibilities aroused by Angelvin's second declaration of weight for his car, thus led the investigators to conclude that the medium of delivery had to be the actor's automobile. Sonny secured a warrant to search the Buick on Thursday, January 25 — ironically, the day that Angelvin was to have sailed aboard the America. In the meantime, rather than trust the police pound on Hudson River Pier, the detectives had hidden the Buick in an old abandoned sanitation garage out in Brooklyn on Meeker Avenue. The Mafia would not be able to find it there.
Once the warrant was official, the Police Department's Motor Transport Maintenance Division mechanic, Irving Abrahams, went over the Buick inch by inch, panel and upholstery, stitch by stitch. He found no trace of narcotics nor any hiding place for a large shipment.
Buick engineering experts next were called in to work with Abrahams, and they finally found what the police were looking for. There were a series of bolts under the front fenders which were caked with dried mud, seemingly undisturbed. But when flakes of the mud were scraped off and examined, it was not crumbly and dusty as might be expected but still retained a certain cohesion, as though it were relatively fresh mud. The samples were tested in the police lab, and it proved to be mud from a known variety of French soil, all right. But it was of recent vintage and, more significantly, had been applied to the underside of the car recently, probably within the past week or two.
The engineers went to work on the bolts, which, apparently attached splash pans to the fender bottoms. They were immovable. Then a Buick technician checked with his plant in Detroit and learned that there were models of General Motors cars with certain bolts that could be fastened or loosened only when the electrical system was operative. The ignition was switched on. The unusual bolts were unscrewed.
The tinny plate covering the splash pan under the left front fender was removed first. There was a hollow trap inside — a detective was able to shove his entire arm into it without obstruction. The secret trap seemed to extend from the front of the car all the way to the back. Now they uncovered more traps on the other side of the Buick and behind and under the headlights. There was easily enough space for 112 pounds of heroin in small packages, and then some.
Using powerful vacuum tubes, the police investigators cleaned out the traps in the Buick and examined the residue. A small amount of white powder, perhaps as much as half an inch of cigarette ash, was found in the vacuum cleaner and tested. The Marquis test showed this residue to be an opium derivative.
Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso had a hunch where to start looking for clues to the hiding place of the eighty-eight pounds of junk which were still missing.
Several times during the investigation they had observed Patsy in or near Anthony's Garage on East Broadway. Maybe that place was a drop for either the missing dope or the "bread" or both.
The two marched into Anthony's on January 27, assuming a pseudo-official air of stern suspicion, although of course they had nothing more incriminating than the fact that a key figure in a major arrest was known to have patronized the auto shop. Their bluff interrogation paid off to the extent that an intimidated Anthony Feola, owner and chief mechanic, nervously admitted that Patsy had paid him fifty dollars to replace the splash panels under the fenders of the 1960 Buick, and coat the bolts with some kind of mud from a jar that Patsy had given him. Then Feola parked the car outside on East Broadway and left it there. But this information produced little more than the satisfaction of filling in a few more details in the overall picture.
A thorough examination of the garage at No. 45East End Avenue had turned up nothing more enlightening than confirmation that Angelvin's Buick had been checked there for a couple of days. It had been deposited on Tuesday, January 16, by a foreign type (Angelvin) and driven out on the eighteenth by the same person. Between times, Patsy Fuca had brought Travato's Cadillac in, left it, and gone somewhere in the Buick; it had been out all one night (Tuesday) and was returned late the next day by Patsy, but where he had driven was still unknown.
The police decided that it was unlikely that Sol Friedman, owner of the garage, whom they knew to be a shrewd, cautious individual, would have risked permitting the actual transfer of so large a load of junk on his premises, sensitive as he had to be about his already shaky relationship with the law. They had small doubt that Friedman knew what was going on — though, again, this would be difficult to prove sufficiently to prosecute even a conspiracy charge. But they reached the conclusion that No. 45 East End Avenue had been only a relay station in the disposal operation. Patsy had transported the Buick somewhere else to unload.
Then, checking their files, they were reminded that Friedman had a near-silent partner, Arnie Shulman, a hoodlum who was known to have been involved in narcotics. Shulman had a share of the No. 45 East End Avenue concession and he also owned another commercial garage on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx in which Friedman had no interest. And this garage was only six blocks from where Patsy's brother Tony lived.
Egan and Grosso drove to the Bronx. With a picture of Angelvin's car they casually wandered into Shulman's garage and found an old mechanic working on a wreck at the rear. They showed him the picture and asked if this car had been in the garage. The mechanic looked at the picture and Egan thought he detected a flash of recognition — but the garageman at first was noncommittal. Egan bore in on him, and after a few moments of tough talk the mechanic remembered that the Buick had been brought in the week before by three men, one of whom he thought he recognized from the neighbourhood. The men had worked on it for most of an afternoon and then driven it away.
Egan patted the old mechanic on the shoulder soothingly, commended him on his public-spirited attitude, and he and Grosso departed, winking at one another.
The detectives made for Tony Fuca's house. They had never figured that Tony was an important cog in the Angelo Tuminaro apparatus. Like Patsy's friend Nicky Travato, longshoreman Tony was roughhewn, little educated and, as far as the police could determine, not particularly bright. They had no past record on him. He had been around Patsy a great deal and obviously had been helpful to his brother, like tending the Brooklyn luncheonette on weekends. Even after the raid on his apartment which had turned up the three-and-a-half ounces of heroin and a loaded pistol, the police had regarded Tony as little more than a muscular stooge, an accessory surely, but hardly one to whom the Mafia might entrust a fortune in responsibility and goods.
But now Egan and Grosso reassessed probabilities.
They remembered a monitored telephone conversation between Patsy and "Uncle Harry" the night before the arrests. Talking about some clothing that Patsy was supposed to have just acquired, "Uncle Harry" suggested that Patsy could "only use a few suits at a time" and that he ought to "put the rest away" in storage.
The "few suits" could have been the eleven kilos seized in Joe Fuca's basement which was to have been current inventory for the local organization, as administered by Patsy for Little Angie. The "rest" could be hidden away in some reliable place, to be drawn upon according to the demands of the marketplace.
Put the rest away, "Uncle Harry" had advised, and Patsy had assured him that he had. But, beyond a few odd ounces, no big stuff had been found in Patsy's own house, in his luncheonette, in Nicky Travato's apartment or in Tony Fuca's flat. But then one of the detectives who had arrested Tony returned from a brief holiday and revealed that only Tony's apartment had been searched the night of the arrests; the rest of the building had been untouched. This opened a new vein of thought to Egan and Grosso. Tony's house was not far from Shulman's Garage, where they were sure the transfer from Angelvin's Buick had been made.
Tony Fuca lived with his wife Peggy
and their two small daughters at 1171 Bryant Avenue in the lower Bronx in a building that was a half-step away from being a firetrap. It was a drab five-story walk-up of dirty brown brick, indistinguishable from adjacent buildings or, for that matter, from thousands of other walk-ups in lower-class sections of New York. The streets and sidewalks were littered with debris and scraps of garbage. The neighbourhood was tucked in a dreary residential pocket bounded by busy thoroughfares such as Westchester Avenue and Southern Boulevard. At one time it had been shared largely by Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, but now there had been an influx of Puerto Ricans, and few of the Italians and Jews remained. Tony was one of the few Italians. He and his family lived in a three-and-a-half-room flat on the top floor.
While Egan was scouting the neighbourhood, Grosso went to see the janitor. At the side of the building was a ramp down into an alleyway separating No. 1171 from the adjacent apartment house. An ill-fitting wood door with glass panels in its upper half led into the basement. Inside, a narrow corridor off the entryway led to the boiler room, where Sonny found the janitor stoking the hot water heater. A lean, sharp-eyed man of fifty or more, he listened expressionless as the officer identified himself. Sonny explained that there had been a recent series of burglaries in the vicinity and that the police were quietly investigating each apartment house in an attempt to uncover a possible hiding place for the stolen goods. "We don't say it's this building," the detective said, "but in case it might be, where around here could people stash things that nobody would be likely to find?"