by Robin Moore
The janitor pointed behind Sonny back along the corridor. "Well, there's a closet for paint, and a storage room, for old trunks and things people leave" —his accent was slightly Germanic or Slavic — "and a room for the carriages, baby carriages, you know. But I don't think — "
"Don't worry about it," Sonny smiled wanly. "There'll be no trouble. We'll handle it nice and quiet. You just cooperate, and everything'll be fine. We don't want nobody to know we came down here — get it?"
The gaunt man nodded, his blue eyes now open very wide.
One hour later, on a dusty, filth-laden shelf in the so-called "carriage room," a cramped, cobweb-covered enclosure near the entrance to the cellar, Grosso and Egan came upon a heavy, large steamer trunk. On it in chalk was scribbled, Fuca. Together they hefted the trunk to the floor and forced it open.
Inside were two battered suitcases. Egan and Grosso opened them — and gasped at the sheer bulk of their find. The bags were crammed with plastic packets containing white powder. They counted out a total of eighty-eight packages weighing about a pound apiece, each, if the heroin proved to be as pure as the stuff seized at Joe Fuca's, worth more than a hundred times its weight in gold.
Egan repacked the bags while Grosso ran outside to his car and called in the information to the Narcotics Bureau. An hour later, Lieutenant Hawkes arrived at the basement with Agent Waters and, after a conference, it was decided to put the junk back where it had been found and mount surveillance over it until someone came to claim it. Somebody had to come for a load that size.
That same day, in Naples, Italy, sixty-five-year-old Charles (Lucky) Luciano, the deported Italo-American vice king who was believed to have continued to reign as a top Mafia boss of the United States even from his palazzo in exile, collapsed and died of a sudden heart attack.
Luciano may or may not have been aware that at the time of his death American and Italian narcotics agents, with the help of French police, were poised to arrest him on charges of having directed the smuggling of more than 150-million dollars' worth of dope into the U.S. over the previous decade.
It is doubtful in any event that Patsy and Tony Fuca, sulking separately in New York jail cells awaiting indictment, could have understood immediately that it was the busting of their own operation which may have crystallized the international operation against Luciano's ring and perhaps even worried the capo, as he was known, to his grave.
C h a p t e r 2 0
The Fucas and Scaglia were arraigned and in jail, and the heroin traces found in the Buick now definitely implicated Angelvin, who was being held only as a "material" witness to the conspiracy until he could be proved part of it. Assistant District Attorney Michael Gagliano, representing Kings County
District Attorney Ed Silver, was given the assignment of presenting the case to the grand jury.
Before a criminal case could be brought to trial, an indictment by a county grand jury had to be obtained. A grand jury is made up of twenty-three citizens — twenty-two jurors and a foreman.
Qualifications for grand jury duty are more stringent than for trial juries. The panel consists entirely of volunteers, most of them professional or retired people of relative affluence and, generally speaking, of wider intelligence than "conscripted" jurymen. Of the twenty-three panel members — of whom no more than six may be women — a quorum of sixteen is required on any one case, and to obtain an indictment at least twelve must vote in favour. In the event of an eleven-eleven tie, the foreman casts the deciding vote. In Brooklyn, each selected grand jury is expected to sit for one month every two years.
However, once empanelled, a panel will continue to sit on a case it has accepted until either an indictment is handed down or the people's evidence is deemed insufficient to prosecute.
The Brooklyn grand jury met in a sealed room on the sixth floor of the antiquated Kings County Court House. The panel members were at all times securely removed from public scrutiny and possible harassment. Special elevators took the jurors from the ground floor of the court building to their hearing room, which was off a corridor inaccessible to the public. During hearings, the only outsiders present are the district attorney, or an assistant, and one witness at a time. There is no judge. Because the sole aim of the proceedings is to afford the attorney for the people an opportunity to establish cause for indictment, witnesses must appear without counsel, and there is no cross-examination. However, witnesses — except for the accused — are granted immunity against self-incrimination, and presumably one could confess to a murder before a grand jury without it being used against him. As for the accused, it is rare that a prisoner personally appears before a grand jury, for to do so he must waive all immunity and civil rights, and his defence counsel is barred from the hearing.
Kings County Assistant District Attorney Michael Gagliano, intent upon the importance of securing indictments in the Fuca case, was pleased to discover that Grand Jury No. 1 was still in session, just finishing up its month's hearing. The foreman of Grand Jury No. 1, Jack Champagne, was a man in whom Gagliano had great faith for his integrity and justice. Champagne himself had served on grand jury duty for fifteen years, and the panel he now headed was, Gagliano knew, composed of particularly experienced jurors.
On February 7, late in the afternoon of the day when he was assigned to the case, Gagliano hurried over to the courthouse in time to catch Jack Champagne as the foreman came out of the lobby elevator from the upstairs hearing room. Gagliano found that Champagne had only moments before dismissed Grand Jury No. 1. Hastily the assistant district attorney explained the case to Champagne, a stocky man in his late fifties, with wavy gray-white hair, who peered through extra-thick tinted glasses as he listened intently. Champagne was a construction man who had also been an officer in city and state penal institutions, and previously done undercover work for the district attorney's office in such cases as the prosecution of the top mobsters of Murder, Inc.
Champagne showed immediate interest in this latest narcotics case and its international ramifications, so he and Gagliano stepped back into the grand jury elevator. On the sixth floor, in the jurymen's private corridor outside the hearing room, they found most of the members of the jury preparing to leave. With all the considerable persuasiveness at his command, Champagne rapidly convinced his fellow jurors that this was the hottest narcotics case ever to come before a grand jury. The hitch was, he explained, that the case had to be opened immediately, because the following day a new grand jury would sit. At 6 P.M., the members of Grand Jury No. 1 filed back into their hearing room.
Gagliano opened the case by having Detective First Grade Edward Egan state that he had arrested François Scaglia on January 19. Egan then outlined the details of the complaint. The case thus now belonged to Grand Jury No. 1, and it would be theirs until disposition one way or another.
Since Patsy Fuca's detainment on January 18, and his official arrest on January 19, he had been increasingly concerned about his wife and his father. The thought of their having to go to jail finally caused him to pass the word to Detectives Egan and Grosso that he might be willing to be co-operative if they could see that Barbara and old Joe were left out of it. The detectives made no promises. Would Patsy talk? Patsy responded by confiding that the Frenchman, Jean Jehan, originally had planned to meet with him at the Inner Circle Bar the night of the arrests, January 18. He also indicated that Giant must have made off with a large bundle of cash. Hopeful, Egan and Grosso called in Grand Jury Foreman Champagne and Assistant District Attorney Gagliano to join in the interrogation.
But it quickly became apparent that Patsy had given the law all the help it could expect from him.
Under direct questioning by men who were aware of his almost every move over the past four months, he failed to provide a single item of new information or even, for that matter, of what the officers already knew to be truth. Either he avoided answering incriminating questions or he lied outright. Finally, when Champagne pressed him about his specific activities i
n the overall Mafia narcotics operations, Patsy quailed. "Are you kiddin'?" he whined. "I answer stuff like this and I'm dead. If they even knew I talked to you guys, I'm a dead man!"
Realizing at last that Patsy had intended his "cooperation" to be a sham from the start, the voluble Jury foreman rose, scowling, and went to a window, where, turning to the prisoner, he challenged: "Then you might as well jump right now!"
As the grand jury hearings opened, the Narcotics Bureau received an anonymous letter from France. The writer said that the Mafia and the syndicate were desperate at the loss of the heroin shipment and, more important, were so concerned that Scaglia, Fuca, or Angelvin might talk that a contract for their deaths had already been let. The hired assassin was identified in the letter as the maitre d'hôtel of one of New York's most exclusive and expensive restaurants, which was not named.
As a result of this cryptic warning, Scaglia was immediately moved to the new maximum security prison in Kew Gardens, Queens, and Angelvin to another high security jail on the lower west side of New York. Since Scaglia was apparently the priority candidate for assassination, the police speculated that any killer who understood the New York City prison system would think that the police would have Scaglia in a Manhattan jail since it was customary to keep a man in the same borough in which he was arrested. By the same reasoning, Patsy, who had been arrested in Brooklyn, was sent to 125 White Street, Manhattan, better known as the Tombs.
During the first month of the grand jury hearings, Detectives Egan and Grosso were shuttling from the courthouse in Brooklyn to the basement of Tony Fuca's house in the Bronx. When the heroin found in the carriage room of the basement, forty kilos, was added to that seized earlier, the total came to something over fifty-one kilos, or about 112 pounds: exactly the underweight so meticulously declared by Jacques Angelvin preparatory to his return voyage to France.
There was no question that the total seizure was the largest ever accomplished by law enforcement agencies in the United States, surpassing the previous record of fifteen months before when a South American diplomat to the United Nations was caught with some one hundred pounds in his sole possession. But there remained one particularly unsatisfying aspect to the Fuca case from the narcotics officers' point of view.
With respect to the last cache of forty kilos, how were they to establish possession? In narcotics, that was the name of the game, and now that the Fucas and two of the Frenchmen were already in jail, as Eddie Egan put it they had "nobody left to pin the big rap on." This dour estimate included Tony Fuca, for, regardless of how reasonable it was to assume that it was he who had squirreled away the bigger load of junk in his own apartment house cellar, it still could not be proven.
Meanwhile, police informers throughout the city had begun to advance reports of a growing restlessness "around." The lowly addicts, the pushers and the small-time connections in the streets all were feeling the pinch of a short supply of heroin. But perhaps more important, the higher-echelon wholesalers and distributors also were beginning to snarl and, it would seem, plan drastic action to safeguard if not to recover their investments. These were the hoodlum "business men" who had paid Patsy Fuca substantial monies for imports that were already contracted at customary incredible profit margins.
The police reasoned that one or more of these disappointed Mafia connections would try to retrieve the eighty-eight pounds from Tony Fuca's basement.
And so, the decision was reached to leave undisturbed the findings at 1171 Bryant Avenue, the Bronx. The basement, the building and the surrounding area would be watched around the clock.
The narcotics officers would wait.
C h a p t e r 2 1
On Sunday, February 4, 1962, seventeen days after the first arrests, the permanent stakeout of Tony Fuca's Bronx tenement began. Tours were divided into eight-hour shifts, with two New York detectives and three Federal agents on each tour. The core of the operation was the cellar where the stuff still reposed on the shelf in the carriage room. This locked room faced the entrance to the cellar, from the alley. To the left of the entry, outside in the alley, were stairs leading to the lobby of the building. Within view of the carriage room was a closet which served as a paint locker. To the left of the carriage room, out of sight of the door to the cellar, was a dingy, musty alcove littered with sundry discards from apartments upstairs, including crippled furniture, mattresses, toys, rugs and ragged trunks. Deeper into the cellar, a narrow whitewashed corridor led to the boiler room in the rear, which was cramped with machinery, pipes and flues. The back area was the only warm spot in the cellar, and the boiler room was chosen as the retreat for any who felt the need of a nap during the long hours of winter vigil. A worn, discoloured mattress was laid on the concrete floor behind the clanking water heater. The men on duty were armed with a small arsenal, which included machine guns, shotguns and tear gas grenades, as well as their service revolvers and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Nobody knew who or how many hoods might show up looking for the hidden fortune in junk. There was little firm information about what might happen; but things were stirring.
Egan, Grosso and Agent Waters slipped in and out of the location through back alleys of adjacent buildings, exchanging and coordinating reports and what few tips were forthcoming from Lieutenant Vinnie Hawkes and Sergeant Jack Fleming of S.I.U. downtown.
Egan and Grosso had been augmented by Detectives Dick Auletta and Jimmy O'Brien; Waters headed a rotating team of twelve Federal agents. The prospect of days or even weeks of sitting in a dismal, filthy basement was enough to stretch the temper of the most seasoned law officer, but, the police detectives observed sourly, the Feds assigned seemed woefully short on hard experience. Except for the tough Waters, most of the agents appeared young and impatient.
As it turned out, the combined surveillance details experienced more harassment from other law officers than from any sinister enemy forces. The investigators decided not to inform the local police precinct of their mission, because they believed that anything less than total security would compromise their position. This decision led to complications almost immediately.
The stakeout team was still relaxed and unapprehensive when on Monday, the second day, a scrawny, sour-faced elderly man wearing the spattered white coveralls and cap of a professional painter walked into the cellar.
Two detectives were in the gloomy alcove beyond the carriage room, playing gin rummy by a dim overhead bulb. A third was back in the boiler room, stretched out on the mattress near the boiler. The painter didn't notice any of these at first. After a few moments of massaging the cold from his hands, he affectionately packed and lit an ancient curved-stem pipe and went to the paint locker. When he opened the door, he jumped back as though he had touched a live electric wire, and his pipe clattered on the floor. Seated there, glaring at him within the lighted paint locker, a paperback book in one hand and a huge shotgun across his lap, was a burly, tough-looking red-haired stranger.
Eddie Egan said nothing; he just stared. Shaken, the painter recoiled into the corridor leading to the boiler room. Then he saw the two sweatered men hunched over an old steamer trunk in the storage alcove. They had laid down their cards and were looking at him. He started to speak — but his eyes went wide, and his mouth hung open. Propped against the wall near these two were machine guns. One of the men stood. Around his waist was a bulky cartridge belt.
There was a movement down the passageway inside the boiler room, and another figure appeared there, standing silently, looking at the painter. In fright and bewilderment, the old man's eyes jumped from one to another of the menacing-looking figures. He backed toward the door to the alley, tore it open and was gone.
The card players glanced at each other, and the one who had stood ambled to the open door of the paint locker, where Egan was on his feet now, stretching.
"I guess that was the house painter," Egan grinned, half yawning.
"He looked surprised as hell. I thought Grosso gave the super a cover story."
"He did. This was another guy. The super must have forgot to brief him. Good super."
"I don't know," the agent shook his head. "This looks like it could get kind of hairy."
Doubt as to the wisdom of keeping their vigil secret from the local constabulary spread quickly.
Later the same day the incredulous old painter returned twice more to the cellar, as if to verify his fears. Each time, to his obvious distress, he found four armed and silent men, and when he came the last time, that evening, there was a different set of four men. The detectives were beginning to feel sorry for the poor old fellow because it was plain that his consternation had led him to the bottle and that his composure was disintegrating. When he tottered from the cellar that night, again without a word having been offered, he might have been one in shock. But a few hours later the third team of narcotics investigators had their first taste of how complex their undercover situation could in fact become from restricted communication. The cellar was dark, except for a slit of light under the closed door of the paint locker, where a Federal agent sat doing a cross-word puzzle. The others were in the alcove and boiler room trying to relax in the dank early-morning chill.
After the painter's last visit, they had decided to rig up a crude warning signal against night callers: a length of supple wire was hooked to the top of the door from the alleyway, strung along the ceiling down the corridor into the boiler room, over a pulley screwed into the ceiling and attached to a pail full of plaster of paris. When the alley door was opened, the heavy pail would drop with a clunk onto the cement floor; the sound probably would not be noticed by anyone entering the cellar, but it would be enough to prepare the detectives in the rear.
It was shortly after 2:00 A.M., Tuesday, when the agent up front in the closet heard a faint shuffle of footsteps outside. He doused the light and opened the door of his hiding place a crack, hands gripping the shotgun. The cellar door creaked open, letting in a rush of cold night air, and he strained to hear the hoped-for clunk from the back but couldn't be sure it had worked. The door was closed softly. The slight scraping of feet on the cement floor sounded like two men. They were moving slowly past the paint locker, now pausing at the mouth of the passage to the rear.