by Robin Moore
By now Egan was concerned over Sonny not being there. His partner should be in on this. Egan volunteered to go out for sandwiches. He drove over to 169th Street and a dozen more blocks west until he found a shopping area far enough from the operation. He went into a Jewish delicatessen and ordered ten corned-beef sandwiches on rye, with pickles, and as many Pepsis. While they were being made he went to the telephone booth in the rear.
It took two calls and considerable melodramatic jargon about "official police business," but twelve minutes later a quizzical Sonny Grosso picked up an extension phone that had been rushed by a nervous attendant to an alcove behind the great main altar of St. Patrick's Cathedral.
"Is this Detective Grosso of the Narcotics Bureau?" Egan asked cheerily.
"Popeye!"
"Yeah. How's it goin'?" He could hear the hollow rumbling of a giant organ.
"Marty says hello and hang up, we have to get married . . ." Then Sonny lowered his voice and spoke carefully into the mouthpiece. "What do you want? Anything go wrong?"
"When can you cut out of there?" Egan asked softly, his flippant tone gone.
"Is something happening?"
"It's building. I think it's going to break soon. Tonight maybe. Our boy came down before and checked on his goods. He'll be back."
"I can't go now. Maybe by five o'clock. I'll have to duck the reception. I had a good toast to give, too."
"You can recite for us. And come as you are. You'll give the place a little class."
Crumpled waxed paper, empty Pepsi cans and remnants of sandwiches and pickles were piled more or less neatly in a corner of the boiler room. By 5:30 P.M., darkness had fallen outside, and the weak overhead bulb cast a pale, almost sinister illumination over the six men standing around the water heater or leaning against the wall, talking quietly. The passageway to the front was dark, but the entry light was on. Egan had taken his place in the paint locker. Two Federal agents sat in the unlit storage alcove adjacent to the carriage room.
The detectives in the rear all started when the pail filled with plaster clunked behind the boiler. The ceiling light was doused, and they flattened themselves against the walls. A dark figure with a turned-up overcoat collar slunk into view at the corner of the entryway, silhouetted by the glow of the hanging bulb there.
"Popeye?" It was a hoarse stage whisper.
Somebody laughed. The light went on in the boiler room and the men came together to watch Sonny Grosso advance toward them with a sheepish grin on his face. He was still wearing his dress suit.
"Here comes the bride . . . " someone sang.
"I could go for her myself," another lisped.
"I don't know. He don't look like a cop."
"He can't be a regular. He must be one of them private cops."
Sonny's grin broadened as he looked around at them. "Well, I can't say it's a pleasure to be back in the dungeon, but at least" — he grimaced and held his nose — "I'm clean!"
"That's who he is," somebody whooped. "Mister Clean!"
Their spirits simmered down, however, and three hours later the familiar air of anxious boredom had again settled over the cellar. It was just past 8:30 P.M. when a signal can rattled down the side of the building like a tinny machine gun and hit the alley floor in what sounded like a claxon to the keyed-up squad. They scrambled to hiding places and vantage points. The only light remained in the entryway.
Five minutes ticked by. The boiler had quieted for the night now, and even the sounds of breathing and the smallest scrapes of leather soles seemed exaggerated. Ten minutes. Then they heard footsteps, coming down the inside stairs from the building lobby.
The door creaked open. Then silence, as though whoever had come in was frozen, listening. The door closed. The man — it has to be Tony — was in. He moved very slowly and quietly. A shadow moved across the entryway. Then the squat silhouette.
Tony paused again at the head of the corridor, motionless, alert, tight as a spring. And then his shoulders sagged as though a tap had been opened and all his suspicion had gushed out, and with swift, easy movements now, he opened the carriage room door. Inside, he even switched on the light. Tony really felt sure of himself.
The moment of truth was approaching, Egan thought; Tony finally was going to lead them to the big guys who had paid for the junk.
Tony opened his lumber jacket and pulled the tire iron from his belt. He climbed onto an overturned baby stroller and from the shelf in the far corner lifted down the well-worn steamer trunk which contained the two suitcases of heroin. He laid it gently on the floor. As if by reflex, he glanced about him, then, with the tire iron he pried open the lid of the locked case. Egan, watching from the paint locker, prayed that Tony wouldn't notice that the lock had already been forced and refastened.
Tony removed one suitcase from the trunk, then closed it and hefted it back up onto the shelf. Bag in hand, he turned off the light, closed the door behind him and walked easily out to the stairs leading to the floor above. The hidden detectives let him go, prepared to follow in a few moments. It wasn't him they wanted as much as his connections.
Meanwhile, Detective Dick Auletta had been on the stair landing above Tony's top-floor apartment, and several minutes after Tony left the flat Auletta had begun to creep silently downstairs after him.
Tony was not on the main floor. Auletta went through the vestibule to the front steps. An agent positioned across Bryant Avenue shook his head —Tony had not come out. Auletta stole back toward the door to the basement stairs. Very gently he opened the door and peered down. Below, in the semi-blackness, he could hear a faint shuffle of feet. What was happening?
Auletta peeked around the corner. To his shock he found himself staring at the beetle-browed thug, who was only a few steps below, apparently on his way up.
He was carrying a bag. Tony recovered quickly from his own surprise. He pulled the tire iron from his belt and charged up at Auletta with a growl. Auletta ducked the iron, but Tony's charge dumped him onto the stairs, and now Tony was scrambling over him and slashing down at his head. This time, twisting away, Auletta caught a heavy blow on a shoulder.
The impact sent him reeling down the stairs and into the door, shattering a glass pane. With a curse, Egan leaped over Auletta and up the steps after the hoodlum. "Tony!" Egan shouted and fired one round from his .38 past Fuca's ear. The explosion reverberated through the halls. Tony stopped dead at the top of the stairs. The heroin-filled suitcase slid from his hand and tumbled end over end down the stairs to the feet of the advancing officers.
For better or for worse, it was over.
C h a p t e r 2 2
It was not until Monday, April 2, 1962, two and a half months after the Brooklyn arrests, that Kings County Grand Jury No. 1 returned indictments against Patsy and Joe Fuca, François Scaglia and, finally, Jacques Angelvin as well.
A week earlier, on March 26, Angelvin's attorney, Robert Kasanof, who had been secured for him through the joint efforts of the French Consulate and Angelvin's friend Jacques Sallebert of Radio Télévision Française, had attempted to gain a writ of habeas corpus. He demanded that the TV performer be released on the grounds that the state had failed to prosecute and thus the continuance of Angelvin in Civil Prison constituted "atrocious abuse of legal power."
Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Frank DiLalla had persuaded the court that at present Angelvin remained a material witness, that the grand jury would name him in its forthcoming indictment as a defendant. The Frenchman was kept in custody. The grand jury's subsequent action removed any ambiguity about Angelvin's status: he was no longer a key witness, he was a defendant in the conspiracy.
On April 4, the four principals appeared in Kings County Criminal Court, and all pleaded not guilty to charges of possession and/or conspiracy to distribute eleven kilograms of illicit narcotics. Also named in the indictment were two "John Does," defendants not present and officially regarded as "unidentified": the missing Frenchmen, Jean Jehan and J. Mouren.
Tony Fuca, of course, had been jailed in the Bronx and would be tried there on a charge of possession of the other forty kilos of heroin. Nicky Travato meanwhile had already pleaded to a lesser charge of possession and would be sentenced separately from the others in Brooklyn. And the recommended indictment against a now visibly pregnant Barbara Fuca, who had been free on bail since January, was "held in abeyance" — an indication that the state might not prosecute her at all.
Within a week after the indictment, a bondsman secured Patsy Fuca's release on $100,000 bail. Patsy remained free less than a month. Presumably he had some serious, and possibly unnerving, discussions with his uncle, Angelo Tuminaro, and/or other members of the "family," for in early May he contacted the bail bondsman and asked for revocation of the $100,000 bond, and he was returned to the relative safety of a maximum security city jail to await trial.
At about the same time, Little Angie himself — at whose feet lay the ultimate responsibility for his nephew's failure — finally turned up in Florida. At a dog track, he presented himself to a patrolman, a rookie on the job only a few weeks, and surrendered himself for having jumped bail in New York more than two years previously. Extradition was arranged.
Having considered all circumstances, apparently Little Angie had become convinced at that point that a couple of years in a secure prison was the best investment he could make in what had to be a dubious future at best.
The legal processes dragged through the summer and into the fall of 1962, without a trial date having been set. In the meantime, the three defence lawyers— Robert Kasanof for Angelvin, Maurice Edelbaum for the Fucas and Henry Lowenberg for Scaglia —undertook a series of legal manoeuvres designed to discredit the indictments on technicalities.
First, Kasanof submitted a motion that the indictment handed up by the grand jury was "faulty" in that it offered no concrete evidence linking Angelvin's automobile with the heroin found in the ceiling of Joe Fuca's basement. If this objection were supported, charges against Angelvin would have to be dismissed, and it could also lead to Scaglia's release as well, inasmuch as the case against the Corsican was so closely tied to Angelvin and his Buick.
On November 1, the district attorney's office was notified that a hearing on Kasanof's motion was set for November 14. Assistant District Attorney Michael Gagliano restudied the indictment at length and decided that the connection of Angelvin's car to the conspiracy was indeed inexactly spelled out — it was a faulty indictment. To make the case stick, they needed a superseding indictment, fast. With less than two weeks to act, Gagliano contacted Grand Jury Foreman Jack Champagne, who was on vacation in Arizona. Champagne cut his holiday short and flew back to New York to reconvene Grand Jury No. 1, which had handed up the original indictment.
At 10:00 A.M. of November 14, Angelvin and his attorney appeared confidently at the Supreme Court in Brooklyn. Angelvin, encouraged by Kasanof's enthusiasm over the loophole he'd found, arrived with a small satchel containing his possessions, fully expecting to be on a plane for Paris that night.
As expected, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Miles F. McDonald upheld the defence contention that the indictment was faulty, adding that he had no alternative but to dismiss that part of the indictment dealing with the defendant Angelvin.
Even as a joyful Angelvin was picturing himself aboard Air France, Assistant District Attorney Frank DiLalla jumped to his feet and handed the judge a superseding indictment which did contain additional evidence linking the French performer's Buick to the conspiracy.
Justice McDonald spent the next three hours in his chambers studying the new document. At 2:00P.M., to the consternation of not only Kasanof and Angelvin but all the defendants and their counsel, Judge McDonald denied the motion to dismiss. Jacques carried his satchel back to the Tombs.
Two months later, in January, 1963 — now almost a year to the day after the Brooklyn arrests— Kasanof was trying another last-ditch ploy on behalf of Angelvin. He moved for a so-called "suppression" hearing, wherein the defence would try to show the court that certain evidence against the accused, however damning, was inadmissible
because it had been obtained by arresting officers without authorization. In this instance, Kasanof sought to prove that Angelvin's automobile should be ruled out of evidence on the grounds that, one, the police, who had no search warrant for the Buick at the time, had proceeded illegally when detectives stopped Angelvin and Scaglia on East End Avenue for allegedly passing a stop signal, January 18, 1962; and, two, they had not established the reliability of the unnamed informer who a week after the arrest (as the police had testified) offered the information upon which the search warrant finally was based.
The fact was, of course, that the "informer" was Detective Sonny Grosso himself, whose deductive reasoning alone had led the police to suspect Angelvin's car following the arrests. Under intensive questioning it was brought out that the informer had tipped off Grosso who in turn had bade Detective Jim Hurley to secure the warrant. The defence attempted to establish that Hurley was acting on second-hand information, while the prosecution maintained that information given to one police officer traditionally was considered firsthand information to all his brother officers.
The suppression hearings before Judge Albert Conway lasted from January 14 to 16, 1963, and when they came to a close neither side was sure what the sum effect had been upon the court. Again, the police and district attorney's office, despite what they felt was overwhelming evidence against the defendants, were concerned lest one technicality might succeed in causing the judge to rule against use of the Buick as evidence in the trial.
But on April 15, Judge Conway denied the motion to suppress. The trial finally was set for May 14, which would be sixteen months after the arrests of the Fucas and the Frenchmen.
Meanwhile, the district attorney's office had gone ahead preparing the case. At the special request of the district attorney, Detectives Egan and Grosso were relieved of all other duties and specifically assigned to help prepare the prosecution of the entire Fuca case and remain in this capacity until the end of the trial.
Assistant District Attorney Frank Bauman, assigned to prosecute, with Egan and Grosso secured a small office in Brooklyn's Municipal Building at Borough Hall and went to work reviewing every detail of the case from the moment they had entered the Copacabana that fateful evening in October of 1961.
They lined the walls with maps prepared by Police Department engineers. Every place where Patsy Fuca and his associates had been observed through January 18, 1962, was indicated via the maps and calendars. A recording and playback device was placed in the office and every tape of the recorded conversations during surveillance of the defendants reviewed again and again.
Immediately after Judge Conway's ruling, Assistant District Attorney Frank Bauman left for France to check out in detail all evidence originating there.
Shortly after his departure, toward the end of April, one of the most reliable police "stools" came up with a startling and, for Egan and Grosso, most vital piece of information: the Mafia had let a "contract" to eliminate both detectives before the trial.
The report even had it that the killer was to be paid $50,000 — half on acceptance of the contract and the rest when the job was done. The informant advised that a "specialist" had been chosen for the Egan-Grosso assignment: a vicious Cincinnati hoodlum called "Tony the Crease," who was known to be slowly dying of cancer. This, the police knew, was the Mafia's standard operating procedure when it came to picking professional cop killers. Such a man had nothing to lose, and if he did his job successfully, he knew whatever family he might have would henceforth be well cared for.
Guards were posted on Eddie and Sonny around the clock. From that point on, they were not permitted to leave Brooklyn's Municipal Building together nor drive in the same automobile nor visit each other socially without protection.
The information on Tony the Crease had been remarkably good, and so was the cooperation of various po
lice departments between Ohio and New York. The word came that Tony was driving from Cincinnati, and his route was followed fairly accurately. Egan and Grosso and their comrades girded themselves for his anticipated arrival in New York.
But one night early in May, just west of Newark, New Jersey, Tony the Crease met with a fatal automobile accident. His car ran off U.S. Route 1, plunged down an embankment and rolled over, bursting into flames. The imported assassin was incinerated.
Egan and Grosso relaxed. They didn't feel their enemies would try the same thing a second time. The trial was held in Criminal Term, Part 4, of the Supreme Court in Brooklyn. Judge Samuel Liebowitz
presided. This did not please the defence. In the courtrooms of New York City, Liebowitz was referred to as "the Hanging Judge." His hatred for hardcore criminals was legend. And very few jurists knew the criminal mind better than Judge Liebowitz: years before he had been one of the country's most famous criminal lawyers, counting among his clients the notorious Al Capone. But like a reformed alcoholic or a religious convert, Liebowitz had dedicated his years on the bench to the most rigid application of the law's penalties to the same type of flagrant violators as he had once defended.
The trial opened at 10 A.M., Tuesday, May 14, 1963. The first motion was made by Maurice Edelbaum, defence counsel for Patsy Fuca. Edelbaum entered a plea of guilty for Patsy on three felony counts: possession of narcotics, conspiracy to possess narcotics and conspiracy to sell narcotics. Patsy was in court not more than a half-hour. The changed plea was accepted, and he was sent back to jail to await sentence.
Patsy's father, Joe Fuca, next was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanour, and he was continued free on bail in his own recognizance.
The Fucas were now severed from the case. Thus began the trial of the two Frenchmen, François Scaglia and Jacques Angelvin.
It was almost no contest. The defence — Henry Lowenberg for Scaglia and Robert Kasanof for Angelvin — had no defense witnesses to present. For the prosecution, Assistant District Attorney Frank Bauman paraded witness after witness — police technical experts, hotel personnel, detectives who had participated in the long surveillance — knitting the web of complicity about the two accused.