The Coffey Files (10 page)

Despite all the energy and interest the Coffey Gang invested in its 1979 investigation of the Westies, Joe never had a face-to-face confrontation with Featherstone. The one time the gang arrested him, Featherstone was a prisoner on Rikers Island, the city's largest jail, where suspects are held awaiting trial.

Nevertheless, Featherstone blamed Coffey for all the Westies' troubles. He would often repeat in saloon conversations how “that fucking Joe Coffey shoulda kept his nose out of the West Side” and how “Coffey was trying to ruin things with ‘Big Paulie.'”

Shortly after Featherstone agreed to be a government witness, he told the FBI that when Joe left the NYPD he tried to get a position as head of security for the Javits Convention Center. “I went to ‘Big Paulie' and stopped it,” Featherstone bragged to anyone who would listen. The claim was a total lie.

At this time Featherstone was being held at the Metropolitan Correction Center. He was transported to the Manhattan district attorney's office every day for interviews with prosecutors and other law enforcement agencies. He talked for hours about the criminal exploits of his West Side crew.

Coffey was then heading up a New York State Organized Crime Task Force unit looking into mob control of the construction industry. He was asked to interview Featherstone to see if the stoolie could help tie any loose ends together.

“I remember Featherstone, who looked like a choirboy, sitting behind a table acting like he was king of the underworld. I knew him to be little more than a sadistic killer, but the assistant U.S. attorneys and the district attorney, basically a bunch of young kids, were fawning over him like he was Meyer Lansky,” Joe says. “I asked him a few questions, just to get his opinion for the record—I really already knew most of what he could possibly tell us—and then I couldn't hold back any longer.”

“Why did you tell the FBI that I tried to get the security job at the Javits Center?” Joe asked him.

“You did, you needed a job, didn't ya?” Featherstone muttered in response.

“You little prick, you know I never tried to get that job. You think anyone would believe I'd get myself mobbed up in an operation like the Javits Center?” Joe, his broad face now red with anger, bellowed.

Featherstone, clearly afraid that his nemesis was about to reach across the table and grab him by the neck, turned to Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Lee Warren for help. The young woman quickly entered the fray, screaming at Joe to cool off and to stop badgering the killer.

“What are you, his mother or a prosecutor?” Coffey barked at the woman.

“That remark quieted the room down, and I got control of myself,” Joe recalls. “I think they all realized that the story about the security job was a figment of Featherstone's imagination. I never went after the job. Not that there would have been anything illegal about it if I had. I just did not like the idea of his trying to be a big shot at my expense.”

Featherstone eventually became one of the most celebrated canaries in mob history. He rolled over 100 percent on his old gang, telling the same tales of the brutal, senseless murders and the connections to Paul Castellano that had filled Joe Coffey's reports eight years earlier. He told about the murder of a man whose decapitated head was tossed into a furnace. He testified about Eddie Commiskey's penchant for cutting up bodies.

The government called seventy witnesses to back up Featherstone's testimony. One recalled the dismemberment of the gambler Ricky Tassiello, carried out in the bathroom of a West Side apartment. “Every time I looked in the bathroom he was getting shorter,” the witness said.

Another time he testified that McElroy attacked a gangster named Bobby Lagville with Lagville's baseball bat and then ran him over with his car several times.

From the stand Featherstone called Joe Coffey “Joe Publicity” because he loved to make the Westies look bad in the press. Joe's love for seeing his name in print was a charge that shadowed him throughout his career. Behind the scenes Featherstone told FBI agents, jealous of Coffey's reputation as the man who had busted the Westies and trying to make a case against him, that Coffey could not be bribed.

He reported being called to a meeting in a Brooklyn restaurant in 1977 with Paul Castellano. He admitted he and Jimmy Coonan were afraid of going to the meeting, thinking Castellano might want to kill them because they had knocked off a couple of Italian bookies. They ordered a group of Westies to stand by in a West Side apartment with hand grenades and shotguns. If the two leaders did not return in two hours, the gang was to kill everybody in the restaurant.

What Castellano wanted to know was if the Westies had killed the notorious loan shark Charles “Ruby” Stein in 1977. “We want his black book; it has millions of dollars in shylock loans,” Castellano said. The boys from the West Side denied having anything to do with Stein's murder.

Featherstone said Castellano told him and Coonan to stop acting like “wild cowboys—if anyone is going to be killed it has to be cleared with us.”

“That meant we were with the Gambino family now,” Featherstone testified in November 1987. Hearing about that bit of testimony, Coffey remembered his own meeting with Castellano and how surprised he was when “Big Paulie” admitted knowing Coonan and Featherstone.

“‘Big Paulie' said he expected 10 percent of everything we made except for shylocking,” Featherstone continued that day on the witness stand.

He told a nerve-wracking story of how the Westies were given a contract on Anthony Scotto, boss of the Brooklyn piers, in a dispute over jobs at the Javits Convention Center, and how it was called off minutes before it was to be carried out. “We were going to get $15,000 for the murder and $30,000 if we made the body disappear,” he testified.

In the face of all this incriminating testimony, defense lawyers for the eight Westies on trial, including Coonan's wife Edna, could only argue that Featherstone was a “hopeless alcoholic” and “paranoid killer.”

When Featherstone was finished with his operatic performance, Jimmy Coonan ended up with a sixty-five-year stretch that included time for the murder of Patty Dugan. Jimmy McElroy got his long-overdue reservation in a prison cell for sixty years. Six other Westie leaders were also sent to prison. Shannon, Bokun, and Kelly were sent away for conspiracy to commit murder. Featherstone is a free man and is being hidden through the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Coffey's investigation of the Westies was not the first time he found himself ahead of his time. When he was a young detective in the Manhattan district attorney's squad he got a hunch that paid off with some significant arrests within a year or two but because of bureaucratic resistance took ten years to come to complete fruition. It was a case that began on the streets of Little Italy and ended in the inner sanctum of the Vatican.

III

COFFEY, JOE COFFEY

Detective Joseph J. Coffey sat ramrod straight in a hard-backed chair directly in front of the wide, highly polished desk of his boss Frank Hogan. He was more frightened than at any time in his career. At his left sat his immediate supervisor, Inspector Paul Vitrano, who was only slightly more relaxed.

It was February 12, 1972, and Coffey had served in the famed Rackets Bureau of Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan for five years. During that time he had built a reputation as a dogged, tough, incorruptible lawman. Though on the force for only eight years, he already had a reputation as a cop who would sink his teeth into a case and not loosen his grip until the bad guy was behind bars. It was a reputation not unlike Hogan's, and Coffey was proud to be thought of in the same vein.

Hogan was the undisputed czar of the New York State Criminal Justice System. While his authority covered only New York County, the borough of Manhattan, his reputation and record of success had earned him national stature. Throughout the world of law enforcement he was known affectionately as “Mr. DA.”

It was Hogan who plucked Police Officer Coffey from the ranks of the elite Tactical Patrol Force for duty in his detective team and took a fatherly interest in the young cop, guiding his career into the detective ranks.

Technically detectives assigned to work in the district attorney's office in each of the five boroughs were New York Police Department cops and were under the command of the chief of detectives. But in practice the DA called the shots, and in Hogan's case his clout outweighed the police commissioner's.

Cops call higher-ranking officials who help their careers “rabbis.” A New York City cop could have no greater “rabbi” than Frank Hogan.

And that's why Joe Coffey was so scared. He was about to lie to “Mr. DA,” about to gamble with his career because he had a hunch that had to be pursued.

Vitrano, the textbook image of a detective supervisor, did most of the talking. He and Coffey had agreed to tell Hogan a totally fabricated story in order to convince the district attorney to use his influence to get the police commissioner to agree to let Coffey follow a Mafia hoodlum to Munich, West Germany.

The New York Police Department had a hard-and-fast rule against such travel. The last time they had let a cop leave the country on an investigation was in 1909. That cop was Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino and he too was following a Mafia lead. They called it the Black Hand in those days. Petrosino's investigation began in the Little Italy section of Manhattan, and it ended in Sicily, where he was murdered by Black Hand assassins. That was enough for New York City police brass. They tried something once and it ended in disaster. Why try again?

The parallels between Coffey's current investigation and the mission that led to Petrosino's death were too similar for Vitrano to expect out-of-the-country approval for Coffey.

Coffey had been trailing a Little Italy mobster named Vincent Rizzo for two weeks. Rizzo was a “made guy” in the Genovese crime family—he owed his allegiance to the family godfather, Vito Genovese, and he had at least one murder to his credit.

He was known as a big earner in the family, bringing in huge amounts of money through such criminal activities as extortion, drug dealing, counterfeiting and running a phony travel agency, which used forged and stolen airline tickets, for the mob.

Coffey's interest in Rizzo grew out of a case involving the attempted takeover of the New York Playboy Club by a group of mobsters. Until the DA's office broke up the racket, the mob had successfully extorted money from the management and, through blackmail, turned several of the “bunnies” who worked there into drug-using prostitutes whose earnings went directly to the Genovese family.

One of the key figures in that case did business with Rizzo. It was while following him that Coffey and his partner, Detective Larry Mullins, realized that Rizzo was more powerful and influential in the Mafia than they had previously believed.

They watched Rizzo's constant street corner meetings with known mob figures and his occasional dinners with higher-ups in the Gambino organization. Along with his connection to the Playboy Club scheme, documentation of Rizzo's daily activities enabled the cops to convince a judge to approve a wiretap on the telephones in his main hangout, a sleazy bar on the Lower East Side called Jimmy's Lounge. In addition, on several occasions Coffey went into the bar in the undercover role of a steamfitter stopping for a drink or two on his way home after a day of back-breaking manual labor.

On February 11, 1972, the cops, crowded in a steamy, smoke-filled basement room not far from Jimmy's Lounge, where the wiretap was being monitored, heard something that really surprised them. Vinnie Rizzo, the barely literate child of the New York slums, who spent his working day wheeling and dealing in the world of low-life strong-arm men and degenerate gamblers, was overheard speaking to Lufthansa Airlines and ordering an expensive package deal to Munich. Rizzo would be staying a week at the brand-new Palace Hotel overlooking the site of the 1972 Olympics, scheduled for that summer.

Besides its seeming out of character for Rizzo to make such a trip, Coffey was also intrigued by the fact that Rizzo booked the trip legitimately, not through the mob's phony travel agency of which he had a majority share. It appeared he did not want anything to go wrong with this trip.

Every instinct Coffey had developed as a cop, plus the knowledge that was an ingrained part of his streetwise upbringing in the tenement neighborhoods dominated by the Third Avenue El, told him that he had to find out what Rizzo was going to do in Munich.

Back at the DA's office he passed on the information to Vitrano, who was just as amazed. Neither man could guess a reason why a guy like Rizzo would step so far out of his comfortable corner of the underworld.

“One thing is for sure,” Coffey told the inspector, “he's not going skiing. The only skiing this guy ever did was on the icy sidewalks of Avenue B when he ran from the truant officers.”

Vitrano agreed with the assessment that it must be something big, something that would eventually end up in Frank Hogan's jurisdiction. But both men knew that they would never get permission to go Germany on just the hunch of an Irish cop. So they agreed to lie to Hogan.

The two concocted a story. They knew Rizzo had a history of being involved in arms deals with South American drug dealers. So it would not appear too farfetched, they decided, if they told Hogan that Rizzo had spoken on the phone about going to Munich to set up an arms deal for the Protestants in Northern Ireland. The weapons, they would argue, would probably be used against the IRA and other Catholic factions. Knowing Hogan's sympathies lay with the Irish Catholics, they thought that was their best chance of getting him to influence Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy to override the “Black Hand Rule.”

Coffey knew that he was taking a big risk. If Hogan didn't care as much about Northern Ireland as he and Vitrano thought he did, they were back to square one. If he caught the lie, the two were headed for the night beat on the West Side piers.