The Coffey Files (28 page)

Coffey realized that DiNome directly connected the activities of the Gambino family to the Westies. That was something he had been trying to prove for years, since he had arrested Jimmy McElroy for the murder of Billy Walker. Then DiNome recounted a murder that Arena had mentioned and that Coffey wanted desperately to solve. He told about the night he and several other members of the DeMeo crew hid in the house of horrors in Brooklyn. As an aside he mentioned that the house was owned by a low-level soldier named Joe Gugliamo, something Arena did not know.

The night he was referring to, the target was told to come to the house to assist in the murder of another man. But as soon as the target came through the door, DeMeo stabbed him in the heart with an ice pick and dragged him to the bathtub. The blood was drained from his body, with DeMeo pausing to taste it, and then the victim was cut into pieces, which were stuffed into a green plastic garbage bag. The bag was taken to Coney Island and, in the shadow of a broken-down pier, dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. DiNome said the murder was directly ordered by Paul Castellano. The victim was his son-in-law Frank Amato. He was murdered because “Big Paulie” believed Amato's womanizing was the cause of his daughter's miscarriage.

For his valuable singing, Freddie DiNome was granted his wish to enter the Witness Protection Program. Eighteen months later he was ordered to meet Ken McCabe in a motel in San Antonio, Texas, to help prepare a murder case. When McCabe arrived, he found the canary hanged from a pipe in the bathroom. He was evidently a victim of his own autoerotic sexual deviation.

Vito Arena also got his wish. He and Joey Lee lived happily under the protection of the Witness Protection Program, until March 1991, when Vito was killed trying to hold up a Houston supermarket.

About one year after their first meeting in Mack's office the strike force was turning up the heat on the Gambino family. Roy DeMeo was one of the first victims as the various capos began to panic. On January 10, 1983, DeMeo, the street leader of the Nino Gaggi crew, was murdered himself because it was believed he was singing to the feds. Not long after DeMeo's demise, Mafia hood Joseph Gugliamo, owner of the house of horrors, apparently met a similar fate for a similar reason. He disappeared off the face of the earth.

There was a lot going on, but Joe was worried that once again he was going to see a big fish slip through the net. Nailing Gaggi was not going to be hard. A jury would see him and his crew for what they were—thugs willing to murder to achieve their goals. DeMeo was dead, but the sadist was just a follower anyway. Joe wanted to see Castellano take the fall. Freddie DiNome's information provided a direct link to Castellano and the operations of Gaggi and the DeMeo crew. He described how the dirty money got into the godfather's hands. He even told of a murder carried out directly on Castellano's orders.

It was long shot to nail Castellano on a case built primarily on information provided by informants. The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, John Martin, would have to get the clout of Washington behind him to even try. “Frankly,” Coffey recalls, “I don't think John Martin would have done it. But we caught a big break.”

Around the time Vito Arena was running out of murders to sing about, Martin resigned. President Ronald Reagan picked as his replacement a Justice Department lawyer named Rudolph Giuliani.

“Giuliani's appointment gave us reason to cheer,” remembers Coffey. “He had a reputation as a doer. We all believed he was the one who could help us tie all the loose strings of the strike force together. We knew we had a gem who would find a way to nail Castellano in the homicide of his son-in-law and tie him in with Gaggi's stolen car ring.”

Coffey was right. When Giuliani heard what Walter Mack, Coffey, and Ferguson had to offer, he agreed to pursue a RICO case—Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization—which would argue that Castellano ran the Gambino crime family as a racketeering enterprise responsible for twenty-five murders, hundreds of car thefts, and a host of other crimes. It was an unusual route to take to nail a godfather, but Giuliani had confidence it would succeed.

“The evidence was all from informants like Vito Arena and Freddie DiNome,” Coffey states. “It took courage for Giuliani to go to Washington and fight for the okay to go after Castellano. If he lost the trial, the Justice Department would have egg on its face. I wish someone had fought to go after Archbishop Marcinkus in 1972 the way Giuliani went after Castellano.”

When word got around among the power brokers that Giuliani was going to make a move against Castellano, Roy Cohn, the lawyer with a reputation of being able to fix anything, paid a visit to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

As it was related to Coffey, Cohn had a private meeting with Giuliani and Walter Mack. He told them that he was there on behalf of his client, a legitimate businessman named Paul Castellano. “Mr. Castellano,” Cohn said, “does not steal cars.”

“You can tell your client that we are not accusing him of stealing cars,” Mack responded. “We are accusing him of garnering the receipts of stolen cars.”

“It was true,” says Coffey, “that Castellano never got his hands dirty. Even when he was an up-and-coming mafioso working for his brother-in-law, Carlo Gambino, he was always the brain. But he made millions of dollars by figuring out how to make other people suffer.”

On March 30, 1984, Castellano and twenty other Mafia figures were indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan. The fifty-one-count indictment charged them with operating a racketeering enterprise responsible for twenty-five murders, auto theft, loan-sharking, extortion, other thefts, fraud, prostitution, and drug trafficking. The cooperation of Vito Arena and Freddie DiNome provided the vital link that connected Castellano and his crime family to crimes dating back to 1973.

The investigative reports of Coffey, McCabe, and Ferguson were translated into court papers that explained that Anthony Frank “Nino” Gaggi was the capo of a crew which reported to Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano. Next in the chain of command was Roy DeMeo, who, until he was murdered, oversaw the day-to-day operations of the crew and reported to Gaggi. Their raison d'être was to generate income for Castellano.

The government was prepared to prove that they protected their criminal enterprises through murder and the bribery of jurors. On one bloody day, March 17, 1979, members of the Gaggi crew were accused of killing five drug-dealing rivals.

Most bone chilling of all, perhaps, was the charge of conspiracy to murder Frank Amato, Castellano's son-in-law. Castellano gave the order to Gaggi to kill his daughter's husband following her miscarriage because he believed the young man was fooling around with other women.

When the story of the RICO case broke in the local newspapers, Murray Weiss, a reporter for the New York
Daily News,
received a call from “a friend of Big Paulie.” “Mr. Castellano is really pissed off that you wrote that part about Frankie Amato. You didn't need to do it,” the caller said. There was no mention of Mr. Castellano's being the slightest bit annoyed about the other murder, drug, and weapons charges detailed in Weiss's story.

The morning the indictments were announced, Paul Castellano went to the office of his defense attorney James LaRossa. A phone call was made, and it was arranged for Joe Coffey and Ken McCabe to go there to arrest the godfather.

It was short drive from the U.S. Attorney's Office at One St. Andrew's Plaza to LaRossa's office in the shadow of City Hall. The two cops had rushed excitedly to their unmarked car parked alongside the building. About two blocks into their trip they stopped for a red light.

While sitting at that street corner it slowly dawned on Joe what he was about to do. The youngster who more than forty years before had made a promise to himself to go after the men who tried to kill his father was about to arrest the most powerful mafioso in the world.

Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano may have considered himself a peaceful businessman. He may have lived in a mansion in a part of Staten Island shared by corporate executives and retired judges; he may have read
The Wall Street Journal
every day; but to Rudy Giuliani, Joe Coffey, Walter Mack, Jack Ferguson, Ken McCabe, Frank McDarby, John McGlynn, and the rest of the men who served in one capacity or another in the Coffey Gang over the years, Paul Castellano was a murdering sleazeball. As far as they were concerned he was about to get his
Wall Street Journal
in the library of a federal prison.

Standing in LaRossa's office waiting for the capo di tutti capi and his lawyer to join them for the ride back to the 1st Precinct, where “Big Paulie” would be booked the same way all the hookers and addicts who worked for him were, Coffey felt like he was in another world looking down on the scene. It was the greatest triumph of his career. Castellano had no Vatican walls to hide behind. He had no strange voices in the night to blame for his willingness to kill. His allies were not found among international espionage agents.

Instead Joe had Vito Arena and other slimeballs like Kenny “the Rat” O'Donnell lined up to bring “Big Paulie” down. Waiting in the wings were legions of young button men and middle-aged capos hoping their godfather would stick by the code of silence he so ruthlessly enforced over the years. If he did not, they were more than willing to take him out as he took out the capos and soldiers who threatened his own evil empire.

There was a very businesslike atmosphere as Coffey placed handcuffs on the sixty-eight-year-old godfather. “I guess we both had a measure of respect for each other. Paulie wasn't an idiot. He asked me how Pat was, making it clear to everyone in the room we knew each other,” Joe remembers. “Once you understand that Italian mob guys live only to make money it's easier to deal with them. Of course they think the only smart cops are the corrupt cops. So I don't think Paulie thought I was very smart. Of course he was the one who was in handcuffs.”

As the four men walked through the lobby of LaRossa's office building, a newspaper photographer jumped from behind a column and snapped their picture.

Coffey, who was always accused of being a publicity hound, immediately defended himself to LaRossa. “Don't look at me, I didn't call them,” he said.

“I know you didn't,” LaRossa answered. “I did. Where could I buy publicity like this?”

The arrest of Paul Castellano was big news. The newspapers were filled with accounts of what Giuliani was going to prove. The luxury car ring, the Kuwait connection, the homicides, the murder of Castellano's own son-in-law all were stories the tabloids fought for. The picture of Joe leading the godfather to justice made the front pages.

Eventually there would be two trials growing out of Giuliani's fifty-one-count indictment, but none of the big three would ever be convicted.

DeMeo was killed on Castellano's orders because it was believed he was cooperating with Coffey and Ferguson. Nino Gaggi died of a heart attack in the midst of his second trial on the charges, and Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano was gunned down outside Sparks Steak House in midtown Manhattan December 16, 1985, in the middle of his trial in Federal Court. The Coffey Gang was not too disappointed that the mobsters died before convictions in a court of law. “They got the ultimate sentence,” says Joe.

VIII

THE RULING COMMISSION

U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani's success in connecting Castellano to the evil doings of the Roy DeMeo crew through use of the RICO statute sent shock waves through both sides of the criminal justice community.

Mob lawyers realized they had a courageous and innovative new adversary in the U.S. Attorney's Office. They advised their clients that it would be much more difficult to beat the conspiracy charges than individual murder or extortion raps. Not since Al Capone was sent away for tax evasion had the mob been forced to deal with a new twist in society's favor.

On the other hand, prosecutors all over the country began taking a different look at their ongoing investigations. The idea of linking a small-time drug dealer to his capo or don appealed as much to a sheriff's deputy in Montana as it did to an assistant district attorney in Los Angeles.

In New York in late 1983, while indictments were still being prepared in the auto crime case, Ron Goldstock, Director, New York State Organized Crime Task Force, figured out the way to use RICO to hit a grand-slam home run against La Cosa Nostra. Earlier in his career he had helped draft the federal RICO laws.

Goldstock was the assistant district attorney in Manhattan who, ten years earlier, had listened to Joe Coffey's first breathless report from Munich on the Vatican case. The two remained close friends throughout their careers. Joe often passed on important intelligence information to the Organized Crime Task Force.

A few weeks after the auto crime indictments were officially brought against Castellano, Gaggi, and DeMeo, Goldstock visited Giuliani's office in St. Andrew's Plaza.

With Coffey and Walter Mack in the room he stepped to the blackboard across from Giuliani's desk.

“Ron was very serious. He looked Giuliani right in the eye as he held a piece of chalk near the blackboard. He said he thought he had a way to bring down New York's five Mafia dons including Castellano in one vast RICO indictment,” Coffey remembers.

Goldstock drew a circle representing a wheel on the blackboard. In the middle he drew the hub. He said the group should consider the hub to be a black 1982 Jaguar owned by Salvatore Avellino, Jr., whom Joe Coffey knew to be the chauffeur of Antonio “Tony Ducks” Corallo, godfather of the Lucchese crime family.

Next, Goldstock drew one spoke off the hub stopping at the perimeter of the circle. He said they should consider that spot the home of Paul Castellano. In reality, Coffey knew, it was a $2 million mansion on Staten Island called by its neighbors the “White House.”