The Coffey Files (4 page)

The two detectives drove out to Ranieri's restaurant. They found the restaurateur extremely nervous. Quickly he confirmed that Ladenhauf had come to see him to collect the $250,000 that Ranieri had borrowed to open the restaurant. With Ladenhauf were two shylocks, Michael Crimi and Bruce Kay. He said the three left together and that was the last time he saw Ladenhauf.

Back at headquarters Maroney and O'Connell reported that Ranieri was very nervous when talking to the detectives. He was afraid of being connected to a murder. They thought that Ranieri was hiding something but was too afraid of Kay and Crimi to talk.

Coffey told O'Connell to return to the restaurant and tell Ranieri that he was going to be charged with killing Ladenhauf. The motive would be that he could not pay the $250,000. “Give him a few days to think about whether he wants to work more closely with us,” Coffey ordered.

“But first,” he told his two detectives, “I want to meet this little shit, Steven Ladenhauf.”

Coffey was seething over the fact that the young man had refused to see his detectives. If the Coffey Gang came calling, you had better pay attention. Otherwise they could not be any more effective than a village constable trying to take on Murder Incorporated.

The three cops returned to the Ladenhauf house. This time Joe Coffey rang the bell. Steven Ladenhauf opened the door but not the screen door in front of it.

Coffey's bulk filled the doorway. His anger was obvious as he announced, “I am Detective Sergeant Joseph Coffey and I have a subpoena for Steven Ladenhauf to appear before a grand jury investigating the murder of Leo Ladenhauf.”

The younger man's reply did nothing to ease the tense situation. “You're a scumbag and you can shove that subpoena up your Irish ass,” he told Coffey.

Before Ladenhauf could take another breath, Joe Coffey put into effect a police technique his colleagues over the years had come to call “Coffey's Martial Law.” He smashed his huge fist through the screen door and into the face of Steven Ladenhauf. The young man hit the floor. Blood flowed from his nose down over his chin and onto the front of his shirt.

Coffey tossed the subpoena through the newly created hole in the screen door and without another word turned his back and walked away. O'Connell and Maroney approved of Joe's brutal act. They smiled at each other and followed their boss to their unmarked ear.

Three days later Coffey and Jack Cahill were inspecting the facilities at one of the police department's best kept secrets—the “Bat Cave”—a deep underground garage adjacent to a Queens high school where the department's surveillance vehicles and equipment were stored and maintained. Joe always kept up-to-date on the latest electronic bugging devices. A tape recorder was as essential to his work as a nightstick was to a street patrolman.

The topic of the morning was a wiretap recording that an undercover agent working on a gunrunning case had brought in. The Bat Cave staff of technicians was having a good laugh over it. The agent was trying to get the gunrunning suspect, a soldier in the Genovese family, to admit on tape that he was in possession of a certain number of guns requested by the agent. A few days earlier the agent had purchased a stolen U.S. Army Colt .45 from the suspect. The soldier, however, was being cagey, trying to talk in code. It went like this:

Agent: Do you have the merchandise I ordered?

Soldier: Yeah, yeah, I got the 'tings.

The agent, knowing that “'tings” would not hold up in court as “guns” and not wanting to use the word himself, which would have alerted the soldier's suspicion, pressed on.

Agent: Well did you get every item?

Soldier: Yeah, every 'ting. I got the twenty-two, the thirty-eight and the nine millimeter.

The word “millimeter” threw the Bat Cave crowd into hysterics. No juror could deny the soldier was talking about a gun. He had broken his own code.

But things got even funnier.

Soldier: Hold on a second, there's a fuckin' mouse in the room, I'm gonna shoot it. [A loud bang is heard on the tape.]

Agent: Did you get it?

Soldier: Nah, I woulda got it if I had that “big boy” I sold you the other day.

Agent: “Big boy?”

Soldier: “Yeah, the forty-five. I coulda shot the mouse and shot my aunt in the room downstairs at the same time.”

Coffey joined in the laugh. He relished every instance of a wiseguy making a fool of himself. He considered mafiosi to be idiots, and as far as he was concerned they proved it time and time again. “The greenest detective in the worst squad in the city is smarter than any capo di tutti capi asshole,” he would say.

Coffey was at the Bat Cave to line up wiretap equipment for the Briguglio investigation and to check out a new van that had been fitted with a periscope device. The periscope was hidden in what looked like an air conditioning unit on the roof. He was crawling around inside the van when his beeper went off.

He phoned headquarters and got a message to call O'Connell at Ranieri's restaurant.

“Joe,” O'Connell said, “Ranieri is pissing in his pants. I told him he's going to have to talk to a grand jury about his role in the murder and he nearly passed out. He says Crimi is Funzi Tieri's nephew and will slice him in little pieces if he talks.”

Funzi Tieri was the godfather of the Genovese crime family at the time, one of the most powerful gangsters in the country. Coffey's mind raced with the possibilities of connecting him to the Ladenhauf murder.

Up to this point all Coffey's gang really had on Ranieri was circumstantial. He was among the last to see Ladenhauf alive and he had a motive, the $250,000, but there was no physical evidence—no gun and no witnesses who saw the murder. However, the tactic of scaring the restaurateur was working. Joe decided to press harder.

“Tell Ranieri he's going to take the fall alone if he won't cooperate. Tell him we have no interest in messing with the nephew of Funzi Tieri as long as we can nail someone for the murder,” Coffey told O'Connell.

Driving out of the Bat Cave into the bright light of the warm April day, Coffey told Jack Cahill to head for the office of the Queens district attorney, where an assistant DA was putting together the Ladenhauf case for presentation to the grand jury.

Cahill waited in the car while Coffey went upstairs to request a grand jury subpoena for Funzi Tieri. He did not really believe the old don had any knowledge of the Ladenhauf hit. From what he knew so far he did not believe it had anything to do with Mafia politics; it was more likely just a falling out of thieves. But because Crimi was throwing around his uncle's name, it gave Coffey a legitimate excuse to subpoena the old man and a chance to annoy the cranky hoodlum, who would certainly be angry with his nephew for causing a cop to visit his home.

Getting into the car, Joe told Cahill to stop at headquarters to pick up McGlynn and then “let's go visit Funzi.”

About one hour later Coffey and McGlynn rang the bell at the front door of the Tieris' modest attached home in the pleasant middle-class area of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

“An elderly woman I took to be Mrs. Tieri answered the door, and I fold her who I was. I said I wanted to see her husband. She was very gentle and polite and asked me to wait a minute. She closed the door in my face,” Coffey remembers.

“A minute or two later Funzi himself opened the door and asked me to come in.”

Funzi Tieri, in his late seventies at the time, was a diminutive man whose large, sharp nose and steely eyes gave him a hawklike appearance. A dangerous hawk to be sure.

The don led the cops to the front porch, and they sat on padded patio chairs facing out to the street, where Cahill sat in the unmarked police car.

“He was wearing a giant diamond pinky ring which I'm sure cost more than his house. I was laughing to myself over this image of a saintly grandfather enjoying his retirement. I knew his mistress lived right around the corner,” Coffey says. The young woman was famous for singing the Star Spangled Banner at the opening of the annual feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy.

Mrs. Tieri brought a tray with a cup of dark Italian coffee for her husband and McGlynn and a cup of tea for Joe. He was flattered to realize they knew enough about him to know he did not drink coffee.

“Sergeant, what brings you to my home?” Tieri asked, as he placed his cup to his thin lips.

“It concerns the matter of a man named Michael Crimi who claims to be your nephew and I believe is involved in the murder of a loan shark named Leo Ladenhauf,” Coffey replied, unconsciously adopting the formal pattern of speech Tieri favored.

“Oh yes, Mickey, he's the husband of my niece. A nice young man but maybe he talks too much. I am surprised to hear you believe he is involved in a murder,” said the feeble Funzi, who had ordered hundreds of beatings and murders in a Mafia career that began when he was a teenager.

“Well, I do not doubt it. Since he is making a point of reminding other suspects that he's your nephew, I have a subpoena for you to appear at the grand jury on the case,” countered Coffey, enjoying every moment of discomfort he was causing the old killer.

Tieri politely took the paperwork from Coffey.

“Thank you for your time. I'll be seeing you again,” Joe said as he left the porch.

“You are welcome in my house any time,” was Tieri's final remark.

Joe and McGlynn walked out the front door, down the steps of the front porch, and back to the car, where Cahill sat waiting. An ear-to-ear smile burst from his face. He had just broken the godfather's chops and was feeling great about it.

“Cahill,” he said as he got into the car, “I love this job.”

The following day the Queens district attorney was advised by Funzi Tieri's lawyer that his client was too ill to appear before a grand jury. That was okay as far as Coffey was concerned. The important thing was that Tieri made his displeasure known to his nephew.

And Coffey had one more trick up his sleeve for Ranieri.

The detectives had learned that he was a fanatic for attending his son's Little League games. For several Saturday afternoons, Coffey arranged for one of his detectives dressed like the typical mob thug—shirt unbuttoned to his waist, gold chains weighing down his neck, thick sunglasses—to sit in the stands at the Little League field.

The “hood” stood out like a sore thumb among the tennis shorts and T-shirts, and throughout the games he never even looked at the field. He just sat and stared at Ranieri.

The next time O'Connell and Maroney visited Crimi, Ranieri, and the strong-arm Kay, they reported a new level of cooperation. Crimi, it appeared, was no longer so sure of Genovese family backing. He and Kay began contradicting each other as to what they knew about Leo Ladenhauf.

Ranieri may have thought of himself as a wiseguy, but he was really a restaurant owner. He did not have the stomach to stand up to the kind of pressure being put on him. Thanks to Crimi's bragging and Coffey's stage direction, he thought he was the Mafia's next target. Only the law held out any hope of his surviving. Ranieri broke.

The district attorney provided the following description to the grand jury: Peter Ranieri wanted to open a fancy gourmet restaurant on Long Island and went to Leo Ladenhauf for a loan. He apparently was making the correct payments on the loan but Ladenhauf, the fringe player, was holding out the tribute money he had to pay Crimi, who was his connection with the Genovese family. Kay did Crimi's strong-arm work. Ladenhauf told them Ranieri wasn't paying, so he had nothing to give them.

Coffey's investigation concluded that there was a confrontation in Ranieri's restaurant on March 17. In front of Crimi, Kay, and another henchman named Caligieri, Ranieri said he had been paying Ladenhauf the required money. Ladenhauf, of course, said Ranieri was lying.

Crimi, Kay, Caligieri, and Ladenhauf then went to a nearby motel to sort things out. In the motel room Kay walked up behind Ladenhauf and shot him one time in the back of the head. Then the three mobsters stuffed Ladenhauf into the trunk of his car. Kay drove the car to Kennedy Airport and left it there to be discovered by a suspicious Port Authority cop four days later.

Only one obstacle remained in the way of Coffey's bringing Crimi and Kay to justice. The Queens DA's office seemed to be dragging its heels on moving toward pressing the grand jury for indictments.

Coffey had expected this resistance: “The Queens DA was traditionally linked to labor unions for political contributions. I was not surprised they weren't anxious to move against Crimi and Kay, who had links to the construction trades and the Teamsters,” Coffey explains.

Finally, Coffey threatened to take the case to the “Twin Towers”—the World Trade Center office of New York State's special prosecutor, John Keenan.

The threat worked, and Crimi, Kay, and Caligieri were indicted for loan-sharking and murder. Ranieri agreed to testify against them.

Two weeks before the trial was supposed to begin Kay was murdered, his body found in the trunk of his car at LaGuardia.

Without Kay, the shooter, the murder charges fell through. There was some disappointment, but Crimi and the others were nailed for loan-sharking. That took them off the streets for a little while. Joe felt that without his special unit the people of New York would not have had the good fortune of seeing Kay murdered, and Crimi would never have been indicted for anything, much less convicted.

The police department was pleased with the results of the Ladenhauf investigation and encouraged by the amount of information Coffey's gang was collecting along the way.

It was now well past the thirty-day deadline, and Sullivan gave no indication the task force would be disbanded.

After Ranieri agreed to cooperate, Coffey turned his attention to the Briguglio case.

The Mafia's need to murder “Sally Balls” Briguglio arose from the battle for power between former Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa and Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, head of Teamsters Local 560 in Union City, New Jersey, the most corrupt union local in the history of organized labor.