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Authors: Jerry; Joseph; Schmetterer Coffey

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BOOK: The Coffey Files
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On July 30, 1975, Hoffa disappeared from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in suburban Detroit, Michigan. The FBI established through sworn testimony that Hoffa was scheduled to meet with Provenzano that afternoon in an attempt to settle some of their differences—mainly who got what piece of the lucrative Teamsters pie.

It was also established that Briguglio, who was officially the business agent for Local 560, was seen in the same parking lot. An FBI search of the file cabinet in Briguglio's office revealed just what kind of duties he performed as Provenzano's business agent. In the cabinet was a pair of handcuffs, a pistol box, loan-sharking records, information linking the local to a mail fraud case in Florida, ammunition for a nine-millimeter pistol, and a target with Briguglio's fingerprints and several nine-millimeter holes. The business he conducted for Local 560 usually involved beating, murdering, and otherwise intimidating the many enemies of Tony Provenzano.

After a two-and-a-half-year investigation, the FBI concluded and shared with other law enforcement agencies that Briguglio picked Hoffa up ostensibly to drive him to the meeting with “Tony Pro.” Instead he drove him to his death.

Provenzano's favorite way of conducting a hit was to have a friend or trusted associate of the victim lure him to a certain place and then have one of his men waiting as the executioner. It was Hoffa's stepson Chuckie O'Brien who drove him to the meeting with “Sally Balls.” Hoffa knew Briguglio and had no reason not to trust him. In addition, other close associates were telling Hoffa that he should find some way of making peace with Provenzano if he ever wanted to get back into power. So he had no choice but to make that rendezvous in the Michigan parking lot where Briguglio was waiting.

Three years later Briguglio was in trouble over the murder of another New Jersey union official and was about to be indicted for a systematic pattern of kickbacks, extortion, and “sweetheart” deals on behalf of what the FBI called the Provenzano Organization, which was linked to the Genovese Mafia family.

“Tony Pro,” who in March 1978 was also on trial for attempting to arrange kickbacks in connection with a $2 million Teamster loan for the renovation of a hotel, and the dons were worried that Briguglio would make a deal with the law in exchange for lenient treatment. They knew any deal would have to include information on the Hoffa hit and the Genovese link to the Teamsters.

Briguglio's time had run out. On March 21, 1978, his mentor “Tony Pro” and the powerful “Matty the Horse” Ianiello took “Sally Balls” out for a night on the town.

They started at a Little Italy social club named the Andrea Doria where they drank heavily. At around 9:00
P.M.
they left for Benito's Restaurant on Mulberry Street where they ate and drank some more until 10:30
P.M.

The three left the restaurant together. As the door closed behind them “Tony Pro” took two steps to his right. “Matty the Horse” took two steps to his left. “Sally Balls,” skilled assassin that he was, undoubtedly realized in those last moments of his life that he had just been set up.

But before his alcohol-laden brain could command his body to react, a car pulled up in front of him and four shots were fired. Each .45 caliber bullet struck the hit man in the chest. Staggering, he fell backward onto the sidewalk. As his blood spread along the street, one of the men from the car walked up to his heaving body and put a bullet into his brain. “Sally Balls” was taken out in the grand style he deserved, according to the lore and tradition of the Mafia. Teamsters Union Local 560 was going to need a new business agent.

A block away, two detectives from the New York Police Department's Intelligence Division, who were trailing Ianiello, witnessed the entire shooting.

Unfortunately, Coffey's detectives Dick Joyce and John McGlynn found a very cold trail of clues when they finally got to Mulberry Street about three weeks after “Sally Balls” was gunned down.

“The two Intelligence Division cops who witnessed the hit could have done two things that might have really helped us later,” says Coffey. “They could have chased the killers or detained ‘Tony Pro' and ‘Matty the Horse' for questioning. They did neither.”

What they did do was try to question other witnesses. But people who encounter a murder on Mulberry Street at 10:30 at night are usually smart enough not to cooperate with the police.

“I would have loved to be in the place of those two cops, but they apparently just took it as vermin killing vermin and did nothing useful,” Coffey reflects.

So Joyce and McGlynn had to start from scratch. The first thing they did was make appointments to talk to Ianiello and Provenzano. Joe went along for the interviews but got the same answer from both: “See my lawyer.”

Next Coffey's gang set out to canvass the entire area again. Going back at 10:30 at night, the time of the shooting, they scoured the crowded sidewalks for four square blocks around Benito's. The hope was they would find someone who was usually on the street at that hour.

After about two weeks of returning to Little Italy every night, Joyce and McGlynn hit pay dirt. They stopped a Chinese teenager and asked him if he had seen anything unusual on the night of March 21. The young man, whose identity is being protected to this day, said he did know something about the murder.

He recalled that he was on Baxter Street, around the corner from Mulberry, returning home from his classes at St. John's University when a car skidding to a halt almost ran him down. Two men jumped out of that car and jumped into another waiting at the curb. Both cars then sped off. He said that he came face to face with one of the men.

“Would you recognize him again?” the detectives barked in unison.

“I'm not sure I would,” the young student responded.

Neither McGlynn nor Joyce bothered asking why he had not come forward before. The formula for survival on the streets of New York did not include talking to the police about the Mafia hit you just witnessed. However, the detectives reported to Coffey that the teenager appeared to be willing to help.

He turned out to be very helpful. First from mug shots provided by Coffey's gang he picked out a Genovese button man named Joseph Scarborough as the guy who almost knocked him over. Scarborough's description matched the one provided by the two Intelligence cops. Coffey believed Scarborough was the one who gave the coup de grace to “Sally Balls.”

The young Chinese student also agreed to be hypnotized to help develop further descriptions. Under the spell of a police hypnotist he remembered the type and license plate of the second getaway car. It was a 1978 Lincoln Versailles that was eventually found in a small town in Georgia.

So now they had a description of a hit man and a motive for the murder. “Tony Pro” was afraid Briguglio was going to sing about Hoffa. Coffey took the information to the district attorney.

“The DA threw us a real curve ball here. He would not go with the kid's ID. He said it was too unreliable because he did not come forward right away. He said there was not enough evidence to seek indictments against the shooter or Provenzano,” Coffey remembers.

“I was upset, but not too angry. After all, as far as the police department was concerned the homicide was solved and we could clear it from our records. We had solved two mob hits in a little over a month, we proved the effectiveness of the task force concept, and I was fulfilling a dream.”

By the end of the summer of 1978 the Coffey Gang had become an integral part of the workings of the chief of detectives' office. They began to overcome some of the initial resistance of precinct detectives and some of the organized crime experts in the five New York City district attorneys' offices and in the department's Organized Crime Control Bureau. “We kept turning new informants and every day it seemed one of my men was testifying before one grand jury or another. We were even able to solve some very old homicides like the rubout of ‘Crazy' Joey Gallo in 1972. Gallo was gunned down as he was celebrating his birthday over a plate of clams in Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy.”

A button man named Joseph Lupurelli who took part in the hit turned informant. He laid the blame on his partners in crime, Carmine “Sonny Pinto” DiBiasi and Phil Gambino. Lupurelli said Matty Ianiello, who owned Umberto's, recommended it to Gallo to set him up for the hit. It was done as a favor to the Colombo family.

The Coffey Gang was even able to clear one of the most notorious rubouts in Mafia history from the department's unsolved files when they linked the 1957 murder of Albert “The Earthquake” Anastasia to a New Jersey hit man. “This was very important to the department's overall morale. We were actually beginning to change the perception that the Mafia could do anything they wanted and get away with it,” states Coffey.

Coffey was also becoming somewhat of a police department ambassador of homicide information. He set up an information sharing network between his own gang and their counterparts in the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's Office, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and New York State's Organized Crime Task Force. Traditionally there was little spirit of cooperation among various agencies. Five years later these early contacts would play an instrumental role in bringing down the heads of New York's five crime families in an enormous case known as the “Ruling Commission.”

On July 12, 1979, something else happened that would eventually play a major part in that case and haunt the godfathers of New York.

It was a warm, typical July day. There was a calm and peaceful feeling on the streets of the Ridgewood section of Brooklyn. The three- and four-story row houses, separated occasionally by an ancient wooden frame home, gave the neighborhood a deceptive feeling of small-town America that belied its connection to the surrounding city.

In the backyards of Ridgewood, Italian grandfathers, retired after years of back-breaking construction work, nurtured gardens of tomatoes, eggplant, and squash that rivaled the Sicilian fields of their youth. Some even found success with grapes that fed the family's personal wine cellars.

Joe and Mary's Italian Restaurant was a Ridgewood landmark known for its old-world home-style cooking. It was also a favorite dining spot for members of the Bonanno crime family. On that summer day in 1979 Carmine Galante, a Bonanno capo, decided to have lunch at one of the backyard tables at Joe and Mary's. He was joined by Cesare Bonventre, a cousin of Bonanno, and Baldo Amato, one of the Bonanno family's top earners. Both men had very close ties to the Sicilian Mafia. Although in the United States for many years, they still spoke in broken English with thick Italian accents.

Also present for lunch were two of Galante's closest associates, Leonardo Coppolla and Guiseppe Turano, owner of Joe and Mary's. Coppolla was a major drug dealer. Except for Turano, none of these men had ever done an honest day's work in their lives.

In this group only Galante enjoyed public notoriety. The press mistakenly believed he was the godfather of the Bonanno family, thanks mainly to the fact that the real godfather, Phil Rastelli, had been constantly in and out of jail since taking over the reins from Joe Bonanno himself. He wisely allowed Galante to get the publicity and take the heat from the other families when he tried to expand his drug business against their wishes.

Despite the fact that he had spent more than half of his sixty-eight years in prison, Galante made the most of his time on the outside. He was first arrested at age sixteen for stealing trinkets from a store counter. That sentence was suspended. When he was twenty he was charged with killing a police officer during a payroll robbery. Those charges were eventually dropped. Four months later he was caught fleeing the scene of a Brooklyn brewery robbery, and that time his luck ran out. He was sent to Sing Sing for twelve years. Behind the Big House walls he stayed in shape playing handball with other inmates who were under orders from Galante henchmen not to win the game. Carmine did not like to lose.

In July of 1979 Galante had been out of the federal prison in Atlanta for three years after serving a fourteen-year term for drug conspiracy. The conviction grew out of his activities in Montreal, where he had established the Mafia in the early 1950s. In fact, Galante was somewhat of an international don, with hoodlums in Canada, France, and Italy following his orders. But because of his inclination to deal in drugs, he was never seriously considered to take the place of Joe Bonanno as don of the family.

Galante was the most brazen of all the city's capos. He spurned bodyguards, and his chauffeur, usually a job reserved for a loyal gunman, was his daughter Nina.

He had called the luncheon meeting to discuss his plans for expanding the Bonanno family's involvement in selling drugs on an international level. It was historically the Mafia's strategy to contract out most of its drug dealing operations. The godfathers like Bonanno, who in 1979 had already retired to Arizona, leaving his operations in the hands of Phil Rastelli, liked to give the impression that they would not dirty their hands with narcotics profits.

“They winked at drug dealing,” Coffey says. “They wanted only their lowest-ranking soldiers involved in drug deals. Instead they allowed black organized crime gangs to deal in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, as long as they paid tribute to the Italian Mafia. So the upper-level mafiosi may not have been dealing directly, but they were raking in huge profits.”

Galante, though, was bending the rules. He was personally setting up drug deals with Latin gangs. His own crew, the thieves and killers aligned with the Bonanno family that reported to him, was known to be running their own drug network. His greed regarding narcotics profits had finally put him in disfavor past the point of saving himself.

With Joe Bonanno himself enjoying the benefits of an Arizona retirement, the family was being run by Rastelli, who, while Galante was digging into his meal at Joe and Mary's, was taking his lunch at the Metropolitan Correction Center, the federal lockup adjacent to the Federal Court House in Manhattan. Rastelli was not only feeling the heat of the government at the time. He was also under pressure from the godfathers of the Gambino, Lucchese, Genovese, and Colombo families to do something about Galante's ambitions, before people began to believe the Mafia dealt drugs to school children.

BOOK: The Coffey Files
6.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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