The Coffey Files (6 page)

This is how the godfathers decided to handle the annoying Carmine Galante: As Galante pushed away his empty plate at the table in Joe and Mary's backyard and placed his customary cigar to his lips, four Bonanno button men, including the father-and-son hit team of “Sonny Red” and Bruno Indelicato, swung open the small wooden door leading from the restaurant and entered the backyard. Without warning they opened fire with shotguns and automatic pistols. Galante never got to light his cigar.

In less than one minute their work was done. As they escaped in a car waiting outside the restaurant's entrance, Carmine Galante, Leonardo Coppolla, and Guiseppe Turano lay dead. They were blown off their chairs by the powerful blasts onto the patio's hard floor. Galante landed in the midst of Joe and Mary's prized tomato plants. John Turano, Guiseppe's son, who worked in the restaurant, was critically wounded as he ran to hide in a refrigerator. Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato, unhurt, ran from the death scene before police arrived.

Joe Coffey was off the day Galante was gunned down. He was at home when Jim Sullivan called, suggesting he travel to Joe and Mary's to see if he could be of any help to the precinct and OCCB detectives at the scene.

But before Joe and many of the other detectives arrived, the area around the restaurant was besieged by uniformed police; emergency medical technicians, who eventually saved John Turano's life; and the media. Reporters and photographers from the city's newspapers and television and radio stations were alerted originally by police scanner reports that four people had been shot in the restaurant. Knowing the neighborhood to be favored by the Bonanno family, the press rushed to the scene. Word that the powerful Carmine Galante had been hit was already thoroughly circulating throughout the city.

Several photographers, refused entrance to the crime scene, made their way to a nearby rooftop that overlooked the backyard dining area. The pictures they took have since served as the model of a mob rubout. There, lying among the scattered dishes and toppled dining table in the middle of the crushed and twisted tomato plants, was Carmine Galante, his shirt drenched in blood, his cigar grotesquely clenched firmly in his mouth.

By the time Coffey got to the backyard, Galante's body had been photographed by the police and removed from the scene. “But that didn't stop everyone from accusing me of putting that cigar in his mouth. The fact that the medical examiner determined he bit reflexively on the cigar when the shotgun blast hit him didn't discourage the rumor either. To this day there are people who believe I put that cigar in Galante's mouth to make him look ridiculous. It's not a bad idea, but I did not do it,” Coffey swears.

Thirty-five minutes after the shooting, a scene was photographed by detectives from the Manhattan district attorney's office that changed forever the way law enforcement thought of the relationships between mob families.

Sitting in an apartment across the street from the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy, Detective John Gurnee captured on videotape the image of “Sonny Red” and Bruno Indelicato being met in the street outside the club by Aniello Dellacroce, the underboss of the Gambinos, who reported only to Paul Castellano, the capo di tutti capi, the boss of all bosses in the American Mafia.

From the apartment, which was rented by the Manhattan district attorney's office for surveillance on the Ravenite, headquarters of the Gambinos, Bruno was photographed taking a pistol from his pocket and placing it under the front seat of the car. Then all three men embraced.

Gurnee was surprised at what he had seen: two Bonanno button men obviously being greeted with great warmth by the underboss of the Gambino family. The detective had no way of knowing at the time about the massacre at Joe and Mary's.

But when he found out later that evening, one of the first things he did was call Joe Coffey.

“Joe,” he asked, “is it possible that Galante was hit by his own crew and it was sanctioned by the Gambinos?”

Coffey, by then fully briefed by his gang, which had been pressing their network of informants, replied that it was possible because of their anger over the drug dealing.

“Well, when you see what I've got on tape you're gonna believe it.”

“When I saw the tape I reasoned that all the families must have been pissed off at Galante, but I didn't think they would order such a hit without Rastelli's okay. That would have gone against their code and would have resulted in just the kind of all-out gang war Jim Sullivan wanted me to prevent.”

Coffey went to the Metropolitan Correction Center to find out who had been visiting Phil Rastelli. He learned that the day before the hit and the day after, Rastelli had meetings with capos of his own Bonanno family as well as high-level capos of the Gambino family.

“In my mind the scenario was clear. All five families wanted Galante hit, and Rastelli agreed to have his men do it. What surprised the hell out of me was the level of cooperation that allowed the Bonanno hit men to report back to the Gambino underboss, Dellacroce. This was a kind of cooperation not often seen.”

Shortly after the shooting, an eyewitness gave one of the first detectives on the scene in Ridgewood a description of the men she saw fleeing in a late-model Oldsmobile and the license plate of the car.

The car was found a few blocks away and fingerprints were lifted but did not connect with any on file at headquarters. Five years later this car, too, would play an important part in bringing the Ruling Commission, the leaders of all the city's Mafia families, to justice.

But the descriptions and the subsequent knowledge provided by Gurnee's tapes led Coffey to begin an all-out search for the Indelicatos and two men they were known to work with: Dominick Trinchera and Phil “Philly Lucky” Giacone. The Coffey Gang began meetings with all their reliable informants and set up their own surveillance on known Bonanno hangouts. After weeks of looking, though, it appeared that all four had vanished from the face of the earth. Dozens of hoodlums were called in for questioning but none had the nerve or personal motive to cooperate.

“There was a rumor that Bruno Indelicato was totally stoned out on cocaine and running through the streets bragging how he was going to be a don in the Gambino family because he hit Galante. There weren't even any rumors about Trinchera and Giacone.”

In May 1981 a young boy walking his dog in a deserted area of Howard Beach, Queens, had trouble dragging the animal away from some kind of bone he found in the dirt.

Closer inspection revealed the bone to be the right arm of “Sonny Red” Indelicato, which had risen through the twenty inches of dirt piled on his body.

“A lot of young guys think the way to Mafia success is to carry out an important hit,” Coffey says. “But the Galante case proves them wrong. All the shooters came to an untimely end, and Cesare Bonventre, who set up the hit, was murdered in 1984. So my homicide investigation was pretty much at a dead end.”

“But once again,” Coffey remembers telling Jim Sullivan, “we're learning things about the mob that we never believed possible before. Even when we don't make an arrest in a homicide we're building intelligence that I know will pay off someday.”

Throughout his career Joe Coffey was always a hunch player. This was one hunch that one day would prove correct in a big way.

II

THE IRISH MAFIA

In early spring 1979, Joe and Detective Jack Cahill were sitting in the bar of a trendy East Side restaurant, the kind of place cops go to when they are trying to get away from other cops, sharing some off-time waiting for word on indictments in the murder of “Sally Balls” Briguglio.

It appeared that the district attorney was not going to change his mind about not using the identities provided by the Chinese teenager to move for indictments against the hit men and Ianiello and Provenzano. The DA was concerned because the teenager had been hypnotized to get his evidence. That would not stand up in court. He also felt that Ianiello and Provenzano could not be considered accessories just because they were out with “Sally Balls.” No amount of arguing from Coffey or Jim Sullivan could change the DA's mind.

Over the years Coffey was known as the kind of boss who enjoyed sharing a cocktail or two with his men. He saw it as a way to keep morale up during frustrating times and to keep abreast of department rumors.

Joe Coffey led by example. He drove his men hard, but no one worked harder than he did. He expected them to be imaginative and to buck the system when they had to. He always stood behind them when they did. He thought the way to success was through honesty and hard work, and no one was more honest or hardworking than Joe Coffey.

He knew better than any of them that his style of police work resulted in more frustration than satisfaction. He had to bite his tongue when an archbishop in the Vatican slipped through the cracks of an indictment against an international ring of counterfeiters and forgers. He had to keep quiet when the green-eyed monster of jealousy that lurked behind every filing cabinet in Police Headquarters kept many of the men who gave a year of their lives to bringing Son of Sam to justice from getting credit. He was forced to watch as a murdering terrorist escaped being charged with eleven murders because a federal agent was more concerned with paperwork than justice.

Sitting at the bar he explained to Cahill how he realized that his own desire to make big cases often led to big problems for the department and frustration for him. But he had learned how to get satisfaction from preserving his own integrity. He maintained the inner knowledge that he did his job well, and, as importantly, the bad guys knew it.

In the Coffey Gang, Joe had assembled a group of cops who liked slapping cuffs on the bad guys. They did not share the department's joy in clearing cases just by knowing who the guilty participants were. It wasn't enough for them that they knew a hit man named “Joe the Blonde” had killed Albert Anastasia. They bemoaned the fact that the Mafia got “Sonny Red” Indelicato before they did. They were homicide detectives and they yearned for face-to-face confrontations with the killers.

The two cops were into major-league drinking when the elderly bartender came over with two drinks in his hands. One of the reasons they had chosen that particular restaurant for their break was that Joe knew the bartender was an old-time friend of his father. He was once an agent for the Internal Revenue Service but had been waiting tables and mixing drinks since being busted for accepting bribes.

“Joe, see that guy over there,” the bartender said as he put the drinks on the bar and tilted his wrinkled face towards a Runyonesque character sitting along the restaurant's back wall. “He sent these drinks over. His name is Butch Hammond. Says he knows your wife and wants to talk to you.”

“I knew Hammond to be a half-assed trigger man and fringe player from Woodside where my wife grew up. I didn't see any harm in accepting his drink and hearing what he had to say. But I made sure Cahill sat with us,” Joe says. “I did not want to be seen in public talking to a mutt like Hammond without a loyal friend to swear there was nothing corrupt going on. So Cahill watched my back.”

Coffey and Cahill sat down with Hammond, who over the years had taken to talking like a gangster in the movies. With a conspiratorial whisper out of the side of his mouth he greeted Joe and shook Cahill's hand.

After some small talk, both cops, now a little high, were holding back their laughter over his Cagney imitation. Finally, Hammond leaned across the table and, with his face just inches from Coffey's and his eyes madly darting left and right, whispered, “Joe, did you hear about Tubby Walker's son Billy?”

No amount of booze ever slowed Coffey's encyclopedic memory. Instantly he fixed on Tubby Walker as a neighborhood guy in Woodside and a friend of Joe's wife Pat. Joe had played football and school-yard basketball with Walker and the rest of his crowd when he was dating Pat.

He couldn't imagine he would be interested in anything that involved Tubby Walker. With a look that implied “I hope you've got something more important to talk to me about than Tubby Walker,” Joe told Hammond to “get to the point.”

Hammond was used to being dismissed by people more important than he. He knew he'd better get Coffey's attention. “His boy was murdered, Joe. The scum on the West Side whacked Billy Walker. They whacked him for no reason at all,” he whined.

The mention of the “scum on the West Side” fixed the cops' attention. Cahill noticed a change in Joe's attitude and leaned his head closer to the two men.

Hammond was now almost inaudible and obviously afraid to continue. He seemed almost sorry he started the conversation, but now Coffey was pressing.

Though he knew it was not true, he said to Hammond, “No one gets whacked for no reason at all, not even on the West Side. What was Billy Walker into?”

Hammond now relaxed a little. He sensed he had Coffey hooked. His risk at inviting two cops to have a drink would now pay off. He leaned back a little and lit a cigarette, letting it dangle from his lips like Nathan Detroit would have.

“I'm tellin' you, Joe, Billy was a legit kid. He smoked some dope and broke up some saloons but he wasn't into the rackets. He made a good living with the stagehands' union. That shithead McElroy whacked him over an argument about a pinball machine, for God's sake—they dumped him in the 79th Street boat basin. The fuckin' madman Jimmy McElroy did him. Do us a favor, go after him,” Hammond pleaded.

Jimmy McElroy, Joe knew, was a member of a gang of Irish thugs and strong-arm men known as the “Westies” because they operated along Manhattan's West Side waterfront and the adjoining neighborhood known as Hell's Kitchen. They ruled the West Side by terror.

Their criminal family tree and their chain of command ran back to Owney Madden's gang in the 1920s. Today's Westies were the offspring of the men who had tried to kill Joe's father, and he was being handed a chance to nail one of them for murder. Joe was hooked, but he was not entirely satisfied with Hammond's story. Hard guys like Tubby Walker and even wannabees like Hammond rarely went to the police for help.