The Coffey Files

by Coffey, Joseph; Schmetterer, Jerry;

  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.

  “If you know who did it, why don’t you guys take care of it?” Joe asked.

  Hammond leaned back and lit another cigarette. Coffey, the chain smoker, also lit up. Cahill signaled for another round.

  “There’s no way we can handle this, Joe. McElroy is totally crazy. He kills for the fun of it and he’s got ‘Big Paulie’ behind him,” Hammond replied.

  This was news, and Coffey and Cahill instantly sobered up. “Big Paulie” was Paul Castellano, godfather of the Gambino crime organization, the largest Mafia family in the country, counting hundreds of gunmen. More important, Paulie was capo di tutti capi—godfather of godfathers—the leader of all the Mafia gangs in the United States. Castellano was the number one target of the Coffey Gang.

  The mention of Paul Castellano’s link to a murder he might solve sent Joe’s adrenaline pumping. The frustration brought on by past successes was forgotten. Another big case was in the making.

  Gulping down the last of his drink, he tried not to reveal his excitement to Hammond. “Jack and I are on our way down to headquarters now anyway. I’ll pull the file and see what I can do,” he said.

  It was news to Cahill that they were going back to the office. After a quick stop at the bar to say good-bye to the busted IRS agent, the two detectives headed south on Second Avenue towards One Police Plaza.

  When they arrived at headquarters, Chief Sullivan was already gone for the day, so Coffey took some time to look up the homicide report filed on the Walker boy. He learned that the body had been found in Billy Walker’s van in a lovers’ lane along the 79th Street Boat Basin, a marina used by city dwellers fortunate enough to own small cabin cruisers and sailboats. There was also a handful of houseboats moored there permanently, an adventurous way to beat the city’s high rents.

  The first detectives on the scene had noted that it appeared Walker had been shot in the mouth or face. The entire back side of his head had been blown away by the exiting bullet.

  Coffey was familiar with the work of James McElroy and his cronies Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan, who ran the Westies. The
y were known for two distinguishing characteristics: their viciousness and their stupidity.

  Joe knew he was going to have to sell Sullivan on the idea of diverting some of the Coffey Gang’s resources to go after McElroy. As he copied the Walker file, he mentally prepared for his conversation with the chief. He went over in his mind all he knew about the West Side Irish gang.

  After Owney Madden formed the original gang, the Prohibition gangster needed a band of thugs to run illegal booze into his speakeasies, including the legendary Cotton Club. Joe’s father even drove for Madden when he needed some extra cash to get the family through a difficult period.

  In order to fight off the Mafia gangs of the twenties, Madden joined forces with Dutch Schultz. Their combined unit was known as the Arsenal Gang because it employed such heavily armed desperadoes as “Machine Gun” Campbell. The gang also included John “Cockeye” Dunn, who had botched the assassination attempt on Joe Coffey, Sr., that had convinced the young Joe to devote his life to bringing such killers to justice.

  In the forties Eddie McGrath took over the Arsenal Gang and was considered the equal of such master criminals as Meyer Lansky, Vito Genovese, Lucky Luciano, and Carlo Gambino. Lansky, McGrath, and Gambino ran the New York mobs.

  By the early sixties Lansky was forced out of the country, Gambino was in failing health, and McGrath had retired to Florida. Before leaving, he turned the Irish gang, now called the West Side Irish, the Irish Mafia, or the Westies, over to Hughie Mulligan.

  Mulligan was more of a character actor than a superstar on the level of Lansky, Gambino, or McGrath. Unfortunately for him, by the time he got control of the gang, New York’s harbor was in the last of its glory days as a shipping and passenger port. As the port’s business disappeared, so did the number of longshoremen and trucking contractors. They had provided a means for the gang to extort and steal money from businessmen who needed to move their wares off the piers and through the West Side streets leading to the garment center and the highways to Long Island and upstate New York. There were fewer trucks to hijack and fewer union men to exploit.

  With the Mafia in control of the lucrative cargo routes, using Kennedy Airport as a hub, Mulligan’s men were left to loan-sharking, bookmaking, extortion of the unions that serviced the Times Square theater district, and increasingly, whatever strong-arm work the Italian gangs would contract out to them.

  An incident involving Mulligan is one of the best illustrations of why detectives hate to rely solely on planted listening devices for information.

  In 1966, when Coffey was a plainclothes police officer working in the Rackets Bureau of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, he was involved in the investigation of the Ruby Stein and Jiggs Forlano loan-sharking ring, which operated on Westie turf and paid tribute to Mulligan.

  Mulligan was seen at a meeting with Stein, Forlano, and Mafia capo Carmine “The Snake” Persico in a restaurant on Third Avenue and 38th Street, four doors from the building where Joe Coffey, Sr., had survived the assassination attempt. Coffey was trailing Stein and Forlano, and as he watched the restaurant from a dingy bar across the street, he noticed numerous middle-aged, very straight-looking men milling about outside. One of the group, he realized, was Richard Condon, a detective who would eventually become police commissioner, but at the time was assigned to the department’s Corruption Unit.

  Coffey approached Condon and asked what all the cops were doing on the street. Condon, first demanding to know why Coffey was there, explained that his men were trailing Mulligan, who was heavily involved in bribing police officers.

  Mulligan’s involvement with Persico, Stein, and Forlano interested everyone. So it was decided to get court approval for a listening device in Mulligan’s car.

  Shortly thereafter the bug was planted and a surveillance plan was put into effect. A team of Condon’s detectives would trail Mulligan everywhere he drove, recording his conversations as they were transmitted by the bug.

  The morning the operation went into effect the running joke was that the detectives had better be careful in traffic because Mulligan was known to be a terrible driver. The humor, however, was lost on District Attorney Frank Hogan when his men had to report that the operation lasted less than one hour.

  Minutes after leaving his garage Mulligan ran off the road and totaled his car, destroying the bug in the process.

  The incident added to Mulligan’s reputation as being more of a clown than a capo. The Westies were becoming a joke to organized crime and to the men whose responsibility it was to put them in jail. It bothered Joe Coffey that people were laughing at Mulligan and his gang rather than hating them for the monsters he knew them to be.

  In 1968 Coffey arrested an up-and-coming West Side Irish mobster named Mickey Spillane for shaking down a West Side night club but could not convince Hogan to push the investigation further. Like his bosses before and since, Hogan told Joe, “Concentrate on the Italians.”

  Spillane, who would take over the gang when Mulligan died in 1974, pleaded guilty and served a short prison term. When he got out he started the gang on a new business. With any kind of sophisticated criminal activity now totally taken over by the Mafia, Spillane hit on the idea of kidnapping Italian bookies and holding them for ransom to be paid by the appropriate Mafia family.

  He got away with it a few times. The Mafia considered it nothing more than a nuisance and, wanting to keep the Westies around as their strong-arms, paid the money and shrugged it off.

  But in an example of the senseless violence that had by this time become their trademark, Spillane killed a bookie named Ziccardi after the Gambino family paid the $100,000 ransom.

  This was pushing their luck too far. Joe remembers being on patrol hunting Son of Sam on the evening of May 13, 1977, when a report of shots fired in a Queens housing complex came over his radio.

  “Our orders were to respond to every call of shots being fired, but as we raced to the scene I remembered that Mickey Spillane lived in that neighborhood. I knew we were going to find his body in the street,” Joe recalls.

  It was indeed Spillane’s corpse they found in the street outside his apartment house between two parked cars. He had been stabbed and shot in the lobby. He had staggered out to the street where he had been shot again. He had collapsed between the two cars and died.

  Later the police would learn that he was lured to the lobby by a friend named Sonny Marini. There he was met by a Gambino soldier named Danny Grillo and two henchmen. The murder was contracted by Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone to the Gambino family.

  The killers did not know and it did not make a difference that Spillane had just returned from a trip to Florida, where he had asked Eddie McGrath to appeal to the Gambinos to let him off the hook for his defiance of their code. McGrath, disgusted at what had become of his legendary gang, told Spillane some stories about how members of his gang like “Cockeye” Dunn went to the electric chair like “men,” and refused to call New York.

  By the time Joe Coffey sat in Jim Sullivan’s office to ask permission to go after James McElroy, all this information was fresh in his mind. He related his restaurant meeting with Hammond. He told Sullivan he had wanted to chase the Westies years before when he was a young detective in the Manhattan district attorney’s office but because the gang was considered so low level, nothing more than street thugs, and because the only publicity came from busting Italian mobsters, he never got the okay.

  “I know you brought me in here to go after the Italian gangs, but now it looks like there might be a provable homicide link between the Irish gang and Castellano. The West Side Irish are the most vicious, mad-dog killers in the city. This may be our chance to nail them,” Coffey told the chief of detectives. He knew Sullivan was as proud of his own Irish heritage as he was of his. Both men were embarrassed by the way the Coonans and Featherstones and McElroys dragged their heritage through the streets.

  Finally, Coffey threw his knockout punch: “These guys are direct descenda
nts of the men who tried to kill my father,” he reminded Sullivan.

  “I don’t really think Sullivan needed that much convincing. He wanted the Westies locked up as much as I did and, given the Coffey Gang’s record of success, Sullivan was too smart a manager to hold us back. He told me to follow up the lead, the Castellano link,” Coffey remembers, savoring the moment to this day.

  Coffey assigned himself and detectives Frank McDarby, John McGlynn, and John Meyer to take on the Westies. One of the privileges of Coffey’s position was that he could assign a detective to serve as his driver and aide-de-camp. Jack Cahill filled that spot and he would be good to have around if things got rough.

  They realized from the start that the only way they were going to nail McElroy for the Walker murder was by finding a cooperative eyewitness. No bullet was recovered from the body, there was no murder weapon in police custody, and because McElroy had never been arrested there were no records of his fingerprints to match with prints taken from Walker’s clothing. Without an eyewitness it could not even be established as evidence that McElroy and Walker were together the night of the murder.

  So the cops hit the streets, going block by block along the West Side piers during the day asking people who could have been their brothers, cousins, or aunts if they knew anything about the death of Billy Walker. The follow-up question was if they knew Jimmy McElroy.

  What they got back from these people was usually a blank stare indicating a total lack of understanding of the question. If they answered at all they said they never heard of anyone named McElroy. Some of the older dock workers offered a warning: “If I were you guys I’d steer clear of Jimmy McElroy.”

  They were told all kinds of stories about the viciousness of the Westies, and the people they spoke to wondered why all of a sudden the cops were taking such an interest in murder and mayhem on the West Side. Why, for instance, one wondered, was nothing ever done about the murders of Dennis Curley and Patty Dugan?