“The offer of the gun calmed me down a little. I realized Peter and his men knew what they were doing. I had been embarrassed by the whining and begging I had to do to get the wiretap approval, and the Walther provided a laugh as I joked about being 007. It was a very important moment in the case because it proved the German cops had faith in me,” Coffey remembers.
Continuing to make light of the emotional moment, Joe said, “What do expect me to do with this? I’ll probably shoot myself in the foot.”
The line brought a laugh from the group, and as Coffey slipped his belt through the holster’s loop, he asked Peter if he could take a look at the surveillance equipment before they went over to the Palace.
“I might as well have asked him to see a heart-lung machine. He looked at me like I was from outer space,” Coffey recalls.
Up to this point Peter had assumed Coffey had brought the necessary equipment with him. The Munich police, having never wiretapped a phone or bugged a room since the end of World War II, did not even have the equipment to do so.
Peter called Rupprect, the director of the criminal division, for advice. The solution was to meet with an American CIA agent with whom the Munich police had a discreet relationship.
Now feeling more and more like an international espionage agent, Joe met the spy for lunch at an American servicemen’s club, very much like the ones he had spent time in thirteen years before while serving in the army in Germany as a cryptographer.
The CIA man was more than cooperative, offering not only the bug but a technician to install it. By early afternoon Coffey and a handful of Munich police officers, including a woman who was fluent in English, German, and Italian, were in Rizzo’s room.
One of the first things a detective in the district attorney’s office in New York learns is the art of eavesdropping. Coffey was much more comfortable around electronic bugging equipment than he was around high-tech weapons. “A good wiretap technician does more to put criminals behind bars than a dozen SWAT teams,” he says.
He quickly realized, and was greatly surprised, that the gear provided by the CIA was outmoded, almost obsolete. The actual listening device was larger than what Coffey was used to working with. It had a very limited range and was operated by batteries that had to be changed regularly. Coffey told the technician to put the bug in the motor that ran the massage unit in the bed. Coffey realized that if Rizzo did his talking while enjoying a massage, the bug would be useless, but he decided it was the only centrally located spot that would hide the unit. The detective wondered to himself how the CIA managed to conduct any kind of sophisticated electronic surveillance with that kind of equipment. He assumed the KGB had better devices, and he knew the Manhattan DA did.
It was decided earlier to wiretap the phone by recording Rizzo’s calls at the hotel switchboard, so that was no problem.
The next day, Sunday, February 27, Rizzo arrived in Munich. Coffey, his James Bond pistol on his hip, and two German detectives, followed the hood from the airport to the Palace Hotel. As Rizzo checked into his third-floor room, the cops went to the room two doors away, which was their monitoring post.
Rizzo unpacked quickly. Within minutes he was on the telephone, first calling the office of a man named Alfred Barg, the German director of a Swiss company. It was now late Sunday afternoon and the cops were not surprised there was no answer.
The next call was answered. Rizzo asked for a Mr. Ense. Rizzo had the wrong number, but the mention of Ense rang a bell with the Munich cops. Klaus Peter knew Wilfred Ense as a con man who was suspected in the robbery of U.S. Treasury Bonds and was a key figure in a ring that spread stolen stocks and bonds around Europe.
Rizzo had no luck on the telephone that evening and eventually went to bed without making a connection. So far, Coffey still had no idea why the street thug from Avenue A was in Munich, but the reputation of Ense was adding fuel to the fire.
Early the next morning Rizzo was dialing again. He tried first to reach a used-car salesman the Germans knew sold stolen cars to American servicemen. Then he got through to Alfred Barg.
It was a conversation difficult for the listening detectives to understand. Rizzo spoke no German; Barg apparently had little English. When Rizzo hung up, the cops played back their tape. After a few replays they agreed Rizzo was trying to collect $350,000 from Barg—money he owed to American criminals he had been involved in a stolen securities deal with. Rizzo demanded a meeting with Barg and Ense in his room at the Palace.
For the next two days Rizzo was on the phone repeatedly arguing with Barg and Ense. Once he left the hotel and went to Ense’s office. Coffey got a kick out of Rizzo’s attempt to threaten the Germans. He kept telling them what an important man he was in New York and gave them the names of several organized crime figures who would vouch for him and certify that he was authorized to collect the $350,000 debt.
But Barg and Ense were professional swindlers. They were expert at maneuvering events to their benefit and they were making Rizzo sweat. No amount of threatening seemed to speed up the process.
Finally, at a little past noon on Tuesday, Ense called Rizzo and agreed to come over with Barg. They would be there about 1:00 P.M. Rizzo said he would he waiting in the bar.
The cops down the hall were elated, but their instant celebration ceased when the CIA technician realized he had to change the batteries in the bug hidden in the massage unit. He had been counting on Rizzo’s leaving for dinner, so the afternoon meeting caught him off guard.
When Rizzo, on his way to the bar, stepped into the elevator, the surveillance team swung into action. The CIA man raced for the bug, while others made sure they would have Rizzo and then Barg and Ense in their sight at all times. The team figured they had about fifteen minutes to get the battery changed. Coffey cursed the outdated equipment and set up position in the hallway, his eye on the elevator bank.
As the CIA man approached Rizzo’s room, a hotel maid stepped out of the room directly across the hallway, a key in her hand. She clearly intended to enter Rizzo’s room to make it up for the day. Coffey realized the problem. He had to think of a way to delay her so that the agent could get in to do his battery change.
He stepped into the monitoring room, which was now filling up with Munich detectives anxious to listen in on the expected meeting. He grabbed a glass from a room service cart and hurled it across the room. It shattered against the wall with a noise that rumbled across the third floor. Coffey stuck his head out of the door and screamed for the maid.
“Maid, we’ve got an emergency in here. Hurry, hurry!” he yelled.
The young woman withdrew her key from Rizzo’s door and ran toward Joe. She had heard the noise and expected the worst. Once in the room, she looked around at a bunch of nervous men she immediately took to be cops and set to work cleaning up the broken glass. The CIA agent was finished in Rizzo’s room about fifteen seconds before the maid returned.
By one o’clock Rizzo, Barg, and Ense were in the room, and Coffey and the Germans were listening. Their first order of business was to call room service for a bottle of Chivas Regal. After it arrived, each poured himself a drink and they settled in to talk business.
The three spoke in English. Barg’s command of the language was obviously better than he first let on to Rizzo. Soon Coffey understood that Rizzo was trying to collect the money for a California wiseguy named Ricky Jacobs. Jacobs was in jail for running a crooked poker game at the Los Angeles Friar’s Club. Coffey knew that several Hollywood stars had been fleeced by Jacobs.
Ense and Barg both denied they owed the money and started to recount all the details of their association with Jacobs. They spoke about meeting him in London with a man called Dr. Ledl.
Ense, who had consumed much of the Chivas Regal, said he helped Jacobs and Ledl work out a deal because Ledl could not speak English and Jacobs did not speak German.
“I learned they had a deal in Rome … with people in the Vatican, and Ledl needed counterfeit securities,” En
se told Rizzo.
Ense was on a roll. He was doing all the talking. “Ricky made me ask him again and again, twenty times, is he quite sure that his people in Rome, in the Vatican, want counterfeit? And Dr. Ledl says, ‘They want all the counterfeit securities they can get.’”
In the room, listening, the group of detectives sat stunned. Coffey had always felt he was on to something big, but this was beyond imagination. The group looked at each other; nothing was said. They were all cops; they were all Catholic; they did not have to be told they had just learned of a crime with enormous implications. Someone in the Vatican at least had attempted to acquire counterfeit securities from members of the American Mafia. At least $350,000 of the mob’s profit was still unpaid, and that’s why Rizzo was in Munich. Coffey realized the numbers involved must be staggering.
Ense continued blabbering. He told of two weeks spent in Rome with Ledl and a few other criminal connections setting up the deal. But Ense and Barg were totally drunk by then. They talked on, but it became more and more difficult to follow the trail they were trying to lay out. Clearly they were confusing the Vatican caper with some other enterprise he and Ledl worked on together.
Eventually Rizzo lost his patience. He really didn’t care about what had happened between Ense, Barg, the mysterious Dr. Ledl, and his fellow hoodlum Ricky Jacobs. He was there to collect the $350,000. He was increasingly frustrated that his tough guy act was apparently not convincing Barg and Ense to reach for their wallets. In New York, it would be different. He had seen grown men wet their pants when Vinnie Rizzo showed up to collect a debt.
At one point Rizzo insisted, “I’m not interested in how much merchandise was involved; I’m only interested in the money that’s coming to my people.”
Rizzo apparently was in Munich only to collect the money due from the stolen securities deal. He did not want to be distracted by anything else—even news of a counterfeit securities deal inside the Vatican.
But to the delight of Coffey, Ense pretended not to hear and continued on about how Ricky Jacobs had promised him that the nine hundred thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise was “qualified”—that it was Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Los Angeles merchandise.
Both Coffey and Rizzo knew that in mob jargon the word “qualified” meant that the merchandise (Coffey now understood it to be securities certificates) was not counterfeit, that it was genuine paper, stolen from either the company or legitimate dealers. Coffey thought that nine hundred thousand dollars of stolen Coca-Cola securities was an enormous haul.
Rizzo, now totally exasperated, said he would do Ense a favor and check whether they were real or counterfeit when he got back to New York. “But what has that got to do with this right now?” he demanded.
For almost two hours Ense and Rizzo argued, with Barg occasionally, breaking in on behalf of Ense. The two con men were masterful at diverting Rizzo’s attention. They pretended not to understand what Rizzo wanted, they claimed they wanted to pay what was owed but did not feel right giving it to Rizzo. They called him an errand boy which made him furious. By the end of the session, Rizzo still had not collected a penny, just promises. Coffey thought to himself that if the meeting were being held in a New York hotel room, Rizzo would have beaten up the two con men.
When Ense and Barg left and the recording machine stopped rolling, a heavy silence lingered in the air. Coffey had been chain-smoking through the entire meeting. He found himself breathing hard and sweating as he replayed the conversation in his mind. All the detectives were going through their notes, turning pages, searching back to the first mention of “Rome” and “Vatican.”
Joe realized he needed some time to organize all this in his mind before calling New York. He and Peter had some lunch, carefully avoiding discussion about what they had just heard, so they would not add to the confusion. Then Coffey went to his room. It was early morning in New York but he gambled Vitrano would already be at the office. He called the Leonard Street number.
Vitrano was in, and without ceremony Coffey began pouring out the details of the Rizzo meeting. He was talking so fast and seemed so excited that Vitrano had to interrupt him to tell him to relax, to slow down. Then, as Vitrano began to comprehend the potential of what Coffey had overheard, he stopped the detective again.
“I want to get this on tape and I want to get Ron Goldstock in here,” Vitrano said. Goldstock, at the time, was an assistant district attorney specializing in organized crime. He understood better than anyone in Hogan’s office how the Mafia put together complicated deals involving millions of dollars.
For more than an hour Joe Coffey read his notes into the telephone and added his own interpretations. When he finished all three men were mentally exhausted.
“You did good, Joe. Get back here as soon as Rizzo leaves,” Vitrano ordered.
Rizzo left the next morning after Ense agreed to open a bank account in Munich into which he would deposit the money owed the American mob. Coffey was on a flight out that evening.
Aboard the plane he ran through the events of the past week. Again and again he read his notes. Who was this Ledl? How much money could possibly be involved? It had to be millions. Was the Coca-Cola company the only one hit? Ense had mentioned at least ten names, people in countries all over the world. Would he have to track them all down? And, most importantly, what was the Vatican Connection? Could these con men have actually gotten their hooks into the Vatican, or worse, could someone in the Vatican actually have been behind a scheme to steal and counterfeit American securities?
As the plane cruised towards New York, Coffey put away his notebook and shut off his overhead light. His fear of flying seemed trivial amid the events of the previous two days. In the darkened cabin he thought about his childhood.
The Coffeys were devout Catholics. His parents, Margaret and Joseph, Sr., children of immigrants from Ireland in the late nineteenth century, scrimped and saved to allow Joe and his brothers and sisters to attend parochial schools in their Manhattan neighborhood. Joe attended Xavier High School, a Catholic military academy, and later Fordham University, a Jesuit school. As a teenager he served as personal altar boy for the priest-philosopher Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, whose radio and television program and writings made him a national figure in the 1940s and 1950s.
Along with FBI agents, priests were among the heroes of Joe’s youth. But when he was a senior in high school, something happened that began to change his attitude toward the church.
Joe’s brother Edward had entered a seminary in Pennsylvania, and when he was eighteen years old, Joe and a neighborhood girlfriend went to visit.
“To my dismay and shock, we found almost all the priests were obviously homosexual. There was nothing discreet about them. My brother was very upset because I was so annoyed. On the drive home I was almost in tears,” Coffey remembers. Edward Coffey soon left the seminary, giving up his dream of becoming a priest.
Years later, when Joe first joined the district attorney’s office, Hogan was wrapping up an investigation called the “phony cop case.” It involved a blackmailer named Sherman Kaminsky who ran a ring of con artists and blackmailers who preyed on travelers at the city’s bus and train depots.
Spotting people they believed to be homosexuals, one member of the team, called the “chicken,” would convince the victim to go to a hotel room. Once they were there for a few minutes a second member of the team, who was called the “bull” and posed as a cop, would break in at the opportune moment and catch the pair having sex. The bull would threaten the pair with arrest and frighten the victim with tales of what prison inmates did to homosexuals. Eventually, of course, the bull would say he was willing to forget the whole thing for a price.
Before Hogan’s men broke the ring, several well-known politicians, an admiral, and even a famous law enforcement official were snared by Kaminsky. But what bothered Coffey the most about the ring was that more than half of their victims were Catholic priests.
So the Joe Coffey flying ba
ck from Munich, Germany, in 1972 was quite a different person from the one who, as a teenager, attended to Bishop Sheen.
“It wasn’t that I was no longer religious; I was. But I had learned that anything was possible. If I could believe that a priest could be a practicing homosexual, then I could believe he could be a con man and a swindler. And if he happened to work in the Vatican, well I could believe that too,” says Coffey.
A car was waiting at Kennedy Airport to drive Joe back to Leonard Street. Much had happened since his telephone call to Vitrano and Goldstock. Most importantly, Vitrano had played Coffey’s tape for the head of the New York office of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force.
The strike force people were immediately interested, but it was not the mention of the Vatican that had made them offer Vitrano all the money and manpower he needed. One of the things that sparked them was the mention of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Los Angeles stock. The Justice Department at the time was deeply involved through the FBI in investigating the manufacture and worldwide movement of more than fifty billion dollars’ worth of counterfeit or stolen stocks and securities bearing the names of blue-chip companies. The strike force knew that Coca-Cola of Los Angeles had lost a large quantity of securities in the mail in 1970. Companies like Occidental Petroleum and Norton Simon also had reported large numbers of securities stolen and were part of the same investigation.
On several occasions the lost paper, even though it was eventually reported stolen, was used as collateral in million-dollar swindles all over the world. One scam almost bankrupted the government of Panama.
The other factor that caused the feds to jump in with both feet was the mention of Ricky Jacobs. They knew him to be one of the major American dealers in stolen and counterfeit securities, and whatever deal he touched they wanted to know about. Could Jacobs, Ense, Barg, and the others mentioned in Coffey’s tapes be the masterminds behind these international scams? The tapes were the first solid lead the Justice Department had received.
The Coffey Files Page 9
