The Coffey Files

by Coffey, Joseph; Schmetterer, Jerry;

  “There were tall cops, short cops, fat cops, skinny cops, Irish cops, Spanish cops, black cops, and just plain nondescript cops,” Coffey recalls. Many had no other expertise other than that they spoke Spanish. Few had ever worked a major investigation.

  He made a mental note of the nondescript types, knowing their value to undercover work. Two of that type were standing in the back of the room laughing and joking.

  Thinking to himself that he had to establish his authority and bring some order to the room, Coffey yelled out, “You two court jesters in the back, what are your names?”

  Unintimidated by their new supervisor, they shot back, “Frank McDarby and Tom Kilduff from the Narcotics Division, Sarge.”

  Noting one was as tall as himself, Coffey took him on first. “You, the tall one, which jester are you?” he asked as the room fell silent.

  “I’m McDarby, Sarge.”

  Feeling all eyes on him, Joe realized he had gone too far to turn back. He proceeded to load a list of orders on the Narcotics detective.

  “McDarby, I want you to go to the medical examiner’s office and pick up autopsy reports, then get the property vouchers for the victims’ personal belongings, then stop at the bomb squad and get copies of their reports, and on your way back pick up coffee for anyone who wants it. I’ll have a cup of tea.”

  There was dead silence in the room as all the eyes shifted to McDarby.

  “Hey, Sarge,” McDarby shot back, “do we have a long-handled broom in the office?”

  Startled, Coffey asked why he wanted to know.

  “So I can stick the broom up my ass and sweep the floor on the way out,” McDarby replied.

  At that point the 150 streetwise cops in the room waited for Coffey to drop the other shoe.

  But despite the hard edge he was trying to display, Coffey broke up in laughter. “Go on. Get the fuck out of here,” he told McDarby. The rest of the room also broke up, and a lifelong friendship was born between Joe Coffey and the nondescript detective from Narcotics.

  No matter how happy he was to be back in the Detective Division, Joe Coffey found the two years he spent in the Arson and Explosion Squad to be the most frustrating and unrewarding of his career. Terrorism was an international problem. The worldwide attention paid to the Fraunces Tavern and other FALN acts of terror caused the New York Police Department to move gingerly for fear of being second-guessed.

  Radical groups like the FALN that operated across international borders were difficult for local police departments to infiltrate. They did not have undercover agents accustomed to dealing with foreign citizens. In the case of investigations of Hispanic groups, they had precious few cops who could even go undercover in the Barrio of East Harlem.

  “The bosses of the Arson and Explosion Squad were not used to having people looking over their shoulders. They were used to running their own show and not having outsiders brought in for help. Fraunces Tavern changed that, and they did not like it,” remembers Coffey.

  “The green-eyed monster was always present when an outsider like myself, McDarby, or the others brought in to supplement the squad had an idea.”

  But Coffey had battled the green-eyed monster before and once again he threw himself into his new job with abandon. He soon developed the trust of a prominent member of the Puerto Rican community in New York. He was a person who, though sympathetic with some of the goals of the FALN, did not condone the kind of violence they were perpetrating.

  The civic-minded citizen helped Coffey place an undercover agent named Jimmy Rodriguez into a pro-independence group which met in a storefront in East Harlem. On the surface the group appeared to be a collection of fringe players, people with an interest in independence for Puerto Rico but not the inclination to fight for it. But Coffey had an informant who indicated that the group’s leadership were actually members of the secret war panel of the FALN. Jimmy Rodriguez was told to find out all he could about four people: René Rodriguez, Julio Rodriguez, Dylicia Pagan, and William Morales.

  Coffey had worked with Detective Rodriguez once before. During the Vatican investigation he had followed an important lead to Argentina and proven himself to be an exceptional undercover agent.

  The civic-minded citizen had passed on his suspicion to Coffey that René Rodriguez was dealing in guns. Coffey decided to have Jimmy Rodriguez pose as a Puerto Rican nationalist who wanted to buy some guns to conduct his own private war.

  René Rodriguez was suspicious at first, but after several weeks of conniving, Jimmy finally convinced him to sell him some automatic weapons. After the transaction was completed, Coffey took the information to a judge to get permission for a wiretap on René Rodriguez’s telephone.

  The judge, impressed by the case Coffey was building, okayed the wiretap. But back at headquarters Coffey’s bosses were beside themselves with anger. “They were pissed off that someone they perceived as an outsider brought in the first solid lead in the investigation,” recalls Coffey. “There were two lieutenants and one sergeant who up to that point were the department’s experts on terrorism. I could not believe it, but they actually went to their supervisor and suggested killing the wiretap idea. They argued I was an organized crime expert and knew nothing about terrorists.”

  The three “experts” made no secret of their argument against the wiretap. They expected Coffey to back off when word got around that the chief of the Arson and Explosion Squad was leaning towards taking their suggestion. But they knew little more about Joe Coffey than they did about the FALN.

  Instead of backing off he went to visit his old friend from the Tactical Patrol Force, Jim Sullivan, who was the executive officer of the Detective Division.

  “Sullivan wasn’t convinced I really had the goods on the FALN, but he realized the department had no better lead at the time,” Coffey says. So Sullivan agreed to argue in favor of the wiretaps with the chief of detectives and the supervisors in Arson and Explosion.

  Sullivan was persuasive, and the wiretap was installed. It did not provide the success Coffey had hoped for. The FALN operatives proved to be highly skilled at disguising their intentions. They spoke only in code on the telephone. Transcripts of the first recorded conversations provided ammunition to the anti-Coffey factions that he should be sent back to chasing Mafia thugs, not trained subversives.

  But Coffey’s experience with wiretaps had taught him patience. No matter how much code or confusing conversation was recorded, he argued, some valuable information could be gleaned from the tap. He turned out to be right when, after hours of listening in on René Rodriguez, he and his team realized the Dylicia Pagan was the real message center used for the passing on of FALN orders. Up to that point Pagan was considered a dilettante, a young woman who was getting her kicks from hanging around with Puerto Rican desperadoes.

  Coffey argued to expand the wiretap to Pagan’s telephone. However, this time the “experts” won out and his plan was rebuffed. “All we’ve got out of Coffey’s operation was a gun charge on René Rodriguez and a bunch of useless wiretapped conversations,” they argued.

  While bombings continued all over Manhattan, the supervisors of the Arson and Explosion Squad decided not to wiretap Pagan’s telephone.

  Instead they launched “Operation Watchdog” which entailed detectives riding around the city in taxicabs trying to catch the bombers in the act. The operation became a joke on the streets. Prostitutes, drug dealers, junkies, and Bowery bums quickly picked up on the tactic and began waving to the cops as they went by. “How you doin’, officers?” became a police headquarters punchline.

  In 1977 William Morales was arrested after he blew his own hands off while making a bomb in his Queens apartment. The ensuing investigation revealed that he was the mastermind behind all the FALN bombings and the master bomb maker. His girlfriend was the woman whose telephone the bosses of the Arson and Explosion Squad had refused to let Coffey tap two years earlier, Dylicia Pagan.

  A few months after his arrest Morales escaped fr
om the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital and fled to Mexico. On January 1, 1980, the FALN set off two bombs at police headquarters that left three cops seriously maimed.

  Throughout 1975 the Arson and Explosion Squad detectives made little or no progress in their investigation of the Fraunces Tavern bombing. Then, two days before the end of the year, they were faced with a new threat and a catastrophe of even greater proportions.

  At 6:33 P.M. on Monday, December 29, 1975, a bomb exploded in a coin locker in the Trans World Airways baggage claim center at LaGuardia Airport. Eleven people were killed and more than fifty-three were injured. The first thought of the detectives who rushed to the scene was that the FALN had struck again. But hours, then days, passed without the terrorist group’s customary telephone call claiming responsibility. After three days department brass realized they had a new threat on their hands. A task force was formed to work out of a special office at the airport. Joe Coffey was taken off the Fraunces Tavern case and sent to LaGuardia. Before the week was over more than 500 investigators, 300 from the FBI alone, were assigned to the case.

  There was a bizarre development in the bombing which threw the investigators off the track for almost one year. Among the victims were a deep cover CIA agent who had been killed and an undercover FBI agent who had been seriously injured. In addition, Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, had walked through the terminal on the way to her plane about thirty minutes before the bomb detonated.

  The only evidence recovered was small pieces of a timing device and a piece of a battery.

  With no group taking responsibility for the act of terror, Coffey and the rest of the detectives assigned to the task force spent months looking into the backgrounds of the government agents to see if anything they were working on could have resulted in the attack. At the same time there was a general feeling that considering the constant pressure from terrorists that Israel was always feeling, the bomb was aimed at Meir and just went off too late.

  One of the supervisors who gave Coffey so much trouble during the FALN investigation had once been involved in a bombing attributed to the Weather Underground. He insisted they be pursued in the LaGuardia case, and Coffey was dispatched to Seattle, Washington, to track down a onetime campus radical. After two weeks of searching by Coffey and two agents from the Treasury Department’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unit, the suspect could not be located. Coffey was ordered back to New York.

  Thousands of investigative hours passed and no genuine leads were developed.

  Then on September 10 another act of international terrorism was carried out that had a tremendous impact on Coffey’s role in the LaGuardia bombing and in his future with the Arson and Explosion Squad.

  On that day five terrorists saying they were Croatian nationalists hijacked TWA Flight 355 from New York to Paris. One hour into the flight the pilot was ordered to radio New York that the hijackers had left a bomb in a locker at Grand Central Station. They said they would reveal the exact location of the bomb and how to disarm it if they were allowed to take the airplane to Yugoslavia.

  The New York Police decided not to count on such an improbable occurrence. The Bomb Squad was sent to Grand Central to find the bomb and disarm it.

  As the hijacked plane crossed the Atlantic, the New York cops searched dozens of lockers. After about thirty minutes of hunting they found the device and removed it.

  Sergeant Terrence McTigue and Detective Brian Murray took the bomb to the police pistol range in a deserted area of the Bronx called Rodman’s Neck. As they attempted to defuse the device it blew up in their faces. Brian Murray was killed and Terry McTigue was scarred for life.

  Meanwhile Flight 355 had landed in Paris. If it was to continue on to Yugoslavia it would have to be refueled. But the French police decided not to let it go. They issued an ultimatum to the terrorist leader Zvonco Busic. Although he claimed to have explosives aboard the aircraft, the police told him to surrender or they would attack the plane.

  Busic later claimed he surrendered after he learned what happened to Murray and McTigue. But it turned out the explosives aboard the aircraft were fake.

  Two days later on a Sunday, Busic, his wife Julienne, and the three other hijackers were returned to New York in the custody of FBI agents. They were taken to FBI headquarters and placed in separate interrogation rooms.

  Joe Coffey and Frank McDarby were assigned to question the group about the Grand Central bomb.

  “A female FBI agent and I went in to question Mrs. Busic, and McDarby and another agent were to question her husband, the ringleader,” Coffey remembers. “Before McDarby went into the interrogation room, I reminded him to ask Busic about the LaGuardia blast.”

  Coffey had suspected a link to the Croatian Nationalist Movement since he learned that on the same day of the LaGuardia attack, December 29, a bomb was set off at the Yugoslavian diplomatic mission in Chicago. December 29 was a state holiday in Yugoslavia.

  Coffey and the woman from the FBI got nothing from Mrs. Busic. She claimed she did not know of the hijack plans and did not know of any involvement her husband had in setting bombs.

  McDarby had better luck. Busic, in tears, admitted placing the Grand Central bomb. McDarby asked him about the LaGuardia blast. The tears increased as Busic bawled that he did not mean to hurt so many people. He admitted being at LaGuardia thirty minutes before the blast.

  McDarby stopped questioning and went to get Coffey. With an assistant district attorney in tow they returned to Busic’s interrogation room. McDarby resumed asking about LaGuardia. Busic again began crying and saying he never wanted to hurt anyone.

  “Just at that moment an FBI agent started knocking on the door saying he had to get Busic to court for arraignment or he would endanger the case,” Coffey remembers. “McDarby kept pressing, but then the agent threatened to arrest us for obstruction of justice if he did not turn Busic over immediately. We had no choice, but we figured we’d get another crack at him, so we let the agent in.”

  The insistent FBI agent took Busic away, and he and the others were locked up in the Metropolitan Correction Center that evening.

  By the next day, when Coffey and McDarby went back to continue the LaGuardia line of questioning, both men had been on duty for thirty-six hours straight. They were ordered to go home and another team of detectives was sent in to question Busic. But Busic said he would only talk to the “cop with the blond mustache and beard.” The description fit McDarby, but the case supervisors refused to call him back.

  The next day, when Coffey and McDarby finally got back to Busic, the terrorist had retained an attorney who refused to let him speak to anyone about LaGuardia.

  Eventually Busic was sentenced to life in prison for the hijacking and the murder of Detective Brian Murray.

  The frustration Coffey felt in being so close to solving the LaGuardia case was greater even than he felt when he was turned down on the FALN wiretaps. He was not enjoying his work with the Arson Explosion Squad and yearned to get back to a unit where the level of frustration might be less.

  Desperate, he increased his effort to get a transfer and finally got the word that he could report to the Queens Homicide Squad in January.

  VI

  SAM

  Bitter cold, below zero. The kind of day when radio car cops find ways to linger at the scenes of indoor crimes and detectives find a million reasons to hang out at the squad room. Bad weather, it is said, is the cop’s best friend. It was Monday morning, January 31, 1977, and Coffey was on his way to his new assignment with the Queens Homicide Squad.

  Despite the weather and the general gloom of a Monday morning, Coffey’s spirits were high. For a cop his age, he already had had an incredible number of challenging experiences. He had tracked Mafia dons through Europe, protected the heavyweight champ of the world, and successfully navigated the dangerous waters of international terrorism. But until now he had never had the opportunity that every serious detective yearns for. He had never been assigned to
solve a homicide—the most serious crime, the crime that deals with the most basic of human evils, the taking of another human’s life. The assignment might not lead to much globe-trotting or to front-page headlines, but homicide was a choice assignment.

  The day after word got around Police Headquarters that he was leaving the Arson and Explosion Squad, a reporter approached Joe in a restaurant and asked him if he was disappointed with his new assignment. Without hesitation Coffey responded, “Homicide is the best job.” The detectives sitting at the table all nodded in agreement.

  He had no idea as he walked into the borough headquarters to report for duty that he was about to step into a case that many in law enforcement and the press believe to be the biggest ever to have hit New York.

  The Queens headquarters office did not exactly burst into cheers when Coffey arrived. Joe had many friends in the department and his work was highly respected. But he was also known as a sergeant who pushed himself around the clock and expected the same from his men. Coffey was welcomed coldly by the acting borough commander, George Weinert, who was filling in for the ill Dick Nicastro.

  Weinert’s attitude made it clear that while Joe Coffey might be a hotshot from One Police Plaza via the Manhattan DA’s office and the Arson and Explosion Squad, he was the new kid on the block in Queens and homicide was what detective work was really about.

  “We had a strange one over the weekend. A couple of kids were making out in their car in Forest Hills. Someone walked up and blew the girl away,” Weinert said. He handed the file to Joe and told him he would be the supervising sergeant on the case. “Report to Joe Borrelli and see where he wants you to go with it,” were Weinert’s final words as Joe put on his heavy overcoat and headed out to the freezing streets of Forest Hills, one of the best neighborhoods in the city.