The Coffey Files

by Coffey, Joseph; Schmetterer, Jerry;

  “If he hangs out in places like that and the way he knows his way around the borough, I’m pretty sure it’s him,” offered the otherwise competent sergeant. Before hanging up the sergeant told Coffey he wanted credit for the call if the police officer was arrested but asked Coffey not to mention it to anyone if the tip did not pan out.

  Another “kite” was from a priest in the Bronx who suspected one of his congregants. The suspect was a police officer who in recent months had taken to cursing at young women who walked down the aisle to take communion. “He called them whores and tramps,” the priest said, “and all of a sudden he has been wearing a large gold cross.”

  Coffey took this one seriously and staked out the cop for a while. Eventually he decided that while this was one cop who needed help, he was not the .44 caliber killer.

  It was a wild time in the 109 squad room, which now bristled with two or three telephones on every desk and piles of police forms waiting to be filed filling up every available corner. “We were getting calls around the clock. Wives were turning in their husbands; mothers turned in their sons; angry girlfriends were sure that their lovers were the killer and demanded that they be arrested and sent to the electric chair,” Coffey remembers. “It may be hard to believe, but we checked into most of the calls. We had nothing else to go on.”

  Coffey was now working around the clock, seeing little of his family. As he left his house early one Saturday morning, Steven Coffey, eight years old and missing his father’s attention, ran after him, a thin rope in his hand. “Daddy, use this rope to catch the guy, like Deputy Dog,” the youngster yelled. “Deputy Dog” was one of his favorite television shows at the time. Coffey put the rope in his trunk, promising Steven he would use it if he needed it. The rope stayed there throughout the Son of Sam case.

  Things were getting very rough on the nighttime streets of the Bronx and Queens. Coffey spread the word that he wanted people followed, questioned, frisked, and ordered to open their packages and cars, without warrants.

  “I guess we kind of put the constitution on the back burner for a while,” he concedes. His men began calling their procedures “Coffey’s Martial Law.” The public did not complain. “More often than not, after we explained what we were doing, the people thanked us.”

  It was around this time that the task force cops on Coffey’s shift began doing their most dangerous work. Joe devised a plan to put cops in unmarked cars posing as young lovers making out. A local department store chain supplied a bunch of mannequins that were fitted with wigs. Coffey took the first shift himself.

  Night after night detectives sat in their cars with mannequins or sometimes with other male detectives wearing wigs. They wore bulletproof vests and kept their regulation .38 caliber revolvers in their laps. Backup teams armed with shotguns kept watch from nearby cars and from behind bushes and trees. This was a desperation tactic. Police brass do not like putting officers in positions of such jeopardy, but there was nothing else to do.

  “We thought we were going to have to catch this guy in the act,” Coffey says. “We were ready to kill him. It seemed to be the only way the nightmare would end.”

  Fearing the brass would call off the decoy squad before someone got hurt, Coffey spoke to a friend in the Secret Service and got the name of the company that made the bulletproof cars used to protect the president of the United States. He contacted the company, and they offered five cars free of charge if that would help catch “Son of Sam.” When Coffey passed the offer to his superiors, he ran into the type of response he never learned to live with.

  Headquarters told him that the department, still smarting from the corruption scandals of the seventies, could not accept the cars for free. But they thought it was a good idea and might be able to afford to buy one car. Eventually a blue bulletproof 1977 Chevrolet Monte Carlo was purchased for $5,000. It arrived in New York the day after Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, was captured.

  More than two months had passed since the murders of Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau, and detectives were pursuing one false lead after another. Joe spent days following a bus driver whose route passed almost directly by the crime scenes. Finally confronting the man, Coffey had to be physically restrained by John O’Connell when the bus driver began complaining that the cops had no right to bother him.

  Tips to the police were being classified in three categories: priority one, priority two, and priority three.

  Coffey and O’Connell spent a whole day checking out a tip that involved the television series “Starsky and Hutch.” A caller to the task force made a convincing argument that an episode of the show paralleled the .44 caliber case. With nothing more pressing to follow up, the two seasoned detectives went to ABC network headquarters and in one marathon session reviewed every episode of the popular show. It was a waste of an afternoon.

  Then Inspector Dowd got a hunch of his own. Every night on his way home from the Omega headquarters he passed a disco called Elephas on Northern Boulevard in Bayside, Queens. He talked to Coffey about beefing up the task force presence at the popular disco, which was in an area bordered by single-family homes on tree-lined streets. Coffey never doubted a cop’s hunch and readily agreed to the adjustment even though he already had extra cops there, and he made sure to swing by the disco himself on every patrol. Other cops, behind his back, poked fun at Dowd’s request. “It’s the only disco he knows, so that’s his big contribution,” they murmured. At the same time they doubly admonished their own daughters to steer clear of the Elephas. “Even Inspector Dowd thinks the place is a target,” they warned.

  Bingo. In June, Dowd’s hunch seemed prescient.

  On June 26, 1977, Judy Placido, eighteen, and Sal Lupo, twenty, met for the first time at the Elephas Disco. Judy had gone there for an evening of dancing and drinking with two girlfriends from the Bronx. Sal introduced himself to Judy, and when her girlfriends left she decided to stay for another drink with Sal. He and his friend, a bouncer at the club, would drive her home later.

  Sal and Judy really hit it off and after the last drink they walked to the car on 211th Street and 45th Road about a block away while Sal’s bouncer friend helped close up. The young couple had talked about the Son of Sam cases and both admitted to being frightened about being on the dark streets at that hour; about 3:00 A.M. Sal let Judy in the passenger side and then ran around to the driver’s side of the Cadillac to let himself in. They were hardly settled into their seats when the car exploded in a blast of noise and shattering glass. Four shots were fired. Lupo was hit in the arm, Judy Placido struck three times in the head, neck, and back. Doctors cannot explain why she did not die. But both survived the attack.

  Leaving the scene, the shooter walked down Northern Boulevard. He was a lone man, wearing a ski hat, carrying a paper bag. Two detectives, assigned to the beefed-up patrol by Coffey, stopped him. They began to ask for identification when their hand-held walkie-talkie barked, “Shots fired, two down, 211th Street and 45th Road.” Turning their back on the lone man, the two detectives ran to their unmarked car and sped to the scene. At the precinct house that night both men sobbed. Son of Sam had been in their hands and had walked away. It was not the only time that night that Coffey’s team had the chance to nail the killer.

  According to plan, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, upon being notified of a “Code .44,” forced all traffic crossing the Throgs Neck and Whitestone Bridges into one toll booth. On the Bronx side of the toll booth two women detectives were stationed. Their orders were to stop and search any lone male crossing into the Bronx following a “Code .44.” Many weeks later, David Berkowitz would tell Joe Coffey that the two women detectives let him drive right through. He said his .44 caliber Charter Arms Bulldog was in a paper bag on the seat next to him.

  At this point in his career, Joe had a low opinion of women’s value in police work, feeling that other than as specific decoys or in undercover operations, they were about as useful as artists’ sketches. He eventually app
roached the two women about Berkowitz’s statement. “They told me they were too afraid to stop anyone that night. The tactic was perfect, but two policewomen, too scared stiff to do their duty, blew it,” Coffey says. The sympathy he has for the two male detectives who walked away from Berkowitz does not carry over to their female counterparts. The difference? “The two guys made a mistake; they acted before they thought. The two women were cowards.” Case closed.

  In the same conversation with Berkowitz, Coffey learned that he too was within striking distance of the killer that night in Bayside. He and George Moscardini were on the Clearview Expressway service road heading away from the Throgs Neck Bridge deeper into Queens when the “Shots fired … 211th and 45th Road,” squealed from their police radio.

  Fifteen minutes earlier they had circled the Elephas, noticing the crowd was breaking up early for a Saturday night.

  “Holy shit, that’s him. We missed him,” Coffey yelled as Moscardini raced to the next street to turn around so that they could head for the scene. Within a minute the “Code .44” was broadcast over the detective band as units at the scene identified the m.o.

  Coffey grabbed Moscardini’s arm, almost causing him to ram a parked car. “I’ve got an idea, George,” Joe screamed over the wail of the electronic siren. “Back up the service road toward the Northern Boulevard entrance ramp. If he’s headed for the Bronx he’ll get on there.”

  Coffey was right but too late. Berkowitz would eventually tell him that he saw a police car heading backward on the service road, but he was far in front of it heading for the bridge where the two women detectives would let him pass. Luck was on the killer’s side.

  Finally at the scene, Coffey remembers mayhem. Judy Placido had been taken to the hospital and Sal Lupo was wandering around in a frantic state, blood pouring from his arm. He apparently did not realize that he had been shot.

  The newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, who had received a letter from Son of Sam, was there. Coffey, who usually admired Breslin’s writing and had for many years maintained an excellent relationship with the city’s tabloid reporters, resented Breslin’s presence. “Headquarters, after he got the letter from Son of Sam, gave him total access to the investigation. Now here he was at the scene and, completely without basis in fact, going around telling people the killer was a priest. Breslin was making himself the story, and that sucked,” Coffey said.

  While he remained at the scene, Coffey dispatched Moscardini to Flushing Hospital to find out what the two victims might be able to add to the pitifully empty Son of Sam evidence container. Shortly after he arrived, Moscardini watched as the doctors removed a .44 caliber bullet from Sal Lupo’s right forearm. The detective, who had become a second set of eyes and ears for Coffey, took the bullet and placed it in an envelope designed for just that kind of evidence. Lupo and Placido could not identify their assailant. It was another successful attack by a devil living in the shadows of the night.

  “As the case built up and we continued without gathering evidence, it became increasingly apparent to us on the front lines that we would have to kill Son of Sam in order for any kind of justice to be dealt out,” Coffey says. “Judging from the letters, he was clearly insane and we had no kind of court case.” The overworked, undernourished criminal justice system had no way of dealing with the killer, but on the street cops were prepared to take him down. “If he came into our sight, he was dead,” Coffey says.

  These are unusually harsh words from a man who disliked firing his gun, even at the police range, but Son of Sam had taken over his life. As surely as the demonic killer had entered the lives of his victims, he had become a dominant force in the thoughts of the detectives charged with bringing him to justice. Barracks humor disappeared from the crowded headquarters squad room. Cops and reporters got into violent arguments. Marriages, already strained by the pressures of everyday police work, were now at the breaking point. Detectives had to be ordered to take their time off. Dowd, Borrelli, Power, Coffey, Gorman, and Conlon had to be pried from their desks and yanked from their patrol cars.

  A great, fearful concept began to dominate their thoughts. The first anniversary of the murder of Donna Lauria, Son of Sam’s first victim, was approaching. Would the demon create some special event to mark the date?

  Everyone agreed he would. The only argument was over which day. The attack on Lauria was on July 29, a Saturday night. In 1977, July 29 would be a Friday. Coffey argued that the attack would come on July 30 or 31 because all his previous attacks, except the one on Voskerichian, occurred late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. It seemed a small thing to be arguing about—the Omega operation would be in force all weekend—but at that point everyone was grasping at straws.

  In mid-July a Yonkers man named Sam Carr went to the 109th Precinct to complain about a neighbor named David Berkowitz who had been harassing his family. He thought Berkowitz could be the Son of Sam killer. The information was classified priority two.

  It did not go unnoticed in the press that the anniversary was approaching. The media, en masse, demanded answers to their questions about protecting their readers and viewers that weekend. It was then, Coffey believes, that Dowd made a serious mistake. The inspector revealed the bridge plan to the papers, letting the killer know how the police planned to catch him. “I was afraid that we had now driven him out of the Bronx and Queens, perhaps to Brooklyn or the suburbs, and those places were not involved in the task force. If he hit there, we might end up back at square one,” Coffey says.

  In the early morning hours of July 31, 1977, David Berkowitz, known to the city as Son of Sam, opened fire with his eighteen-ounce, .44 caliber Charter Arms Bulldog on a car containing Stacy Moskowitz, age twenty, and Robert Violante, also twenty. The couple was parked in a lovers’ lane area off Shore Parkway in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn.

  Stacy Moskowitz was mortally wounded. Robert Violante’s eyes were shattered, leaving him legally blind.

  Coffey, Moscardini, and O’Connell had cruised Queens Boulevard most of that evening. Dowd had ordered the Omega force to continue to concentrate on Queens. “He called the Elephas shooting right and that made him hard to argue with,” says Coffey. So only the bridges that connected the Bronx and Queens were being covered. Brooklyn’s highways were left to the one Omega car and the regular Highway Patrol units.

  At 2:35 A.M., as they were riding past the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, not far from where Christine Freund and Virginia Voskerichian were murdered, their radio barked with a report of a shooting at Bay 17th and Shore Road in Brooklyn. Coffey knew the area was a favorite parking spot. A follow-up report said to be on the lookout for a single gunman and that it might be a homicide.

  Moscardini pulled up to a pay phone and Coffey called Omega Headquarters. He asked to speak to Dowd. He told his boss he wanted to respond to Brooklyn. Dowd said he doubted it would be their man but told Coffey to ride out anyway, because the sole Omega unit in Brooklyn had already gone off duty.

  Moscardini broke all his personal driving records as he maneuvered down the Van Wyck Expressway and the Belt Parkway to the scene. This time, the scene was crawling with cops who had no inside knowledge of the Son of Sam case. They had not been included in the task force. All they knew was what they had read in the papers. So they had no special response planned. They reacted like it was just another murder.

  But moments after he arrived, Coffey’s worst fears were realized. “Son of Sam had left his calling card,” Coffey says. “Right in the middle of the steering wheel of Robert Violante’s car was a .44 caliber bullet.”

  But there were other forces at work against the demon that night, and though Joe could not know it at the time, Son of Sam’s luck was beginning to run out. Stacy Moskowitz was to be his last victim.

  Coffey sent Moscardini and O’Connell to the hospital where Stacy and Robert were fighting for survival, and he headed for the local precinct. The first thing he did when he got there was to call Dowd. The inspector wo
uld have to get in touch with Brooklyn Homicide brass and make them a part of the task force—fast. Coffey took no satisfaction in the fact that he was right about the date and about having tipped Sam off about the Queens bridges. He was emotionally drained, without a clue about where to go next in the investigation. So he turned to routine detective work and called in the two police officers who patrolled the sector in which the shooting occurred. He asked them a routine question, something all detectives ask local patrol officers: “Did you two guys issue any parking summonses tonight?” The theory was that a killer might have to park illegally to facilitate a quick getaway. The two cops answered, “No Sarge, we didn’t write any tickets.”

  To this day Joe Coffey cannot understand why they answered that way, because about four days later, rechecking every possible area for clues, detectives Ed Blaise and Ed O’Sullivan discovered that a summons for parking at a fire hydrant had been given out that evening for a 1977 Ford Galaxie, registered to a David Berkowitz of 35 Pine Street, Yonkers, New York.

  “I can only imagine that the two Uniformed cops were covering their asses. Both had had problems with Internal Affairs, and I think they were afraid of being called on the carpet for missing a killer wandering in their sector,” theorizes Coffey more than a decade later. For their part, the two cops told superiors they were caught up in the excitement of the evening and couldn’t even remembering dropping the summonses into the box at the precinct reserved for that purpose.

  At any rate, events now began to unfold quickly, and Joe and the men of the Omega Task Force were pretty much left out of them. The detectives of Brooklyn’s 10th Homicide Zone seized the Moscowitz-Violante attack and ran with it. Although the department’s Intelligence Division was in touch with the Yonkers Police Department about a strange, single man named Berkowitz who was threatening and tormenting his neighbors and although the report filed at the 109th Precinct by Sam Carr about Berkowitz’s being a likely suspect was working its way to the top of the pile, it was the guys from the 10th Homicide Zone who ran Son of Sam to the ground.