The Coffey Files

by Coffey, Joseph; Schmetterer, Jerry;

  He decided to call in another old friend and trusted ally, Lieutenant Jack Ferguson, commanding officer of the NYPD Investigative and Analysis Unit of the Organized Crime Control Bureau. Ferguson was the only other officer in the department who, like Coffey, reported directly to a three-star chief. Ferguson’s boss was Dan Courtney, head of OCCB. Like Joe, Ferguson also spent almost as much time fighting off the green-eyed monster as chasing crooks.

  Courtney agreed to have his men enter the case. Their knowledge and experience in dealing with all levels of organized crime was invaluable. They could quickly analyze O’Donnell’s tips and help him decide in which direction to move.

  Beginning in October 1980, Kenny the Rat started testifying before a grand jury in Brooklyn about the information he and two undercover agents, whom he had helped place in the mob, had been gathering. The testimony was being used to prepare the indictments that would support a major roundup of highly placed mob figures. The project was dubbed “Operation Clyde.”

  Joe Coffey and the undercover agents—Joe Lemondola, a New York detective, and Dominick Polifrone, a U.S. treasury agent—also gave lengthy and detailed testimony to the grand jury.

  A few days after the grand jury began hearing the testimony, Joe and Jack Ferguson were having a drink in a gin mill near Police Headquarters. Joe’s beeper went off. He called the Coffey Gang’s office and was told an FBI agent out on Long Island named Larry Sweeney urgently needed to talk to him.

  Within minutes Coffey got Sweeney on the phone. “Joe, do you have an informant named Kenny testifying for you right now?” Sweeney asked.

  “How do you know that?” Coffey, instantly alarmed, shot back.

  The agent explained that he had an extremely high-level informant of his own who was told by a mob friend about an inside source who was keeping him apprised of something called Operation Clyde. Sweeney knew enough about Operation Clyde to figure Joe was involved in it.

  “They’re waiting for this guy Kenny to show up at Anthony Spero’s club. They’ve dug a grave for him in the basement,” Sweeney said.

  Coffey’s sense of alarm increased. Spero was a loan shark O’Donnell was currently trying to nail. Joe knew the Rat was going to Spero’s club that evening.

  “Sweeney, you’ve got to help us identify that source,” Coffey said, fighting to keep his composure and trying not to reveal his surprise that an FBI agent was making such an effort to help a local cop.

  “Look, you don’t have to tell me how important it is. I’ll do all I can,” the agent said.

  Joe registered in the back of his mind that he owed Sweeney one as he slammed the receiver down and dialed the number where he knew O’Donnell could be warned. Frank McDarby and John Meyer were babysitting the informant in a house on the grounds of a state mental facility on Long Island. The Coffey Gang, which had used the safe house many times, called it 10 Downing Street. Joe prayed the three had not yet left for Spero’s.

  McDarby answered the telephone. “Frank, get the Rat out of there fast,” Joe barked. “I don’t even want to know where you bring him. Just go for deep cover now.”

  Without waiting for a response from McDarby, Joe hung up and went back to the bar to get Ferguson. Together they returned to the telephone and called Joe Kelly. They told him to bring the two undercover agents in from the cold. Next they called Chief of Detectives Jim Sullivan and Chief of the Organized Crime Control Bureau Dan Courtney and briefed them on the problem. Two undercover agents were in peril.

  After the call to Courtney the two cops stood around the pay phone for thirty minutes. Joe chain-smoked. When the telephone rang, Joe grabbed the receiver. It was good news. Kelly’s office reported that the two undercovers had been contacted and had fled to safety. A few minutes later the phone rang again. This time it was McDarby saying O’Donnell had been taken to an apartment on Governors Island, the Coast Guard base in the middle of New York Harbor. He would be safe there until Operation Clyde wound up.

  That crisis over, Coffey and Ferguson turned their attention to the dangerous source of the leak. They reasoned it had to be coming from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which had entered the investigation to prepare the case for the grand jury. Coffey called the chief of the DA’s Rackets Bureau and the assistant DA who was handling the case. He asked them to meet him at Police Headquarters pronto. The two attorneys were briefed on everything except where Coffey learned of the leak.

  Three hours after their first conversation, Sweeney once again contacted Joe. This time he was able to tell him who the leak was. “My man says it’s an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn,” Sweeney said.

  Coffey immediately called the two attorneys, who had just left the meeting at Police Headquarters. He told them to meet him and Ferguson in a bar in Queens. It was a place Joe often used for high-security meetings. He knew the owner would provide him with a private back room and would watch his back.

  An air of doom hung over the back room as Coffey and Ferguson told the Rackets Bureau chief and the young assistant DA what FBI agent Sweeney had revealed.

  “I knew it. I knew it,” the assistant blurted out before Coffey even finished.

  With tears welling up in his eyes, he told the three men about another young assistant district attorney he carpooled with. He verified how the other man was always pumping him for information about, the case. He wondered why he was so interested, but he never thought he might have such an evil motive.

  The three veteran investigators soothed the younger man, telling him that he could not have known what was going on but that it should be a lesson to play everything close to the vest. All agreed the facts should be reported to the special state prosecutor for corruption. Coffey and Ferguson also decided to wind up the investigation as quickly as possible, as Kenny the Rat’s cover was surely blown.

  The next day, with the encouragement of the special prosecutor, a trap was set for the traitorous assistant DA. The young assistant who was feeling so guilty was given the chance to redeem himself. Coffey and Ferguson gave him a phony story about an impending indictment of a top mob boss to plant with his friend the next time they carpooled. He would wear a wire to record the fact that he passed on the indictment information.

  Within twenty-four hours Sweeney was told of the phony indictment by his informant. He, in turn, passed on the good news to Coffey and Ferguson.

  With that accomplished, the special prosecutor agreed to go after the crooked assistant DA. As much as he wanted to personally strangle the traitor, Joe decided to put the incident out of his mind until he had completed Operation Clyde.

  Finally, on the evening of November 1, 1980, a force of 150 agents and NYPD detectives was gathered in the auditorium of Police Headquarters. They were there to take part in a unique operation built almost solely on the information supplied to the NYPD and Joe Kelly’s ATF agent by Kenny “the Rat” O’Donnell and analyzed by Ferguson and Coffey. The force was turned out to track down and arrest fifty Mafia figures as part of Operation Clyde.

  Before the night was over they had knocked in doors to private social clubs, raided gambling parlors, and served warrants at the homes of suspects. By the next morning all fifty wiseguys, members of the Colombo, Genovese, Bonanno, and Gambino families, were locked up on charges ranging from criminal possession of stolen property to drug dealing to selling machine guns equipped with silencers. Kelly ended up laying out more than $50,000 in ATF funds to help create the traps.

  Not a shot was fired or a punch thrown in anger by the arrested suspects. In the mob’s usual style when apprehended by an honest cop, they went peacefully and relied on their capos and lawyers to get them out of jail on bail as soon as possible.

  Kenny the Rat was the only person connected to the operation who was physically injured at all. He did not like being cooped up in the Governors Island apartment while all the action was taking place across the bay. He began whining to McDarby and Meyer that he wanted to take the ferry to Manhattan for a little nigh
tlife. Several times he started for the door only to be stopped in his tracks by an icy stare from McDarby. But the Rat was nothing if not persistent. The two cops later told Coffey that the only way they could keep him quietly in the apartment was to knock him out. On his umpteenth try for the door O’Donnell was stopped by a left hook from Meyer.

  The next morning as the hoods arrested in the “Godfather Roundup,” as the press was calling Operation Clyde, were being arraigned, Kenny “the Rat” O’Donnell was spirited off Governors Island by U.S. marshals and placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program.

  Joe was relieved Kenny was tucked safely away in the federal program. He reluctantly had to admit he had grown to like the informant since their first meeting. Usually he held all informants in disdain, but O’Donnell was the best he ever met and there was a certain likability in his eagerness to please and take on the most dangerous cases.

  He was at his desk, surrounded by paperwork, about two days after the operation when he got a call from his old friend in Internal Affairs, Richard Condon.

  Condon, who would one day become police commissioner, was at the time assigned as chief investigator for the special prosecutor. He was working on the case of the assistant DA who almost blew Operation Clyde. He did not call with good news.

  He told Joe that the Brooklyn district attorney, Eugene Gold, who five years later would be charged with being a child molester and would move out of the country in disgrace, informed the corrupt assistant about the investigation against him before charges could be brought.

  The assistant denied everything, and Gold was standing behind him.

  “Joe, we want you and Ferguson to question the kid before we decide whether or not it is worthwhile to continue,” Condon said.

  The next day the two cops questioned the young assistant for three hours. They grilled him as they would a Mafia hit man, saying they had a tape of him being told about the phony indictment. They told him they had a highly placed mafioso who had given him up.

  In spite of the gathered evidence and the hostility of Coffey and Ferguson, the young man, knowing how the criminal justice system worked and how to beat it, denied everything. The next day they were informed that the case against the assistant DA would not be prosecuted. His career was over, but he would not face criminal charges. Coffey and Ferguson were livid over the decision.

  “If that had been a cop they would have cut his balls off. It was a matter of a bunch of lawyers taking care of their own,” he remembers feeling.

  Together he and Ferguson tried to get the police department’s Internal Affairs Division (IAD) to pick up the case. But their persistence began to backfire. “We were pushing so hard the IAD guys began to think we were trying to hide our own guilt. They began to investigate us. At that point Jack and I let it go. An assistant district attorney almost got two undercover cops and a trusted informant killed, and he got away with it,” Coffey says.

  That was not the end of the troubles heaped upon them by the ubiquitous Kenny “the Rat” O’Donnell.

  More came when a lawyer for a small-time shylock named Ciro Perrone whom O’Donnell had helped nail told a television reporter that O’Donnell had committed dozens of stickups while working as a police informant.

  The reporter, without checking with the police department, went with the story and added the lawyer’s implication that the Coffey Gang was sharing in the proceeds from the robberies.

  The report gave ammunition to the many enemies Joe Coffey had within the police department who wanted to build a case for corruption against him. All the jealous bureaucrats and less skilled detectives envious of his close relationship with the chief of detectives used the news story to push Internal Affairs to go after him.

  Deputy Inspector Roy Richter, a straightforward, by-the-book police officer, was assigned to look into the possibility that the news report was correct. Coffey knew Richter. He liked and respected him. He also knew that he was the kind of cop who conducted a thorough investigation and would not hesitate to nail any corrupt cop.

  At their first face-to-face confrontation Richter was prepared to take on the Coffey Gang. “Joe, this O’Donnell fellow committed twenty-six armed robberies while working for you,” Richter said. His information came from the mob lawyer who first went to the television reporter.

  “Inspector,” Coffey responded, “if you did your homework instead of relying on a reporter’s misinformation and a bunch of jealous cocksuckers in this job, you would know that I got that information first myself, from O’Donnell.”

  Coffey explained that when he had first brought O’Donnell to the grand jury, he made him reveal all his past crimes. O’Donnell admitted twenty-six robberies in 1976 and 1977, long before Joe met him in T.T.’s Cellar.

  “In fact, Inspector,” Coffey went on, “I assigned Detective Jerry Maroney to accompany O’Donnell to all the robbery locations and tell the local precincts that the stickup man had been identified and they could clear the cases. I also told all the prosecutors involved in Operation Clyde about the possibility that O’Donnell was implicated in those robberies. I never tried to cover up a thing and I never made an illegal penny from this job.”

  Richter was taken aback by Coffey’s defense. Joe Coffey was surely the most careful detective he had ever come across. Still, as Coffey remembers it, Richter thought he had an ace up his sleeve. He said he knew for sure that O’Donnell had committed a house robbery during the period he was working for Coffey.

  Again Joe was prepared. “I know all about that also. The morning he did it, O’Donnell called me and confessed. He said he had to do it to maintain his cover.”

  A smile crossed Richter’s face. “That’s not good enough, Joe. How can we believe O’Donnell about that?” he said.

  The smile on Joe’s face was bigger and lasted longer as he replied, “I guess you don’t know about the tape.” The morning after the house robbery, Coffey and McDarby met O’Donnell for breakfast. They had him confess to the incident on tape, including the part about trying to get in touch with the cops before the robbery. This was a fact verified by the log in the chief of detectives’ office, where calls to the Coffey Gang were listed.

  When Coffey finished his explanation Richter looked up from his notebook. Deliberately he placed his pen inside his jacket pocket. “Joe, I always knew you were extremely competent and possessed a high degree of integrity, but I must say I’m impressed. Consider this matter closed,” he said as he snapped his notebook shut and offered his hand.

  That was a narrow escape from disgrace for Joe. His enemies in the department were greatly disappointed by IAD’s failure to nail him. One detective with one too many drinks in him told McDarby, “That son of a bitch always lands on his feet, but if he wasn’t Sullivan’s boy he’d be gone.”

  “Looking back on Operation Clyde I realize the best thing that came out of it, not including the locking up of fifty hoodlums, was my relationship with Jack Ferguson,” Coffey says. “So of course I was thrilled that he would be a part of Walter Mack’s strike force against the stolen car ring. The first day Ferguson, McCabe and I met in Mack’s office and spent more than an hour rehashing the stories about Kenny the Rat and how the green-eyed monster got Richter to come after us.”

  Soon Walter Mack laid out his battle plan. Ferguson would concentrate on analyzing all the auto ring information so far gathered and try to link it up with either ongoing investigations or previously gathered evidence that could be used to begin a prosecution. McCabe, with his vast knowledge of everything involving organized crime, would seek some previously overlooked or not obvious areas the federal prosecutors could pursue. The Coffey Gang would run down every homicide lead developed by the entire strike force.

  It soon became obvious to the team that one hood could be the link to the success of their case. His name was Vito Arena and he was known, especially to McCabe and Coffey, as a three-hundred pound slob of a stickup man and car stripper. Coffey suspected he might also be a hit man.
He was unique among mafiosi in the fact that he made no secret of his homosexuality. He was a member of the crew of Roy DeMeo, a top earner in the Gambino family who reported to capo Nino Gaggi. Gaggi, a confidante of “Big Paulie” Castellano himself, and DeMeo were major-league mobsters.

  A great deal of the accumulated evidence against the luxury car theft ring pointed to Arena. His name was consistently heard on wiretaps. Informants pointed to him as DeMeo’s enforcer. Even two cops who were sent to Kuwait to detail the delivery of the stolen cars heard tales of a “gay hit man” who made sure there was no double cross. It was clear to the strike force members that Arena had knowledge of and had participated in both ends of the stolen car operation. He stole them, he helped ship them to Kuwait, and he eliminated anyone who got in the way.

  Coffey desperately wanted to put some pressure on Arena as quickly as possible. He, McCabe, and Ferguson wanted to use Arena as a link to DeMeo and Gaggi, arguing they could continue the chain all the way to the capo di tutti capi, Paul Castellano.

  The only problem was that Arena was at that time on the run. There were warrants out for him in connection with armed robberies, and he had skipped town. He was on the lam with his lover, a pathetic two-bit criminal named Joey Lee.

  As Joe and his gang spread out in their search for Arena, they realized that he was a feared killer. No one would help at all. As unlikely as it seemed, the 300-pound slob seemed to have vanished. Coffey began to consider the possibility that he may have even been hit on orders from DeMeo because of the heat he was bringing down on the crew.

  Then, on a Saturday night in November 1982, the gang ran into a stroke of luck, one that would have a profound impact on the Mafia in New York.

  It occurred when an off-duty detective named Steve Marks, who usually worked in Brooklyn, stopped with his wife at a Long Island Chinese restaurant for a late night dinner. As he sat at the table he noticed an enormous man and a smaller unkempt younger man engaged in conversation at the counter.