The Coffey Files

by Coffey, Joseph; Schmetterer, Jerry;

  The detective realized the two men were the wanted Vito Arena and Joe Lee. Prudently, Marks told his wife to remain at the table while he went to the restaurant’s pay phone. He called Suffolk County police and asked for backup. Vito Arena was not the type of criminal to try to take down by yourself in a restaurant full of people including your wife.

  The Suffolk County Police Department also responded professionally and prudently. As uniformed cops in patrol cars ringed the place, two plainclothes detectives came to help the Brooklyn cop. Arena never realized what was happening before a snub-nosed .38 was placed in the nape of his neck and a handcuff was on one wrist.

  Within an hour after the call for backup, Arena and Lee were behind bars. The next day they were in the Brooklyn House of Detention on armed robbery charges.

  The strike force was itching to get their hands on Arena, but they had no official reason, at the time, to take him in custody. Their investigation had not yet reached the indictment stage, and they had nothing but circumstantial evidence against Arena and nothing at all against Joey Lee.

  By that time the gay hit man had a lawyer who made it clear the feds were not to speak to his client. “I knew we would make Arena roll over if we could just get a chance to talk to him. If we could get him to start talking, no lawyer would even bother taking his case,” Joe recalls.

  So Coffey, Frank McDarby, and Jack Ferguson and some of his auto crime detectives made a midnight trip to the Brooklyn House of Detention. With the help of a contact in the New York Department of Corrections they signed Arena out and brought him to Walter Mack’s office in lower Manhattan.

  Arena may have looked like a big dumb slob to most of society but he was wise to the ways of the underworld. He knew what Coffey wanted from him, and he knew he was in a position to deal.

  “By that time we were convinced Arena would bring us to Roy DeMeo and Nino Gaggi, and the prospect of Castellano still was real, so we were ready to give the guy almost anything he wanted—even a free ride on the warrants against him,” Coffey remembers.

  “What do you want in exchange for cooperation?” Joe asked the hit man.

  “Then he made our day; I realized we were on our way to a major victory against the mob.”

  “All I want is to be put in the same cell with my lover Joey,” Arena responded.

  The tough bunch of cops standing in a semicircle around the thug were at first stunned. Then they began giggling like school kids. Finally they cracked up. They laughed until tears ran down their faces. Not only at the vision of the enormous, hulking goon asking for his sad-faced, scraggly lover but also out of relief. Arena could have made things difficult for them. He knew that and they knew that. They all realized that they were on their way to a big score.

  When Walter Mack arrived, the group had just gotten hold of themselves. They told him of Arena’s request, and he quickly gave the okay. The interrogation of Vito Arena and the downfall of Paul Castellano began in earnest.

  “We knew we had to move fast before the Brooklyn detectives realized we had our hands on their man. So I got to question him first. Homicide was the most serious crime to nail him with. I got right to the point and told him I wanted to hear about a murder he had committed. Right away he gave us a perfect case. A murder connected to auto crime,” Coffey recalls.

  Arena’s first homicide story was about the time he killed a fringe player named Joe Scorney who owned a body shop on Glenwood Road in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. The shop was often used to strip stolen cars for parts or repaint them and change the identification numbers for resale. But Arena said his boss, Roy DeMeo, thought Scorney was stripping some of their profits for himself. He told Arena to put a permanent halt to the larceny.

  Arena said he and another enforcer named Richie DiNome walked into the shop and asked Scorney if they could speak to him in the back room. As Scorney walked in front of them, Arena took out his .25 caliber pistol and shot the auto body repairman in the back. Scorney was a big, strong man and the force of the bullet only knocked him to his knees.

  “He turned around and screamed at me, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’” Arena told Coffey, as a tape recorder captured every gory detail.

  “I’m killing you, motherfucker!” Arena said he yelled back as he shot Scorney a second time, killing him with a bullet in the head.

  Coffey wanted more. He wanted physical evidence. “What did you do with the body?” he asked.

  Arena continued his story as he gobbled down huge amounts of pizza and hamburgers.

  “We stuffed him in a 55-gallon drum. But his head kept sticking out, so DiNome took a shovel and chopped his head off. We put it next to the body and then filled up drum with cement,” Arena said.

  Noticing the puzzlement on the faces of the surrounding cops and obviously enjoying all the attention and free food, Arena explained that it was easy to chop someone’s head off.

  “The head comes right off,” he said. “The hardest part of the body to cut off is the arm. It’s hell to cut through the elbow area,” he offered.

  Arena continued that he and DiNome lugged the now heavy oil drum out to a pier in Shirley, Long Island, and dumped it in the Great South Bay.

  The following day Coffey took a contingent of detectives to the exact spot. Scuba divers were sent under the water to search for the barrel.

  On their first dive they found eight 55-gallon drums and a piece of bone they believed was human. They checked each barrel. Choosing the heaviest one as their target, they ordered a tow truck and lifted it from the water.

  The drum was taken to the office of the Suffolk County medical examiner, where detectives using a hammer and chisel broke through the cement to discover the body of Joe Scorney. His head was still jammed in next to his shoulder just where Arena said he placed it.

  “Vito Arena was the most despicable character I ever met. But he sure did the people of New York a service, once he started singing,” says Coffey.

  Day after day, Coffey sat feeding Arena french fries and pizza, and the hit man sang his songs. He loved to give details of how he cut bodies up, explaining how he once cut a man’s testicles off and laughed as they rolled across the room, “like two white marbles.”

  He told the cops about a house in Brooklyn where victims were brought to be executed and dismembered. It was a house of horrors, and hardly a day would go by without a poor soul being brought in to be murdered by the sadists who were part of Roy DeMeo’s crew. DeMeo, Arena said, would even drink the victims’ blood.

  Arena related that although he had nothing personally to do with it, he knew that Paul Castellano’s own son-in-law, Frankie Amato, was executed in that house. The disappearance of Amato was indeed a mystery to organized crime watchers at the time. Eventually Arena gave Walter Mack’s strike force information on twenty-five murders.

  In August 1983, while Arena was singing his song, Richie DiNome, the killer who had stuffed Joe Scorney’s head into the barrel, was the victim of a shotgun attack outside his house on Staten Island. He was shot because DeMeo mistakenly believed he was cooperating with Coffey. Miraculously he survived, spending six months in the hospital and at home recovering. All that time Arena continued to eat and sing, sing and eat. In February 1984, when he was fully recovered, Richie DiNome was ambushed again. This time he died.

  The second attack had a profound effect on DiNome’s brother Freddie, a thug who often worked as Roy DeMeo’s chauffeur. Freddie thought that because his brother had survived the first attack, DeMeo would let him off the hook. He misread the Mafia code of “honor.” In revenge he contacted Ferguson and Coffey and said he wanted to make a deal. It was agreed that if he cooperated he would be placed in the Witness Protection Program.

  “I found a great irony in all this,” Coffey states. “For decades people thought the Mafia survived because its members refused to cooperate with authorities. That was always true of the higher echelons, and until Joe Valachi opened the door on La Cosa Nostra in 1963, it was even tru
e of the low-level guys. Now here I was running a Rat Squad with Vito Arena and Freddie DiNome, and they were doing great damage to the Mafia.”

  Freddie DiNome turned out to be as important to Coffey and Ferguson as Arena. He told Ferguson about how he performed the driving duties for DeMeo. He said he would often take his boss to Castellano’s home, where he would drop off hundreds of thousands of dollars from the autotheft, gambling, and loan-sharking rackets the Nino Gaggi crew was running.

  He reported that once a week he would drive DeMeo to the corner of 57th Street and Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan, where he would meet a representative of the Westies. The Westie would hand over a paper bag filled with money—tribute the Irish thugs had to pay to Castellano in order to be allowed to operate their own illicit businesses. DiNome said the money would sometimes be passed in the entrance of the building that occupied that corner—the building that contained the New York headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  Coffey realized that DiNome directly connected the activities of the Gambino family to the Westies. That was something he had been trying to prove for years, since he had arrested Jimmy McElroy for the murder of Billy Walker. Then DiNome recounted a murder that Arena had mentioned and that Coffey wanted desperately to solve. He told about the night he and several other members of the DeMeo crew hid in the house of horrors in Brooklyn. As an aside he mentioned that the house was owned by a low-level soldier named Joe Gugliamo, something Arena did not know.

  The night he was referring to, the target was told to come to the house to assist in the murder of another man. But as soon as the target came through the door, DeMeo stabbed him in the heart with an ice pick and dragged him to the bathtub. The blood was drained from his body, with DeMeo pausing to taste it, and then the victim was cut into pieces, which were stuffed into a green plastic garbage bag. The bag was taken to Coney Island and, in the shadow of a broken-down pier, dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. DiNome said the murder was directly ordered by Paul Castellano. The victim was his son-in-law Frank Amato. He was murdered because “Big Paulie” believed Amato’s womanizing was the cause of his daughter’s miscarriage.

  For his valuable singing, Freddie DiNome was granted his wish to enter the Witness Protection Program. Eighteen months later he was ordered to meet Ken McCabe in a motel in San Antonio, Texas, to help prepare a murder case. When McCabe arrived, he found the canary hanged from a pipe in the bathroom. He was evidently a victim of his own autoerotic sexual deviation.

  Vito Arena also got his wish. He and Joey Lee lived happily under the protection of the Witness Protection Program, until March 1991, when Vito was killed trying to hold up a Houston supermarket.

  About one year after their first meeting in Mack’s office the strike force was turning up the heat on the Gambino family. Roy DeMeo was one of the first victims as the various capos began to panic. On January 10, 1983, DeMeo, the street leader of the Nino Gaggi crew, was murdered himself because it was believed he was singing to the feds. Not long after DeMeo’s demise, Mafia hood Joseph Gugliamo, owner of the house of horrors, apparently met a similar fate for a similar reason. He disappeared off the face of the earth.

  There was a lot going on, but Joe was worried that once again he was going to see a big fish slip through the net. Nailing Gaggi was not going to be hard. A jury would see him and his crew for what they were—thugs willing to murder to achieve their goals. DeMeo was dead, but the sadist was just a follower anyway. Joe wanted to see Castellano take the fall. Freddie DiNome’s information provided a direct link to Castellano and the operations of Gaggi and the DeMeo crew. He described how the dirty money got into the godfather’s hands. He even told of a murder carried out directly on Castellano’s orders.

  It was long shot to nail Castellano on a case built primarily on information provided by informants. The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, John Martin, would have to get the clout of Washington behind him to even try. “Frankly,” Coffey recalls, “I don’t think John Martin would have done it. But we caught a big break.”

  Around the time Vito Arena was running out of murders to sing about, Martin resigned. President Ronald Reagan picked as his replacement a Justice Department lawyer named Rudolph Giuliani.

  “Giuliani’s appointment gave us reason to cheer,” remembers Coffey. “He had a reputation as a doer. We all believed he was the one who could help us tie all the loose strings of the strike force together. We knew we had a gem who would find a way to nail Castellano in the homicide of his son-in-law and tie him in with Gaggi’s stolen car ring.”

  Coffey was right. When Giuliani heard what Walter Mack, Coffey, and Ferguson had to offer, he agreed to pursue a RICO case—Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization—which would argue that Castellano ran the Gambino crime family as a racketeering enterprise responsible for twenty-five murders, hundreds of car thefts, and a host of other crimes. It was an unusual route to take to nail a godfather, but Giuliani had confidence it would succeed.

  “The evidence was all from informants like Vito Arena and Freddie DiNome,” Coffey states. “It took courage for Giuliani to go to Washington and fight for the okay to go after Castellano. If he lost the trial, the Justice Department would have egg on its face. I wish someone had fought to go after Archbishop Marcinkus in 1972 the way Giuliani went after Castellano.”

  When word got around among the power brokers that Giuliani was going to make a move against Castellano, Roy Cohn, the lawyer with a reputation of being able to fix anything, paid a visit to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

  As it was related to Coffey, Cohn had a private meeting with Giuliani and Walter Mack. He told them that he was there on behalf of his client, a legitimate businessman named Paul Castellano. “Mr. Castellano,” Cohn said, “does not steal cars.”

  “You can tell your client that we are not accusing him of stealing cars,” Mack responded. “We are accusing him of garnering the receipts of stolen cars.”

  “It was true,” says Coffey, “that Castellano never got his hands dirty. Even when he was an up-and-coming mafioso working for his brother-in-law, Carlo Gambino, he was always the brain. But he made millions of dollars by figuring out how to make other people suffer.”

  On March 30, 1984, Castellano and twenty other Mafia figures were indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan. The fifty-one-count indictment charged them with operating a racketeering enterprise responsible for twenty-five murders, auto theft, loan-sharking, extortion, other thefts, fraud, prostitution, and drug trafficking. The cooperation of Vito Arena and Freddie DiNome provided the vital link that connected Castellano and his crime family to crimes dating back to 1973.

  The investigative reports of Coffey, McCabe, and Ferguson were translated into court papers that explained that Anthony Frank “Nino” Gaggi was the capo of a crew which reported to Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano. Next in the chain of command was Roy DeMeo, who, until he was murdered, oversaw the day-to-day operations of the crew and reported to Gaggi. Their raison d’être was to generate income for Castellano.

  The government was prepared to prove that they protected their criminal enterprises through murder and the bribery of jurors. On one bloody day, March 17, 1979, members of the Gaggi crew were accused of killing five drug-dealing rivals.

  Most bone chilling of all, perhaps, was the charge of conspiracy to murder Frank Amato, Castellano’s son-in-law. Castellano gave the order to Gaggi to kill his daughter’s husband following her miscarriage because he believed the young man was fooling around with other women.

  When the story of the RICO case broke in the local newspapers, Murray Weiss, a reporter for the New York Daily News, received a call from “a friend of Big Paulie.” “Mr. Castellano is really pissed off that you wrote that part about Frankie Amato. You didn’t need to do it,” the caller said. There was no mention of Mr. Castellano’s being the slightest bit annoyed about the other murder, drug, and weapons charges detailed in Weiss’s story.

  The morn
ing the indictments were announced, Paul Castellano went to the office of his defense attorney James LaRossa. A phone call was made, and it was arranged for Joe Coffey and Ken McCabe to go there to arrest the godfather.

  It was short drive from the U.S. Attorney’s Office at One St. Andrew’s Plaza to LaRossa’s office in the shadow of City Hall. The two cops had rushed excitedly to their unmarked car parked alongside the building. About two blocks into their trip they stopped for a red light.

  While sitting at that street corner it slowly dawned on Joe what he was about to do. The youngster who more than forty years before had made a promise to himself to go after the men who tried to kill his father was about to arrest the most powerful mafioso in the world.

  Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano may have considered himself a peaceful businessman. He may have lived in a mansion in a part of Staten Island shared by corporate executives and retired judges; he may have read The Wall Street Journal every day; but to Rudy Giuliani, Joe Coffey, Walter Mack, Jack Ferguson, Ken McCabe, Frank McDarby, John McGlynn, and the rest of the men who served in one capacity or another in the Coffey Gang over the years, Paul Castellano was a murdering sleazeball. As far as they were concerned he was about to get his Wall Street Journal in the library of a federal prison.

  Standing in LaRossa’s office waiting for the capo di tutti capi and his lawyer to join them for the ride back to the 1st Precinct, where “Big Paulie” would be booked the same way all the hookers and addicts who worked for him were, Coffey felt like he was in another world looking down on the scene. It was the greatest triumph of his career. Castellano had no Vatican walls to hide behind. He had no strange voices in the night to blame for his willingness to kill. His allies were not found among international espionage agents.