The French Connection

by Robin Moore

  This contrived to place at least one observing automobile waiting to pick up the subject car at the end of any block it chose to enter. Thus Patsy was not able to shake his stalkers again that night, if that was what he meant to do. To Grosso and Waters, who maintained the closest tail, it seemed that the three men were having a lively, even heated, discussion as they drove around. They had to be talking about the transaction, the detectives surmised: perhaps Patsy didn't have all the bread yet, and was trying to buy more time; or maybe they were arguing about the sample Jehan had "fronted," or put on display, if that was what was in the valise he'd brought. Maybe Jehan was short of the quantity Patsy needed right away. Or maybe it was true, as police stoolies had been suggesting, that there was some question about quality.

  Finally, about 1 A.M., Patsy drove straight across 49th Street, turned south on Broadway, still garish and crowded, and stopped at the corner of 47th Street. Jean Jehan stepped from the Buick, without the blue valise, and picked his way among pedestrians toward the Edison, leaving only Patsy and the unidentified individual in the Buick. Sonny hopped out of Waters' car back near 48th Street and hustled after Frog One. Dick Auletta advised that he would park somewhere and meet Sonny in the hotel lobby.

  Patsy, meanwhile, at the change of traffic signals, cut adroitly across the confluence of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, east on 46th, followed by Waters, now alone. But by the time the agent reached Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue, always, to New Yorkers), two other cars were backing him up, Jimmy O'Brien in one and Sergeant Dan Leonard and Jim Hurley in another. Patsy drove uptown on Sixth, then, at 51st Street, west again. Waters and the other trailing officers speculated via radio that the trio was heading for the Hotel Victoria at the next corner. But a few hundred feet shy of Seventh Avenue, the little Buick slowed and drew up before the Abbey Hotel, situated on 51st adjacent to the Victoria. There, the other man got out and went directly inside, and Patsy accelerated away. Waters directed Leonard and Hurley to cover the Abbey, while he and O'Brien continued on after Patsy.

  The blue valise was still in the car. Had they made the exchange?

  Jim Hurley scrambled to the sidewalk and into the Abbey. The man in the gray hat was waiting for an elevator. Hurley got on with him. The man was neatly dressed in a business suit and a striped tie. He was shorter than he had appeared from afar; wiry, dark, with a tan cast to his skin; late thirties or fortyish, the detective guessed. They rode in silence to the fourteenth floor, where the man stepped off. Hurley went up to fifteen, found an Exit staircase, and slipped down to fourteen. At the end of a corridor, the subject was just putting his key to a door. When the door closed behind him, Hurley sauntered down the corridor until he could see the room number, 1437.

  Hurley returned downstairs to the front desk, spoke with the night manager and learned that the newcomer was registered as J. Mouren, from Paris, France. Frog Number Three. He had checked in with a reservation just that previous afternoon of the eleventh. Hurley went out to Sergeant Leonard's car and radioed base that they were sitting on another Frenchman at the Hotel Abbey.

  What had happened to Egan? If he was on Barbier, why hadn't he advised which way Patsy had headed during those demoralizing ten minutes when everybody lost the Buick and, it turned out, Barbier was being dropped off back at the Victoria? These questions had plagued Waters and particularly Sonny during their hectic chase after Patsy and the Frenchmen.

  It wasn't until later, when they had a chance to piece together events of the night, that they understood what really had happened.

  Egan had spent the entire evening in the Victoria lobby. He had been composed enough for the first hour or so after Barbier had gone to his room around eight. But as nine o'clock became 9:30 and then 10

  P.M., and the night continued to crawl on, he had grown increasingly edgy. He prowled the lobby, repeatedly checking the front desk to see if Barbier's key was still out, understanding it to be the custom of Europeans, unlike most Americans, to deposit their room keys whenever leaving a hotel. Barbier still had his key. Egan couldn't understand it; nobody was making any kind of move. His calls in to base radio every hour brought the same report each time — all suspects accounted for and quiet. He didn't like it.

  His last call had been about 11:30 P.M. Shortly after midnight, the morning of Friday, January 12, as, unknown to him, his comrades were frantically trying to relocate the blue Buick bearing Patsy Fuca and the Frenchmen, Egan sprawled irritably on a plastic-covered divan in the lobby of the Victoria, trying to force himself to relax. Then, his eyes popped: coming up the stairs from the street, fully dressed in suit and heavy overcoat, his hair mussed by the wind outside, was François Barbier — who was supposed to be upstairs in his room all this time. Fascinated, Egan watched Frog Two cross the lobby and board an elevator without a glance about him.

  Oh, God! Egan flayed himself, how long has he been out? Have I blown it? He sprang from the couch to the elevator bank, his eyes on the floor indicator. It stopped at eleven. Well, he's up there now at least. Glancing around, he saw the two young Federal agents who had relieved Jack Ripa staring at him anxiously.

  C h a p t e r 9

  None of the suspects stirred until after noon of Friday, January 12. Egan had finally gone home for a few hours to get some rest in his own bed and a change of clothes. But before leaving the Victoria he satisfied himself by figuring out how Barbier had eluded him the night before. One elevator, he discovered, in the hotel's bank of four went down below the lobby level to the Parasol Lounge at street level.

  Barbier obviously had taken this one and simply walked out through the bar.

  At 12:30 P.M., Agent Jack Ripa and Detective Jim Gildea saw Frog Two leave the Victoria's front entrance and within seconds join a man who had sauntered out of the Abbey Hotel next door, Frog Three, J. Mouren. Trailed by both Ripa and Gildea, the two strolled east, across Sixth Avenue, and turned into Rockefeller Plaza. It was a clear, bright winter's day, the air brisk but not biting as it had been. The pair stopped by one of the stone and marble abutments encasing the sunken ice rink and gazed down at the colourfully dressed skaters circling and whirling to the festive amplified music.

  After about ten minutes, Barbier and Mouren eased out of the group of cheery lunchtime spectators and made their way across the narrow street to the RCA building. Ripa and Gildea moved quickly to keep the Frogs in view in the milling concourses inside.

  The Frenchmen seemed in no hurry, just two more tourists — until suddenly they darted into an elevator corridor. The officers sprinted toward the corner turned by the subjects, but they were too late. Barbier and Mouren already were ascending into the massive RCA building's complex maze of floors, corridors, offices, stairways, elevators and, to be sure, exits.

  At about that same moment, out near 67th Street in Brooklyn, Eddie Egan, looking and feeling chipper once again, sat in his Corvair with Agent Artie Fluhr, waiting for Patsy Fuca to do something. Patsy had not left his house all morning, since his return about 2 A.M. from the running meeting with the Frenchmen.

  Just before 1 P.M., both Patsy and Barbara appeared on the white iron-railed porch of their house, he wearing a suburban coat and she a short furry car coat. They got into their blue and white Oldsmobile parked outside.

  "Patsy must love blue," Egan said. "This car is blue, his other one is blue, inside the house they have blue.

  So what's with blue?"

  They followed the Oldsmobile onto the Gowanus Expressway and up to the Williamsburg section, where Patsy and his wife went to their luncheonette, which was being tended by Barbara's father. Egan checked with base radio and learned that his friend Barbier had managed to fade again, taking the newcomer, Mouren, with him this time. Otherwise, nothing was doing.

  "That Barbier is something else," Egan remarked to Fluhr. "Here we got two, three hundred cops all over the place, and he still loses us three times in twenty-four hours. Now there's a guy who's been around the track!"

  "You think he feels
heat?" the agent asked.

  "He might. They all might. They might not, too. Guys like these bums, they're so used to looking over their shoulders, lots of times they see things that aren't even there. They'd duck behind a tree if they were alone on a desert island. But as long as we don't push them too hard, chances are they'll go right ahead with their plans as though nobody is watching them."

  "So what we have to do is not lose them and just wait until we see which way they jump."

  After about a half hour, Patsy and Barbara came out of the store and re-entered their Olds. They drove back busy Grand Avenue and up onto the Williamsburg Bridge toward New York. As he had the night before, Patsy cut off Delancey to Houston Street and swung into the uptown lanes of the East River Drive. But this time he ignored the 42nd Street exit and continued up the East River Drive to 61st Street, where he turned off. He made a right on York Avenue, going north. At the near corner of 79th Street, the Oldsmobile stopped, and Patsy backed into a parking space on the east side of York. Egan drove past and pulled into a space just beyond 79th.

  As he watched in the rear-view mirror, Patsy stepped out of his car and crossed 79th, walking up York toward them; Barbara remained in the Olds.

  Fluhr unfolded a newspaper and held it up to read, hiding his face, while Egan, porkpie hat low on his forehead, studied the storefronts along York Avenue. It was an old, established neighborhood of apartments and small shops.

  Patsy went by them, striding along at an easy pace. When he reached 80th Street, Egan slid out of the Corvair. "I'll see you," he said. Then he thrust his head back into the window: "Tell the people where we are."

  Patsy went another block to 81st, where he turned right and walked the block to a modern apartment house on the northeast corner of 81st and East End. It was difficult for Egan to place a thug like Patsy in this fashionable neighbourhood of tall luxury apartments, many of them exclusive cooperatives — the sort of area where the high-rise buildings had their own private underground garages, where personal chauffeurs wore black and maids in tiny white hats actually walked miniature poodles. Only a few blocks north on the avenue was Carl Shurz Park, a strip of woodland overlooking the East River, the setting for Gracie Mansion, long the home of New York's mayors.

  Patsy entered the corner building, No. 45 East End Avenue. Egan waited a minute or two, then he entered the richly furnished lobby. There was no one there, but the elevator was in operation. He watched the floor indicator halt at fifteen, and went out to check the resident directory, just inside the front door. He recognized none of the names listed on the fifteenth floor, but then, Patsy could just as easily have stepped off there and walked up or down to another floor. Why Patsy's sudden visit to such a place, which he hadn't been near in the months the police had had him under surveillance? The detective ambled back across the avenue and waited on the far corner of 81st Street.

  After about fifteen minutes, Patsy emerged from No. 45 and walked back to his car three blocks away. He chatted with his wife for a moment before starting the motor and heading downtown on the drive, back to Brooklyn.

  While Egan and Fluhr were heading back down-town on the East River Drive behind Patsy Fuca, Frog One, Jean Jehan, was stirring for the first time that day. At 2:45 P.M. he appeared in the lobby of the Edison, dressed for the outdoors. In the lobby, or in the immediate vicinity, were Detectives Sonny Grosso and Dick Auletta and Agent Frank Waters.

  Jehan left the hotel on 47th Street, walked up Broadway to 51st Street, and thence east. He moved gracefully, apparently savouring the crisp January air, looking every inch like an accomplished man of the world. He crossed Seventh Avenue, but instead of going to the Victoria Hotel or the Abbey, as the officers expected, he entered the Hotel Taft, on the corner of 51st Street directly opposite those hotels where his compatriots had rooms.

  Jehan went to the barbershop in the lobby and had his shoes shined. Then he bought a newspaper at the hotel newsstand and settled himself on a circular red-leather banquette in the centre of the lobby. The three officers who had followed him from the Edison roamed about, one stopping at a telephone to report to headquarters on the current whereabouts of Frog One. The police had trained their primary attention upon Jehan, who exuded the importance of being the key figure in the conspiracy, whatever that conspiracy might prove to be. They were convinced that when the break came it would evolve out of action originated by Jehan.

  Frog One sat calmly reading the New York Journal-American. He was absorbed in a front page story, one in a series by ace crime reporter Jim Horan, exposing the spread of narcotics addiction in the metropolitan area. Over the next half hour a dozen more detectives and Federal agents drifted into the Taft lobby, all believing that action was imminent. Some were dressed rather oddly. A winter track and field meet was beginning that afternoon at Madison Square Garden, and mid-town hotels were crowded with amateur athletes representing colleges and athletic clubs from throughout the country. To observers, then, it might not have appeared strange that a number of agile-looking young men wearing sneakers and baggy gray sweatsuits, with shirt fronts bearing the names of various amateur athletic organizations, were gathered in the lobby of this particular hotel, which long had been popular with tourist groups.

  The "athletes" milled about, as did the other officers in normal street attire, all trying to keep Jehan under observation without daring to look directly at him.

  Then, at 3:30 P.M., there was a sudden sensation that something was wrong. Incredibly, Frog One had vanished from within their midst! No one had seen him make a move. The hotel lobby became a buzz of confused excitement, with shouts of "Where the hell did he go?" and "He was right here a minute ago!" Even more embarrassing, perhaps, than the fact that the suave Jehan had slipped away from under their very noses was the likelihood that he'd seen through their disguises, which now seemed a little silly, and was aware of the massive surveillance being directed at him.

  Actually, however, the situation was not as bad as it appeared in those first moments. Jehan had in fact managed somehow to walk through the front door of the hotel without detection, but outside he was spotted by Jimmy O'Brien and Jack Ripa. They followed him as he window-shopped casually on Broadway; then, about 4 P.M., he bought a ticket to the Trans-Lux newsreel theater at 49th Street and Broadway. When he went inside, O'Brien hurried back to the Taft to advise Sonny and the others of Frog One's whereabouts, while Ripa waited outside the theatre, dividing his attention between the entrance and the fire exit.

  A small mob of narcotics agents soon gathered outside the Trans-Lux. Sonny, O'Brien and Ripa went in. Taking pains not to appear obvious in the half-full theatre, they tried to single out Jehan —but they could not spot him. Back outside on Broadway, they were trying to decide what to do next, when the chief of the Federal agents, George Gaffney, arrived.

  Gaffney was a diminutive, wiry veteran investigator who rarely allowed himself to be derailed by momentary setbacks. When Ripa and Sonny outlined the predicament, Gaffney said, "Let's go back in."

  Positioning the others in the rear, Gaffney doffed his hat and coat, padded briskly down the centre aisle as far as the front row, then, like any theatre manager, turned and walked back up the aisle, glancing right and left as though counting the house.

  When he rejoined the waiting detectives, Gaffney whispered: "He's in the sixth row, seventh seat on the right." And he put on his hat and coat and left.

  Soon, half a dozen agents were seated all around Jean Jehan, watching the Trans-Lux newsreels.

  By the time Frog One came out of the Trans-Lux at 6:30 P.M., Eddie Egan had rejoined the dozen detectives and agents strung around the theatre.

  Earlier, Egan had followed Patsy and Barbara Fuca back to their home neighbourhood in Brooklyn, where Patsy went shopping for sports clothes at a men's shop while his wife was in the beauty parlour.

  When Agent Jim Bailey showed up to assist, Egan left the Fucas to him and Artie Fluhr and headed back to midtown. He prowled around the Victoria an
d Abbey hotels, but agents staked out at those hotels reported no trace yet of either Barbier or Mouren.

  Other teams of detectives had the Edison and Taft hotels covered, as well as the Roosevelt. In addition, not only were Patsy's home, the luncheonette and his parents' house on 7th Street on twenty-four-hour watch, but also the tenement where the Travatos lived, four blocks from Patsy and Barbara; Tony Fuca's apartment in the Bronx; and the area downtown around the Pike Slip Inn. It was hard to imagine any of the principals making a move without the police being aware of it and reacting instantly. And as far as all were concerned, the '‘‘principals" were Patsy and Jehan.

  Emerging from the Trans-Lux, Jehan appeared perfectly cast for the neon-splatted make-believe of nighttime Broadway. He was a stage figure almost larger than life, a supremely confident supporting player out for a breath of air after dress rehearsal. Egan and Sonny almost admired the man, he was so cool and assured.

  They wondered what he was thinking as he paused at the corner of 49th Street, glancing about so diffidently, and then walked through the crowds down Broadway, with his cane swinging. Had he in fact recognized the surveillance, or was he merely taking normal precautions by diverting to a newsreel theatre for two and a half hours? Or had he purposely withdrawn himself from circulation while the two missing Frenchmen culminated the deal? The fact that Patsy had been covered all day seemed to remove the latter possibility, but then Patsy had escaped observation for at least fifteen minutes in that apartment building up at East End Avenue. Barbier and Mouren might have met him there and made the exchange. And what about that blue valise last night? What was in it, and what had happened to it? Full of questions and doubts, Eddie and Sonny, with the unseen agents around them, followed Frog One back to the Edison Hotel.

  There, Jehan checked the mail desk for messages, but there were none for him. He looked at his watch; it was 6:45 P.M. He walked to the 46th Street exit and, outside, waved down a taxi. While Sonny stayed behind at the Edison, Egan and Frank Waters, who had been in the lobby when they arrived with Jehan, ran out to Waters' car and went after the Frenchman.