Joe Coffey did not forget it. He went back to work on the meat racket as he was ordered, but his hunch that they had underestimated Vincent Rizzo, that Rizzo was into something big, kept eating away at him. Even years later, he was not sure why. He remembered only that an alarm had sounded in his brain; that some basic instinct, the indefinable mark of the good detective, had convinced him that something was wrong, was out of place, in the scene he had witnessed that rainy March night; that he had caught the edge of something it would be perilous to ignore.
If he couldn’t forget it, he was determined that nobody else would either. “I made a pest of myself,” he says. “Every couple of weeks, I’d go in to see Vitrano and bug him about Rizzo. I was bugging Hogan, too; everyone.” And everyone kept telling him, “Not now, the office is too busy, there isn’t the manpower to spare to play a hunch.” Though he could not convince them then, his persistence made it certain that when the time and the manpower were available, the name Rizzo would not be forgotten.
It may have been inevitable that the paths of Joe Coffey, detective on the rise, and Vincent Rizzo, organization criminal on the rise, would one day cross at a crucial moment, and that crossing would have consequences of unexpected dimensions, would change forever their lives and the lives of many others. From childhood, they had traveled different roads, but those were not diverging roads; they edged ever closer until they met and the two men were joined in a deadly conflict.
If there was a single passion that dominated Joe Coffey’s life from the time he was a small boy, it was to play some vital role in the war against organized crime and perhaps win a major victory. Organized crime had been around him all the years of his growing, had been part of his development, and had played an important role in making him what he was.
Joseph Coffey, Sr., was a truck driver, born and raised on New York’s Lower East Side. His closest boyhood friend was Eddie McGrath—the man who became during Prohibition the leading Irish mobster in the East, close friend to Meyer Lansky and other rising young syndicate bosses. While McGrath was rising to the top in the underworld, Coffey, possessed of deep religious and moral convictions, tried to make it in the straight world. He faltered only once: jobs were hard to find during Prohibition and about the only work a young truck driver could get was driving a beer truck for the bootlegger Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz. The older Coffey hardly considered that a slip—he was no bodyguard and did not carry a gun; he just drove a truck for a wage that certainly did not make him rich. When Prohibition was over, he took his driving skills to the city’s department stores—Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Gimbels.
By 1938, when his second child, first son and namesake, Joseph, Jr., was born (there would be two more children, both boys, in the next eight years), he was driving for United Parcel Service, which had taken over deliveries for most of the city’s retail stores. He, his wife, Margaret, and the children were living then in a tenement at 569 Third Avenue, between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth streets, in the shadows of the looming, and soon-to-be-doomed, Third Avenue El. But for $28 a month, which was about all the Coffeys could afford, it would have been hard to find anything better than that three-room railroad flat. It was not a bad place in which to grow, for it was a home filled with love and concern, ruled by parents determined above all to guide their children along a moral and religious path. And there were some very real advantages. Most of the neighbors were, like the Coffeys, devout Catholics. And the apartment was only a couple of short blocks west of the UPS garage on East Thirty-eighth Street out of which the elder Coffey drove his truck every morning.
For young Joe, those were good years. “We were poor, only we never knew it,” he says. “We always had a roof over our heads and enough to eat on the table, so none of us—my older sister, my two brothers, me—realized that we were poor and always living right on the edge.”
There were twin centers to his life, overlapping and meshing—his family and his church. In each he found a hero, someone to influence his thinking and his very existence in the most basic ways.
At home, there was his father. Every evening at dusk, standing on the corner near the apartment house, he watched for him to appear a block away, striding wearily home from the UPS garage. He would run to him, throwing a ball when he was close enough, and they would play together as long as there was light, or sometimes just talk and be together until it was time to go inside.
Around the family table, he listened with fascination to tales of another world and another time—his father’s world, beyond his own experience, almost beyond his imagination, where life was hard and not so pleasant or safe as the world in that warm kitchen. There were always friends from his parents’ childhood around, and they were men who lived on both sides of the law. Sometimes, McGrath showed up, along with those who had traveled with him. Young Joe’s uncle (his mother’s brother) was there often with his own stories, and he had many, for he knew and was a friend to everyone; he was the man who supplied theater, fight and ballgame tickets to those in power in the organized underworld. Those evenings and those Sunday afternoons, the air reverberated with tales of adventure and daring, of the perils of existence on the fringes and in the center of the Prohibition wars and the battles that followed repeal when so many were faced with a crucial choice. Listening, watching, young Joe encountered the very men who were the myths of the time; he came to see them not as distant heroes or ogres, but as human beings.
By the early 1940s, Joe Coffey, Sr., was deep into union affairs. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters had chartered Local 804 to organize the drivers at UPS. He was a founding member of that local, a trustee, active in spreading the gospel of solidarity, and instrumental in turning the unorganized drivers into a strong and unified force. Now the men who gathered around the Coffey table were not just the old friends from early days, that mixture of the honest and the shady, but men committed to the union, and the stories they told were, about the struggle with management. But something else was creeping in, something frightening and fascinating to a boy of seven or eight: there were new skirmishes, for organized crime was trying to seize the local.
Word of the success in organizing the drivers of Local 804, and the scent of the lucrative potential that lay within the local with its deliveries for the city’s retail stores, had not escaped the racketeers. They had already muscled in and taken control of other teamster locals. Now they took aim at Local 804.
It was 1946 and young Joe Coffey was eight, and the moment was approaching that would dictate his future.
There had been many opportunities for the older Coffey to take a turn from his path and throw in with his old friends. There were moments when he was tempted, but those moments passed quickly. “One thing I have to give my father credit for,” Joe Coffey says, “is that he never sold out to them. He could have, easily, a dozen times, and maybe if he had he could have put us all on easy street for a while. But, on the other hand, if he had, he could just as easily have been dead and we could have been dead, too. But I don’t think he ever thought about selling out for more than maybe ten seconds. It wasn’t in him.”
In 1946, the temptations were there once more, and the demands that he sell out grew stronger. The underworld wanted Local 804. Increasing pressure and lucrative offers were directed at those who ran the local. One of those most insistent was John “Cockeye” Dunn, sometime boss on the waterfront and a merciless killer who would one day die in the Sing Sing electric chair. He was another of the older Coffey’s childhood friends and, if not friendship, at least a certain warmth had lasted between them despite their moral differences. A message was sent to Coffey: “Your old friend, Cockeye Dunn, wants to meet with you to discuss a little union business.”
Dunn calculated that the threat would be enough to win compliance. He should have known better from childhood days. The senior Coffey might be a physically unprepossessing man, a bare five foot eight inches and only 125 pounds (in later years, he would stare at his sons with amazement and amusement, wondering how he had managed to sire three men who all towered more than eight inches above him and outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds), but he was a tough Irishman with an unbending code of honor. He sent back a sharp reply. “Tell the son of a bitch I don’t want to meet with him. We don’t have anything to talk about.”
A few evenings later, Coffey and his wife, then pregnant with their fourth and last child, were returning home from a shopping expedition. They had just passed through the glass front doors into the shadowy hallway of the tenement, illuminated by only a single dim bulb in a fixture in the ceiling on the landing, and were on their way up the stairs when a sharp report, followed instantly by a second, detroyed the quiet of that narrow space, and echoed through the stairwell. Coffey felt a sudden gust and a searing heat between his sleeve and his body. Behind him, the glass panes of the door shattered, a spider web of cracks spreading from two overlapping holes in the center. He heard the rapid clatter of feet racing up the stairs from the landing above. Someone had fired two shots at him. He understood immediately that they had been intended to kill, that they had missed and that he and perhaps his wife and unborn child, as well, had been saved, only because of a trick image, an illusion created by the rays of the light and the glass of the door. The light struck that pane in such a way that it always appeared that anyone on the stairs, between the light and the door, was actually standing just inside the door. The shots had struck the center of that image.
The shaken Coffeys rushed into their apartment, closed the door tightly behind them, then sat around the kitchen table trying to understand what had happened and what they could do about it. It was obvious that Dunn had put out a contract on Coffey’s life and an assassin had waited on the landing to fill it. That the shots had missed did not mean there would not be a second attempt. Indeed, Coffey knew that there would be and probably very soon. Dunn was out to get him, and now the reasons were doubled: he had not only spurned Dunn’s demands for a meeting, and capitulation, but he had become a very real danger to the killer. He had survived an attempt on his life and so he would have to be silenced before he could talk to anyone.
As his parents talked and worried, young Joe Coffey stood near them, listening. He was frightened by what had happened and he was outraged as only a child can be outraged. He wanted to hear that his father would do something, would take some action himself against those people. “But my father was very low-key, philosophical,” he says, “and he was inclined to wait and see what happened. My mother, on the other hand, was a real firebrand. She always wanted to do something right away, take some steps. She was never one to wait.” From the discussion that evening came the realization that they had only a single hope: an appeal to an old and still-close friend with more power and influence than Dunn. She called Eddie McGrath and told him what had happened. McGrath listened, told her they should take it easy and he would see what he could do.
The Coffeys waited, hoped, prayed, feared and watched their every step. Dunn made no further move. Then the word came back from McGrath. It had been taken care of. The contract had been killed. There was nothing more to worry about.
But Joe Coffey would never forget. From the moment he learned of the attempt on his father’s life, of the reasons for the attempt and who had been behind it, Joe knew what he would do with his life. “I was going to be an FBI man,” he says. “That’s where the action against the Mafia was. At least, that’s what I thought then. Those people, they did a number on my father and, as a result, they did a number on the rest of us. I was going to get back at them and going into the FBI was the best way I could think of.”
He knew firsthand about the Irish Mafia, from those conversations across the kitchen table, and from the answers to the questions he now began to pose to his father’s friends. He began to learn all he could by reading about the Italian Mafia, the Jewish Mafia and the rest of the organized underworld. “I must have read every book ever written about the mob and the FBI and the DA’s office. I was pretty impressionable when I was a kid and I believed everything I read. Some of it, though, was pretty accurate, even if it was flamboyant, so I learned a lot about those people and the ways they operated.”
If Joe Coffey’s home and his admiration for his father was one of the twin centers of those years, the other was the church. And in the church, there was the other hero of Joe Coffey’s youth—Fulton J. Sheen.
As devout Catholics, the Coffeys were determined that their children would be trained in the disciplines of their church. When he was six, Joe was enrolled in Saint Agnes Parochial School, an easy six-block walk north of his home. His parents would have it no other way, though they could ill afford it and needed help from a relative to make it possible.
From those first days at school, his education was always under the strict discipline of the church—first the Sisters of Charity at Saint Agnes, then the Jesuits at Xavier High School, a Catholic military academy he attended for three years, then the Marist Brothers at Saint Agnes High School for his final year, and again the Jesuits at Fordham University. He was a good student and a good athlete, flourished under the tutelage of the nuns and the brothers, absorbing lessons from his books and the lessons implicit in that cloistered world. Some he would never forget, reinforcing what he had learned at home: there are things in the world that are inherently good and things that are inherently evil and a man must learn to know them and so be able to choose the right course. And some lessons would take him years to see as fallacies, years and trauma before he could shake them: that priests are not ordinary men; that they have a vocation—they have been chosen by God from among the common herd to perform a mission, to carry the word of God to man; and so priests are without blemish, are not tempted or swayed by the passions and desires of ordinary men.
No single man exemplified more that sense of priestliness to the young Joe Coffey than Fulton J. Sheen. Coffey was thirteen when he met Sheen for the first time. He had been an altar boy at Saint Agnes Church since he was seven, had assisted visiting priests in their tasks, had served them mass every morning at one of the side altars before going on to school. Sheen, then a monsignor and making a mark as a writer, philosopher and vocal church advocate and proselytizer, had been relieved from the usual parish assignments to carry on his other work, and he used Saint Agnes as the church where he said his daily mass. Young Coffey was assigned to assist him and soon the monsignor and the boy became close, Sheen requesting his services for those daily rituals. When Sheen was named to head the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in late 1951, and so moved into the society’s headquarters on East Thirty-ninth Street, he asked Coffey if he would be willing to come to the office every morning as his personal altar boy and serve him mass at his private altar there. For the next eighteen months, Coffey did just that, and after every mass, Monsignor Sheen forced a five-dollar bill into his hands.
“I would have to say he was the finest man I ever met in my life,” Coffey says even now. “He was a fabulous man, a truly holy man. I mean, he wasn’t a phony. He was truly dedicated to what he believed in. He’s probably the only priest I ever met in all my years that I can say that about. Sheen was everything a priest was supposed to be. You could talk to him. You could go to him if you had a problem and he would try his damndest to help you out. He was a man full of wisdom. You’d leave after you spoke to him and you’d say, ‘This guy is dynamite.’ You’d feel good when you left him.”
With the influence of home and father on the one hand, and church and Sheen on the other, Coffey had both the determination and the impetus to move hard toward the goals he had set for himself, to do the things in school and out that were necessary to attain them.
When he went to Fordham after graduation from high school, it was as a prelaw student; he knew that to be an FBI agent, he would need a degree in either law or accounting, and since he wanted to be in the field, where the action was, he was sure law was the better route. But he kept that ultimate ambition to himself. He knew well enough that his father, from bitter experience in childhood and in union affairs, had little affection for either the police or the FBI. Joe explained only that it was his desire to be a lawyer, which was fine with his father, who was certain he could steer him into labor law.
The dream of the law and the FBI died within a year, a victim, ironically, of organized crime. A Senate subcommittee, under John McClellan of Arkansas, with Robert F. Kennedy as chief counsel, was deep into public hearings on labor racketeering and corruption and the links between the labor movement and organized crime. The main target was the Teamsters Union, and particularly its strongman, James R. Hoffa. The senior Coffey and other officers of Local 804 were subpoenaed to testify about their battle against underworld infiltration. But the night before they were to appear, the local’s president and one of Coffey’s closest friends, Leonard Geiger, was found dead behind the wheel of his car. The official diagnosis was a heart attack. The appearances of Coffey and the other officers were initially postponed and then canceled.
The death of Geiger spurred newer and younger men to move to seize control of the local. The elder Coffey had been in too many battles to relish another, especially one that might tear his local apart. He abandoned the union office with its comfortable salary and benefits, and went back to driving a truck, at reduced pay.
Without the financial support of his father and, indeed, with the family now needing help from him, Joe Coffey dropped out of Fordham. If the FBI was, then, beyond reach, still he did not abandon the idea that somehow, someday, he would find a way to the battlefront. Until then, he would do what he had to do. He became a mailroom clerk at Western Electric and was quickly advanced into the data processing department, becoming an expert computer programmer.
And, at Western Electric, he met and fell in love with Patricia Flynn. “She didn’t want the best part of me at first,” he remembers. “She thought I was just a wise kid because I was two years younger.” She ignored his advances, even laughed at them, until a year later, on Saint Patrick’s Day, they happened to be at the same party and started talking. “It was one of those things. Something clicked and pretty soon we were talking about marriage. But we were pretty practical kids in those days. I had the service hanging over my head and we decided that there was no way we would get married until I got that out of the way.”
He pushed up his draft, went into the army in September 1957, when he was nineteen, did his two years, most of it in Germany. It was, except for missing Pat, not a bad time. Since he’d been an outstanding athlete in school, the army tapped him not for his abilities with computers and electronics, but for his talents on the football field and basketball court. And he played hard enough and well enough for service teams in Germany to gain some notice; when his two years were up, he was offered football scholarships to a couple of colleges and an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. “Because I was in love and wanted to get married, I didn’t go anywhere but home. I turned them all down. Maybe if I’d gone to West Point, my life would have been different. But I haven’t really got many regrets, not the way things turned out.”
A civilian once more, he was back at Western Electric, back programming computers, and early in 1960, he and Pat Flynn were married. By the time their first child, Kathleen, was born a year later, he was doing well—he’d been promoted to systems analyst, was setting up and directing computer flows, had been transferred to the Western Electric operation in Yonkers, in Westchester County, and was earning $12,000 a year, which was very good pay, indeed, in the early 1960s.
But the old dream to fight the syndicate would not die. It was, he was sure, the thing he really wanted to do, the thing he had been born to do. A few months after Kathleen was born, he took the examination for the New York City Police Department, passed high on the list, and was offered an appointment. “I wanted it. But at the same time, I had a wife and a child and responsibilities and I was earning a fairly good living at Western Electric, about twice what I’d be making if I became a cop. I thought about it and I figured I couldn’t do that to my family. I had to turn it down.”
Fifteen months later, the police department summoned him again, offered him that appointment a second time. Again he thought about it and again came to the same reluctant conclusion. “I thought it just wasn’t in the cards for me, so I said no.”
He thought then that the dream was dead and he would have to settle for what he had. But early in September 1964, the offer was extended a third time. “Now I was really up against the wall. There was a rule in the police department that if you turned them down three times, that was it. Three nos and you were out for good. So, this was my last shot. I had to make up my mind whether I was going into the police department and maybe get a chance to do what I always wanted to do through them, or just forget the whole dream and spend my life with the computers at Western Electric or some other place.”
He and Pat talked about it, thought about it, explored it from every angle. “We made a decision. Not me. Both of us. She told me, ‘Joe, money isn’t going to do that much for us if you’re miserable with what you’re doing. You have to do the thing you believe in. If being a cop is what you have to do, then you’ll be a cop. Maybe someday, if we’re lucky, the salaries in the police department will get up to the level of private industry. But even if they don’t, we’ll make out some way.’”
So Joe Coffey quit Western Electric and on October 2, 1964, became a New York City cop. The luck that would mark his years on the force began almost immediately. He was part of a class of 150 new cops, the first class to be trained at a newly opened Police Academy. The department decided that this class would be a model one, its members those who had scored highest on the department’s entrance examinations and had the highest IQs of all potential new officers. For the next twenty years the bureaucracy would follow them to see what effect, if any, high intelligence has on a man’s performance as a cop. In that stellar class, Joe Coffey was one of the brightest stars. He ranked near the top in marksmanship (though through his police career, he would never fire his gun at anyone), physical ability, investigative aptitude. And, at the end of the four months of training, he shared the award for highest academic achievement.
Now his real career as a cop began, and his luck continued to hold. He was assigned exactly where he wanted to go—the department’s elite unit, the Tactical Patrol Force. The TPF was sent into high-crime areas, or anyplace where there was trouble that had to be handled quickly, firmly and with dispatch. “I wanted the TPF and I got it. And the reason I wanted the TPF was because I wanted to be a detective and that was the best road into the detective bureau. And not only did I want to be a detective, I knew exactly where I wanted to go: the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Because, in my estimation, working for Frank Hogan was the epitome of working against organized crime. Now, it’s not easy to get into the detective division. You have to work, you have to get your ass out there and make quality arrests, not garbage arrests like a two-dollar street-corner junkie or that kind of stuff, but quality arrests. And since the TPF worked Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant and other high-crime neighborhoods, we were bound to get quality collars.” He was with the TPF for a year and four months, racking up hundreds of quality arrests—for homicides, possession of guns, dealing in heavy narcotics, other major felonies. That record did not escape the attention of his superiors.
In January 1966, John V. Lindsay was inaugurated as mayor of the city of New York. One of his first acts was to appoint Howard Leary of Philadelphia as the new police commissioner. One of Leary’s first acts was to name Sanford D. Garelik, who had been assistant chief inspector, as chief inspector, the highest ranking uniformed officer in the department. And Garelik had a particular affection for the Tactical Patrol Force and its members. He considered them the pride of the department, men with courage and intelligence whose performance every cop should emulate. Garelik determined to spread some of those men around, into sensitive areas where they would show just how good they were and perhaps in so doing prod others into excellence. He ordered the commanding officer of the TPF to take 150 of his patrolmen—those with the best arrest records and the greatest potential—and make them detectives and assign them to various parts of the detective division.
“I was one of the guys they chose. And they gave us three choices of where we wanted to go in the division—narcotics, homicide, the rest. We were supposed to list them in order of preference. I wrote down the Manhattan district attorney’s squad three times, period.”
But the detective squad in Frank Hogan’s office was small, elite and a closed shop. It had a reputation in and out of the police department for excellence and incorruptibility, for doggedness in pursuit of evidence and for results. Many chose it but few were chosen. The word in the department was that unless a cop had a rabbi, somebody to speak and vouch for him, he had no chance of being admitted into that tight circle of sixty detectives. As far as Coffey was aware, he knew nobody in Hogan’s office, had nobody to put in that good word for him. Yet that was his choice and he was convinced that somehow he would manage to make it work.
He waited for an answer, and while he waited, he went about his usual business with the TPF. One afternoon, he was summoned to Leonard Street—not to Hogan’s office but to appear before a grand jury, which was on the same floor, to testify about an arrest he had recently made. As he was leaving the grand-jury room, one of Hogan’s veteran detectives was just leaving the office of the rackets bureau. Coffey stared and the detective stared back. They recognized one another after only a moment. “His name was Henry Cronin and I’d known him since I was a little kid. We used to spend a couple of weeks every summer out at Rockaway Beach and so did he, and he became a friend of my family.”
They greeted each other warmly. Cronin asked, “Joe, how are you? How are things going? What are you doing down here?”
“Where are you working now?” Cronin asked.
“I’m in the TPF,” Coffey said. “But you’ve probably heard, Garelik’s transferring a bunch of us to the detective division.”
“That’s great,” Cronin said. “Why don’t you come to work here, then?”
“Henry,” Coffey said, “that’s exactly where I want to come. In fact, the DA’s office is the only place I put down on my application.”
“Then don’t worry about it, Joe,” Cronin said. “I’ll put in a good word and see what I can do.”
The next morning, Cronin called Coffey. He had arranged an interview for the following day with Inspector Paul Vitrano, head of the detective squad. Coffey should get himself into his finest clothes and make sure he was on time.
Coffey showed up in his best mohair suit, groomed as he imagined a Hogan detective would be groomed. Vitrano was impressed with his appearance, but more impressed with Coffey’s record, which he had on his desk. “I think you’d fit in,” Vitrano said. “Now, do you know anybody who can write a letter recommending you to Mr. Hogan?” Coffey still needed a rabbi.
His father’s cousin was Matthew Walsh, and Matty Walsh was the general manager of the Hotel Roosevelt, a favorite watering hole of important politicians. Walsh knew everyone who was anyone, in and out of politics, and while he happened to be very close to New York Republican leaders, like Governor Nelson Rockefeller and New York County GOP boss Vincent Albano, his circle included important businessmen as well. Coffey was sure he could call Matty Walsh and Walsh would come up with one of those prestigious friends who would be willing to write a letter of recommendation that would win a talented and ambitious young cop a place on the district attorney’s staff.
He decided not to wait a moment, to call Walsh from the lobby of the Leonard Street building as soon as he left Vitrano’s office. Perhaps it was a portent, but on the way down in the elevator he bent over, heard a screeching rip. The seam in the seat of his trousers split. He put one hand behind him, tried to hold the split seam together, shuffled out of the elevator to the nearest phone booth. He made his call, won Walsh’s promise of help, then somehow, clutching the seat of his trousers, managed to get to his car without attracting undue attention.
If there was one man Walsh should have stayed away from, it was Vincent Albano. But that was the man Walsh asked to write the letter. One of Frank Hogan’s proudest boasts was that he had removed the district attorney’s office from politics. He himself was a Tammany Democrat and ran for reelection every four years on the Democratic line, and on several other lines as well, and had even run in 1958 as a Democrat for the United States Senate. But where the district attorney’s office was concerned, he said often and firmly, politics had no place. Any politician, Democrat or Republican, who approached Hogan looking for favors was turned away peremptorily, and more than one such requests led Hogan to take a searching look into that politician’s affairs.
So, Hogan turned choleric when the letter from Albano reached his desk. He read, “It would be greatly appreciated if you would take Patrolman Joseph J. Coffey, Jr., currently a member of the Tactical Patrol Force, on your staff as a detective. I am certain you will find that his previous performance as a police officer was outstanding and that he will make a major contribution to your work.” Hogan fumed. He summoned his chief aide, Alfred Scotti, and showed him the letter. He summoned Vitrano and showed him the letter, too. He ordered them to do something about this patrolman who was trying to use political influence, and Republican political influence at that, to worm his way into the office. He ordered them to conduct a complete investigation of Coffey and if they turned up anything at all, he wanted Coffey arrested, indicted and tried.
When Coffey got back to the TPF headquarters that afternoon, there was a message for him to call Inspector Vitrano. He was sure the inspector was calling to tell him that he had been accepted. But when Vitrano told him Hogan’s reaction to the letter and indicated that the letter had just about ended any chance Coffey had of getting that appointment, Coffey paled and immediately rushed down to Leonard Street to try to explain to Vitrano exactly what had happened. “I want you to investigate me, like Mr. Hogan said,” Coffey said, “because when you do you’ll find out there was nothing behind it. All Albano was doing was a favor for my father’s cousin. There wasn’t anything political in it at all. In fact, the only reason Matty Walsh asked him to write that letter in the first place was because you said I had to get somebody to put in the good word for me.”
Vitrano heard him out. But there was nothing Vitrano could do to smooth things over. Coffey would just have to forget his ambition. Then Sanford Garelik came down on Coffey’s side. He heard about the mix-up, about the trouble one of his TPF stars had gotten into, and made a call to Hogan himself. The district attorney was appeased and withdrew his objections. Two weeks later, Coffey took off his uniform, put on a suit and was officially made a detective in the rackets bureau.
Coffey had imagined that joining Hogan’s staff would immediately propel him into the war on the syndicate, that he would quickly be in the thick of an investigation into the Mafia. He could not have been more wrong. Rookies on Hogan’s staff, especially those rookies who had come aboard with few if any friends (Coffey’s only friend was Henry Cronin), got only those dirty, routine jobs that nobody else wanted. Coffey’s first assignment was to be a bodyguard to Sidney Slater, an informer who had once been a member of Crazy Joe Gallo’s mob, had broken with it and testified against Gallo. He had been under protection since 1961, and the first job given to the new detectives in the rackets bureau was to baby-sit Slater and his wife twenty-four hours a day in their Queens apartment. Working in shifts of twenty-four hours on and twenty-four off, they slept on cots in the foyer of the Slater apartment, accompanied Slater wherever he went—when he walked his Afghan hound, when he drove his car every night a few blocks to pick up a paper. They catered to the desires, whims and needs of the Slaters, made sure nobody got close to them, made sure that, in exchange for Slater’s testimony, they remained safe and secure.
It was an assignment that was supposed to last for the first year in the office, and every detective who served that term later said it was the most miserable of jobs. “It took me about ten minutes to develop an extreme dislike for that creep, and his monster dog, Sheik,” Coffey says, and he was not alone. There was not a babysitter who did not come to detest Slater. In order to make life at least a little bearable, they took what petty revenge they could: invented stories that they knew would terrify him, about contracts put out on his life, about strangers lurking in the neighborhood; planted smoke bombs in his car that exploded with a deafening bang and emitted noxious fumes when he turned on the ignition; came up with a variety of harmless practical jokes that he never found amusing and that kept him on edge. But then, Slater had little affection for his guardians and tormentors, and took his own revenge. He was constantly on the phone to Hogan’s office with complaints about anything that didn’t suit him, trying to make as much trouble as he could, and, indeed, he managed to get a couple of detectives transferred not just from the assignment but out of the rackets bureau.
Coffey lived in the middle of this turmoil for seven months, from May 1966 until shortly before Christmas. “The whole thing finally blew up,” he remembers, “late one night in the middle of December. All that time I was miserable, not just because I really hated that guy, which I did, but because I had come on the squad to investigate organized crime, not be a bullshit bodyguard.” Just before midnight every evening, Slater would take his dog and one of his bodyguards, go downstairs, get into his Chrysler Imperial, shove the dog into the backseat and drive into the center of Flushing to buy the morning newspapers. On that particular night, it was Coffey who went with Slater, sitting in the front seat beside him.
“We were coming back along Main Street in Flushing when Sheik saw another monster of a dog in the lobby of a building we were just passing. He went crazy. He started barking, leaping around, frying to get out of the car, trying to jump over the seat onto my head. I thought if I didn’t go deaf from all that barking, I’d get killed when he landed on me. That was too much. I grabbed the dog and shoved his snout right against Sidney Slater and I said, ‘Here, you rat cocksucker, you keep this fucking dog away from me or I’m going to kill him, and you, too. Got that?’”
The next morning, Inspector Vitrano was on the phone to Coffey. “You’re off the bodyguard detail as of right now,” he said. “Report back to the office tomorrow morning.”
Within days, Coffey was thrust into the center of an investigation of the infiltration of organized crime into the electricians’ union. He was where he wanted to be at last, and he immediately showed that it was where he ought to be. His instinct and intuition were instrumental in helping to break that case, and led to several major arrests.
His reputation began to grow. “Over the next couple of years,” he says, “I kept getting better and better cases, mostly in organized crime, though I got the Black Panthers and the Cuban bombers, too, and I was lucky because I kept getting good results. One case after another—it was like every case I touched turned to gold. It was just one of those things, like I always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.”
And he had what a lot of cops don’t have and desperately need: he had a wife who supported him, who believed in him and what he was doing as deeply as he did, who understood the importance of his work and knew that if he were to reach the goals he had set for himself, social life and even family plans had to come second. She had been behind him from the moment he made that decision to become a cop, had worried with him and tried to shore up his confidence during the difficult times when he was uncertain. There were those first weeks as a TPF rookie out of the Police Academy, when he looked for and failed to find his first arrest, returned home more and more depressed, convinced that, as he told her, he was going to be the first cop in the history of the department to go through his twenty years without making a collar. “No matter how many times I told him not to worry, it kept getting worse,” she says. “It got so I wanted to go around the corner and hold up the local bank just so he could make that first arrest. And then, of course, he made it.”
There had been the first years in Hogan’s office when he had waited so anxiously to receive the gold shield that would officially mark him a detective. That shield meant something, and not just the extra pay. There had been times he had made arrests and then, when he couldn’t produce the gold, had been laughed at and told he was only a cop pretending to be a detective. But he could go home and talk to Pat about it and know she would understand, that her own rage would exceed his and that would calm him. She would remind him of what he already knew: that the men of Hogan’s office were at the bottom of the list when it came to handing out detective shields, the feeling being that working for Hogan was reward enough in itself. And when the shield was finally given in May 1969, if it seemed almost anticlimactic to him, he could take pleasure in her righteous indignation that it had been so long in coming.
Pat Coffey believed in him totally—believed, too, that he could take care of himself. “The kids in our neighborhood,” she remembers, “said that while one bullet might stop most cops, it would take at least four to stop Joe, but nobody was ever going to get a chance to get four shots at him.” She learned enough about his work, by listening and sharing, not to worry too much when he was working on organized crime cases. He managed to convince her that those in the syndicate, vicious and unprincipled as they might be, nevertheless lived by a code that forbade violence against a cop, and called for actual respect for a cop who was doing his job. She knew that this combat was a game-that had to be played by the rules, on both sides.
She did worry when Coffey was assigned to investigate terrorists, for she had come to know that codes, that respect for those on the other side, meant little to them. She never forgot the fears that shook her when he testified against the Black Panthers and as he left the witness stand became a target for vituperation and threats of retribution, as they shouted that he and his whole family would not escape their reach. Though he refused an offer of police protection at home, Pat was able to take some small comfort from the knowledge that for the next weeks cruising patrol cars would keep a constant watch over their house. But she kept her fears to herself. She was determined to do nothing that would communicate those fears to the children.
So, his luck held. At home, there was Pat. And on Leonard Street, he had caught Frank Hogan’s eye. At first, it was because of the trouble that had been caused by the letter of recommendation from Albano. Then it was because he could not be overlooked; his very size and Irish good looks and charm made him stand out in any crowd. But, most important, it was because his name kept appearing on reports of the most important cases that passed through the office. Hogan started calling Coffey in for private conferences about those cases, questioned him closely, listened to his recommendations.
And he discovered something else in Coffey that led to the creation of a firm bond between them. Though years younger, Coffey shared much the same background and philosophy. Both were Irish Catholics from poor families. Both believed deeply in their church and its sanctity. Both were committed totally to fighting the war against the syndicate, and to winning that war no matter the odds or the difficulties.
When Coffey, through 1971, talked so vehemently about Vincent Rizzo, about his hunch, Hogan paid attention. If the time ever came when it was possible and practical, he would be of a mind to turn Coffey loose.