Another Christmas. After more than a year, the investigation into the meat racket had finally wound down. There had been some good arrests and indictments, and the racket had been set back. But, as the cynics in the district attorney’s office knew, as experience had shown only too well, it was a small victory that would not last; before long, the racket would be operating just as broadly as before and one day they would have to go after it again.
With the investigation over, Joe Coffey went on vacation the first two weeks of December—not to play and rest but to moonlight as a truck driver to earn enough extra money to pay a few outstanding bills and maybe be able to buy Pat and their three children some Christmas presents. On the Monday morning he returned to work, Inspector Vitrano called him into his office.
“Have a good vacation, Joe?” he asked.
Coffey shrugged. “Okay. About as good as you could expect, considering.”
“You ready to get back to work?”
“Sure.”
“Are you still interested in that guy Vincent Rizzo?”
Coffey stared hard at him, leaned forward in anticipation. “What do you think I’ve been breaking my balls about for the last ten months? Of course, I’m interested in Rizzo. You know it.”
“Good. We’ve been talking about him. We’ve decided it’s time to give it a shot. Go pick yourself a partner and get on him and see where it leads.”
Coffey wanted somebody who would share his own enthusiasm, a younger man anxious to make a mark. He approached Larry Mullins and Mullins, who had just come into the rackets bureau, agreed the moment he sensed Coffey’s excitement. But, that afternoon, before they could start out, Mullins got a phone call from home. His wife had suffered a miscarriage, had been rushed to the hospital. Mullins looked at Coffey and told him what had happened. “I want to work with you on this thing, Joe,” he said. “But, you understand.…”
“Sure, Larry,” Coffey said.
“Look, Joe,” Mullins said, “don’t pick anybody else. Just let me make sure my wife’s okay, get her out of the hospital and back on her feet, and then you can count on me.”
“Sure, Larry,” Coffey said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“What are you going to do in the meantime?”
“I don’t know. Maybe take it solo.”
Coffey would wait for Mullins, would until then move after Rizzo on his own. He drove up to the Columbia Civic League Club where he had first had that hunch, parked, and waited for his target to appear. The wait was not long. Rizzo came strolling along the street, walked into the club, remained there an hour, emerged and headed east. Coffey tailed him to the L and S Coffee Shop, knowing now that Rizzo owned it and the whole building, and waited outside while Rizzo went in and talked to several people in a manner that indicated he was giving orders. When Rizzo left, he started north, went not even a block, and entered Jimmy’s Lounge, a sleazy bar at 211 Avenue A, between Twelfth and Thirteenth streets.
Coffey continued his lone surveillance over the next several days, past New Year’s, 1972, sitting on Rizzo eighteen hours a day. He began to discern a pattern of behavior, to see Rizzo in a new light. Picking up Rizzo outside his apartment house in the morning, he would follow him to the Columbia Civic League Club, the first stop on the day’s rounds. There was no way Coffey could follow inside; it was tightly sealed against intruders. But he could sit in his car across the street and watch, make note of the license plates of the Cadillacs and other expensive cars that drove up and parked, make note of those who entered. His notes read like a listing of the hierarchy of all the New York Mafia families. Into the Columbia Civic League Club those winter days went Joseph N. Gallo, Aniello Dellacroce, Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, Phil Tartaglia, Nicholas Frustachi, the regents of the fallen Joseph Colombo, and more—the men who ruled the rackets in New York. From his distant vantage, Coffey watched as they huddled together, and noted that Rizzo seemed always somewhere near the center. Though he heard none of the words they said, Coffey understood something clearly and without a doubt: Rizzo was no minor Mafia soldier. He was accepted into these rarefied circles as an equal. He was treated with the respect due a man of standing. He was somebody very important, indeed.
Rizzo never stayed at the club long, only long enough to make his presence felt. When he left, he invariably headed for Jimmy’s Lounge. The police had not suspected it was a hangout for the organization; but that function came clear to Coffey almost immediately. Rizzo was using it as an office. He was in and out several times during the day and long into the night. He met people there and on the street outside. He made and received a steady stream of telephone calls. And those who frequented Jimmy’s Lounge were men Coffey recognized, men on the middle and lower levels of the syndicate. There was Vincent “Popo” Tortora, an important man in the Genovese family, a notorious gambler, loanshark, and dealer in narcotics, with an arrest record dating back to 1943, when he was twenty; despite nearly yearly arrests, he had spent hardly a day in jail. There were soldiers and hangers-on, like Freddy Mayo, Jimmy Heimerle, Tommy LaManna, Pasquale “Patty” Marino, Joe Calgano, Rizzo’s brother, George, and more. If there had been any doubts before about Coffey’s intuition of Rizzo’s importance, they were now dispelled. These men, coming and going, hanging out at Jimmy’s Lounge, were into crimes of all kinds, and they were taking orders from Rizzo.
Day after day, long into the night that freezing January, he sat in his car across the street from Jimmy’s Lounge, hunched down behind the wheel to make himself inconspicuous, invisible, and watched, saw crimes committed in the open with a nonchalance that said no one cared and no one would intervene to stop them. Hardly a day passed when young Puerto Ricans, blacks, Italians did not appear before Tortora, receive small packages, carry them away. Coffey had been a cop long enough to know exactly what was going on. “Tortora was dealing street-level junk,” he says. “There wasn’t any question about that. I could have made an arrest right then and there. But I didn’t make a move because we were after something else, something a lot bigger, even if we didn’t know what, and I wasn’t going to tip our hand.”
If he could see and chart what was happening in the street and on the sidewalk in front of Jimmy’s Lounge, what was going on inside remained a mystery. The bar was open from ten in the morning until four the next morning, every day but Sunday, when it closed early. Inside, there were clandestine meetings, conversations, phone calls. “I had to get in there,” Coffey says. “The only way we were ever going to know what was going on was to put an informant in there—and the chances of that at that stage weren’t very good, to say the least—or plant a bug or a wiretap on the phones. I wanted to build up enough information so we could go to court and get an order to put the place up. So, even though I was working by myself until Mullins got back, I made up my mind that I’d go undercover, go in and take a look. There was a time when I used to moonlight as a steamfitter to make a little extra money. What I did was to put on those old clothes, like I was still a steam-fitter, and start going into the place on a regular basis, about six o’clock, and hang around the bar, drink some beer and see what I could pick up.”
Unlike the Columbia Civic League Club, which was out-of-bounds, Jimmy’s Lounge was open to outsiders, though why any outsider should have wandered into it and stayed more than a minute was an enigma. It was an Augean stable, filthy and repellant; it had not been painted in years, or even cleaned since the day it opened; the walls, furnishings—everything—was coated with thick layers of dirt, grime and grease, and roaches and vermin played undisturbed games in the litter. Had anyone bothered to complain, the health department could have closed it on a dozen different grounds. Yet it had its customers, and they were not just Rizzo, Tortora and their friends and underlings. Laborers in the neighborhood were wont to drop by after work for a beer or two before going home, and even some of the cops from the local precinct stopped in now and then, some on a regular basis. Thus, Coffey did not appear totally out of place at the bar in his worn, dirty steamfitter’s clothes. Still, he was a stranger and no one exactly welcomed him or tried to strike up a conversation. The other patrons, the regulars, moved away, left a space around him at the bar, pretended he was invisible. And that suited him.
The first evening he strolled in, and every evening thereafter, he made sure he found a vacant spot at the bar opposite the telephone, ordered a beer, spent the next couple of hours sipping, watching and listening, though his expression was bland, distant, uninterested. He noticed several things immediately.
Rizzo and Tortora were engaged in a hushed conference at one of the tables. The phone had an Out-of-Order sign on it, but it rang continuously. The barmaids, Loraine and Tootsie, were usually the ones who answered it. The calls were almost always for Rizzo or Tortora, and though Coffey could not hear what the caller said, he heard distinctly Rizzo’s and Tortora’s end of the conversation. They acted as though they had total privacy, as though nobody could possibly be listening in, as though that tall, muscular steamfitter at the bar did not exist. What Coffey heard was enough to add weight to his assurance that his hunch had been right and he was on to something very big.
“Yeah,” he heard Rizzo say one evening, “well, you tell that fuckin’ ragpicker if he doesn’t come up with the dough he’s gonna end up with two broken kneecaps.… I don’t give a damn about his alibis. You tell him I don’t make no jokes. I mean it. You tell him, pay up and no more crap or he’s got broken legs, busted kneecaps, maybe worse.”
Outside, in the street, Coffey had seen narcotics. Now, inside, he was learning about extortion and more. His time drinking beer at the bar in Jimmy’s Lounge came to an end, though, the night Rizzo picked up the phone, said, “Yeah, I agree. We got to have a meet. When? Tomorrow. Ponte’s. I’ll be there. You be there.”
Ponte’s restaurant was the antithesis of Jimmy’s Lounge. Near the piers on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, it had a reputation for good and expensive Italian food and a fashionable clientele, was a gathering place for important people from the worlds of business, finance, politics, society and the underworld. If Rizzo was going to meet somebody there, Coffey would tail him and find out who. He would not, of course, go inside; he would wait and observe from the outside. “All he would have needed was to see me, the steamfitter from the bar at Jimmy’s, walk in and that would have blown it right there and then,” Coffey says. “But I figured I’d pick up something just watching who went in and who came out.”
Those who went in, Coffey observed from his car in the cold and the dark near the waterfront, were Phil Tartaglia, a major figure in the Joe Bonanno crime family, Jerry de Lorenzo and several others. About two hours after all had entered, Rizzo came out. With him was Jerry de Lorenzo. They were talking with considerable animation and intensity. And Coffey was struck by the repetition of what was becoming a very familiar pattern. The discussion was one between equals, or, if one was more equal than the other, it was Rizzo. De Lorenzo was listening with absolute concentration, his attitude one of respect shown only to a man of importance.
Watching that, watching them drive off, Coffey knew that whatever was happening was spreading and growing rapidly, that it had become far too big for a single detective operating alone, or even for two men (Mullins was about ready to join him). The next morning, he was back in the office, closeted with Vitrano and then with Hogan. They listened, agreed it was time to bring more men onto the scene, time to take official notice. An assistant district attorney named Ronald Goldstock was assigned to oversee the case and try the case when it came time to present evidence to a grand jury and go to trial. In addition to Mullins, several other detectives, including Mario Trapani and an older veteran, Fred Casey, joined the investigation. Now Jimmy’s Lounge, the Columbia Civic League Club and Ponte’s would all be under observation.
Ponte’s was to be the province of Coffey and Trapani. They went undercover. Coffey, hanging his steamfitter’s clothes back in the closet, put on a good suit and became a teamster lawyer from Chicago, visiting New York on union business. Trapani, a hulking, tough-looking man, put on his good suit and became a teamster official from the same city, hooked up with the Midwest syndicate. They moved in, became regulars at Ponte’s. They had only a single concern, and it was a slight one. Rizzo might appear at the restaurant and if he did, he would probably recognize Coffey despite the change of clothes. But Ponte’s was not part of Rizzo’s normal orbit, so the chances that he might show up again were not great, and if he did, Coffey and Trapani could be warned by the other detectives who were keeping watch on him and so have time to get out before he appeared.
It took a little time and some lavish spending on drinks for the regulars and tips for the help, but soon Coffey and Trapani were accepted. Nobody doubted that they were what they claimed to be. They played their game every evening—sat at the bar, drank, talked to the bartender and others, picked up bits and pieces of information, enough to give them leads in a dozen different directions. They watched and listened as Jerry de Lorenzo, Tartaglia and other Ponte regulars made frequent trips to the nearby phones to conduct business and they heard plenty about extortion, loansharking, stock deals and a lot more.
By the third week, information was pouring in to them without any effort on their part. They had become so familiar, so much a part of the atmosphere that they were being fed confidences. And then Gino Galina walked in. He had once been an assistant district attorney on Hogan’s staff. He knew Joe Coffey. He had been defrocked by Hogan—summarily fired when the district attorney discovered that Galina was violating many of his strict rules, was not up to the standards he demanded, had perhaps been corrupted by those he was supposed to be prosecuting. Out of the office, he had gone into private legal practice representing some of the leading New York mobsters and there were rumors that he was something more than just a mob lawyer. (A few years later, Galina was murdered because of his knowledge of and participation in the business of his clients and because of reports that he was prepared to talk about that business to a grand jury.)
Coffey saw him, jabbed an elbow at Trapani. “Mario,” he whispered, “we’re going to be made.”
Galina’s face froze when he recognized Coffey. He nodded, just a slight movement of the head. “Hello, Joe,” he said softly.
Coffey glared at him, made an obscene gesture.
Galina ignored it, walked down to the end of the bar and motioned to the bartender and several mob figures nearby. They gathered. Galina leaned toward them, whispered, gestured toward Coffey and Trapani. The bar went silent. The group around Galina stared down the bar, tense, poised.
“Now,” Coffey says, “Mrs. Coffey didn’t raise any stupid kids. Nobody had to put up a neon sign telling us what was going on.” He grabbed Trapani’s arm. Together they rose from the bar, those glares like knives against their backs. If there was one thing they could find some comfort in it was that they were in Ponte’s, with its respectable clientele, and not in Jimmy’s Lounge. Still, they did not take their time. They walked directly to the exit and did not feel completely safe until they were in their car and blocks away.