It was the beginning of February 1972 and the moment for decision had come. It was time to put aside total reliance on undercover work. The confrontation at Ponte’s dictated that. Nobody doubted that an alert had been sounded within the mob to be wary of strangers. Long-distance surveillance had done about all it could. It was time, then, to move a little closer.
The morning after that episode at Ponte’s, there was a meeting in the district attorney’s office with Goldstock, Vitrano, Mullins, Casey, Trapani, Coffey and the other detectives who had joined the hunt. The investigation had been in progress for five weeks, and in those weeks a lot of hard evidence had been uncovered about a variety of crimes, and hints had emerged about many more. “We’ve got enough,” Goldstock said, “to go to court and get an order to wiretap all those spots—Ponte’s, the Columbia Civic League Club, Jimmy’s Lounge, the L and S Coffee Shop, Rizzo’s apartment. There’s just one trouble and you guys know it as well as I do. Money. We don’t have enough to tap every location. We’ve got enough to put up one spot and that’s it. So, we’ve got to make a choice. Where do we go?”
There was near unanimity. It had to be Ponte’s. It was a fashionable place. Important leaders of the syndicate gathered there almost every night. They used the phones to conduct their business. If Ponte’s were wiretapped, the arguments went, then important information incriminating those at the very top would certainly emerge, and what everybody wanted, of course, was to get to those at the top.
Goldstock and Vitrano went around the room, and one after the other, the detectives chorused, “Ponte’s.” But, when they reached Coffey, he said, “Jimmy’s Lounge. That’s the place we ought to put up.”
“You’re out of your head,” somebody said. “Ponte’s is the place. It’s a natural.” There was general agreement.
But Coffey would not give. He argued, explained, insisted. “A lot of people think that if you start in a place like Ponte’s, which is a very nice place where the big guys go,” he says, and it was the argument he used that day, “you’re going to get a Carlo Gambino or a Funzi Tieri, the really important guys, the heavies. But, when you really think about it, you know we aren’t going to get them, at least not that way. They’re too well insulated. In this business, things don’t trickle down. In this business, you have to start at the bottom, you have to start with the shit and hope it flows up.”
Coffey was persuasive enough so that by the time he fell silent, Vitrano and Goldstock, at least, were convinced. It would be Jimmy’s Lounge. Goldstock would draw up the papers, go into court and ask Judge Harold Birns for authorization to tap the phones in the bar.
The order, granted by Judge Birns, was good for only thirty days, though, and in order to have it extended for another month, evidence of crimes had to be amassed through the wiretap. Nobody had any doubts that such evidence would come over the phones, and that it would be solid enough so there would be no difficulty in winning judicial extensions every thirty days. The only problem was in placing that tap. Mobsters have little compunction about talking on the telephone and make only minimal efforts to disguise what they are talking about—so long as they are convinced that the phones are safe. But they are forever on the alert for any sign that somebody might be listening. Rizzo was a man who took special care to see that his phones remained clean. He paid people to do little but sit in their windows and watch the telephone terminals in the backyards of any building where he frequently made phone calls, paid them to report to him any suspicious movements near those poles, the appearance of strangers, the arrival of telephone men at odd hours. He had technicians who checked the terminals, wires, boxes, every aspect of the telephones on a regular basis, who ripped out anything that looked suspicious. Most important, he had telephone company employees on his payroll so that he could get the word from inside about whether he was being tapped.
A way had to be found to escape that scrutiny. Hogan’s people went to the telephone company’s security officers, and after a long discussion, they hit on an idea. An unused telephone line on the central frame in the telephone company’s main office, a frame that handled all the phones within a fifty-square-block radius that included Jimmy’s Lounge, was leased, at a cost of $3,000 a month. The tap was placed on that unused line. Behind the frame, the phones in Jimmy’s Lounge were bridged to it. Thus, all calls to and from the bar traveled their normal route to and from the central frame. But, instead of following the normal route in and out of the frame, they were bridged onto the unused line, split into two channels. One sent the calls along their usual route; the other diverted those same calls to the eavesdroppers. Unless someone came across that bridge—and that someone would have to know exactly where to look and what to look for—the tap was undetectable.
The bridge was in place, the phones tapped, the leased line wired into a listening post in an unused room in the basement of one of the buildings in Stuyvesant Town, a block and a half from Jimmy’s Lounge. In that dark and dingy basement plant—without windows or adequate ventilation, furnished only with a few cots and some battered chairs and tables the cops brought in, and wired with specially installed electricity to provide both lights and power for the equipment—the tape recorders, monitors and the rest of the electronic gear were set up, manned by a crew of detectives who would sit there eighteen hours a day, all the time that Jimmy’s Lounge was open, and even longer if necessary. And there were many times in the months to come when Coffey and other detectives did not leave that basement plant for days on end—sleeping there, eating there, never emerging into the daylight and fresh air.
About noon on February 8, 1972, exactly a year to the day after the grand jury’s indictment of Donald Viggiano for assault of a West Point cadet at the Playboy Club, a switch was thrown and the first tape recorders and monitors began to hum. Surrounded by a jungle of wires and cables leading to those machines, Coffey, Trapani and a couple of other detectives waited anxiously for something to happen. Their wait was a short one, and when it was over, there was no worry about getting a judicial extension of the wiretap order.
Somebody named William B. “Billy” Benjamin kept picking up the phone in the bar, dialing numbers in the New York area, and asking urgently, “Is he in? I’ve got to talk to him.” Just who Benjamin was calling he never said, and apparently it wasn’t necessary. He never succeeded in reaching his man, and he was finally forced to leave a message: “Tell him Mr. Benjamin called and I’m going back to Philly and I’ll call him tonight.” By four-thirty that afternoon, Benjamin abandoned his search. Detectives watching the bar saw him leave with Vincent Rizzo.
Those might, of course, have been only innocent calls and the departure in company with Rizzo might have been just a meeting of two casual acquaintances. They might have been, except for who William Benjamin was. A short, fat man from Philadelphia, then sixty-three years old, he was a familiar figure, in name and person, to those who knew the inner workings of the syndicate. Benjamin’s criminal record dated back to the 1930s, and his prison record included terms in federal penitentiaries and Sing Sing. He was an accomplished forger, a dealer in stolen and counterfeit securities; he had long worked with the leaders of the organized underworld all over the United States, and there were rumors that he had recently moved into heroin and cocaine. On the files of the Pennsylvania Motor Vehicle Commission, he was listed as the owner of a new Mercedes. He never drove it. The man who drove it was Vincent Rizzo.
If nobody knew who or what Benjamin was seeking with such urgency all the day, there was no doubt what Vincent “Popo” Tortora was up to when he picked up the phone a little while later. He called Freddy Mayo, reached Jimmy Heimerle instead. Heimerle would serve as well, for he and Mayo were sometime partners. Tortora was sending two guys to Florida on a job, he told Heimerle. “I need two things for Miami on Tuesday.”
No trouble, Heimerle assured him. The airline tickets would be prepared and delivered in plenty of time. Indeed, there was no reason why Heimerle or Mayo would have any difficulty supplying two airline tickets, or a thousand if they were asked for that many. That was their business, among other things. Heimerle had been arrested two years earlier by Las Vegas police—he was using the alias “James Farrell,” and he was carrying a suitcase full of stolen airline tickets, credit cards and traveler’s checks; he and Mayo had been picked up a few months later in Queens with another bundle; and in 1971, Heimerle had wholesaled more than 10,000 stolen and counterfeit tickets. It was a big business and a lucrative one, and he and Mayo were the travel agents for Rizzo and a lot of others in the syndicate. The listeners in the Stuyvesant Town plant would hear a lot more about that business in the days, weeks and months to come.
Rizzo returned alone, in time to take a long-distance call.
“Vinnie?” asked the caller.
“Yeah. How are you? I’ve been waiting for your call.”
“I saw the guy.”
“You went to L.A., personally?”
“Yeah. No, I sent somebody. He owned up owing you. He admitted owing it to you.”
“Yeah,” Rizzo said. “He knows he owes it. Twenty-five grand.”
“I’ll take a trip in with a friend of mine.”
“Yeah, you do that.”
“Do you want me to lean a little bit?”
“You … oh, just so far, you know.”
“Yeah. You don’t want nothin’ physical?”
“No, no,” Rizzo said. “A lot of abuse. But that’s about it.”
“Maybe a little slap job?”
“Well, if he steps out of line. I hadda throw a few, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“You collect the twenty-five,” Rizzo said, “you keep five for your trouble.”
“Right.”
“You’ll let me know?”
“Right. Or you can call me. You got the number?”
“Home or at the salon?”
“At the salon.”
“You’d better give me the number again, to make sure.”
The number was given, though not with an area code.
“Got it,” Rizzo said. “How are things out there otherwise?”
“Great. Hot as hell.”
“Just like New York.”
There was a laugh. “You gotta come out here.”
“One of these days. Right now, I got other things.”
“Sure.”
“So, you’ll take care of that matter?”
“You bet. I’ll be in touch.”
Standing in the plant next to the monitor, Coffey knew immediately that he was listening to something that went beyond the jurisdiction of the New York district attorney’s office. He was hearing a conversation about extortion and assault, and maybe more; the crimes crossed state lines and so were in the federal jurisdiction. That could be a major break. Though he considered this his personal case, and one he wanted to hold on to until he reached an end, still, the federal government, and particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had the resources and the money that Hogan’s office did not. If the FBI could be brought in, then maybe sharing the case, and the glory that might come from it, would be worth the price.
But Coffey did not then know the identities of either the victim or the man Rizzo was contacting to collect what was owed, and he wasn’t even certain where the call had originated. Something in what had been said made him think of Las Vegas. Acting on that hunch, he dialed Las Vegas information, asked for the telephone numbers of the beauty salons in all the hotels he could think of—the Sands, the Flamingo, the Sahara, Caesar’s Palace and others. He prayed silently while the numbers were recited, his eyes fixed on the pad on which he had scribbled the digits given to Rizzo. He hit a winner. There was a match. The number was that of the Salon di Pompiea at Caesar’s Palace. Its owner: Isadore Marion. Coffey had heard that name before.
Forty-year-old “Izzy” Marion was a man of many faces and several careers. Swarthy, muscular, always meticulously groomed and dressed in the latest Hollywood styles, he was a ladies’ man, a man who knew what women wanted and how to give it to them. He pampered and curried and catered to them in the beauty salon he owned at Caesar’s Palace, which his clients called “Izzy’s Place” and where his very expensive personal services were in constant demand. He owned, too, the beauty salon at the Playboy Hotel in Great Gorge, New Jersey, and had made it flourish, its appointment books filled from morning till night despite the exorbitant fees he demanded. His appeal to women was not merely the outgrowth of his expertise with scissors, combs and all the other tools of the beautician. There was something about him, something earthy and sensual and menacing, that appealed to certain types of women, and he was always surrounded by the most beautiful ones. He had been married for a time to the pop singer Connie Francis, but that marriage had come to an end when another side of Marion appeared: he beat her so badly the night before she was scheduled to open at the Copacabana that she had to cancel the appearance. Marion was more than a beautician and more than a lover. He was a tough guy, a strong-arm man, a man with his hands in a multitude of rackets. He was originally from Detroit and was very close to the boss of the Detroit Mafia family, Joe Zerilli.
Coffey took that news and a tape of the Marion-Rizzo conversation back to Goldstock and Vitrano and suggested that they call in the federal people. That was the only way they were going to move in on this particular crime, since Marion was in Las Vegas, his victim in Los Angeles and the New York police on their own would have no way of discovering his identity and so, perhaps, preventing an assault on him, or worse.
Goldstock called Daniel Hollman, then head of the Organized Crime Strike Force for the Department of Justice in the Southern District of New York, and told him something very hot, with federal implications, had come into the hands of Hogan’s detectives. They ought to meet to talk about it.
Hollman and his chief assistant, William Aronwald, himself an assistant district attorney in Hogan’s office before moving on to the Strike Force, showed up the next day in Goldstock’s office and listened while he and Vitrano went over what had been discovered. When they finished, Hollman and Aronwald rose, shook their heads, said it had been a pleasant meeting, but that they were not really interested. They had bigger things to do, more important people to go after than a couple of smalltime hoods in New York and Nevada.
So, Hogan’s office was still on its own. The Rizzo-Marion extortion lead had to be put to one side and the detectives in the plant had to look for something closer to home that they could deal with. They could only keep watching and waiting and listening to see what happened next.
What happened next was totally unexpected, totally bewildering. Shortly after noon on February 11, three days after the plant went into operation, Rizzo picked up the phone in Jimmy’s Lounge and called Lufthansa Airline. “I want to make a reservation on a plane to Munich, Germany, on the twenty-sixth,” he said. “That’s in two weeks, two weeks tomorrow.”
“We do have a flight that day. Flight 409, leaving John F. Kennedy Airport at five forty-five in the evening.”
“Yeah, that sounds okay.”
“Will that be one-way or round-trip?”
“Round-trip. I want to come back in, like, in a week, like, what would that be—oh, March fourth? You got anything then?”
“Yes, sir. We can confirm you on Flight 408, leaving Munich at eleven in the morning on March fourth.”
“Okay. That sounds good.”
“Will that be first-class or tourist?”
“You got a package or something? You know, plane, hotel, the whole thing?”
“Yes, sir, we have a package that would give you a week in Munich at the Palace Hotel.”
“What kind of hotel is that?”
“It’s a new hotel, sir, overlooking the site where the Olympic Games will be held this summer.”
“How much is it gonna cost me?”
“Two hundred twenty dollars,” the Lufthansa clerk replied. “Would you like me to confirm your reservations now?”
“Yeah, I want to make the reservations now. Name is Rizzo, V.”
Rizzo had made his first mistake. It was a major one, but natural to him, born of his cheapness, of his eternal search for a bargain. For, listening to that conversation in the plant, Joe Coffey knew not only that Rizzo was intending to go to Germany, and when he was going and returning, but where he would be staying while in Munich. Coffey rushed back to Leonard Street, into Vitrano’s office. “You won’t believe this,” he said, “but Rizzo’s going to Munich, Germany.”
Vitrano stared at him. “You know that for sure?”
“He just called Lufthansa, made a reservation, plane, hotel, the whole deal.”
“What’s he going to Germany for?”
“Inspector,” Coffey said, “that’s beyond my comprehension. But I can tell you what he’s not going for, and that’s for the skiing in the Alps. The only skiing that guy’s ever done is on the sidewalks of New York, and you can bet he didn’t have boards on his feet.”
“Agreed. Then, why do you think he’s going?”
“That’s the trouble. I haven’t got the slightest idea. But I’m sure it’s got to be something big. Rizzo’s not the kind of guy to take a trip like that unless it’s really big. And I think we ought to go with him.”
Vitrano laughed sarcastically. “You got rocks in your head.”
“I’m not kidding,” Coffey said. “Look, this investigation has really taken off. Everything we’ve done so far has paid off good. We tail the guy around and look what we came up with. We’ve had the tap on Jimmy’s for three days and we’ve made a dozen cases already. Now, all of a sudden, Rizzo’s doing something totally unexpected. I don’t think we can just drop him and let him run by himself. We’ve got to go with him.”
“Look, Joe,” Vitrano said. “As it happens, I agree with you. I think you’re absolutely right. But I can tell you right now that the chances of your getting on a plane and flying off to Europe are absolutely zero. First of all, you tell anybody you want to go to Europe to tail Rizzo, they’re going to be sure what you really want is to set up a big party, have an all-expenses-paid vacation on Hogan, and chase a few frauleins. Maybe we could get around that. But the main thing is that you’re up against department policy, and you know it as well as I do. You know the last time a New York cop went out of the country on an official investigation? In 1909. That was Petrosino. And you know what happened to him. He got knocked off in Sicily. No cop’s been sent out of the country since then on an investigation. That’s a hard-and-fast rule. No exceptions.”
“Maybe,” Coffey said, “after more than sixty years it’s time somebody changed a few rules, or at least made an exception. Besides, Hogan’s not bound by that, and we all know it. If he wants to send somebody, nobody’s going to say no.”
“Okay, Joe,” Vitrano conceded, “I think you’re right, and because I think you’re right, I’ll see what I can do. But I don’t want to go in to the boss and tell him you want to go because you’ve got some kind of wild hunch. We have to give him something solid. Take a little time, do some thinking, see if you can come up with something that will make Hogan go for it.”
For the next several hours, Coffey hung around the office, went out a couple of times for coffee, tried to come up with an idea that would not be too farfetched, that would be logical enough so that Hogan would believe it and agree that the time had come to break that ancient police department rule. He pulled out all the reports on Rizzo, went over them, looking through the files for something. And then he found it. “This was the time,” he remembers, “when the troubles between the IRA and the Protestants were really blowing up in Northern Ireland, not that they’ve ever stopped, of course, but the situation was really bad then, people getting killed all over the place, practically a real war going on. Now, I know that Hogan’s an Irish Catholic, just like me, and, to put it mildly, he doesn’t like what’s going on over there. And I know, and we can show it to him, that Rizzo had been a gunrunner, that that had been one of his rackets. So, suddenly, this real bullshit story comes to me and it looks pretty good. We’ll tell Hogan that it looks like the reason Rizzo is going to Munich is to make contact with the people at Krupp over there and arrange to buy guns which he’s going to ship to the Protestants in Northern Ireland to use against the Catholics. I figure if Hogan’s going to buy anything, it’ll be something like that.”
Coffey went back to Vitrano with the story. Vitrano listened, started to grin, laughed out loud. “That’s pretty good, Joe,” he said. “It just might work. Anyway, let me give it a shot. I’ll go in to see the boss and lay it out for him.”
Coffey waited near Vitrano’s office with mounting anticipation while Vitrano went in to talk to Hogan. Vitrano reappeared about fifteen minutes later, grinned at Coffey. “He didn’t say yes,” the inspector said, “but then he didn’t say no. He said he’d think about it over the weekend and give us an answer on Monday. You’re still in business.”
But Monday was a long way off and a lot could happen over the weekend. Coffey knew he could not rush Hogan, that he would have to wait those days, but still he wondered if perhaps his chances might improve, become more solid, if he could enlist additional support to put more pressure on the district attorney. He sought out Frank Rogers, an assistant district attorney, the chief administrator of the office, a man very close to Hogan and someone Coffey had come to know well, and respect. Late that Friday afternoon, he asked Rogers to have a drink with him. Over a couple of martinis, he explained exactly what he wanted to do and why; he told him the story he had invented for Hogan’s benefit and the reason for it, and stressed how his intuition had so far been right and there was no reason to think it would turn sour this time. “Now you have the whole thing, Frank,” he said. “I would appreciate your help in getting the okay from Hogan.”
Rogers nodded slowly. “I think you’ve got your teeth into something, Joe,” he said. “I’ll talk to the boss. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
Coffey wandered through the weekend edgy, nervous, the waiting pressing in like a restricting garment, making it hard to eat or breathe or sleep. He took offense at even the mildest remark; from Pat or the kids, found himself snapping and snarling at them. All he wanted was for Monday to arrive, for Hogan to say yes.
Monday morning, within an hour after they arrived at the office, Coffey skipping an early appearance at the plant for a change, Coffey and Vitrano were summoned by Hogan. The district attorney told them to sit down, stared at them silently, his expression blank, unreadable. “I’ve thought about it,” he said when the waiting became unbearable. “I’ve come to a decision.” He looked from one to the other; leaned forward. “I agree that that man, Rizzo, must be followed to Munich. I agree that we must send someone to find out exactly what he’s up to. If he’s trying to send arms to Ireland, we have to stop it. But I’m only going to approve sending one man. That’s all we can afford. That one man is going to be you, Joe Coffey, nobody else. Joe, we’ll give you a thousand dollars to cover all your expenses, and let me tell you, that’s more than we can really afford. But let me warn you right now, you’d better come back with results or you can start looking for a job as a nightwatchman.”
Coffey floated out of Hogan’s office. Since, unlike Rizzo, he would not be traveling on a special package deal, would be paying, the full freight all the way, the plane fare alone was going to cost $852 round-trip. That would leave him less than $150 for the hotel and all the rest of his expenses. That didn’t bother him at all. “I was so enthusiastic about this that I didn’t care if they told me they were only going to give me two hundred dollars. I wanted to go. I had to go.”