When he had departed for Munich, his wife and children had been the only ones to see him off. Now, on his return, a limousine was waiting for Coffey at the airport, to speed him without delay into Manhattan, to the eagerly awaiting FBI agents, Strike Force attorneys and his friends in the district attorney’s office. For the next two days, with only a few hours out for a reunion with his family, he answered a thousand questions, went over again and again in excruciating detail all that had taken place in Munich, his reading of those events, the interpretation of the German authorities. What he reported began to give a direction to what until then had been essentially an amorphous and unfocused investigation.
Now, after Munich and the Palace Hotel, the skin was being peeled away and they were seeing the core and its magnitude. They were being given a look into the multi-billion-dollar trade in stolen and counterfeit securities, were seeing how it spread across oceans and around the world, were learning that languages and borders were no barriers to those who traveled through that world. It was huge enough and dangerous enough—physically dangerous and economically perilous—to have united the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the Justice Department in an all-out campaign to stop it.
Indeed, the FBI had thrown its arsenal into the hunt, its vast store of men, equipment and money. What Hogan had wanted to do and could not was now being done. The FBI computers were whirling away, developing patterns, spewing out information, cross-checking, cataloguing. In a dozen cities across the country, agents were taking that information, developing new leads, feeding what they learned back into the computer banks. Attorneys went to court seeking the right to wiretap any and all suspicious phones, including those at William Benjamin’s home and office in Philadelphia, at the Columbia Civic League Club, at Rizzo’s home and at his L and S Coffee Shop. (When investigators discovered that the phone at the coffee shop was about to be cut off for nonpayment of the outstanding bill, they paid the bill and arranged with the telephone company for the order to be quashed and a notice sent to Rizzo explaining that the threatened termination of service had been a mistake.)
A major breakthrough had grown from Coffey’s hunch and from the work he and others in Hogan’s office had been doing, and now there seemed little the FBI was not willing to do to make certain the investigations melded and that cooperation was total. An agent was offered, to work with Coffey as a partner, and Coffey was asked if he had any particular agent he preferred. He did. A few years before, he had worked on another joint investigation with Richard Tamarro, an agent about his own age and physical size. But in many ways, they were antithetical. Coffey had grown up on the streets of New York, was intuitive, willing to act on hunches and bend or break the rules if he had to. Tamarro was Rhode Island born and bred, a strait-laced FBI agent in the mold stamped out by J. Edgar Hoover, a mold from which it had never occurred to him to deviate. But he was a superb researcher, at home with papers, able to read reports and make sense out of obscurities, able to take a plethora of information and turn it into a coherent memorandum. And he was willing to bow in the field to the street-wise Coffey. “He wasn’t too sharp when it came to street knowledge,” Coffey says, “but then that’s true of most FBI guys who haven’t grown up in a big city. When it came to taking papers and a Dictaphone and a computer and the rest of the office-type stuff and putting things together, though, he was very competent, very sharp. In that area, he was able to generate a hell of a lot. I liked Tamarro and we worked pretty well together. But, really, the reason I asked for him, the reason we actually got in touch with him ourselves when they offered us an agent, was because we knew him and we figured we might as well have somebody we knew as some eightball they might hand us who’d fuck everything up. We figured we could probably handle Tamarro, at least to some extent.”
Making all the arrangements for the future of the investigation took days, and it was the middle of the week following his return from Munich before Coffey could get back where he wanted to be—in the field and into the middle of the accelerating chase. He showed up as soon as he could at the Stuyvesant Town plant, eager to go over the logs, read transcripts, listen to the tapes, find out what had gone on while he was away. The other detectives were waiting for him. When he came through the door, the first thing he saw were photographs of himself taped to the walls, all labeled with messages: God Is Back! Jesus Has Returned!
He could laugh at that, recognizing the levity in it, knowing that he was a hard taskmaster, a ballbreaker, who constantly demanded work and more work from those working with and under him. But there was something he could not laugh at. The logs for the time he had been gone were empty, the tapes blank.
“What gives?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” somebody said. “You were off in Europe with Rizzo, Joe, having a good time with the frauleins. What could have been going on?”
Coffey could hardly believe what he was being told. “What do you mean, what could have been going on?” he said. “You bastards have been goofing off, that’s what. You’ve been having a big party all the time I was away, that’s what’s been going on. Do you guys realize you could have screwed up this whole investigation? Rizzo’s not the only one who uses that phone. Tortora uses it. Jerry de Lorenzo uses it. Tartaglia uses it, and so do a lot of other wise guys. But you decided, screw that. Do you realize that Rizzo could have called in from an outside phone in Munich and because you decided to have a party and fuck off, we’ll never know it?” He turned to one of the detectives, a veteran of years on Hogan’s staff, who had been charged with running the plant in Coffey’s absence. “I want to talk to you,” Coffey said. “I’m going to take you out to dinner tonight. Let’s go down to Mulberry Street and have Italian.”
The restaurant was a favorite of the detectives, and when they entered, they were welcomed warmly, given a table in the rear where they could have a little privacy. Coffey ordered martinis for both of them, and when they had finished, ordered another round. They chatted casually about inconsequentials over their drinks and through dinner. Coffey waited until steaming cups of coffee were poured and placed in front of them. Then he leaned back, stared hard at the other detective, said, “Hey, fuck-up, I want you to tell me exactly what you did while I was gone.”
The older detective looked at him and grinned. “Screw you, Joe,” he said. “You’re not my boss. So what’s the big deal?”
Coffey glared. “No?” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you exactly what you did. You didn’t do one damn thing. You sat around on your ass and you told those other guys, ‘Fuck him, he’s only a detective like the rest of us. He’s not here anyway. He’s over in Germany having a good time. How’s he ever going to find out?’ You fed them all that shit and they listened. Well, you’re older, you’re more experienced, they listened to you. You’re the guy who was supposed to keep things going while I was away. That was your responsibility. And you fucked it up. So, I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to lock you up.”
“What are you going to lock me up for?” the older detective said, aghast.
“I’m going to lock you up for nonfeasance. How’s that for a start?”
“Jesus, Joe.”
“Don’t Jesus me, you bastard. You could have blown this whole case.”
It went on for ten, fifteen more minutes, Coffey growing angrier, his voice more determined and convincing, cowing his companion. But the rage and the threats had their effect on both of them. Coffey rid himself of the frustration and fury that had been building since he had first walked into the plant. By the time they left the restaurant, they had come to terms, declared a temporary truce. The older detective would go back to work, would shape up. And for the moment, Coffey would watch, see how things developed, do nothing untoward. “Actually,” Coffey says, “from then on he worked as hard as anybody, so maybe it all turned out for the best. But, I was really pissed off that day and I wasn’t going to let anything like that happen again.”
He would never know what, if anything, had been lost because he had been gone. He was, though, always certain that there was something, perhaps even something vital. Now that he was back, he was determined there would be no future lapses. He instilled his own passion into the others, not least because, with the entrance into the hunt of the FBI, the reality of his hunch was confirmed and everyone began to see potential gain for himself. “This was turning into the biggest thing the office had had in twenty-five years and they knew it,” Coffey said. “And they knew that they would be able to heap glory on themselves if they did it right. There’d be promotions and all the rest. Everybody got to thinking that, so there wasn’t any more goofing off after that.”
Once more the tapes began to roll, once more the monitors began to emit the sound of voices confident that nobody was listening. Torrents poured forth. Evidence of crimes of every sort mounted higher and higher.
Vincent Tortora answered the phone. It was Izzy Marion calling from Las Vegas. “Popo,” he said, “I got somethin’ I’d like you to do for me.”
“Name it,” Tortora said.
“There’s a guy over in Jersey, name of Capasso. You know him?”
“I heard of him.”
“Owns seven, eight garbage trucks over in Lodi.”
“Yeah.”
“I want you to mess up those trucks.”
“How bad?”
“Just the transmissions. You know, whatever you can do. I don’t want nothin’ done to Capasso or his people personally. Just the trucks, that’s all.”
“I got you,” Tortora said. “I got to meet some people over in Belleville tomorrow. I’ll talk to ’em. They’ll do anythin’ I ask. They owe me a million favors as it is.”
“Whatever it costs,” Marion said, “you let me know. It will be fair because it’s good people involved.”
“Okay,” Tortora said. “Before I do anythin’, I’ll call you back at the salon and let you know what it’s gonna cost.”
The next day, detectives and FBI agents followed Tortora to Belleville, N. J., saw him meet with several New Jersey hoodlums, though they did not hear what was said. A few days later, Capasso’s garbage trucks were immobilized.
What was behind it became clear within a week, when Marion called Tortora to tell him that he was on his way to Syracuse. Marion had been trying to muscle his way into a New Jersey company called Scientific Incineration Devices, Inc., which had developed some products along the guidelines laid down by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce toxic odors and pollutants during the disposal of waste. The company was trying to market those devices throughout the northeast. One of SID’s directors was Frank Capasso and apparently he had been resisting Marion’s efforts to become a partner. The attack on Capasso’s trucks was designed to change his mind and demonstrate that Marion could be a very valuable partner.
It apparently worked. When Marion arrived in Syracuse and checked into the Holiday Inn, he was not alone. With him were Ray Neal, a major syndicate figure in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, and Michael Riccardelli, a director and leading figure of Scientific Incineration Devices. On the hotel register, Marion identified himself as a sales representative for the company.
Marion, Neal and Riccardelli were in Syracuse for three days, with a side trip one evening down the New York Thruway to Utica. Watching their every move were two of Hogan’s detectives, who had rushed upstate as soon as Marion’s travel plans were known, and several FBI agents attached to the Syracuse office of the bureau. Those three days were a time of constant meetings. Marion, Neal and Riccardelli went into conference with nearly every major figure in organized crime in upstate New York. They met with elected officials of Syracuse, and after those meetings, Marion was heard to boast, “We sold them an incinerator.” They had a long dinner session with Utica’s mayor Michael Caruso, and when dinner was over, they went on to visit with the man who controlled all the bookmaking in central New York. And throughout those days, they were in constant contact with Sergeant Jack Dinaro of the Syracuse Police Department and head of that department’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. Several times a day, he called Marion at the Holiday Inn and Marion called him.
It was during those days that the FBI came perilously close to blowing the investigation. As Coffey explains it, “We don’t operate the way they do. We prefer to stay undercover as long as we can. We don’t come out in the open until we absolutely have to, and we never interview people until we’ve made our case. Their philosophy is that if they come right out up front and flash those magic credentials, they’re going to get information, people are just going to open up and spill everything at the sight of those wallets flashing open in front of them. But by doing that, they can wreck the whole operation, which they nearly did in Syracuse and a half a dozen other times.”
Near the end of Marion’s stay, two local FBI agents approached the desk clerk at the Holiday Inn, flashed their credentials and asked to see the telephone records for Marion’s room. The desk clerk produced the records. He also did something else. He called Sergeant Dinaro at Syracuse police headquarters and told him of the appearance of the FBI agents. Dinaro passed the word on to Marion. Marion must have made some kind of connection, become convinced that one of the numbers he had been calling was tapped and that was what had put the FBI on to him in Syracuse. He rushed from his room to a pay phone, dialed long-distance.
In Jimmy’s Lounge in New York, the phone rang. In the Stuyvesant Town plant, the tape recorder began to spin, the monitor to give out the sound of Marion’s voice. Coffey, standing nearby, heard it all.
“Is Popo there?”
“Just a minute. Popo, phone for you.”
“Yeah?”
“Popo?”
“Yeah.”
“You know who this is?”
“Yeah. I recognize the voice.”
“Don’t say my name.”
“What? Why?”
“Just listen to me. I’ll give you a number. You go to another phone and call me right back. I got to talk to you.”
“You can talk,” Tortora said. “This is my safe phone. There ain’t nothin’ to worry about.”
“Listen to me, Popo, and do like I tell you. I’m tellin’ you, take a walk, go to a public phone, anyplace, and call me back.”
“You nuts?” Tortora said. “We can talk now. Nothin’s wrong here.”
For more than ten minutes they argued. Realizing that Marion was adamant, Tortora finally agreed. A hundred feet from where he stood in Jimmy’s Lounge, out on the street corner, there was a public phone. It would have taken Tortora thirty seconds to get to it and make the call. But Tortora was so certain his phone was secure he would not make that hundred-foot walk. He merely waited five minutes, then picked up his own phone and dialed the number in Syracuse that Marion had given him.
“Okay, Izzy,” he said.
“You on another phone?” Marion demanded.
“Sure, just like you said. I’m callin’ from outside.”
(In the plant a block and a half away, Coffey and the other detectives stared at the monitor and at each other in disbelief, could barely hear what was being said as they erupted with laughter.)
“Okay,” Marion said.
“So, what’s the big deal?” Tortora asked.
“I think your phone’s tapped.”
“You nuts or somethin’,” Tortora said. “How could it be tapped? We’re payin’ off enough guys. We’re checkin’ all the time. So, if it was tapped, we’d sure as hell know.”
“Yeah?” Marion said. “Well, Jack just tipped me. The feds have been askin’ some questions. They was here lookin’ up the phone records for my room. One of the numbers they got to come up with is yours.”
“So what?” Tortora said. “You been callin’ a lot of places, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, what are you worried about? What makes you think they’d figure there was somethin’ special about this one?”
“I just got a hunch.”
“Forget it.”
“Yeah? Well, tell me, how’d they’d know I was here?”
“Who knows? A dozen ways. It don’t mean nothin’. Forget it. Look, you comin’ down?”
“Yeah. Soon as we finish up here. I’ll call you when we get in.”
It had been a near thing. For a long time afterward, Coffey worried that Tortora might begin to have some second thoughts and if he did, the phone in Jimmy’s Lounge that had been paying such high dividends in so many areas, and all the other tapped phones, as well, might suddenly go silent. He waited. And then he began to breathe easier. Neither Tortora nor Rizzo nor any of the others who used all those phones so often and so openly grew suspicious until it was far too late. Even Marion’s fears were calmed; within another day he was back on that line, speaking as freely as ever.
But Coffey did not forget. He went back to the office in a rage. “I told the boss that the FBI was a bunch of fuck-ups who were going to blow this whole investigation unless he did something. We had a meeting and we sat down with the feds and we said, ‘This has got to stop unless you want this thing to collapse right around your feet.’ Well, they agreed to play it cool, and except for one or two other times down the road when they went back to their old tricks, they did just that. So, no harm was done, but it sure could have been.”
Their business in upstate New York finished, Marion and Neal boarded a flight on a Sunday afternoon in late March for LaGuardia Airport. Coffey, other detectives and FBI agents were waiting for them when they landed. But it was dusk on Sunday and traffic into the city from Long Island was very heavy. By the time they crossed the Triborough Bridge into Manhattan, they had lost sight of the car containing Marion and Neal. There was one hope of picking them up again. Marion had told Tortora he would call once he was in the city. Coffey raced back to the Stuyvesant Town plant, hung anxiously over the monitor for the next few hours waiting for that call. It finally came late in the evening. He and Neal, Marion informed Tortora, were in rooms 706-07 at the Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue.
There was a rush to Leonard Street. Orders for wiretaps and bugs were drafted, a judge was roused to sign them, and then it was back into the cars to speed uptown to the hotel. The Delmonico’s manager, Charles Gray, was informed just who the guests were in rooms 706-07. When he heard that, when he saw the official wiretap and bugging orders, he offered to do anything he could to help, assigned the detectives a room just down the hall from Marion. It quickly filled with Hogan’s men, FBI agents and technicians lugging in their load of listening devices. Then they could only wait and hope that Marion and Neal would leave so they could gain access and install the taps, plant the bugs.
The wait was a short one. Within an hour, Marion and Neal left, got into a cab in front of the hotel and headed for the Separate Tables, a restaurant on Third Avenue favored by people well placed in the entertainment world, politics and the rackets. Close behind Marion and Neal were cars filled with FBI agents. Their job: observe what was going on and, more important, let Coffey and the technicians at the Delmonico know if and when either Marion or Neal left the restaurant and started back. Other agents and detectives were stationed downstairs in the hotel lobby to keep watch just in case either managed to slip past those observing the restaurant.
The technicians moved in. The phones were tapped. A sophisticated bug, far superior and more sensitive than the one provided by the CIA in Munich, was planted. The technicians returned to Coffey’s room, did a check on the bug. Something was wrong. The tap was working fine, but the bug was picking up nothing. They would have to return to the suite and try to figure out what was wrong. They needed time.
Coffey got in touch with the FBI agents watching the Separate Tables. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. No sweat.”
“They’re still there, inside?”
“Nice and cozy. A couple of people are with them.”
“Who? You recognize them?”
“One of them’s Popo Tortora. A couple of other guys we don’t know, two dames.”
“Okay. Let us know if they move.”
“Don’t worry. We’ve got them staked out. Nobody’s going to get past us.”
Assured, Coffey sent the technicians on their return mission. They went over the installation, slowly and carefully, made a few repairs on what seemed like possible trouble points, returned to their room and went through the tests once more. Something was still not right. The bug refused to function. They would have to get back into Marion’s suite once more, and it was growing late.
Coffey reached the FBI surveillance team again. “Are they still there?”
“Sure. We told you we’d let you know if they move.”
“You’re positive?”
“Yes.”
“Because we’re having some trouble here. We need more time.”
“Don’t worry. We’re sitting on them. Nobody’s left the place. If somebody does, we’ll let you know.”
Coffey took a deep breath, nodded to the technicians. “It’s still clear. One more time. Only, for Chrissake, get it right this time.”
The two wiremen, both dressed in shabby work clothes, moved down the hall one more time, picked the lock on the door of the suite one more time, pulled the door open and started in. Ray Neal was sitting on the bed. He was naked. Next to him was a forty-five-caliber pistol. Marion might still be at the Separate Tables, but somehow Neal had managed to leave without being spotted, had managed to return to the Delmonico, pass through the lobby, ride up the elevator and get into his suite without being observed by any of the watchers. He looked up at the sound of the door opening, saw two men standing in the doorway, one holding a set of lock picks. He stared at them in surprise for only a moment, then leaped from the bed and rushed for them. They slammed the door in his face. He grabbed the inside knob and tried to pull it open. They held the outside knob tightly to keep it closed. The tug-of-war went on and on, the wiremen holding tightly from the outside, Neal pulling and shouting from the inside. It was a stalemate that could not last. Neal’s grip relaxed. The wiremen let go, turned and started to race down the corridor, seeking escape.
Behind them, they heard a door open. They glanced back. Neal was coming out the door, still without any clothes but now holding on to his forty-five, waving it and shouting. They turned a corner. They were trapped. They had come against a cul-de-sac and there was no way to turn. Neal came around the corner. He saw them, stared, raised his pistol and started to aim. Suddenly he stopped. It was as though he had just realized that he was standing in a public hallway in a hotel, holding a pistol, completely naked. He spun, raced back toward his room.
Coffey and the other detective who had remained with him heard the commotion but had no idea what was happening … until Neal called the front desk. Through the wiretap they heard him say that two guys had been trying to break into his room and he had chased them down the corridor, had them trapped. He demanded that the cops be called immediately.
That worried Coffey. Gray was gone for the evening. Nobody else on duty except the switchboard operator knew what was going on. The precinct cops would soon be on the scene, and they would be joined by the burglary squad and by units from all over midtown and the east side; the hotel was about to become the arena for a massive manhunt, certainly a room search on the seventh floor. Coffey was sure of that. Not long ago, the Pierre Hotel had been the scene of a major jewel robbery. The thieves had not yet been caught and there was some fear that another major hotel burglary or robbery was going to take place at any time. The police had been alerted for any sign of a repetition at other luxury midtown hotels. If the cops entered the room during their search, they would certainly have Neal with them to identify the men who had broken into his room. They would not only spot and identify the two wiremen but they would also see the electronic hardware and then the game would be over. Neal and Marion would have been warned. The whole investigation might then be set back.
Coffey rushed out into the hall, grabbed the two wiremen and pulled them back into the room. Even through the sealed windows, they could hear the sirens of the police cars pulling up in front of the hotel, could see through the windows the flashing lights of at least twenty radio cars jamming the streets, could see scores of cops and detectives pouring into the hotel. The room phone rang. It was the switchboard operator. The cops, she said, were just coming through the door. What should she do?
Coffey had a sudden inspiration. One of the wiremen, Pete DiCastol, was about fifty years old, but with his gray hair and seamed face, he looked a lot older. Coffey told the woman on the switchboard to tell the cops that DiCastol was an old man who rented the room on a permanent basis and lived there with his grown son. Then the electronic gear was shoved under the beds and into the closet. The second wireman and Coffey’s partner hid in the closet as well, the door locked behind them. The room was straightened. DiCastol got undressed and climbed into bed. Coffey stripped, jumped into the shower and turned the water on.
There was a pounding on the door. Coffey turned off the shower, wrapped a towel around his middle, went to the door. DiCastol sat up in bed, looking as though he had just awakened. Coffey opened the door a crack. “Yes?”
“There’s been a report of a burglary on this floor,” a cop in uniform said, “a couple of rooms away. Have you heard or seen anything suspicious?”
Coffey shook his head. Neal stood just behind the cop, trying to peer into the room, seeing only the shape of DiCastol in bed, not his face. Other cops filled the hall. “No, we haven’t, officer,” Coffey said. “There’s just my father and me in here. He went to bed a while ago and I’ve been in the shower. We haven’t heard a thing.”
The cop looked around the room from the doorway. He did not enter. He could see nothing out of the ordinary, only an older man in bed, half awake, and a younger man, obviously young enough to be the son, standing just inside the room, a towel wrapped around his middle, obviously just out of the shower. “Okay,” the cop said. “If you do happen to hear anything suspicious, call downstairs. We’ll be here for a while.”
It was some time before the hotel finally quieted and the cops left, having found nothing despite their search. The situation was still tenuous, though. The bug in Neal and Marion’s room still needed to be repaired. The problems would have to be corrected before Marion returned or the project would turn out to be useless. Some means had to be found to get Neal away from the hotel long enough for the wiremen to get back to that room and do what had to be done. Coffey pulled a two-way radio out from under the bed, called Robert Nicholson, a sergeant in Hogan’s office who was down on the street, and asked him to come up to the room.
“Look,” he said when Nicholson came through the door, “we’ve got to get that guy out. Why don’t you go knock on his door and tell him you’re from the burglary squad and you want him to go down to the station with you and go over some mug shots to see if he can pick out the two guys? That way, you can keep him away while we find out what’s wrong with the bug.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Nicholson said. “He could go through the mug shots in less than an hour. So, what I’ll do is this. I’ll take him around to the bars in midtown, tell him we’ve got an idea the guys may be hanging out in one of them and we want to see if he can spot them. That way, you can have as long as you need. We’ll find some way to keep Marion away, too. I’ll call you every half-hour or so and you can let me know how you’re doing.”
Nicholson did just what he said. And this time it took the technicians only a few minutes to trace the trouble and get the bug working. Then it was wait and see what came through.
But what came through that bug was hardly worth the trouble. In the early hours of the morning, both Neal and Marion had returned to the suite. Neal told Marion the story of the evening’s excitement. Marion played tough guy, informing Neal that he should have shot the two burglars where they stood instead of worrying about the fact that he didn’t have any clothes on.
The wiretap, however, did pay off. Marion phoned his partner in Scientific Incineration Devices, Mike Riccardelli. “I want you to call up Gabe Piermonte in Boston on Monday,” he ordered. “You know who he is. He’s the deputy mayor up there. You tell him you’re with Izzy Marion. He can do a lot for us up in Boston with the incinerators.”
And Marion took another step along the path he had first trod more than a month before, a path that had its twistings toward Munich and the Palace Hotel. He talked to Vincent Rizzo.
“The guy in L.A. is duckin’ me,” he said. “I want your okay to get heavy with him.”
“Okay,” Rizzo said. “You got it.”
“I want to go in and crack him up.”
“Okay,” Rizzo said.
“You think maybe he’s gonna yell cop?”
“I dunno,” Rizzo said. “He might.”
“Then maybe we ought to send somebody else in to give him a whack first, so he don’t recognize me right away.”
“If you want.”
“What do we do if we still don’t get satisfaction?” Marion asked.
“We go the ultimate,” Rizzo said.
The satisfaction that Rizzo demanded was not forthcoming. Marion contacted a friend in Las Vegas, a thug named William Robertazzi, ordered him to pay a call on the recalcitrant debtor in Los Angeles. “Find that guy,” Marion said, “and tell him the next visit won’t be a friendly one.”
(Coffey was by then convinced that the debtor had to be Jerry Marc Jacobs; convinced, too, that the debt grew from money Ense and Barg had paid Jacobs and which he had not turned over to Rizzo. On the first point, he was right. On the second, and for one of the few times in this investigation, he was wrong. The money was the price Rizzo was demanding for $100,000 worth of United States Treasury “E” bonds that Rizzo had given to Jerry Jacobs to sell and which had been seized in Canada from an associate of Jacobs before the sale could be consummated. Rizzo had informed Jacobs that as far as he was concerned, he didn’t care what had happened to the bonds after Jacobs had taken possession of them. That was Jacobs’s problem, and it was Jacobs’s responsibility to pay Rizzo the agreed price of $25,000. Jacobs maintained that since the bonds had been lost, everybody was out his profits and so Rizzo could really expect nothing. That was not acceptable to Rizzo and he had let Jacobs know during a confrontation in a bar in Arcadia, California, when he slapped the younger man, that if he didn’t get his money, Jerry Jacobs would be a very sorry young man.)
Acting on Marion’s instructions, Robertazzi hurried to Los Angeles, met Jerry Jacobs at a Rexall Drug Store on La Cienega Boulevard. He dismissed Jacobs’s explanations, grabbed him by the collar, lifted him off the ground, nearly strangling him, and shouted, loud enough for other customers in the store to stare with alarm and back away, “I don’t want to hear none of that crap. I come here to get the twenty-five grand you owe and I ain’t leavin’ until I get it. You understand? Don’t think you can run away, because you can’t. No matter where you go, we’ll find you. So, you better get the dough, or else.”
Jacobs gasped that he didn’t have the money with him and there was no way he could get it. Robertazzi dragged him into a phone booth, dialed a long-distance number, said something, then shoved the phone against Jacobs’s ear. Izzy Marion was on the other end. “I’m a friend of Vince Rizzo,” Marion said, “and I’m the guy who sent the guy you’re with to collect what you owe. Now, I want you to understand somethin’. You think the guy you’re with is bad? Well, I’m mean and rotten, and if you don’t come up with it, somethin’ is gonna happen to you. I don’t want to hear no more bullshit. I want that dough, and I want it quick.” Marion hung up. Robertazzi yanked Jacobs out of the booth, slammed him against a nearby wall, told him that nobody was kidding around, that it was pay up or push up daisies.