Through the years, isolated pieces had been put into place—an event here, a name there. But no one, not even the FBI computers, had been able to discern the links, to see that all were part of the same puzzle. Leads were followed without a clear sense of where they were pointing, clues and hints picked up without an understanding of their true import. Then, one spring morning in 1972 in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Detective Joe Coffey lit a cigarette for a nicotine-starved Tony Grant.
In the days before Grant began his recital, Freddy Mayo and Jimmy Heimerle, to save themselves, had talked about stolen and counterfeit airline tickets and credit cards, about the travel agency they operated for Rizzo and others in the syndicate, about trips to San Francisco and Miami and other places. But Grant’s statements sparked the realization that these were just the edges of a much larger canvas. Grant stepped up to that canvas and began to sketch in the contours around the edges and toward the center, adding details, filling in empty places, drawing the lines that connected disparate elements. Though he left the center blank because he did not know what was there, still he knew enough to provide the clues and the means by which that center would one day be filled and the painting completed. If what he did was, in some measure, self-serving and self-exculpating, was only as much as he felt he had to do to win gratitude and eventual freedom, still it was enough. He revealed what Coffey and the New York detectives, and Tamarro and the FBI, were looking for and who they were after. He pointed them toward the potential weak links who might turn. The investigators now began to move more steadily and with surer purpose along the avenues Grant had marked.
But the turning of Grant, Mayo and Heimerle also had an immediate consequence. The detectives would have much preferred to move slowly and carefully along the paths laid out for them by Grant until they reached that center, until they knew it all and there were no more questions. That was no longer possible. The leap had to be made from the investigative to the prosecutive stage. Once the three were in custody, it did not take long before suspicion began to grow and spread along Avenue A that they were undoubtedly talking. That suspicion created a new sense of caution, perhaps even a belief that Izzy Marion might have been right all along when he said the phones were probably tapped. The flood that had poured from the phones at Jimmy’s Lounge, Rizzo’s home, the L and S Coffee Shop and all the other locations for months suddenly began to dry up.
So, the time had arrived to begin to use all that had been gathered since the chase began for its real purpose—to put society’s enemies in society’s prisons. Certainly, the investigations would continue to move steadily ahead, especially in those areas where uncertainty remained and where the evidence was inconclusive. But the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Ronald Goldstock for Hogan’s office and Strike Force attorney William Aronwald for the Justice Department, now took the central roles, empaneled grand juries, began to present the evidence and seek indictments, and prepared to go to trial. That they were duplicating each other’s efforts often was a calculated decision. They were determined to avoid any chance of a slipup, and so indictments for the same crimes were sought in both jurisdictions and once obtained, the burden of prosecution would fall in the jurisdiction in which conviction carried the stiffest sentence. If that meant that Aronwald and the Justice Department would go to court more often and so win most of the laurels, it had to be; Goldstock and Hogan accepted that, even though they were convinced that the success of the whole investigation was primarily the result of the work of their own detectives.
The first indictments were handed down within weeks after those critical arrests on Staten Island, against Grant, Mayo, Heimerle and several others for dealing in stolen and counterfeit airline tickets and credit cards. They were, of course, merely weapons to ensure the continued cooperation of the three and, indeed, none was ever tried. The indictments were, as well, a means for Hogan to ensure that his office and his men got at least some of the credit before the federal government began to claim the major share when the bigger cases started to break. No longer concerned that he might be tipping his hand to those who were the main targets—the hand had already been tipped, he knew, with the arrests of Grant and the others—Hogan called a press conference and announced that the indictments had grown out of a lengthy investigation that was still in progress and that centered around organized crime’s involvement in stolen securities and narcotics. Some of those stolen airline tickets, for instance, he said, had been used by Grant and Mayo for a trip to Argentina to buy cocaine.
If there were still a few on Avenue A who were blind to the significance of the arrests of Mayo, Heimerle and Grant, that revelation by Hogan stripped away the blinders. Some began to run. Rizzo’s strong-arm collector, Patty Marino, disappeared within days and it was years before he finally resurfaced. And the phones went completely silent. Along Avenue A, everywhere syndicate leaders congregated, there were muted conversations and wary glances at strangers, and a growing sense of impending trouble.
It came quickly. Hogan’s detectives passed through the doors of Jimmy’s Lounge and the other hangouts with regularity, bearing subpoenas for appearances before the grand juries. For some of the cops, it was one of the small pleasures at the end of months of frustration; after hearing about so many crimes over those phone taps they were finally able to take some action.
If there was one man who greeted that opportunity with particular relish it was Joe Coffey, whose hunch on a winter night had begun it all. He had been in Jimmy’s Lounge before, of course, but that was at the start and he had been dressed as a steamfitter, was unknown and unrecognized. By the time he walked into the bar again on a July afternoon, his name was well known; it had appeared on enough of those subpoenas, had been mentioned frequently enough in the grand-jury rooms to leave a bitter and unforgettable echo in the ears of those who had heard it and repeated it. Some of them had been waiting for him to appear, just to see what he looked like, to hear what he sounded like. But during that initial period of subpoena serving, he had remained in the background, not out of choice but because that was how things fell. Then his turn came: he was to serve a subpoena on one Vincent Rizzo.
When Coffey strode through the door, looming large in the dim light, groomed and dressed in a lightweight summer suit, nobody doubted that he was a cop, and nobody doubted that Detective Coffey had finally come to call. Rizzo was at the bar. He stared. This was the first time they had ever come face-to-face, but he knew it was Coffey. “So,” he said, “you’re Coffey.”
“Yeah,” Coffey said. “I’m Coffey. What about it?”
“I want to buy you a drink,” Rizzo said.
“I don’t want one of your drinks,” Coffey said.
“No,” Rizzo said, “I want to buy you a drink.” He gestured to the girl behind the bar. “Loraine,” he ordered, “give Detective Coffey a beer.”
“I told you,” Coffey repeated, “I don’t want one of your drinks.”
“Give him a beer anyway,” Rizzo insisted.
Loraine poured the beer, put the glass down in front of Coffey. He picked it up and slowly and deliberately turned it upside down, dumping the beer in a large, spreading puddle all over the bar. “I told you,” he said slowly, “I don’t want your beer. I don’t drink with scum like you.”
Rizzo’s fists clenched, his face turned apoplectic. “Just who the fuck do you think you are?” he raged.
“I know who I am,” Coffey said. “And I told you what you could do with your beer.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” Rizzo shouted. “You come in here like you’re God almighty himself, like you think you own the fuckin’ place. Well, let me tell you somethin’, you son of a bitch. You’re gonna have to learn. I’ll get you, you bastard.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Coffey said. “But I’ve got something for you.” He pulled the subpoena out of his pocket, put it in Rizzo’s hand, turned and walked without haste out of the bar.
When Rizzo made threats, though, it was always with the intention of backing them up. It was not long after Coffey’s appearance in the bar, then, that Rizzo sought out a neighborhood punk everyone knew was an FBI pigeon, told him that the people in the right places ought to know that a detective from the Manhattan D.A.’s office named Joe Coffey had just shaken him down for $50,000. The informant rushed to the FBI with the story. For the next six months, the FBI investigated Coffey, kept him under surveillance, dug deep into his life. The man who did much of the work was Coffey’s friend and partner, Dick Tamarro. He turned up nothing to substantiate the story Rizzo had started, nothing that even showed Coffey to have bent the law or even minor rules or regulations, and eventually a report was filed saying the tip had been baseless and Coffey was clean. (It was not until years later that Coffey learned about that FBI investigation of him, learned about Tamarro’s part in it. He was furious. “It doesn’t make any difference that they found out I was clean,” he says. “They didn’t even have the decency to come to me and ask me about it. All the time they were working on me, they were working right alongside me—Tamarro and the others. They were supposed to be my partners and my friends, which meant they were supposed to trust me like I trusted them. And all that time they were on me, looking for something. Thank God, I wasn’t wearing white socks instead of the department regulation black, or taking two hours for lunch or going home early, anything like that. Who knows what they would have done if they ever found out I was breaking some nit-picking rule?”)
All through the rest of the year and beyond, into 1973, the grand juries sat, viewed the evidence, listened to hundreds of witnesses—the innocent victims, the conspirators who became informants to save themselves, the grim and uncooperative men soon to be defendants. Mayo, Heimerle and Grant spread before them twisted tales of stolen and counterfeit airline tickets and credit cards used to make possible an international trade in narcotics and hot securities. The Argentinian Adolf Soboski, now an informant himself, explained the way cocaine and other narcotics travel from South America to the United States and named those who helped them travel. John Calamarus detailed how a man could be trapped when he borrowed from a loanshark named Vincent Rizzo. After a lot of intense persuasion from detectives, Jose Brocero, the Puerto Rican who had been nearly killed with a pool cue for his temerity in walking into Jimmy’s Lounge and ordering a drink, decided that it might not be such a bad thing after all to tell what had really happened to him that night. One after another, the witnesses paraded before those grand juries, told their stories and went their ways, and the evidence piled up to staggering heights.
By the start of the 1972 Christmas season, only the securities cases remained unfinished. They were, of course, the most important, with the most far-reaching implications, and the most difficult. But all the others had been dealt with. More than a hundred persons had been arrested during all those months on those other charges, and the grand jurors, having heard the evidence of dozens of crimes, had returned or were about to return indictments of thirty-two defendants on seven federal and seventeen New York State counts, including conspiracy, extortion, counterfeiting, mail fraud, perjury, narcotics, attempted murder, attempted robbery, possession of stolen property, forgery, criminal usury and possession of weapons. (No indictments against the others who were arrested were sought because some had turned informant, or the evidence had not been considered strong enough, or there were some other mitigating circumstances.)
Perhaps most satisfying were the multiple indictments against Vincent Rizzo. Particularly satisfying to Joe Coffey was the assignment to take Rizzo personally. But that December, as the blizzard of charges came swirling out from the grand-jury rooms, Rizzo vanished. He was not at his home at 201 Avenue A, or at his country estate in Wurtzboro in the Catskills; he was nowhere to be seen at any of his accustomed places. There were rumors that he had fled to South America, seeking shelter with his friends in the cocaine business. If he had done that, he would have found a cold welcome, for by then Soboski had become a major government witness. Stops were put on the bank accounts he was known to have, but there was no conviction that that would dry up his funds, for everyone realized that most of Rizzo’s money was not kept in banks, at least not under his name. His Mercedes, too, seemed to have disappeared, but Coffey knew where it was; he found it buried under mounds of dirt in a dark corner of the garage where it was usually kept. Then Coffey passed the word along the street: somebody was likely to get hurt if the police had to continue the large-scale manhunt for Rizzo; it would be wise if he turned himself in, would save everybody a lot of grief. A few days before Christmas, Rizzo walked into the Leonard Street offices of the Manhattan district attorney, asked for Detective Coffey and, glowering malevolently, said, “I hear you’ve been lookin’ for me.” Barely able to restrain a wide grin, Coffey took him personally through the routine of arrest—the booking, the fingerprinting, the mugging, the search and all the rest.
Hogan’s detectives and the FBI agents had done their work well. In every case but the narcotics ones, most of the defendants, faced with evidence so overwhelming there was no hope of combatting it, bowed to the inevitable. Advised by attorneys that a jury trial would surely bring upon them not just wide publicity but the wrath of the jurors and long sentences from judges, they pleaded guilty and threw themselves on the mercy of the courts. The advice had been good.
Uncle Marty de Lorenzo went to prison for a year for his part in arranging the supply of counterfeit money that traveled to San Francisco and then to the Far Eastern black markets, and to Miami to buy cocaine; the evidence against him in all the other cases was considered not strong enough to warrant indictments. Sam Salli went away for two years for supplying those counterfeit bills.
Izzy Marion got a five-year suspended sentence, five years’ probation and a $3,000 fine for his part in trying to force Jerry Marc Jacobs to pay the $25,000 he owed Rizzo. The charges against Robertazzi, the man Marion had sent to Los Angeles to put pressure on Jacobs, were dismissed when the judge refused to accept the wiretap evidence.
Vincent “Popo” Tortora earned three years after pleading guilty to multiple counts of possession of stolen and counterfeit airline tickets and credit cards. Most of the other defendants in most of the other cases received similarly short sentences.
Rizzo, however, did not get off so easily. He was sentenced after guilty pleas to twenty years for extortion of John Calamarus, five years for his role in the counterfeit money scheme, and five years for the attempted murder of Jose Brocero. He elected to fight the narcotics charges, went through a two-week trial and lost. That cost him another fifteen years in federal prison. But he knew that, as heavy as those sentences appeared, they would run concurrently and if he was a model prisoner, he would be back on the streets in about seven years.
The results, then, amounted to little more than slaps on wrists. It hardly seemed to have been worth the effort of a year and more in the time and work of so many men. In a year or two, everyone but Rizzo would be back at the old stands, refreshed after a short vacation at public expense, and even Rizzo would not be away long.
But still ahead, still obscure and tortuous even after the revelations of Grant and the informants who followed him, lay the trail that led to the center of the securities swindles, the most important cases of all.