The Coffey Files (15 page)

As powerful as he was, Hogan was still a product of a political system. He could step on just so many toes before endangering his own position. Reluctantly, he realized he would have to count on Washington to investigate the Vatican connection.

The atmosphere in Washington at this time, however, was not conducive to chasing a big scandal. It was during the Watergate period, and Richard Nixon's administration was fighting for its life. Michele Sindona, Marcinkus's mentor, had been a supporter and adviser of Richard Nixon when Nixon was practicing law. It has been reported that Sindona offered a secret contribution of $1 million to Nixon's campaign fund, which was wisely refused but indicated the level of interest Sindona had in Nixon's success.

Aronwald's request to the attorney general's office for permission to travel to Rome to quiz Marcinkus was refused.

Hogan was furious. He considered the politics of his office a burden he had to bear in order to do the law enforcement work he savored. He was now ready to risk everything rather than see Marcinkus escape untouched by the investigation.

During his forty years in politics and law enforcement, Frank Hogan had developed an unequaled network of powerful connections from Capitol Hill to boardrooms of Wall Street. He began working his Rolodex as if he was a young lawyer running for office for the first time. He called in long-owed favors and put his personal reputation on the line with people who did not take such offers lightly.

And his efforts paid off. Washington finally agreed to send Aronwald, Tamarro, and Bill Lynch (head of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Department of Justice) to the Vatican. Joe Coffey was not allowed to go.

Hogan hit the roof: Coffey, he argued, was essential to the case. There would be no case without Joe Coffey. “You're only keeping him out because you don't want the tough questions asked!” Hogan screamed at anyone who would listen in Washington. But he was out of favors. This time, Mr. DA did not get his way. Joe Coffey, bursting with anger at the turn of fate, was left at home.

On April 23, 1973, Aronwald, Lynch, and Tamarro went to the Vatican City office of Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, the assistant secretary of state. Tamarro was forced to sit outside the office while Lynch and Aronwald spoke with Benelli and with Monsignor Martinez, an assessor in the secretary of state's office. Later Joe Coffey was allowed to read the report of the Vatican visit.

This is what he learned from that report.

Lynch presented the case to Benelli and Martinez. He outlined the evidence, mostly provided by Ledl, that $14.5 million in counterfeit bonds, forged by Rizzo's gang, had been delivered to Rome in July 1971.

Lynch told Benelli and Martinez that those bonds had been a sample to be shown to people in the Vatican, who eventually wanted $950 million in bonds. He said he was prepared to tell an American grand jury that Archbishop Marcinkus had been directly involved in the plot, as well as in other illegal dealings in association with Michele Sindona. In a veiled threat, Lynch indicated that no matter what transpired during his visit to Rome the information about the Vatican would make its way into indictments, against Barg, Ense, and the others. Eventually it would become public record. Lynch showed Benelli the letter Ledl had provided to the doubting Rizzo as proof of the Vatican request for the $950 million. It was agreed the letter appeared to be genuine.

But Martinez refused to accept the letter or the word of the swindler Ledl as proof of Vatican involvement in an illegal deal. According to Lynch, Martinez refused to check a list of stolen and counterfeit securities against the Vatican's inventory on deposit in banks. He said such an investigation would be under the aegis of Archbishop Marcinkus.

The next day, with Tamarro once again forced to wait outside, Lynch and Aronwald met with Marcinkus.

According to Lynch's report, Marcinkus listened patiently to the allegations against him and agreed to answer them.

He admitted a close relationship with Sindona, whom he considered a financial genius “well ahead of his time.” But he said he had few financial dealings with him. He said he considered the charges against him serious but not based enough on fact that he would violate the Vatican Bank's confidentiality to defend himself. He implied that other Vatican officials jealous of his position of closeness to Pope Paul VI had conspired to implicate him.

He replied to all the specifics against him, falling back on the bank's need for secrecy when he could not satisfy Lynch and Aronwald. And then after about two hours he bid the two Americans good day.

Back in the states it was agreed on the highest levels that the case against Marcinkus could not be pursued further.

Coffey was crushed. To him Barg, Ense, Ledl, Grant, and even Rizzo were habitual, dime-a-dozen criminals whose place in the roster of organized crime would be quickly filled after their imprisonment or death. But Marcinkus was a different story. He was a man who held the trust of millions of Catholics. To let him get away with violating that trust was unthinkable to Coffey. Yet that is what happened.

Life in the DA's squad was becoming increasingly difficult for Joe Coffey. So, in May 1973, when the assignment came to join the 25th Precinct in East Harlem as a patrol sergeant, it was almost a relief.

Hogan was sorry to see his protégé go, but the department rule was a firm one. On his last day at Leonard Street, the DA called Joe into his office.

“I'm sorry the Vatican business ended the way it did,” Hogan said, shrugging his shoulders in resignation, “and I'm sorry I won't be able to bring you back to my squad when your six months are up.” Hogan had no opening for a detective sergeant. “But I do have a going away present for you,” he said. He told Coffey he had arranged for him to join the Queens DA's squad as soon as possible.

So Coffey left for East Harlem feeling better than he had since reading Lynch's report. “In six months I'll be back with a crack unit chasing big cases,” he thought.

Six weeks later he got a call from Vitrano saying the federal indictments were to be announced and he should be at the press conference.

On the morning of July 11, 1973, in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a press conference was held to detail the breaking up of a ring accused of trying to dump more than $18 million in stolen and counterfeit securities throughout the world. Sixteen men, including Vincent Rizzo, Winfried Ense, Alfred Barg, and Leopold Ledl were indicted.

Just prior to the press conference Bill Aronwald took Coffey aside. Relations had been strained between the two men since Aronwald's return from Rome. Coffey was convinced the prosecutor had engaged in a cover-up.

“I want you to stay away from the press. We do not want the Vatican mentioned,” Aronwald warned.

“You're not my boss. I'll do what I want,” Coffey replied.

Edwin M. Shaw, chief attorney of the federal Joint Organized Crime Strike Force, told the assembled press corps that the indicted persons had attempted to dispose of the fake securities in California, Panama, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland. He said the forgeries were in the names of such companies as Pan American Airways, AT&T, and General Electric and that the ring dealt in securities stolen from Manufacturers Hanover Trust and Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith.

Shaw also graciously explained how the investigation had started in Hogan's office, giving due credit to Coffey and to Assistant District Attorney Ron Goldstock.

And because mention was made of the Vatican in the indictments, mostly in reviews of conversations between the defendants, Shaw made sure to emphasize that the twenty-page indictment contained no criminal charges against anyone connected with the Vatican.

Following the official press conference Coffey fielded a question from a
Wall Street Journal
reporter who asked about the involvement of the Munich police. Coffey explained they had provided invaluable surveillance and logistical help.

The next day several newspaper accounts did focus on the meager mentions of the Vatican in the indictments. In the New York
Daily News,
reporter Ellen Fleysher wrote that “two of the defendants reportedly told other ring members that they could dispose of $14.5 million in fake blue-chip bonds through a source within the Vatican.”

The Wall Street Journal
quoted a source as saying that “a man of the cloth was suspected of being the fence within the Vatican.”

“Aronwald thought I was the source of that quote and he was pissed off,” Coffey says. “I wasn't. The reporter used my name with a quote about the Munich police involvement, and I stood by that.

“But Aronwald was fit to be tied. He threatened to ruin my career and make me sorry I ever spoke to the press. He said now he was going to have to subpoena the sixteen Munich cops I worked with.

“Of course it was nonsense. He didn't need those cops for his case. But he stayed mad at me. I told him to take a hike. He didn't run my life.”

So that was the end of it. Vinnie Rizzo got more jail time, eventually serving about twelve years. When he got out he was never able to return to his powerful position in the Genovese family because of suspicions that he had turned informant.

Ledl, thanks to the deal he made with Coffey and Tamarro, was never indicted. Barg and Ense got slaps on the wrist. Tony Grant, because of the help he provided in nailing Rizzo, was allowed to return to England, where he vanished into the underworld.

But to best understand the final results of the investigation that began when Joe Coffey got the hunch to follow Vinnie Rizzo to Munich, one has to let about ten years pass.

Thanks probably to the toes he stepped on, especially Aronwald's, in pursuit of Marcinkus, it took Joe Coffey two years to get off patrol in Harlem and back to detective work. In 1979, when Pope John Paul II arrived in New York as part of a tour of the United States, Joe, a prominent detective in the department, was assigned as bodyguard.

Leading the Pope's team of bodyguards was Archbishop Marcinkus, whose power and clout in the Vatican had not diminished following the death of Pope Paul VI.

Directly after the pope's arrival in Manhattan, a group of New York dignitaries including Police Commissioner Robert McGuire was gathered to meet him. When McGuire stepped forward to kiss the Pope's ring, Marcinkus stepped in front of him. “No cops,” he demanded and pushed McGuire aside.

Later McGuire asked Ellen Fleysher, the former reporter who was now the department's deputy commissioner for public information, who the rude cleric was. “Ask Joe Coffey,” Fleysher said. “He can tell you all about him.”

The incident rekindled the fire in Joe. He decided to collaborate on a book about the case with author Richard Hammer.

“It was clear as we worked on the book that many people were going to try to stop its publication,” Coffey remembers. Church officials refused to cooperate. They sent the police department's Catholic chaplain to persuade McGuire to prohibit Coffey from taking part in the book. But McGuire remembered Marcinkus. He backed Coffey.

Even a former New York City mayor, Robert F. Wagner, who once served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, got into the act. Representing Marcinkus, he threatened to sue the publisher.

As Coffey and Hammer worked on the book in early 1982, the Italian police finally began to pull together their own investigation of the crimes of Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi.

Their biggest break came in March 1980 with the conviction in the United States of Michele Sindona, “God's Banker,” on sixty-five counts of fraud and perjury. It was found that he had siphoned $45 million in funds from the Franklin National Bank in New York. Bankers claimed at the time that the Vatican Bank had secretly lent Sindona $30 million to help save the Franklin. In jail Sindona bragged that Marcinkus “earned at least $200 million from me.”

In March 1986 Michele Sindona was murdered in a jail cell in Italy by someone who put cyanide in his food.

In the summer of 1982 the Italian government accused the Vatican Bank and its president, Archbishop Paul C. Marcinkus, of looting $1.2 billion from Italy's largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano of Milan.

In June 1982 Roberto Calvi, who was the head of Banco Ambrosiano a decade earlier when Leopold Ledl said he was collecting counterfeit securities for delivery to Marcinkus, was found hanging from the scaffolding of Blackfriar's Bridge over the Thames River in the heart of London's financial district.

The Vatican Bank has repaid about $250 million to the Central Bank of Italy but admits no wrongdoing. In 1987 Italian authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Marcinkus. Had not the courts ruled that he enjoyed immunity as a Vatican employee, he would have been indicted and stood trial along with thirty-five others on charges of bankruptcy fraud.

In 1990 the archbishop voluntarily resigned from Vatican duty to take a parish post in his native Cicero, Illinois.

IV

THE FIGHT

Coffey's assignment to protect Pope John Paul II was not the first time he was entrusted with someone's life. As a detective in the DA's office he would often find himself babysitting a mob stoolie or, less often but more significantly, an honest civilian who had agreed to cooperate in an investigation. Then there are those special occasions that even an active, risk-taking policeman like Joe Coffey can never forget.

Once near the end of his career with the New York Police Department, he was placed on special assignment to help protect the first lady, Nancy Reagan. She was in New York to take part in a cultural event at Lincoln Center. Also present was Britain's Prince Charles.

The pressure of having two high security-threat personalities moving around the city at the same time overloaded the State Department, Secret Service, and NYPD intelligence units. Coffey and a few other crack detectives were temporarily placed under the command of Captain Frank Bolz, the prominent commander and founder of the Hostage Negotiations Team. Their assignment was to protect the perimeter of the dining and dancing area set up in a huge tent behind Lincoln Center.