The Coffey Files (16 page)

“Everyone was wearing tuxedos and beautiful gowns. It was really a glamorous crowd, great dancers, smooth talkers—the jet set! All the cops were really impressed and were afraid of doing something wrong,” Coffey remembers. “Even Frank Bolz, who has a real outgoing personality, was on his best behavior. He was serious as could be.”

Then something happened that scared the breath out of Bolz, a man who had faced down countless desperate characters. Joe Coffey asked Nancy Reagan to dance.

“I don't know what came over me. Here comes perhaps the most famous woman in the world. She's wearing this fabulous glittering gown and she walks right up to me and asks if I'm a New York police officer.”

Coffey thinks it took him about ten seconds to compose an answer. Then the best he could come up with was, “Yes I am.”

“Well, my husband is a great admirer of police officers,” Mrs. Reagan responded.

“I was completely tongue-tied, couldn't get a word out of my mouth. Then, all of a sudden, the band started playing—some kind of fox-trot—and I asked if she would like to dance.”

The wife of the president of the United States said she would be honored to dance with Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey. In a flash the six-foot-four Coffey was walking towards the dance floor arm in arm with the diminutive first lady.

“Across the room I could see Bolz having a conniption. He was shaking his head—no, no—but I was in another world. It was great,” says Coffey.

“She felt like a doll. I'm no Fred Astaire but she really knew how to dance and we glided across the floor for about a minute. She told me how the president always supported the work of police officers and how important he thought they were to our society. I don't remember what I said. I felt like an awkward schoolboy dancing with a movie star, which really wasn't far from the truth.”

To the relief of Bolz, the dance did not last long. The Secret Service men let it go on for about two minutes. Then one walked up to Mrs. Reagan and whispered that they would appreciate it if she sat down. Coffey got a dirty look from the agent, but it could not put a damper on the glow of the moment.

“Bolz was waiting for me with a drink. He was trying to be mad, but all the New York cops thought it was a fantastic thing. It's still one of our favorite stories. It's one of the great things about being a cop in New York. How else would a guy like me get to dance with the first lady?

“A cop sees the best of the best, the worst of the best, the worst of the worst, and the best of the worst. We see everything. We don't make much money, but being a cop is a wonderful job.”

When he retired from the New York Police Department in 1985, with the arrests of more than 200 major crime figures throughout the United States, Europe, and South America to his credit, Coffey made a farewell speech to his friends. He concluded the speech by saying: “I want to thank the New York Police Department for giving me a ringside seat to the greatest show on earth.”

In March 1971 Coffey literally was ordered to take a ringside seat—in Madison Square Garden for the first heavyweight championship fight between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. Frazier's life depended on it.

Four days before the fight Joe got a call from Frazier's manager, the brilliant, colorful fight game character, Yank Durham. Coffey and Durham had known each other for a few years. They first met when District Attorney Hogan's office was conducting an investigation of a fixed championship fight between a tough pug from Jersey City named Frankie De Paula and the world-class light heavyweight, Bob Foster.

It was eventually determined that De Paula, who had no chance of winning against the likes of Foster, had taken a dive at 2:17 of the first round. Coffey's investigation resulted in an indictment against James “Jimmy Nap” Napoli, a capo in the Genovese crime family.

Coffey also arrested De Paula, who was eventually murdered in the hallway of his Jersey City apartment house because the mob thought he was singing to the cops.

“I really felt sorry for De Paula. He had more muscles than brains, but he was a pretty nice kid. The mob used him and then murdered him when they thought he was standing up for himself. In reality, he had refused to help us at all. He was more of a stand-up guy than most of the capo di tutti asshole types we brought in for questioning in that case,” Coffey believes.

Coffey was also able to determine that Foster knew nothing about the fix. During the course of his investigation he and some important figures in the fight business, even some who walked on the other side of the law, developed a mutual respect.

Durham was one of the legitimate fight people, so when he called for help, Coffey was inclined to believe him and offer what help he could.

Durham explained that the Frazier team, training in Pennsylvania, had been receiving threatening telephone calls and letters from a splinter group of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization once headed by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The callers accused heavyweight champion Frazier of being an “Uncle Tom” and of taking part in a fight that was being financed by white money. They said the fight would benefit only the white community and warned that Frazier would be killed before he stepped in the ring.

At first Durham did not take the threats seriously. Such letters and calls to prominent athletes were common. In 1971 two militant black groups, the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, were active and used every opportunity to spread their doctrine. Then Durham's car disappeared from a lot at the Franklin Motor Inn in Philadelphia, where the Frazier camp was headquartered. Two days later a car belonging to Cloverlay, the corporation which backed Frazier, was vandalized. Finally, Durham got a call from a contact in Ali's camp—Yank actually had represented both fighters in negotiating their $2.5 million purses—who said Ali had received some threats that also included Frazier.

Durham decided it was better to be safe than sorry. After getting little help from the Philadelphia Police Department, he called Joe Coffey.

Coffey remembers getting Durham's phone call as he made a brief stop at the district attorney's Detective Squad office on Leonard Street. Coffey wasn't spending much time at the office. More often, he was hunched over in the basement of a West Side building monitoring taps on the telephones of Ruby Stein and Jiggs Forlano, the two biggest loan sharks in the country.

He explained to Durham that he might not be able to take on the Frazier problem personally but would pass on Durham's concerns to his boss, Inspector Paul Vitrano, and recommend a unit be assigned to protect “Smokin' Joe” when he arrived in New York.

Vitrano was willing to go along with the idea; but District Attorney Hogan's support was needed because normally the police department's Intelligence Division, in 1971 known as the Bureau of Special Services Intelligence (BOSSI), would be assigned to such a task. They would be jealous of the opportunity to run such a high-profile mission. But it was Coffey who had gotten the call from Durham, not an Intelligence Division detective.

Durham spoke to Hogan. He told him he had gotten little help from the Philadelphia police when he first brought the threats to their attention. He also said he did not trust the Madison Square Garden private security police to handle the entire operation. He said he wanted a real cop. He said he wanted Joe Coffey on the case.

It didn't matter to Yank Durham, but Coffey was still just a detective third grade, not the necessary rank to oversee this kind of task. Once again, Coffey found Hogan in his corner as the DA okayed the bodyguard plan and Vitrano freed twelve detectives to work with him. But Coffey was told he would still be responsible, for the Stein-Forlano case. Frank Hogan had been after Ruby Stein for a long time and would not be happy if he slipped through this current trap. Coffey assured Vitrano he could juggle both balls for the few days Frazier would be in town. Vitrano told him he'd better.

The assignment excited Coffey, thirty-three years old at the time. He was an athlete himself, a standout football player in college and for an army team during a two-year stint in Germany. He was also a fanatic New York Yankee fan. Now he would have the chance to meet, up close and personally, “Smokin' Joe” Frazier and probably even the enigmatic Muhammad Ali, whose camp would have to be included in the heightened security arrangements.

Using the phone in Vitrano's office, Coffey called over to the wiretap location and began shuffling schedules. He wanted to put together his best team. Coffey made sure his regular partner, Larry Mullins, was included in the group. Next he called Pat in Levittown and asked her to pack a bag for him, explaining he would be handling security for Frazier but leaving out the information about the threats. Coffey told his wife it was a routine assignment that he was lucky to get. It was already Friday afternoon, Frazier was to drive into New York the next day, and the fight was scheduled for Tuesday. Four frantic days lay ahead.

By Friday evening, while seven-year-old Joseph Coffey spread the word among his disbelieving second-grade classmates at the Northside School in Levittown that his father was protecting Joe Frazier, the men who would do the job were gathered on Leonard Street.

Joe explained how the case had come under their jurisdiction and detailed Durham's fears. Coffey had had his own experience with black militants and agreed with the others that the controversial Ali seemed a more likely target of some splinter group than the withdrawn family man, Frazier.

Joe believed that it was under the threat of death by Muslims that Sonny Liston dumped his second fight with Ali; but he knew that Durham and the Muslims maintained good relations, and finally it was agreed to discount them as the foe. Coffey bought into Durham's theory about the SCLC. Officially, the group had protested the promotional arrangements of the fight, which excluded black firms from sharing in the major money. They had picketed Cloverlay's office in Philadelphia and had had a public confrontation with Durham.

Durham's own sources in the SCLC and the Philadelphia Police indicated there were members, fueled by the militant rhetoric of the times, who were fed up with peaceful picketing and were pressing for more immediate action.

Finally, Coffey had a source of his own in the Philadelphia Police who confided that one of the threatening phone calls had been “trapped,” that is, traced back to the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. Because they could not be sure who had actually made the call, and because of strained relations between the Philly cops and the city's black community, that information was kept under tight wraps. For Coffey there was no doubt that the death threats had to be treated seriously.

It was agreed that there was little time to solve this problem through investigation and arrest. The emphasis would have to be on physical protection of the fighters. Ali had his own highly competent contingent of Muslim bodyguards from Chicago, so the Hogan men would concentrate on Frazier. Joe Aquafreda, the head of Madison Square Garden Security, was brought into the team and a plan was worked out.

Early the next morning, as Frazier and his entourage began their drive from Philadelphia, the Coffey plan went into effect.

It was widely known through the media that Frazier planned to stay at the City Squire Hotel on the West Side, just uptown from Madison Square Garden. The area around the hotel was abuzz with fight activity. For days fans had been hanging around in front of the hotel, and much of the media also registered there to be near any fight-related developments. Coffey reasoned that an assassin would have little difficulty hiding among the crowd. He had no intention of letting Frazier near that hotel.

Instead, arrangements had been made for the fighter and his immediate inner circle—Durham, Frazier's private security man Tom Paine, his chauffeur Les Perlman—and Coffey's team to check into the Hotel Pierre. “The Pierre, with its old world charm and old money clientele, was about the last hotel where you'd expect to find a black heavyweight contender from Philadelphia,” Coffey reasoned. “I thought it would be a perfect place to hide, and it turned out to be the single element that made the whole plan work.”

By eleven o'clock Saturday morning, Coffey, Mullins, and Detective Mario Trapani were waiting in an unmarked car on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. They did not expect the two cars carrying the Frazier people to arrive for at least another hour, and they used the extra time to check out the tunnel entrance. Frazier would have to stop to pay the toll, and that would give a sniper time to line up a shot.

The one-hour wait became almost four hours because a mix-up in messages had made Durham think Coffey wanted him at the tunnel at 3:00
P.M.
It was an anxious wait, and the three cops began thinking something might have happened along the turnpike from Philadelphia. Finally, the three DA squad cops spotted Frazier's gold Cadillac limousine turning down the long curving approach to the toll booths, and Coffey got out to motion them over. The second Frazier car, carrying sparring partners, pulled up behind the Cadillac.

Coffey, taking immediate charge, ordered Frazier into the back seat, where Durham, a look of doom clouding his broad face, a cigar chomped tightly in his jaw, sat next to a reporter named David Wolf, who was close to Frazier and had been let in on the plan. Coffey slid in next to Tom Paine and told Les Perlman to follow Mullins through the tunnel.

As soon as they hit the New York side, Coffey told Perlman to head to the Pierre, while the second entourage car, as previously planned, continued to the City Squire. Now, two more cars filled with Coffey's men, shotguns cradled in their laps, picked up the route. As Mullins turned away, in order to circle around and check the back end of the route, another car of detectives would protect the front.

The security team kept in contact by walkie-talkie. They were using a radio frequency reserved for special intelligence operations. Joe thought it was unlikely an assassination squad would be able to monitor the frequency. It was unknown even to the city's aggressive press photographers who regularly monitored police activity.