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Authors: Jerry; Joseph; Schmetterer Coffey

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BOOK: The Coffey Files
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“Finally he got up and I followed him out to the bar, where McGlynn and McDarby were bullshitting with the mob.”

Coffey and Castellano, both six-foot-plus, both with the aura of powerful, successful men, caught the attention of the diners in the crowded restaurant. Conversation stopped as the two adversaries approached the bar.

Then the ever-present Delmonico grabbed his boss's arm. “Boss, this guy McDarby just told a great joke. You gotta hear it,” he said, displaying his intimate relationship with the godfather for all to see.

“Frank, tell the boss your joke. Come on,” he implored McDarby.

McDarby swallowed the last of his drink and walked in between his own boss and Castellano. In a friendly voice he repeated a joke about an Irish cop who came across a little black kid playing with a pile of dog shit in the street.

“‘Son, what are you doing with that dog shit?' the Irish cop asks.

“‘I'm making a statue of a cop,' the child responds.

“This angers the officer who demands, ‘A cop, what kind of cop is that?'

“‘It's an Italian cop. I'm making an Italian cop,' the boy answers.”

At this point Castellano's face tightened. Did McDarby have the nerve to tell an anti-Italian joke to Paul Castellano, the most powerful Italian in America?

But quickly McDarby continued.

“So the Irish cop cracks up. He runs to the call box and calls his friend the Italian cop. Tells him to come over, he's got something to show him.

“When the Italian cop shows up, the kid repeats that he is making a statue of an Italian cop. With smoke coming out of his ears the Italian cop barks, ‘An Italian cop? Why are you making an Italian cop?'

“‘Because I didn't have enough shit to make an Irish cop.'”

The punchline delivered by McDarby threw the group at the bar, including Castellano and Coffey, into hysterics.

“Delmonico was laughing so hard tears were streaming from his eyes, and Paulie was also cracking up,” Coffey remembers. “I don't think the five button men got it. With everyone laughing we took our cue and left.”

Driving back to Manhattan, Coffey told his partners about his conversation with “Big Paulie.” They discussed for the first time the idea that there seemed to be more cooperation between Mafia families than they previously had thought.

For instance, Funzi Tieri, head of the Genovese family, told the godfather of the Gambinos about his conversation with Joe Coffey about a murder case that involved a victim who wasn't even a family member, just as in the Briguglio homicide the Provenzano organization got the help of Genovese capo Matty Ianiello in setting up Briguglio. And now Paul Castellano admitted that the Gambinos knew Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan, heads of a gang that did little more than hijack trucks and bust heads. Coffey surmised correctly that Castellano was using the Westies to do strong-arm and contract killings.

All this cooperation was going on while the city was under the impression that a gang war raged. Coffey made a mental note to discuss this new trend with his old friend Ron Goldstock, who as an assistant district attorney specialized in organized crime matters.

As things turned out, Castellano did not pass the word that he was not protecting McElroy—so much for the Mafia code of killing only your own—but Coffey did come up with an eyewitness who finally agreed to cooperate.

He received a message at his desk one day to call a man about the “Billy Walker thing.” The man turned out to be an older member of Local 817 of the Theatrical Workers Union who admitted being out with Walker the night of the murder.

What he witnessed had made him sick, and he had been having nightmares ever since. He decided that the only way to feel better was to help nail the killer, no matter what the personal risk was. He was afraid he might be killed because of what he saw. The police, he reasoned, would protect him.

He identified McElroy from the picture McDarby had taken in the station house that night, and based on the eyewitness account and identification, McElroy was indicted and arrested for the murder of Billy Walker.

At the trial the witness testified that he and Walker and a few other coworkers spent the night of the murder, which was their payday, drinking and using cocaine, going from one West Side bar to another.

Toward the end of the evening, he testified, they found themselves playing pinball at a Hell's Kitchen bar.

He said that McElroy was in the bar drinking with another group and that he and Walker got into some kind of argument over a pinball game.

There was a little pushing and shoving, and Walker, a tough guy, held his own. Someone else broke it up, and McElroy stormed out of the bar.

Exhausted after his night of binging, Walker went outside to sleep it off in the back of his van. A little while later McElroy returned with a gun and found Walker asleep.

The eyewitness testified that without waking him, McElroy opened Walker's mouth and put the gun barrel in. With a bunch of stoned theatrical workers standing around, the witness said, McElroy pulled the trigger once. The shot blew off the back of Billy. Walker's head.

It went down just as Coffey imagined. It was a case he couldn't have made without the eyewitness, who did a great job of describing the harrowing murder. Unfortunately he did too good a job. McElroy was acquitted of the murder of Billy Walker.

“We were stunned by the verdict and decided to interview the jurors to see where we went wrong,” Coffey says. “It turns out we lost to what we call the ‘Perry Mason' syndrome. The witness seemed so well prepared and our case seemed so airtight that the jurors thought we had concocted it. The jury bought the defense argument that we coached the witness.”

It was not the first time Joe Coffey had experienced a severe amount of frustration following months of hard police work. Sometimes the frustration was caused by the jealousy and narrow-mindedness of his colleagues, sometimes by the public's misunderstanding of police work.

The Coffey Gang was demoralized by the loss of McElroy. They were also starting to take some heat from their fellow cops and former bosses who would warn them they were throwing away good careers by chasing mutts like McElroy whom they couldn't put in jail anyway. In saloon bull sessions around Police Headquarters Joe found it more and more necessary to be a cheerleader.

He tried to emphasize the positive. The Walker case was solved, after all, according to police guidelines. They knew McElroy was the killer. The Chief of Detectives' Organized Crime Homicide Task Force was clearing almost one case a week. No one was talking about its being disbanded. In fact, it would operate for eight more years.

In addition, Ron Goldstock was increasingly fascinated by Coffey's theory that the different Mafia organizations were cooperating with each other on a grand scale. While following McElroy leads, Joe's men saw Westies delivering money to the East Harlem headquarters of the Genovese family don “Fat Tony” Salerno as well as to Roy DeMeo, one of Castellano's most important henchmen. Goldstock thought that pursuing the possibility that Mafia families operated under one umbrella might be a way to bring them all down at once.

In fact, the information gathered by the Coffey Gang was shared with investigators on all levels—city, state, and federal. They had turned over leads on more than thirty homicides, including that of Patty Dugan.

In less than two years after the creation of the Coffey Gang, Joe reported to the Police Department that in the area of cooperation with other agencies his men had accomplished the following: They had informed the FBI about mob figures active in New York and New Jersey in connection with the murder of “Sally Balls” Briguglio and the disappearance and apparent murder of Jimmy Hoffa. They had provided witnesses and information developed during the Ladenhauf homicide to the Internal Revenue Service with regard to a major case of labor racketeering and income tax evasion in progress. They had assisted the Drug Enforcement Agency in making twelve arrests of drug smugglers and seizing six kilos of 100 percent pure cocaine at Kennedy Airport, thanks to leads developed in the investigation of the murder of “Patty Mack” Macchiarole. They had used their knowledge of the murder of Mickey Spillane to aid the U.S. Secret Service and the Division of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to make a major gunrunning and homicide arrest. They had developed an informant to work undercover for treasury agents; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau in an investigation of a series of homicides at Kennedy Airport that led to the arrest of fifty important mob figures. They had passed on information enabling the Secret Service to bust a counterfeiting ring.

By the end of 1981, the Coffey Gang had solved twenty-one gangland homicides and established an ongoing pattern of cooperation with the FBI, the Secret Service, and the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York State.

A good example of how Joe's network of information helped other units was the raid on the Collins family. At the time of the McElroy trial, the Coffey Gang discovered that a family named Collins was operating a loan-sharking and gambling ring out of their West Side apartment.

Joe knew that detectives in the unit known as the Manhattan Detective Area were working a case that included a link to the Collins ring. He passed his information on to the Manhattan detectives and then joined them on a raid of the apartment. Inside, as he had suspected, they found evidence of extortion, gunrunning, loan-sharking and gambling.

Also in the apartment were Tom Collins, his wife, Flo, and their son Mickey.

Joe took the young man aside and offered him a deal. “Mickey,” Joe told him, “fess up to possession of these items and we'll let your mother off the hook.”

The young man did not hesitate before answering.

“Fuck my mother. She can take care of herself,” he told Coffey. Tom, Mickey, and Flo Collins eventually received long prison terms.

“So you see why I wanted to press on with the Westies. They were scum and they all belonged in prison. At least the Italians confined their killing to matters of money. The Westies killed for the fun of it, and they did not even honor their own mothers.

“I would have been happy to devote all my time to pursuing them,” Joe says.

But that was not possible. The Coffey Gang had become a victim of its own success. More and more they were being called on to take part in joint operations with other jurisdictions, and Sullivan never let them lose sight of the Mafia as their main objective.

In 1985, after Joe had retired in bitterness from the NYPD and joined Ron Goldstock's New York State Organized Crime Task Force, he attended a party for an old friend on Staten Island.

As he shared laughs and drinks with a group of men whom he had worked with for more than twenty years, an FBI agent he did not know very well grabbed him by the arm and eased him to a corner of the room.

“Joe, I always admired your work on the West Side Irish. You really opened the door for everyone on that bunch of mutts. You'd probably like to know we've got an old friend of yours singing his brains out,” the agent said.

“It's Mickey Featherstone, right?” Joe responded.

“That's right, how did you know? We've got him hidden away pretty good since he contacted Ira Block, the assistant U.S. attorney.”

Coffey knew because it had been only a matter of time before Featherstone struck back at the men who framed him and sent him to prison for murder.

Featherstone was convicted in the murder of Michael Holly outside the Jacob Javits Convention Center on April 25, 1985.

Eyewitnesses had testified that it was Featherstone who screwed a silencer on a pistol and at high noon walked up behind Holly. The motive was the final settlement of an old feud in which Holly had been shot once before. In 1977 John Bokun, a Featherstone henchman, attacked Holly on Featherstone's orders as part of a struggle over a construction contract. Holly was hit in the leg, but Bokun was killed by a cop as he fled the scene.

Featherstone made it widely known that he believed Holly was cooperating with police in trying to nail him for that shooting in 1977.

Witnesses to the second shooting of William Holly said they were sure it was Featherstone and said they saw the killer flee in a brown station wagon registered to the Erie Transfer Company, where Featherstone worked.

Based on the eyewitness accounts, Featherstone was arrested and within a year was convicted and sentenced to at least twenty-five years in prison for murder.

Mickey Featherstone was no virgin when it came to being accused of murder. The Coffey Gang had him as a prime suspect in seven homicides and he had already served a prison sentence for manslaughter, but he was not going to allow himself to be framed and not strike back. He suspected Coonan had set him up, and he resented being dealt with in such a manner. If Coonan and McElroy wanted him out of the way so that they could control the Westies, he would have preferred to be murdered rather than be put in prison for life.

Featherstone was a supply room clerk in Vietnam who never saw a day of lighting but tried to explain away his murderous personality as battle fatigue. He decided to strike back. Not trusting the New York police, he called former Assistant U.S. Attorney Block, who interceded with the Manhattan DA.

They listened to Featherstone's story and agreed to let his wife Cissy wear a wire and try to trap the three men who Featherstone believed carried out the crime on the orders of Coonan: William Bokun, John's brother; Kevin Kelly; and William Shannon.

Cissy met with the men at the Ninth Avenue food festival, an annual event celebrating the ethnic diversity of the West Side, and on tape they admitted their roles.

The Manhattan district attorney was convinced that the Westies used a Broadway makeup man to make Bokun look like Featherstone. Shannon, they believed, drove the getaway car provided by Bokun, who, like Featherstone, worked for Erie Transfer and was the mastermind. Kelly helped with the plan. The disguise was so good it actually fooled the witnesses, who picked Featherstone out of a lineup.

BOOK: The Coffey Files
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