Read Online The Coffey Files by Jerry; Joseph; Schmetterer Coffey - Free Book Online
Authors: Jerry; Joseph; Schmetterer Coffey
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serviced the Times Square theater district, and increasingly, whatever strong-arm work the Italian gangs would contract out to them.
An incident involving Mulligan is one of the best illustrations of why detectives hate to rely solely on planted listening devices for information.
In 1966, when Coffey was a plainclothes police officer working in the Rackets Bureau of the Manhattan district attorneyâs office, he was involved in the investigation of the Ruby Stein and Jiggs Forlano loan-sharking ring, which operated on Westie turf and paid tribute to Mulligan.
Mulligan was seen at a meeting with Stein, Forlano, and Mafia capo Carmine âThe Snakeâ Persico in a restaurant on Third Avenue and 38th Street, four doors from the building where Joe Coffey, Sr., had survived the assassination attempt. Coffey was trailing Stein and Forlano, and as he watched the restaurant from a dingy bar across the street, he noticed numerous middle-aged, very straight-looking men milling about outside. One of the group, he realized, was Richard Condon, a detective who would eventually become police commissioner, but at the time was assigned to the departmentâs Corruption Unit.
Coffey approached Condon and asked what all the cops were doing on the street. Condon, first demanding to know why Coffey was there, explained that his men were trailing Mulligan, who was heavily involved in bribing police officers.
Mulliganâs involvement with Persico, Stein, and Forlano interested everyone. So it was decided to get court approval for a listening device in Mulliganâs car.
Shortly thereafter the bug was planted and a surveillance plan was put into effect. A team of Condonâs detectives would trail Mulligan everywhere he drove, recording his conversations as they were transmitted by the bug.
The morning the operation went into effect the running joke was that the detectives had better be careful in traffic because Mulligan was known to be a terrible driver. The humor, however, was lost on District Attorney Frank Hogan when his men had to report that the operation lasted less than one hour.
Minutes after leaving his garage Mulligan ran off the road and totaled his car, destroying the bug in the process.
The incident added to Mulliganâs reputation as being more of a clown than a capo. The Westies were becoming a joke to organized crime and to the men whose responsibility it was to put them in jail. It bothered Joe Coffey that people were laughing at Mulligan and his gang rather than hating them for the monsters he knew them to be.
In 1968 Coffey arrested an up-and-coming West Side Irish mobster named Mickey Spillane for shaking down a West Side night club but could not convince Hogan to push the investigation further. Like his bosses before and since, Hogan told Joe, âConcentrate on the Italians.â
Spillane, who would take over the gang when Mulligan died in 1974, pleaded guilty and served a short prison term. When he got out he started the gang on a new business. With any kind of sophisticated criminal activity now totally taken over by the Mafia, Spillane hit on the idea of kidnapping Italian bookies and holding them for ransom to be paid by the appropriate Mafia family.
He got away with it a few times. The Mafia considered it nothing more than a nuisance and, wanting to keep the Westies around as their strong-arms, paid the money and shrugged it off.
But in an example of the senseless violence that had by this time become their trademark, Spillane killed a bookie named Ziccardi after the Gambino family paid the $100,000 ransom.
This was pushing their luck too far. Joe remembers being on patrol hunting Son of Sam on the evening of May 13, 1977, when a report of shots fired in a Queens housing complex came over his radio.
âOur orders were to respond to every call of shots being fired, but as we raced to the scene I remembered that Mickey Spillane lived in that neighborhood. I knew we were going to
An incident involving Mulligan is one of the best illustrations of why detectives hate to rely solely on planted listening devices for information.
In 1966, when Coffey was a plainclothes police officer working in the Rackets Bureau of the Manhattan district attorneyâs office, he was involved in the investigation of the Ruby Stein and Jiggs Forlano loan-sharking ring, which operated on Westie turf and paid tribute to Mulligan.
Mulligan was seen at a meeting with Stein, Forlano, and Mafia capo Carmine âThe Snakeâ Persico in a restaurant on Third Avenue and 38th Street, four doors from the building where Joe Coffey, Sr., had survived the assassination attempt. Coffey was trailing Stein and Forlano, and as he watched the restaurant from a dingy bar across the street, he noticed numerous middle-aged, very straight-looking men milling about outside. One of the group, he realized, was Richard Condon, a detective who would eventually become police commissioner, but at the time was assigned to the departmentâs Corruption Unit.
Coffey approached Condon and asked what all the cops were doing on the street. Condon, first demanding to know why Coffey was there, explained that his men were trailing Mulligan, who was heavily involved in bribing police officers.
Mulliganâs involvement with Persico, Stein, and Forlano interested everyone. So it was decided to get court approval for a listening device in Mulliganâs car.
Shortly thereafter the bug was planted and a surveillance plan was put into effect. A team of Condonâs detectives would trail Mulligan everywhere he drove, recording his conversations as they were transmitted by the bug.
The morning the operation went into effect the running joke was that the detectives had better be careful in traffic because Mulligan was known to be a terrible driver. The humor, however, was lost on District Attorney Frank Hogan when his men had to report that the operation lasted less than one hour.
Minutes after leaving his garage Mulligan ran off the road and totaled his car, destroying the bug in the process.
The incident added to Mulliganâs reputation as being more of a clown than a capo. The Westies were becoming a joke to organized crime and to the men whose responsibility it was to put them in jail. It bothered Joe Coffey that people were laughing at Mulligan and his gang rather than hating them for the monsters he knew them to be.
In 1968 Coffey arrested an up-and-coming West Side Irish mobster named Mickey Spillane for shaking down a West Side night club but could not convince Hogan to push the investigation further. Like his bosses before and since, Hogan told Joe, âConcentrate on the Italians.â
Spillane, who would take over the gang when Mulligan died in 1974, pleaded guilty and served a short prison term. When he got out he started the gang on a new business. With any kind of sophisticated criminal activity now totally taken over by the Mafia, Spillane hit on the idea of kidnapping Italian bookies and holding them for ransom to be paid by the appropriate Mafia family.
He got away with it a few times. The Mafia considered it nothing more than a nuisance and, wanting to keep the Westies around as their strong-arms, paid the money and shrugged it off.
But in an example of the senseless violence that had by this time become their trademark, Spillane killed a bookie named Ziccardi after the Gambino family paid the $100,000 ransom.
This was pushing their luck too far. Joe remembers being on patrol hunting Son of Sam on the evening of May 13, 1977, when a report of shots fired in a Queens housing complex came over his radio.
âOur orders were to respond to every call of shots being fired, but as we raced to the scene I remembered that Mickey Spillane lived in that neighborhood. I knew we were going to
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