Read Online The Coffey Files by Jerry; Joseph; Schmetterer Coffey - Free Book Online Page A

find his body in the street,” Joe recalls.
    It was indeed Spillane’s corpse they found in the street outside his apartment house between two parked cars. He had been stabbed and shot in the lobby. He had staggered out to the street where he had been shot again. He had collapsed between the two cars and died.
    Later the police would learn that he was lured to the lobby by a friend named Sonny Marini. There he was met by a Gambino soldier named Danny Grillo and two henchmen. The murder was contracted by Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone to the Gambino family.
    The killers did not know and it did not make a difference that Spillane had just returned from a trip to Florida, where he had asked Eddie McGrath to appeal to the Gambinos to let him off the hook for his defiance of their code. McGrath, disgusted at what had become of his legendary gang, told Spillane some stories about how members of his gang like “Cockeye” Dunn went to the electric chair like “men,” and refused to call New York.
    By the time Joe Coffey sat in Jim Sullivan’s office to ask permission to go after James McElroy, all this information was fresh in his mind. He related his restaurant meeting with Hammond. He told Sullivan he had wanted to chase the Westies years before when he was a young detective in the Manhattan district attorney’s office but because the gang was considered so low level, nothing more than street thugs, and because the only publicity came from busting Italian mobsters, he never got the okay.
    â€œI know you brought me in here to go after the Italian gangs, but now it looks like there might be a provable homicide link between the Irish gang and Castellano. The West Side Irish are the most vicious, mad-dog killers in the city. This may be our chance to nail them,” Coffey told the chief of detectives. He knew Sullivan was as proud of his own Irish heritage as he was of his. Both men were embarrassed by the way the Coonans and Featherstones and McElroys dragged their heritage through the streets.
    Finally, Coffey threw his knockout punch: “These guys are direct descendants of the men who tried to kill my father,” he reminded Sullivan.
    â€œI don’t really think Sullivan needed that much convincing. He wanted the Westies locked up as much as I did and, given the Coffey Gang’s record of success, Sullivan was too smart a manager to hold us back. He told me to follow up the lead, the Castellano link,” Coffey remembers, savoring the moment to this day.
    Coffey assigned himself and detectives Frank McDarby, John McGlynn, and John Meyer to take on the Westies. One of the privileges of Coffey’s position was that he could assign a detective to serve as his driver and aide-de-camp. Jack Cahill filled that spot and he would be good to have around if things got rough.
    They realized from the start that the only way they were going to nail McElroy for the Walker murder was by finding a cooperative eyewitness. No bullet was recovered from the body, there was no murder weapon in police custody, and because McElroy had never been arrested there were no records of his fingerprints to match with prints taken from Walker’s clothing. Without an eyewitness it could not even be established as evidence that McElroy and Walker were together the night of the murder.
    So the cops hit the streets, going block by block along the West Side piers during the day asking people who could have been their brothers, cousins, or aunts if they knew anything about the death of Billy Walker. The follow-up question was if they knew Jimmy McElroy.
    What they got back from these people was usually a blank stare indicating a total lack of understanding of the question. If they answered at all they said they never heard of anyone named McElroy. Some of the older dock workers offered a warning: “If I were you guys I’d steer clear of Jimmy McElroy.”
    They were told all kinds of stories about