Authors: Jerry; Joseph; Schmetterer Coffey
“The feds were very happy. They did not need to, and they did not want to, open the Vatican can of worms. I was arguing to continue the investigation, but I was a low-ranking member of that team even though I was the one who first brought the case to the Justice Department,” Coffey remembers.
Coffey knew that eventually the Austrian, Dr. Ledl, would become a major figure in the case, but for the time being he was not anxious to return to Europe to track him down. During Joe's second trip to Munich, Pat had suffered a miscarriage. Joe did not learn about it until he returned home, and he was bothered by the fact that he was not there for his family when they needed him. He decided not to pursue Ledl unless he had a near 100 percent chance of getting something out of him regarding the Vatican.
As summer approached, the strike force began preparing their grand jury presentation against Rizzo. In August, Coffey's Interpol contact reported that a Dr. Leopold Ledl was under arrest in Vienna on a fraud charge and would certainly get a prison term.
This was great news. If Ledl was imprisoned, he might be willing to talk about his connection in the Vatican in return for a deal not to prosecute him in the United States as part of the Rizzo ring.
Coffey began agitating for the chance to go after Ledl in Austria. He knew he was running out of time to nail the Vatican link. Word around the department was that the recently promoted sergeants would be sent to their new assignments in early 1973. Joe was sure that he would never get to Ledl once that happened, and he knew that no one else would try. He was losing sleep over the possibility that whoever violated the trust of Vatican office would get away with it.
Finally in mid-November he got the okay to travel to Vienna with Dick Tamarro to see what they could get out of Ledl. They were authorized to offer a deal of immunity to any charges he might face in the U.S.
During the last week of November, while their families were celebrating Thanksgiving, Detective Joe Coffey and Special Agent Dick Tamarro sat in the dank cellar interview room of a 150-year-old prison in Vienna. Across from them was Leopold Ledl, an international swindler accustomed to sharing the high society life of his victims. His stay in the Vienna prison had convinced him that he had to avoid extradition to America at any cost. He would do whatever was necessary to avoid this, even putting his life at risk by implicating some of the most important people in Rome in a counterfeit stock deal designed to shore up the weakened finances of the Vatican Bank, and even if one of those people was an archbishop in the Vatican.
The deal was made and Ledl talked.
“Ledl finally brought all the pieces together. He told us he had been approached by Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, dean of the Vatican's College of Cardinals, to buy $950 million in counterfeit U.S. corporate bonds. Ledl passed on the request to Rizzo,” Coffey notes.
Ledl said that the deal had the total backing of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, president of the Institute for Religious Works, known as the Vatican Bank.
Marcinkus's goal, Ledl told Coffey and Tamarro, was to use the counterfeits as collateral for loans. At first, Ledl said, he never spoke to Marcinkus directlyâthe cleric used emissaries and coverâbut later he did have direct contact with the archbishop and eventually delivered $14.5 million in forged blue-chip securities to him. Ledl believed at least half of that amount was deposited in the Vatican Bank and a substantial amount was placed in the Bank of Italy and Banco Ambrosiano of Milan, Italy's largest private bank, which was headed by Roberto Calvi.
Rizzo, Ledl said, at first did not believe the Vatican could be involved in such a scheme and had been reluctant to put in an order for such a large amount of phony paper to be printed by the mob forgers. Ledl said he eventually showed Rizzo two typed requests, on Vatican letterhead, as proof of the Vatican contact.
Coffey and Tamarro left the interview stunned. All along they believed there was a Vatican connection, but neither man imagined it could be on such a high level.
“We walked around in a daze the rest of that day. We couldn't focus our attention on anything except what Ledl had said. We even unknowingly walked into a restaurant known as the most romantic in Vienna. When it dawned on us that all the people around us were young lovers, we looked at each other and cracked up. What we two very large cops must have looked like to the others in the restaurant we can only imagine. We hadn't even noticed the violinists playing behind us. But the incident broke the tension. Then we were ready to report back to New York.
“Our first order of business back in New York was to find out all we could about Marcinkus, who seemed to be the keystone of the whole operation,” Coffey recalls. “What we discovered knocked our socks off.”
Marcinkus was an American from Cicero, Illinois, affectionately known as “Il Gorilla” because of his burly, six four, 240-pound body. In 1972 he was one of the most powerful men in the Vatican, presiding over the Vatican Bank and serving as the Pope's personal bodyguard and mayor of Vatican City. He was a popular figure on Rome's golf courses and a frequent guest at high society parties and charity events.
Yet despite the public attention, an air of mystery surrounded the man because of his almost total control over the finances of the bank. His secrecy regarding those dealings earned him the nickname “the Gnome of Rome,” from Zurich bankers.
With no formal education in finance or banking, it was believed he owed his appointment to the bank position to his friendship with Michele Sindona, the man known as “God's Banker.”
Sindona was an international financier who controlled more than 140 companies around the globe. For many years it was believed the Vatican bankers followed his lead very closely, pouring millions of dollars in Vatican funds into his ventures, not all of them eventually profitable. When the Sindona empire finally collapsed, the Italian press reported that the Vatican had lost more than $100 million.
Sindona, it appeared to some, used the Vatican Bank as his personal slush fund to transfer funds secretly (and illegally) out of Italy and to launder illegally obtained cash and counterfeit or stolen securities, sometimes at the behest of the Sicilian and American Mafias.
In 1972 all of this was speculation, howeverâthe instinctive beliefs and hunches of law enforcement agencies and legitimate financial analysts and advisers. These groups generally agreed that Marcinkus, at first, was duped by Sindona, but eventually had to know what was going on. Then, instead of bringing the illegal dealings to a halt, he jumped in with both feet, probably to avoid major scandal.
But if Joe Coffey was to have his way, major scandal was about to come down on the Vatican anyway. He went to Hogan and to the strike force and demanded that Marcinkus be questioned with the aim of indicting him as a part of Rizzo's scheme to counterfeit and steal $950 million in American corporate securities.
Joe was on a personal crusade to nail Marcinkus. He was offended by the archbishop's alleged illegal activities not only because of his faith but because of the additional embarrassment of Marcinkus's having been an American. Skeptical as he was about the clergy, Coffey still loved the church. But the best thing to do with dirty laundry, he believed, was to air it. He had long talks with Hogan about pursuing the Marcinkus lead and found his boss in agreement.
Ron Goldstock, the assistant district attorney in charge of the case, also agreed, as did Vitrano and Tamarro. They also had the support of Bill Aronwald, who was coordinating the investigation for the Justice Department's strike force.
“We all saw it as our duty to follow any lead wherever it took us,” says Coffey.
As in May, when he learned of Pat's miscarriage, Joe again returned home to some disturbing news after the Ledl trip. His son Steven had come in from playing one day over the Thanksgiving holiday and, as only a four-year-old would, decided to put his wet snowsuit in the oven to dry. When the suit caught fire, Steven pulled it out and, in panic, ran through the house dragging it behind him. Only quick action by his brother, Joseph III, who jumped on the suit and smothered the flames, saved the house from burning down.
The incident once again reminded Joe of the jeopardy cops often leave their families in for the sake of their jobs. “Here I was running around Europe trying to nail a Vatican official, who no one else seems interested in nailing, and my house almost burned down. I began to wonder if it was worth it.”
He expressed his concern to Pat, who once again found the right combination of words and emotions to convince her husband he was doing right by his family. He had a calling as strong and demanding as that of any priest, to do what he did best: catch crooks.
Meanwhile the clerks at the grand jury chambers were being kept busy typing subpoenas based on information Tony Grant was giving. In an effort to save himself, each new suspect would invariably give up someone else, so the list of suspects continued to grow. Cops and FBI agents all over the country were serving subpoenas and making arrests based on the information.
Coffey had the pleasure of handing Rizzo his subpoena personally. During the first week of December 1972 he walked into Jimmy's Lounge and asked to see Rizzo. Coffey had been there before in his steamfitter's disguise but never had made direct contact with Rizzo.
“I had been following him and listening in on his conversations for almost a year. I knew when he went to the bathroom, when he made love, and when he ordered his henchmen to get tough with a late payer, but we never actually met until that day in Jimmy's Lounge,” Coffey remembers.
“And I knew Rizzo to be an animal. I knew how brutal he was to his wife and kids. He once almost beat a young Puerto Rican kid to death with a bar stool. I knew he had no conscience and deserved no place in a lawful society. He was garbage.”
On Rizzo's part, by that December day he knew he was being hounded by Hogan's man, Joe Coffey, and the feds. He was seeing his mob being rounded up, and he was getting reports from his own informants that his boys were singing like the cowards they were. But he had no idea that he had been under such intense surveillance for months. He had no idea that even the telephone in Jimmy's Lounge was being tapped. He could not imagine that as he had sat in the Palace Hotel in Munich and talked about collecting $350,000 owed from the stolen securities job and heard Enze talk about a caper in the Vatican, Joe Coffey had been down the hall recording every word for the benefit of a future grand jury.
Inside Jimmy's Lounge that day there was no doubt it was Joe Coffey who had come calling. Coffey fits the movie image of a cop. In his dark blue suit, a grin on his “map of Ireland” face and the subpoena clenched in his big fist, he asked the mob thug who stood in front of him, “Are you Vincent Rizzo?”
“That's me. You must be Coffey,” Rizzo replied.
“I am Detective Joseph Coffey, and this is a subpoena ordering you to appear before a Manhattan grand jury.”
Rizzo, who had been handed such paperwork on previous occasions, took the paper from Coffey.
“Yeah, yeah, big deal,” he said. “Sit down for a minute. What do ya drink?”
“I wouldn't drink with you,” Coffey growled as Rizzo pulled over an empty bar stool and snapped his fingers for the bartender to pour a shot of scotch.
“Come on, don't be such a tough guy. Things can be worked out,” Rizzo countered, as he handed the shot to Coffey.
Joe took the glass, tipped it toward Rizzo as if offering a toast, and then turned it over and poured the scotch all over the bar. He turned and walked out the door.
Rizzo went berserk. He was not used to being treated that way. He had always been able to intimidate everyone. Even cops. As Coffey walked through the door Rizzo cursed after him. “You think you're hot shit now, but I'll get you! Count on it.”
Before Coffey was back at Leonard Street, Rizzo had contacted a local drug dealer known to be an informant for the FBI. He told the dealer that Coffey had tried to shake him down for $50,000.
It wasn't until years later that Coffey learned that the FBI conducted a thorough investigation of the charge. Dick Tamarro was the agent assigned to look into every aspect of his friend's life to see if the allegation could be true. Nothing remotely incriminating was ever turned up, but Joe Coffey never forgave his colleagues for not letting him know he was under investigation.
“It doesn't matter that I was cleared. They were supposed to trust me over a low-life drug dealer. After a year of seeing what kind of cop I was, Dick Tamarro and the rest of them let me down. It hurts worse than if I'd been shot,” Coffey says.
But in 1972 Coffey had no knowledge of that part of the investigation. He was occupied with trying to get permission to go after Marcinkus.
Rizzo and twenty-four members of his ring were quickly indicted in Manhattan for operating an international drug smuggling and counterfeiting ring. Right before Christmas he surrendered to Coffey at the Manhattan district attorney's office. With the city's press corps following, Coffey led Rizzo in handcuffs to the First Precinct and booked him on the charges. Later that day he was released on $25,000 bail.
Early in January, on the advice of their highly paid attorneys, Rizzo and his key henchmen pleaded guilty. Rizzo was sentenced on extortion, counterfeiting, and drug charges to a total of twenty-five years in prison. Because many of the charges were to be served concurrently, he could be back on the streets in less than ten years. Still being held over his head were the charges being presented to a federal grand jury by Aronwald and the strike force. It was during that case, Coffey hoped, that Barg, Ense, Ledl, and Marcinkus would also be brought to justice (the other Vatican official named by Ledl, Cardinal Tisserant, died in February 1972).
At first, in early 1973, Frank Hogan, trying to keep control of the case, appealed to Cardinal Terrance Cooke, head of the New York Archdiocese, to intercede with the Vatican and arrange for detectives to interview Marcinkus. Cooke did not take long to shoot the idea down. He told Hogan he saw no reason to believe any Vatican official was involved in a criminal act. He would not help.