The Coffey Files (19 page)

It was a perfect night for “cooping.” As usual the cold weather put a damper on street crime. The radio on the dash board, which normally squawked out commands constantly to the busy two-five, was quiet. The streets were cold and empty. It was difficult for cops on the overnight shift to stay awake on nights like that. But Coffey knew it was his job to make sure they did.

Fico headed for a coop on a small street adjacent to the Harlem River Drive. As they approached the spot, hidden from other streets by the approach to the drive and kept in constant darkness by the surrounding industrial buildings, Coffey noticed a car straddling the middle line of the two way street. It was not a police car.

He reached out to touch Fico's arm to signal him to slow down, but the driver too had already spotted the car and was lightly tapping the patrol car's brake.

“Stay behind him; don't go alongside,” Coffey ordered. As they pulled to a stop the heads of four black men, two in the front and two in the back, were visible. The car was a late model Lincoln.

At this time the radical Black Panthers and their even more violent offshoot, the Black Liberation Army, were carrying out a shooting war with police officers across the country. Cops in pairs had been ambushed and murdered in New York, and the BLA had even tried to attack the home of District Attorney Frank Hogan. The two cops who thwarted that attack were both critically wounded by machine gun fire. The assailants escaped.

With that on his mind Coffey was being very careful. He and Fico stayed about fifteen feet behind the Lincoln as Coffey radioed the license plate to headquarters. When Fico put the turret lights on, the Lincoln started slowly backing up. Coffey thought it might be pulling alongside. His hand went to the revolver on his hip.

Then in a sudden move the Lincoln backed into the patrol car. It hardly touched the front bumper before screeching forward again. It kept going, making a sharp right turn onto the entrance to the Harlem River Drive. Without waiting for orders, Fico pursued the Lincoln.

By the time they hit the drive, both cars were going 100 miles per hour. Coffey radioed headquarters to report the chase. He requested that units from the 32nd Precinct try to cut the Lincoln off at the next entrance to the drive, about three miles away. Other cars from the 25th, monitoring the radio calls, sped northward towards the drive. Coffey remembers thinking that his old RMP could not have kept up and being thankful for the new car.

With the Lincoln still well in front of them after about one minute of chasing, Coffey could see the flashing lights of the cars from the three-two spreading out across the roadway.

The driver of the Lincoln also saw them. He hit his brakes, and for a moment Joe thought his car was going to ram the suspects'. But before he came to a full stop, the driver of the Lincoln executed a fantastic U-turn onto the southbound roadway. When they spotted all the other police cars heading up the drive, the suspects decided to abandon their car. They skidded to a halt, almost adjacent to where Fico had braked, and jumped out of the Lincoln.

Coffey and Fico also jumped out of their car, and units were closing in from all sides. In desperation the four men from the Lincoln opened fire. Two had shotguns; the other two fired nine-millimeter automatic pistols.

Coffey, for the second and last time in his career as a police officer, fired three shots from his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. Fico also returned fire.

As all the other police cars pulled up to the scene, the gunmen gave it up. They threw their weapons to the ground and surrendered to Coffey and Fico. No one had been wounded.

Later the gunmen confessed they were members of the Black Liberation Army and were waiting at the cooping spot to ambush a police car. Coffey and Fico both received medals for meritorious duty.

During the next year Joe settled into his patrol duties. The six months he expected to spend out of the Detective Division had come and passed. He did not give up hope, but realistically he knew it would be a tougher road than he had emotionally prepared for.

Then on January 26, 1975, one of the most outrageous acts of terror ever committed in the United States accomplished for him what Frank Hogan and Tom Mackell could not do.

At 1:25
P.M.
that day a thunderous explosion ripped through a 100-year-old annex to the historic Fraunces Tavern in New York's Financial District. The tavern was the scene on December 4, 1783, of George Washington's farewell address to his officers.

Four people were killed and fifty others injured. One of the dead was decapitated.

The victims in the tavern restaurant and the second-floor dining room of the adjacent Anglers Club were thrown from their tables. For fifteen minutes, until help arrived, the three-story red brick building was a scene of terrifying screams amid flying debris, collapsed walls, and a fallen marble stairway. The force of the blast wrecked a truck parked outside the restaurant and shattered heavy plate-glass doors and windows in a New York Telephone Company building across the street.

Fifteen minutes after the blast, callers identifying themselves as members of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriquenda (FALN), a Puerto Rican revolutionary group, telephoned the Associated Press. They said, “This is FALN. At Bridge Street and Water Street, ten feet from the corner in a telephone booth, there's a communiqué there.”

Police found a three-page document in which the FALN took all responsibility for the bombing. It went on to say that the FALN was the armed forces of Puerto Rican nationalists and that the bomb was in retaliation for the “CIA ordered bomb” that had killed three people in a restaurant in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, two weeks earlier.

The revolutionary rhetoric went on to charge the United States with terrorizing and killing Puerto Ricans in order to stop them from seeking independence. It called for the release of political prisoners and said that a storm had been unleashed that “comfortable Yankis cannot escape.”

It ended with the demand, “Free Puerto Rico right now.”

The FALN was not unknown to the New York Police Department. Since the late sixties they had been setting off small explosive devices and making threatening telephone calls in the name of Puerto Rican independence. In late 1974 they seemed to be increasing their activities, first by setting off small bombs in Manhattan office buildings in October, which injured no one, then on December 11, they set a booby-trap bomb that blew up in the face of Police Officer Angel Poggi. It was the twenty-two-year-old cop's first night on duty. He lost his right eye in the explosion. Coffey and Fico were the first cops on the scene of that booby trap. Joe held Poggi in his arms, trying to stem the flow of blood from his head until another patrol car arrived and they were able to rush the rookie cop to a hospital.

The NYPD's Bureau of Special Services Intelligence was having no luck in dealing with the FALN. They seemed incapable of developing useful information and were not able to identify its leaders or predict its movements. At one time they resorted to putting a rookie cop with no training directly into an undercover assignment. But it also was to no avail. With few Hispanics on the force and weak ties to the Hispanic communities, the police were desperate. The bombing of Fraunces Tavern, however, threw the problem into the public spotlight, and the NYPD was forced to react.

The day after the bombing, Police Headquarters sent out a call for all officers who might have a special ability to help in the top-priority investigation of the FALN. Joe Coffey's reputation as a wiretap and bugging expert, developed during his years in Hogan's office, overcame any intradepartmental resistence to bringing him back to the Detective Bureau. Before the week was over he was ordered to put away his sergeant's uniform and report to the Arson and Explosion Squad at Police Headquarters.

The department's quick fix, aimed at making it appear in the media that something constructive was going on, was to assign 150 cops to the investigation.

The first night that the new group assembled at headquarters, it was Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey's duty to assign them to the various leads that had been pouring in to the department's switchboard. Sitting at the supervisor's desk in the eleventh-floor offices of the Arson and Explosion Squad, he tried to make some sense of the mass of 150 cops squeezed in around him.

“There were tall cops, short cops, fat cops, skinny cops, Irish cops, Spanish cops, black cops, and just plain nondescript cops,” Coffey recalls. Many had no other expertise other than that they spoke Spanish. Few had ever worked a major investigation.

He made a mental note of the nondescript types, knowing their value to undercover work. Two of that type were standing in the back of the room laughing and joking.

Thinking to himself that he had to establish his authority and bring some order to the room, Coffey yelled out, “You two court jesters in the back, what are your names?”

Unintimidated by their new supervisor, they shot back, “Frank McDarby and Tom Kilduff from the Narcotics Division, Sarge.”

Noting one was as tall as himself, Coffey took him on first. “You, the tall one, which jester are you?” he asked as the room fell silent.

“I'm McDarby, Sarge.”

Feeling all eyes on him, Joe realized he had gone too far to turn back. He proceeded to load a list of orders on the Narcotics detective.

“McDarby, I want you to go to the medical examiner's office and pick up autopsy reports, then get the property vouchers for the victims' personal belongings, then stop at the bomb squad and get copies of their reports, and on your way back pick up coffee for anyone who wants it. I'll have a cup of tea.”

There was dead silence in the room as all the eyes shifted to McDarby.

“Hey, Sarge,” McDarby shot back, “do we have a long-handled broom in the office?”

Startled, Coffey asked why he wanted to know.

“So I can stick the broom up my ass and sweep the floor on the way out,” McDarby replied.

At that point the 150 streetwise cops in the room waited for Coffey to drop the other shoe.

But despite the hard edge he was trying to display, Coffey broke up in laughter. “Go on. Get the fuck out of here,” he told McDarby. The rest of the room also broke up, and a lifelong friendship was born between Joe Coffey and the nondescript detective from Narcotics.

No matter how happy he was to be back in the Detective Division, Joe Coffey found the two years he spent in the Arson and Explosion Squad to be the most frustrating and unrewarding of his career. Terrorism was an international problem. The worldwide attention paid to the Fraunces Tavern and other FALN acts of terror caused the New York Police Department to move gingerly for fear of being second-guessed.

Radical groups like the FALN that operated across international borders were difficult for local police departments to infiltrate. They did not have undercover agents accustomed to dealing with foreign citizens. In the case of investigations of Hispanic groups, they had precious few cops who could even go undercover in the Barrio of East Harlem.

“The bosses of the Arson and Explosion Squad were not used to having people looking over their shoulders. They were used to running their own show and not having outsiders brought in for help. Fraunces Tavern changed that, and they did not like it,” remembers Coffey.

“The green-eyed monster was always present when an outsider like myself, McDarby, or the others brought in to supplement the squad had an idea.”

But Coffey had battled the green-eyed monster before and once again he threw himself into his new job with abandon. He soon developed the trust of a prominent member of the Puerto Rican community in New York. He was a person who, though sympathetic with some of the goals of the FALN, did not condone the kind of violence they were perpetrating.

The civic-minded citizen helped Coffey place an undercover agent named Jimmy Rodriguez into a pro-independence group which met in a storefront in East Harlem. On the surface the group appeared to be a collection of fringe players, people with an interest in independence for Puerto Rico but not the inclination to fight for it. But Coffey had an informant who indicated that the group's leadership were actually members of the secret war panel of the FALN. Jimmy Rodriguez was told to find out all he could about four people: René Rodriguez, Julio Rodriguez, Dylicia Pagan, and William Morales.

Coffey had worked with Detective Rodriguez once before. During the Vatican investigation he had followed an important lead to Argentina and proven himself to be an exceptional undercover agent.

The civic-minded citizen had passed on his suspicion to Coffey that René Rodriguez was dealing in guns. Coffey decided to have Jimmy Rodriguez pose as a Puerto Rican nationalist who wanted to buy some guns to conduct his own private war.

René Rodriguez was suspicious at first, but after several weeks of conniving, Jimmy finally convinced him to sell him some automatic weapons. After the transaction was completed, Coffey took the information to a judge to get permission for a wiretap on René Rodriguez's telephone.

The judge, impressed by the case Coffey was building, okayed the wiretap. But back at headquarters Coffey's bosses were beside themselves with anger. “They were pissed off that someone they perceived as an outsider brought in the first solid lead in the investigation,” recalls Coffey. “There were two lieutenants and one sergeant who up to that point were the department's experts on terrorism. I could not believe it, but they actually went to their supervisor and suggested killing the wiretap idea. They argued I was an organized crime expert and knew nothing about terrorists.”

The three “experts” made no secret of their argument against the wiretap. They expected Coffey to back off when word got around that the chief of the Arson and Explosion Squad was leaning towards taking their suggestion. But they knew little more about Joe Coffey than they did about the FALN.

Instead of backing off he went to visit his old friend from the Tactical Patrol Force, Jim Sullivan, who was the executive officer of the Detective Division.