The Coffey Files (20 page)

“Sullivan wasn't convinced I really had the goods on the FALN, but he realized the department had no better lead at the time,” Coffey says. So Sullivan agreed to argue in favor of the wiretaps with the chief of detectives and the supervisors in Arson and Explosion.

Sullivan was persuasive, and the wiretap was installed. It did not provide the success Coffey had hoped for. The FALN operatives proved to be highly skilled at disguising their intentions. They spoke only in code on the telephone. Transcripts of the first recorded conversations provided ammunition to the anti-Coffey factions that he should be sent back to chasing Mafia thugs, not trained subversives.

But Coffey's experience with wiretaps had taught him patience. No matter how much code or confusing conversation was recorded, he argued, some valuable information could be gleaned from the tap. He turned out to be right when, after hours of listening in on René Rodriguez, he and his team realized the Dylicia Pagan was the real message center used for the passing on of FALN orders. Up to that point Pagan was considered a dilettante, a young woman who was getting her kicks from hanging around with Puerto Rican desperadoes.

Coffey argued to expand the wiretap to Pagan's telephone. However, this time the “experts” won out and his plan was rebuffed. “All we've got out of Coffey's operation was a gun charge on René Rodriguez and a bunch of useless wiretapped conversations,” they argued.

While bombings continued all over Manhattan, the supervisors of the Arson and Explosion Squad decided not to wiretap Pagan's telephone.

Instead they launched “Operation Watchdog” which entailed detectives riding around the city in taxicabs trying to catch the bombers in the act. The operation became a joke on the streets. Prostitutes, drug dealers, junkies, and Bowery bums quickly picked up on the tactic and began waving to the cops as they went by. “How you doin', officers?” became a police headquarters punchline.

In 1977 William Morales was arrested after he blew his own hands off while making a bomb in his Queens apartment. The ensuing investigation revealed that he was the mastermind behind all the FALN bombings and the master bomb maker. His girlfriend was the woman whose telephone the bosses of the Arson and Explosion Squad had refused to let Coffey tap two years earlier, Dylicia Pagan.

A few months after his arrest Morales escaped from the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital and fled to Mexico. On January 1, 1980, the FALN set off two bombs at police headquarters that left three cops seriously maimed.

Throughout 1975 the Arson and Explosion Squad detectives made little or no progress in their investigation of the Fraunces Tavern bombing. Then, two days before the end of the year, they were faced with a new threat and a catastrophe of even greater proportions.

At 6:33
P.M.
on Monday, December 29, 1975, a bomb exploded in a coin locker in the Trans World Airways baggage claim center at LaGuardia Airport. Eleven people were killed and more than fifty-three were injured. The first thought of the detectives who rushed to the scene was that the FALN had struck again. But hours, then days, passed without the terrorist group's customary telephone call claiming responsibility. After three days department brass realized they had a new threat on their hands. A task force was formed to work out of a special office at the airport. Joe Coffey was taken off the Fraunces Tavern case and sent to LaGuardia. Before the week was over more than 500 investigators, 300 from the FBI alone, were assigned to the case.

There was a bizarre development in the bombing which threw the investigators off the track for almost one year. Among the victims were a deep cover CIA agent who had been killed and an undercover FBI agent who had been seriously injured. In addition, Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, had walked through the terminal on the way to her plane about thirty minutes before the bomb detonated.

The only evidence recovered was small pieces of a timing device and a piece of a battery.

With no group taking responsibility for the act of terror, Coffey and the rest of the detectives assigned to the task force spent months looking into the backgrounds of the government agents to see if anything they were working on could have resulted in the attack. At the same time there was a general feeling that considering the constant pressure from terrorists that Israel was always feeling, the bomb was aimed at Meir and just went off too late.

One of the supervisors who gave Coffey so much trouble during the FALN investigation had once been involved in a bombing attributed to the Weather Underground. He insisted they be pursued in the LaGuardia case, and Coffey was dispatched to Seattle, Washington, to track down a onetime campus radical. After two weeks of searching by Coffey and two agents from the Treasury Department's Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unit, the suspect could not be located. Coffey was ordered back to New York.

Thousands of investigative hours passed and no genuine leads were developed.

Then on September 10 another act of international terrorism was carried out that had a tremendous impact on Coffey's role in the LaGuardia bombing and in his future with the Arson and Explosion Squad.

On that day five terrorists saying they were Croatian nationalists hijacked TWA Flight 355 from New York to Paris. One hour into the flight the pilot was ordered to radio New York that the hijackers had left a bomb in a locker at Grand Central Station. They said they would reveal the exact location of the bomb and how to disarm it if they were allowed to take the airplane to Yugoslavia.

The New York Police decided not to count on such an improbable occurrence. The Bomb Squad was sent to Grand Central to find the bomb and disarm it.

As the hijacked plane crossed the Atlantic, the New York cops searched dozens of lockers. After about thirty minutes of hunting they found the device and removed it.

Sergeant Terrence McTigue and Detective Brian Murray took the bomb to the police pistol range in a deserted area of the Bronx called Rodman's Neck. As they attempted to defuse the device it blew up in their faces. Brian Murray was killed and Terry McTigue was scarred for life.

Meanwhile Flight 355 had landed in Paris. If it was to continue on to Yugoslavia it would have to be refueled. But the French police decided not to let it go. They issued an ultimatum to the terrorist leader Zvonco Busic. Although he claimed to have explosives aboard the aircraft, the police told him to surrender or they would attack the plane.

Busic later claimed he surrendered after he learned what happened to Murray and McTigue. But it turned out the explosives aboard the aircraft were fake.

Two days later on a Sunday, Busic, his wife Julienne, and the three other hijackers were returned to New York in the custody of FBI agents. They were taken to FBI headquarters and placed in separate interrogation rooms.

Joe Coffey and Frank McDarby were assigned to question the group about the Grand Central bomb.

“A female FBI agent and I went in to question Mrs. Busic, and McDarby and another agent were to question her husband, the ringleader,” Coffey remembers. “Before McDarby went into the interrogation room, I reminded him to ask Busic about the LaGuardia blast.”

Coffey had suspected a link to the Croatian Nationalist Movement since he learned that on the same day of the LaGuardia attack, December 29, a bomb was set off at the Yugoslavian diplomatic mission in Chicago. December 29 was a state holiday in Yugoslavia.

Coffey and the woman from the FBI got nothing from Mrs. Busic. She claimed she did not know of the hijack plans and did not know of any involvement her husband had in setting bombs.

McDarby had better luck. Busic, in tears, admitted placing the Grand Central bomb. McDarby asked him about the LaGuardia blast. The tears increased as Busic bawled that he did not mean to hurt so many people. He admitted being at LaGuardia thirty minutes before the blast.

McDarby stopped questioning and went to get Coffey. With an assistant district attorney in tow they returned to Busic's interrogation room. McDarby resumed asking about LaGuardia. Busic again began crying and saying he never wanted to hurt anyone.

“Just at that moment an FBI agent started knocking on the door saying he had to get Busic to court for arraignment or he would endanger the case,” Coffey remembers. “McDarby kept pressing, but then the agent threatened to arrest us for obstruction of justice if he did not turn Busic over immediately. We had no choice, but we figured we'd get another crack at him, so we let the agent in.”

The insistent FBI agent took Busic away, and he and the others were locked up in the Metropolitan Correction Center that evening.

By the next day, when Coffey and McDarby went back to continue the LaGuardia line of questioning, both men had been on duty for thirty-six hours straight. They were ordered to go home and another team of detectives was sent in to question Busic. But Busic said he would only talk to the “cop with the blond mustache and beard.” The description fit McDarby, but the case supervisors refused to call him back.

The next day, when Coffey and McDarby finally got back to Busic, the terrorist had retained an attorney who refused to let him speak to anyone about LaGuardia.

Eventually Busic was sentenced to life in prison for the hijacking and the murder of Detective Brian Murray.

The frustration Coffey felt in being so close to solving the LaGuardia case was greater even than he felt when he was turned down on the FALN wiretaps. He was not enjoying his work with the Arson Explosion Squad and yearned to get back to a unit where the level of frustration might be less.

Desperate, he increased his effort to get a transfer and finally got the word that he could report to the Queens Homicide Squad in January.

VI

SAM

Bitter cold, below zero. The kind of day when radio car cops find ways to linger at the scenes of indoor crimes and detectives find a million reasons to hang out at the squad room. Bad weather, it is said, is the cop's best friend. It was Monday morning, January 31, 1977, and Coffey was on his way to his new assignment with the Queens Homicide Squad.

Despite the weather and the general gloom of a Monday morning, Coffey's spirits were high. For a cop his age, he already had had an incredible number of challenging experiences. He had tracked Mafia dons through Europe, protected the heavyweight champ of the world, and successfully navigated the dangerous waters of international terrorism. But until now he had never had the opportunity that every serious detective yearns for. He had never been assigned to solve a homicide—the most serious crime, the crime that deals with the most basic of human evils, the taking of another human's life. The assignment might not lead to much globe-trotting or to front-page headlines, but homicide was a choice assignment.

The day after word got around Police Headquarters that he was leaving the Arson and Explosion Squad, a reporter approached Joe in a restaurant and asked him if he was disappointed with his new assignment. Without hesitation Coffey responded, “Homicide is the best job.” The detectives sitting at the table all nodded in agreement.

He had no idea as he walked into the borough headquarters to report for duty that he was about to step into a case that many in law enforcement and the press believe to be the biggest ever to have hit New York.

The Queens headquarters office did not exactly burst into cheers when Coffey arrived. Joe had many friends in the department and his work was highly respected. But he was also known as a sergeant who pushed himself around the clock and expected the same from his men. Coffey was welcomed coldly by the acting borough commander, George Weinert, who was filling in for the ill Dick Nicastro.

Weinert's attitude made it clear that while Joe Coffey might be a hotshot from One Police Plaza via the Manhattan DA's office and the Arson and Explosion Squad, he was the new kid on the block in Queens and homicide was what detective work was really about.

“We had a strange one over the weekend. A couple of kids were making out in their car in Forest Hills. Someone walked up and blew the girl away,” Weinert said. He handed the file to Joe and told him he would be the supervising sergeant on the case. “Report to Joe Borrelli and see where he wants you to go with it,” were Weinert's final words as Joe put on his heavy overcoat and headed out to the freezing streets of Forest Hills, one of the best neighborhoods in the city.

Knowing that he would be working under Captain Joe Borrelli, an old friend, was the first good news Coffey had that day. The two talked for about an hour before getting down to the gruesome work of finding out why someone would want to shoot to death a twenty-six-year-old Wall Street secretary named Christine Freund.

Christine was sitting with her boyfriend, John Diel, in his car near the Forest Hills train station. It was a popular make-out spot. At 12:30
A.M.
on Sunday morning, a lone male fired three shots through the passenger-side window. Christine was hit twice in the face; Diel was not injured.

All that was known at the time was that the couple had spent the evening in Forest Hills. They went to a movie and then to a small restaurant on Queens Boulevard and were seen by passersby playfully sliding and falling on the ice-covered streets as they made their way back to the parked car.

Borrelli called in his squad commander, Lieutenant Bill Gorman, and his number one sergeant, Dick Conlon, to go over the case with Coffey. Joe was floating on air. He was in a room with three pros, the kind of cops he loved working with. He knew both Conlon and Gorman personally and by reputation. “This assignment will be a good one,” he thought, “as long as I can work with guys like these.”

It was decided that Joe would concentrate on the Freund case, supervising the detectives working the night tour, roughly 4
P.M.
to midnight, while Gorman and Conlon would continue to run their shifts as usual, adding the Freund case to their already heavy caseloads. At this time New York City was at the height of its fiscal problems. For the past year the department had been operating with only about 1,000 detectives, about one-third the number there had been when Coffey first reported to DA Hogan's squad ten years before. Squad commanders like Gorman were hard-pressed to spread their resources around. A hard-working cop like Coffey was a valuable commodity, and by working the night shift he would be able to do the important follow-ups and second looks, the leg work that was increasingly falling through the cracks of the thinned-down Detective Division.