The Coffey Files (27 page)

“In fact, Inspector,” Coffey went on, “I assigned Detective Jerry Maroney to accompany O'Donnell to all the robbery locations and tell the local precincts that the stickup man had been identified and they could clear the cases. I also told all the prosecutors involved in Operation Clyde about the possibility that O'Donnell was implicated in those robberies. I never tried to cover up a thing and I never made an illegal penny from this job.”

Richter was taken aback by Coffey's defense. Joe Coffey was surely the most careful detective he had ever come across. Still, as Coffey remembers it, Richter thought he had an ace up his sleeve. He said he knew for sure that O'Donnell had committed a house robbery during the period he was working for Coffey.

Again Joe was prepared. “I know all about that also. The morning he did it, O'Donnell called me and confessed. He said he had to do it to maintain his cover.”

A smile crossed Richter's face. “That's not good enough, Joe. How can we believe O'Donnell about that?” he said.

The smile on Joe's face was bigger and lasted longer as he replied, “I guess you don't know about the tape.” The morning after the house robbery, Coffey and McDarby met O'Donnell for breakfast. They had him confess to the incident on tape, including the part about trying to get in touch with the cops before the robbery. This was a fact verified by the log in the chief of detectives' office, where calls to the Coffey Gang were listed.

When Coffey finished his explanation Richter looked up from his notebook. Deliberately he placed his pen inside his jacket pocket. “Joe, I always knew you were extremely competent and possessed a high degree of integrity, but I must say I'm impressed. Consider this matter closed,” he said as he snapped his notebook shut and offered his hand.

That was a narrow escape from disgrace for Joe. His enemies in the department were greatly disappointed by IAD's failure to nail him. One detective with one too many drinks in him told McDarby, “That son of a bitch always lands on his feet, but if he wasn't Sullivan's boy he'd be gone.”

“Looking back on Operation Clyde I realize the best thing that came out of it, not including the locking up of fifty hoodlums, was my relationship with Jack Ferguson,” Coffey says. “So of course I was thrilled that he would be a part of Walter Mack's strike force against the stolen car ring. The first day Ferguson, McCabe and I met in Mack's office and spent more than an hour rehashing the stories about Kenny the Rat and how the green-eyed monster got Richter to come after us.”

Soon Walter Mack laid out his battle plan. Ferguson would concentrate on analyzing all the auto ring information so far gathered and try to link it up with either ongoing investigations or previously gathered evidence that could be used to begin a prosecution. McCabe, with his vast knowledge of everything involving organized crime, would seek some previously overlooked or not obvious areas the federal prosecutors could pursue. The Coffey Gang would run down every homicide lead developed by the entire strike force.

It soon became obvious to the team that one hood could be the link to the success of their case. His name was Vito Arena and he was known, especially to McCabe and Coffey, as a three-hundred pound slob of a stickup man and car stripper. Coffey suspected he might also be a hit man. He was unique among mafiosi in the fact that he made no secret of his homosexuality. He was a member of the crew of Roy DeMeo, a top earner in the Gambino family who reported to capo Nino Gaggi. Gaggi, a confidante of “Big Paulie” Castellano himself, and DeMeo were major-league mobsters.

A great deal of the accumulated evidence against the luxury car theft ring pointed to Arena. His name was consistently heard on wiretaps. Informants pointed to him as DeMeo's enforcer. Even two cops who were sent to Kuwait to detail the delivery of the stolen cars heard tales of a “gay hit man” who made sure there was no double cross. It was clear to the strike force members that Arena had knowledge of and had participated in both ends of the stolen car operation. He stole them, he helped ship them to Kuwait, and he eliminated anyone who got in the way.

Coffey desperately wanted to put some pressure on Arena as quickly as possible. He, McCabe, and Ferguson wanted to use Arena as a link to DeMeo and Gaggi, arguing they could continue the chain all the way to the capo di tutti capi, Paul Castellano.

The only problem was that Arena was at that time on the run. There were warrants out for him in connection with armed robberies, and he had skipped town. He was on the lam with his lover, a pathetic two-bit criminal named Joey Lee.

As Joe and his gang spread out in their search for Arena, they realized that he was a feared killer. No one would help at all. As unlikely as it seemed, the 300-pound slob seemed to have vanished. Coffey began to consider the possibility that he may have even been hit on orders from DeMeo because of the heat he was bringing down on the crew.

Then, on a Saturday night in November 1982, the gang ran into a stroke of luck, one that would have a profound impact on the Mafia in New York.

It occurred when an off-duty detective named Steve Marks, who usually worked in Brooklyn, stopped with his wife at a Long Island Chinese restaurant for a late night dinner. As he sat at the table he noticed an enormous man and a smaller unkempt younger man engaged in conversation at the counter.

The detective realized the two men were the wanted Vito Arena and Joe Lee. Prudently, Marks told his wife to remain at the table while he went to the restaurant's pay phone. He called Suffolk County police and asked for backup. Vito Arena was not the type of criminal to try to take down by yourself in a restaurant full of people including your wife.

The Suffolk County Police Department also responded professionally and prudently. As uniformed cops in patrol cars ringed the place, two plainclothes detectives came to help the Brooklyn cop. Arena never realized what was happening before a snub-nosed .38 was placed in the nape of his neck and a handcuff was on one wrist.

Within an hour after the call for backup, Arena and Lee were behind bars. The next day they were in the Brooklyn House of Detention on armed robbery charges.

The strike force was itching to get their hands on Arena, but they had no official reason, at the time, to take him in custody. Their investigation had not yet reached the indictment stage, and they had nothing but circumstantial evidence against Arena and nothing at all against Joey Lee.

By that time the gay hit man had a lawyer who made it clear the feds were not to speak to his client. “I knew we would make Arena roll over if we could just get a chance to talk to him. If we could get him to start talking, no lawyer would even bother taking his case,” Joe recalls.

So Coffey, Frank McDarby, and Jack Ferguson and some of his auto crime detectives made a midnight trip to the Brooklyn House of Detention. With the help of a contact in the New York Department of Corrections they signed Arena out and brought him to Walter Mack's office in lower Manhattan.

Arena may have looked like a big dumb slob to most of society but he was wise to the ways of the underworld. He knew what Coffey wanted from him, and he knew he was in a position to deal.

“By that time we were convinced Arena would bring us to Roy DeMeo and Nino Gaggi, and the prospect of Castellano still was real, so we were ready to give the guy almost anything he wanted—even a free ride on the warrants against him,” Coffey remembers.

“What do you want in exchange for cooperation?” Joe asked the hit man.

“Then he made our day; I realized we were on our way to a major victory against the mob.”

“All I want is to be put in the same cell with my lover Joey,” Arena responded.

The tough bunch of cops standing in a semicircle around the thug were at first stunned. Then they began giggling like school kids. Finally they cracked up. They laughed until tears ran down their faces. Not only at the vision of the enormous, hulking goon asking for his sad-faced, scraggly lover but also out of relief. Arena could have made things difficult for them. He knew that and they knew that. They all realized that they were on their way to a big score.

When Walter Mack arrived, the group had just gotten hold of themselves. They told him of Arena's request, and he quickly gave the okay. The interrogation of Vito Arena and the downfall of Paul Castellano began in earnest.

“We knew we had to move fast before the Brooklyn detectives realized we had our hands on their man. So I got to question him first. Homicide was the most serious crime to nail him with. I got right to the point and told him I wanted to hear about a murder he had committed. Right away he gave us a perfect case. A murder connected to auto crime,” Coffey recalls.

Arena's first homicide story was about the time he killed a fringe player named Joe Scorney who owned a body shop on Glenwood Road in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. The shop was often used to strip stolen cars for parts or repaint them and change the identification numbers for resale. But Arena said his boss, Roy DeMeo, thought Scorney was stripping some of their profits for himself. He told Arena to put a permanent halt to the larceny.

Arena said he and another enforcer named Richie DiNome walked into the shop and asked Scorney if they could speak to him in the back room. As Scorney walked in front of them, Arena took out his .25 caliber pistol and shot the auto body repairman in the back. Scorney was a big, strong man and the force of the bullet only knocked him to his knees.

“He turned around and screamed at me, ‘What the fuck are you doing?'” Arena told Coffey, as a tape recorder captured every gory detail.

“I'm killing you, motherfucker!” Arena said he yelled back as he shot Scorney a second time, killing him with a bullet in the head.

Coffey wanted more. He wanted physical evidence. “What did you do with the body?” he asked.

Arena continued his story as he gobbled down huge amounts of pizza and hamburgers.

“We stuffed him in a 55-gallon drum. But his head kept sticking out, so DiNome took a shovel and chopped his head off. We put it next to the body and then filled up drum with cement,” Arena said.

Noticing the puzzlement on the faces of the surrounding cops and obviously enjoying all the attention and free food, Arena explained that it was easy to chop someone's head off.

“The head comes right off,” he said. “The hardest part of the body to cut off is the arm. It's hell to cut through the elbow area,” he offered.

Arena continued that he and DiNome lugged the now heavy oil drum out to a pier in Shirley, Long Island, and dumped it in the Great South Bay.

The following day Coffey took a contingent of detectives to the exact spot. Scuba divers were sent under the water to search for the barrel.

On their first dive they found eight 55-gallon drums and a piece of bone they believed was human. They checked each barrel. Choosing the heaviest one as their target, they ordered a tow truck and lifted it from the water.

The drum was taken to the office of the Suffolk County medical examiner, where detectives using a hammer and chisel broke through the cement to discover the body of Joe Scorney. His head was still jammed in next to his shoulder just where Arena said he placed it.

“Vito Arena was the most despicable character I ever met. But he sure did the people of New York a service, once he started singing,” says Coffey.

Day after day, Coffey sat feeding Arena french fries and pizza, and the hit man sang his songs. He loved to give details of how he cut bodies up, explaining how he once cut a man's testicles off and laughed as they rolled across the room, “like two white marbles.”

He told the cops about a house in Brooklyn where victims were brought to be executed and dismembered. It was a house of horrors, and hardly a day would go by without a poor soul being brought in to be murdered by the sadists who were part of Roy DeMeo's crew. DeMeo, Arena said, would even drink the victims' blood.

Arena related that although he had nothing personally to do with it, he knew that Paul Castellano's own son-in-law, Frankie Amato, was executed in that house. The disappearance of Amato was indeed a mystery to organized crime watchers at the time. Eventually Arena gave Walter Mack's strike force information on twenty-five murders.

In August 1983, while Arena was singing his song, Richie DiNome, the killer who had stuffed Joe Scorney's head into the barrel, was the victim of a shotgun attack outside his house on Staten Island. He was shot because DeMeo mistakenly believed he was cooperating with Coffey. Miraculously he survived, spending six months in the hospital and at home recovering. All that time Arena continued to eat and sing, sing and eat. In February 1984, when he was fully recovered, Richie DiNome was ambushed again. This time he died.

The second attack had a profound effect on DiNome's brother Freddie, a thug who often worked as Roy DeMeo's chauffeur. Freddie thought that because his brother had survived the first attack, DeMeo would let him off the hook. He misread the Mafia code of “honor.” In revenge he contacted Ferguson and Coffey and said he wanted to make a deal. It was agreed that if he cooperated he would be placed in the Witness Protection Program.

“I found a great irony in all this,” Coffey states. “For decades people thought the Mafia survived because its members refused to cooperate with authorities. That was always true of the higher echelons, and until Joe Valachi opened the door on La Cosa Nostra in 1963, it was even true of the low-level guys. Now here I was running a Rat Squad with Vito Arena and Freddie DiNome, and they were doing great damage to the Mafia.”

Freddie DiNome turned out to be as important to Coffey and Ferguson as Arena. He told Ferguson about how he performed the driving duties for DeMeo. He said he would often take his boss to Castellano's home, where he would drop off hundreds of thousands of dollars from the autotheft, gambling, and loan-sharking rackets the Nino Gaggi crew was running.

He reported that once a week he would drive DeMeo to the corner of 57th Street and Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan, where he would meet a representative of the Westies. The Westie would hand over a paper bag filled with money—tribute the Irish thugs had to pay to Castellano in order to be allowed to operate their own illicit businesses. DiNome said the money would sometimes be passed in the entrance of the building that occupied that corner—the building that contained the New York headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration.