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

Lucchese, Genovese, and Colombo families to do something about Galante’s ambitions, before people began to believe the Mafia dealt drugs to school children.
    This is how the godfathers decided to handle the annoying Carmine Galante: As Galante pushed away his empty plate at the table in Joe and Mary’s backyard and placed his customary cigar to his lips, four Bonanno button men, including the father-and-son hit team of “Sonny Red” and Bruno Indelicato, swung open the small wooden door leading from the restaurant and entered the backyard. Without warning they opened fire with shotguns and automatic pistols. Galante never got to light his cigar.
    In less than one minute their work was done. As they escaped in a car waiting outside the restaurant’s entrance, Carmine Galante, Leonardo Coppolla, and Guiseppe Turano lay dead. They were blown off their chairs by the powerful blasts onto the patio’s hard floor. Galante landed in the midst of Joe and Mary’s prized tomato plants. John Turano, Guiseppe’s son, who worked in the restaurant, was critically wounded as he ran to hide in a refrigerator. Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato, unhurt, ran from the death scene before police arrived.
    Joe Coffey was off the day Galante was gunned down. He was at home when Jim Sullivan called, suggesting he travel to Joe and Mary’s to see if he could be of any help to the precinct and OCCB detectives at the scene.
    But before Joe and many of the other detectives arrived, the area around the restaurant was besieged by uniformed police; emergency medical technicians, who eventually saved John Turano’s life; and the media. Reporters and photographers from the city’s newspapers and television and radio stations were alerted originally by police scanner reports that four people had been shot in the restaurant. Knowing the neighborhood to be favored by the Bonanno family, the press rushed to the scene. Word that the powerful Carmine Galante had been hit was already thoroughly circulating throughout the city.
    Several photographers, refused entrance to the crime scene, made their way to a nearby rooftop that overlooked the backyard dining area. The pictures they took have since served as the model of a mob rubout. There, lying among the scattered dishes and toppled dining table in the middle of the crushed and twisted tomato plants, was Carmine Galante, his shirt drenched in blood, his cigar grotesquely clenched firmly in his mouth.
    By the time Coffey got to the backyard, Galante’s body had been photographed by the police and removed from the scene. “But that didn’t stop everyone from accusing me of putting that cigar in his mouth. The fact that the medical examiner determined he bit reflexively on the cigar when the shotgun blast hit him didn’t discourage the rumor either. To this day there are people who believe I put that cigar in Galante’s mouth to make him look ridiculous. It’s not a bad idea, but I did not do it,” Coffey swears.
    Thirty-five minutes after the shooting, a scene was photographed by detectives from the Manhattan district attorney’s office that changed forever the way law enforcement thought of the relationships between mob families.
    Sitting in an apartment across the street from the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy, Detective John Gurnee captured on videotape the image of “Sonny Red” and Bruno Indelicato being met in the street outside the club by Aniello Dellacroce, the underboss of the Gambinos, who reported only to Paul Castellano, the capo di tutti capi, the boss of all bosses in the American Mafia.
    From the apartment, which was rented by the Manhattan district attorney’s office for surveillance on the Ravenite, headquarters of the Gambinos, Bruno was photographed taking a pistol from his pocket and placing it under the front seat of the car. Then all three men embraced.
    Gurnee was surprised at what he had seen: two