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

Bonanno button men obviously being greeted with great warmth by the underboss of the Gambino family. The detective had no way of knowing at the time about the massacre at Joe and Mary’s.
    But when he found out later that evening, one of the first things he did was call Joe Coffey.
    â€œJoe,” he asked, “is it possible that Galante was hit by his own crew and it was sanctioned by the Gambinos?”
    Coffey, by then fully briefed by his gang, which had been pressing their network of informants, replied that it was possible because of their anger over the drug dealing.
    â€œWell, when you see what I’ve got on tape you’re gonna believe it.”
    â€œWhen I saw the tape I reasoned that all the families must have been pissed off at Galante, but I didn’t think they would order such a hit without Rastelli’s okay. That would have gone against their code and would have resulted in just the kind of all-out gang war Jim Sullivan wanted me to prevent.”
    Coffey went to the Metropolitan Correction Center to find out who had been visiting Phil Rastelli. He learned that the day before the hit and the day after, Rastelli had meetings with capos of his own Bonanno family as well as high-level capos of the Gambino family.
    â€œIn my mind the scenario was clear. All five families wanted Galante hit, and Rastelli agreed to have his men do it. What surprised the hell out of me was the level of cooperation that allowed the Bonanno hit men to report back to the Gambino underboss, Dellacroce. This was a kind of cooperation not often seen.”
    Shortly after the shooting, an eyewitness gave one of the first detectives on the scene in Ridgewood a description of the men she saw fleeing in a late-model Oldsmobile and the license plate of the car.
    The car was found a few blocks away and fingerprints were lifted but did not connect with any on file at headquarters. Five years later this car, too, would play an important part in bringing the Ruling Commission, the leaders of all the city’s Mafia families, to justice.
    But the descriptions and the subsequent knowledge provided by Gurnee’s tapes led Coffey to begin an all-out search for the Indelicatos and two men they were known to work with: Dominick Trinchera and Phil “Philly Lucky” Giacone. The Coffey Gang began meetings with all their reliable informants and set up their own surveillance on known Bonanno hangouts. After weeks of looking, though, it appeared that all four had vanished from the face of the earth. Dozens of hoodlums were called in for questioning but none had the nerve or personal motive to cooperate.
    â€œThere was a rumor that Bruno Indelicato was totally stoned out on cocaine and running through the streets bragging how he was going to be a don in the Gambino family because he hit Galante. There weren’t even any rumors about Trinchera and Giacone.”
    In May 1981 a young boy walking his dog in a deserted area of Howard Beach, Queens, had trouble dragging the animal away from some kind of bone he found in the dirt.
    Closer inspection revealed the bone to be the right arm of “Sonny Red” Indelicato, which had risen through the twenty inches of dirt piled on his body.
    â€œA lot of young guys think the way to Mafia success is to carry out an important hit,” Coffey says. “But the Galante case proves them wrong. All the shooters came to an untimely end, and Cesare Bonventre, who set up the hit, was murdered in 1984. So my homicide investigation was pretty much at a dead end.”
    â€œBut once again,” Coffey remembers telling Jim Sullivan, “we’re learning things about the mob that we never believed possible before. Even when we don’t make an arrest in a homicide we’re building intelligence that I know will pay off someday.”
    Throughout his career Joe Coffey was always a hunch player. This was one hunch that one day would prove correct in a big way.

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