The Coffey Files Read Online Free PDF Page A

Law.” He smashed his huge fist through the screen door and into the face of Steven Ladenhauf. The young man hit the floor. Blood flowed from his nose down over his chin and onto the front of his shirt.
    Coffey tossed the subpoena through the newly created hole in the screen door and without another word turned his back and walked away. O’Connell and Maroney approved of Joe’s brutal act. They smiled at each other and followed their boss to their unmarked ear.
    Three days later Coffey and Jack Cahill were inspecting the facilities at one of the police department’s best kept secrets—the “Bat Cave”—a deep underground garage adjacent to a Queens high school where the department’s surveillance vehicles and equipment were stored and maintained. Joe always kept up-to-date on the latest electronic bugging devices. A tape recorder was as essential to his work as a nightstick was to a street patrolman.
    The topic of the morning was a wiretap recording that an undercover agent working on a gunrunning case had brought in. The Bat Cave staff of technicians was having a good laugh over it. The agent was trying to get the gunrunning suspect, a soldier in the Genovese family, to admit on tape that he was in possession of a certain number of guns requested by the agent. A few days earlier the agent had purchased a stolen U.S. Army Colt .45 from the suspect. The soldier, however, was being cagey, trying to talk in code. It went like this:
    Agent: Do you have the merchandise I ordered?
    Soldier: Yeah, yeah, I got the ’tings.
    The agent, knowing that “’tings” would not hold up in court as “guns” and not wanting to use the word himself, which would have alerted the soldier’s suspicion, pressed on.
    Agent: Well did you get every item?
    Soldier: Yeah, every ’ting. I got the twenty-two, the thirty-eight and the nine millimeter.
    The word “millimeter” threw the Bat Cave crowd into hysterics. No juror could deny the soldier was talking about a gun. He had broken his own code.
    But things got even funnier.
    Soldier: Hold on a second, there’s a fuckin’ mouse in the room, I’m gonna shoot it. [A loud bang is heard on the tape.]
    Agent: Did you get it?
    Soldier: Nah, I woulda got it if I had that “big boy” I sold you the other day.
    Agent: “Big boy?”
    Soldier: “Yeah, the forty-five. I coulda shot the mouse and shot my aunt in the room downstairs at the same time.”
    Coffey joined in the laugh. He relished every instance of a wiseguy making a fool of himself. He considered mafiosi to be idiots, and as far as he was concerned they proved it time and time again. “The greenest detective in the worst squad in the city is smarter than any capo di tutti capi asshole,” he would say.
    Coffey was at the Bat Cave to line up wiretap equipment for the Briguglio investigation and to check out a new van that had been fitted with a periscope device. The periscope was hidden in what looked like an air conditioning unit on the roof. He was crawling around inside the van when his beeper went off.
    He phoned headquarters and got a message to call O’Connell at Ranieri’s restaurant.
    â€œJoe,” O’Connell said, “Ranieri is pissing in his pants. I told him he’s going to have to talk to a grand jury about his role in the murder and he nearly passed out. He says Crimi is Funzi Tieri’s nephew and will slice him in little pieces if he talks.”
    Funzi Tieri was the godfather of the Genovese crime family at the time, one of the most powerful gangsters in the country. Coffey’s mind raced with the possibilities of connecting him to the Ladenhauf murder.
    Up to this point all Coffey’s gang really had on Ranieri was circumstantial. He was among the last to see Ladenhauf alive and he had a motive, the $250,000, but there was no physical evidence—no gun and no witnesses who saw the murder.