The Coffey Files Read Online Free PDF Page B

burst from his face. He had just broken the godfather’s chops and was feeling great about it.
    â€œCahill,” he said as he got into the car, “I love this job.”
    The following day the Queens district attorney was advised by Funzi Tieri’s lawyer that his client was too ill to appear before a grand jury. That was okay as far as Coffey was concerned. The important thing was that Tieri made his displeasure known to his nephew.
    And Coffey had one more trick up his sleeve for Ranieri.
    The detectives had learned that he was a fanatic for attending his son’s Little League games. For several Saturday afternoons, Coffey arranged for one of his detectives dressed like the typical mob thug—shirt unbuttoned to his waist, gold chains weighing down his neck, thick sunglasses—to sit in the stands at the Little League field.
    The “hood” stood out like a sore thumb among the tennis shorts and T-shirts, and throughout the games he never even looked at the field. He just sat and stared at Ranieri.
    The next time O’Connell and Maroney visited Crimi, Ranieri, and the strong-arm Kay, they reported a new level of cooperation. Crimi, it appeared, was no longer so sure of Genovese family backing. He and Kay began contradicting each other as to what they knew about Leo Ladenhauf.
    Ranieri may have thought of himself as a wiseguy, but he was really a restaurant owner. He did not have the stomach to stand up to the kind of pressure being put on him. Thanks to Crimi’s bragging and Coffey’s stage direction, he thought he was the Mafia’s next target. Only the law held out any hope of his surviving. Ranieri broke.
    The district attorney provided the following description to the grand jury: Peter Ranieri wanted to open a fancy gourmet restaurant on Long Island and went to Leo Ladenhauf for a loan. He apparently was making the correct payments on the loan but Ladenhauf, the fringe player, was holding out the tribute money he had to pay Crimi, who was his connection with the Genovese family. Kay did Crimi’s strong-arm work. Ladenhauf told them Ranieri wasn’t paying, so he had nothing to give them.
    Coffey’s investigation concluded that there was a confrontation in Ranieri’s restaurant on March 17. In front of Crimi, Kay, and another henchman named Caligieri, Ranieri said he had been paying Ladenhauf the required money. Ladenhauf, of course, said Ranieri was lying.
    Crimi, Kay, Caligieri, and Ladenhauf then went to a nearby motel to sort things out. In the motel room Kay walked up behind Ladenhauf and shot him one time in the back of the head. Then the three mobsters stuffed Ladenhauf into the trunk of his car. Kay drove the car to Kennedy Airport and left it there to be discovered by a suspicious Port Authority cop four days later.
    Only one obstacle remained in the way of Coffey’s bringing Crimi and Kay to justice. The Queens DA’s office seemed to be dragging its heels on moving toward pressing the grand jury for indictments.
    Coffey had expected this resistance: “The Queens DA was traditionally linked to labor unions for political contributions. I was not surprised they weren’t anxious to move against Crimi and Kay, who had links to the construction trades and the Teamsters,” Coffey explains.
    Finally, Coffey threatened to take the case to the “Twin Towers”—the World Trade Center office of New York State’s special prosecutor, John Keenan.
    The threat worked, and Crimi, Kay, and Caligieri were indicted for loan-sharking and murder. Ranieri agreed to testify against them.
    Two weeks before the trial was supposed to begin Kay was murdered, his body found in the trunk of his car at LaGuardia.
    Without Kay, the shooter, the murder charges fell through. There was some disappointment, but Crimi and the others were nailed for loan-sharking. That took them off the streets for a little while. Joe felt that without his special unit the