Joseph Coffey, Detective Who Took Son of Sam’s Confession, Dies at 77

By Sam Roberts
New York Times
October 2, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/nyregion/joseph-coffey-detective-who-took-son-of-sams-confession-dies-at-77.html?_r=0

Police investigate a Cadillac where a man and a woman were shot by David Berkowitz in Queens. Joseph Coffey is at far left.

Joseph Coffey, a New York City detective sergeant who took the confession of the serial killer known as Son of Sam, arrested John J. Gotti three times, trailed a minor mobster from Little Italy to Germany in a case that implicated the Vatican Bank, and danced with Nancy Reagan at the Waldorf one night when he was assigned to guard her, died on Sept. 27 at his home in Levittown, N.Y. He was 77.

The cause was complications of a heart condition, his wife, Susan Elise Coffey, said.

“He was instinctive, he understood people, and when you were in his cross hairs he knew everything about you,” said Jerry Schmetterer, who collaborated with Sergeant Coffey on “The Coffey Files: One Cop’s War Against the Mob,” which was published in 1992.

Sergeant Coffey’s other exploits included the investigation of the 1978 Lufthansa heist at Kennedy International Airport (about $5 million in cash was stolen from a cargo-area vault) and the 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan by the Puerto Rican nationalist group F.A.L.N.

Sgt. Joseph Coffey, left, is sworn in at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Organized Crime in 1983.

Later, as the principal investigator for New York State’s Organized Crime Task Force, he pursued the so-called Commission Case against the bosses of the city’s top organized crime families. (Four were convicted in 1986, and another was killed under orders by Mr. Gotti and succeeded by him.)

Eavesdropping on a wiretapped conversation during an investigation into an attempted mob takeover of the Playboy Club in Manhattan, Sergeant Coffey overheard a minor mobster, Vincent Rizzo, mysteriously arrange a mission to Munich, but not through the usual organized-crime-connected travel agency.

His suspicions took him to Germany, where he persuaded United States Army intelligence officers to plant a bug in a hotel room. There Mr. Rizzo and two confederates detailed the transfer of counterfeit and stolen securities through the Vatican Bank.

The case ultimately led to charges against an archbishop who was the bank’s president.

Perhaps his most notorious case was that of the serial killer David Berkowitz, who called himself Son of Sam. Mr. Berkowitz fatally shot six people and wounded seven others before he was arrested in 1977. He confessed to Sergeants Coffey and Richard Condon, claiming his orders to kill came from a neighbor’s dog.

“When I entered the room on the 13th floor, I wanted to pick up Berkowitz and throw him out the window,” Sergeant Coffey told The New York Post in 2007. “But when he started talking about getting messages from a dog, I realized I was not dealing with a mob killer, but a psycho, a sick man.”

Joseph John Coffey was born on April 3, 1938, in Manhattan, the son of Joseph Coffey Sr. and the former Margaret Fitzgerald.

His storied career and his gung-ho commitment to fighting organized crime may have been inspired by a brush with violence when he was only 8.

Young Joseph was waiting for his father, a truck driver and union organizer, to return home to the family’s tenement in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. Suddenly he heard gunfire. His father had been targeted by a rival faction in a Teamsters union that represented department store deliverers.

But the gunman missed, hitting Joseph Sr.’s image in a mirror instead. As the story goes, his son decided on the spot to become a police officer.

He joined the police force in 1965 after graduating from Xavier High School in New York and serving in the Army in Germany.

He married Patricia Flynn, who died in 1993. He is survived by their three children, Joseph Jr., Steven and Kathleen Toon; his second wife, the former Susan Elise McGonigle; six grandchildren; and a sister, Patsy Lynch.

“When he retired from the police force, he thanked the city for giving him a ringside seat to the greatest show on earth,” his wife recalled.

One highlight of that show was the night he was assigned to protect Nancy Reagan, the first lady, at a reception at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan. At one point, as she was standing alone — apparently because other guests were too shy to approach her — she stepped over and asked Sergeant Coffey to dance.

The boxer Joe Frazier was also once put in Sergeant Coffey’s charge, after he received threats attributed to Nation of Islam supporters as he was poised to fight Muhammad Ali, a member of the movement, at Madison Square Garden in 1971.

Recalling that night at a dinner honoring Sergeant Coffey in 2000, Ronald Goldstock, a former leader of the State Organized Crime Task Force, challenged the ringside-seat metaphor.

Sergeant Coffey, he said, “never sat in any row; he was center stage, the ringmaster straight out of central casting, directing, doing — making things happen.

“And that is meant both figuratively and literally. Indeed, anyone who has seen the classic sports cable reruns of the Ali-Frazier fight will recognize our honoree as the first man in the ring.”