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in Georgia.
    So now they had a description of a hit man and a motive for the murder. “Tony Pro” was afraid Briguglio was going to sing about Hoffa. Coffey took the information to the district attorney.
    â€œThe DA threw us a real curve ball here. He would not go with the kid’s ID. He said it was too unreliable because he did not come forward right away. He said there was not enough evidence to seek indictments against the shooter or Provenzano,” Coffey remembers.
    â€œI was upset, but not too angry. After all, as far as the police department was concerned the homicide was solved and we could clear it from our records. We had solved two mob hits in a little over a month, we proved the effectiveness of the task force concept, and I was fulfilling a dream.”
    By the end of the summer of 1978 the Coffey Gang had become an integral part of the workings of the chief of detectives’ office. They began to overcome some of the initial resistance of precinct detectives and some of the organized crime experts in the five New York City district attorneys’ offices and in the department’s Organized Crime Control Bureau. “We kept turning new informants and every day it seemed one of my men was testifying before one grand jury or another. We were even able to solve some very old homicides like the rubout of ‘Crazy’ Joey Gallo in 1972. Gallo was gunned down as he was celebrating his birthday over a plate of clams in Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy.”
    A button man named Joseph Lupurelli who took part in the hit turned informant. He laid the blame on his partners in crime, Carmine “Sonny Pinto” DiBiasi and Phil Gambino. Lupurelli said Matty Ianiello, who owned Umberto’s, recommended it to Gallo to set him up for the hit. It was done as a favor to the Colombo family.
    The Coffey Gang was even able to clear one of the most notorious rubouts in Mafia history from the department’s unsolved files when they linked the 1957 murder of Albert “The Earthquake” Anastasia to a New Jersey hit man. “This was very important to the department’s overall morale. We were actually beginning to change the perception that the Mafia could do anything they wanted and get away with it,” states Coffey.
    Coffey was also becoming somewhat of a police department ambassador of homicide information. He set up an information sharing network between his own gang and their counterparts in the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and New York State’s Organized Crime Task Force. Traditionally there was little spirit of cooperation among various agencies. Five years later these early contacts would play an instrumental role in bringing down the heads of New York’s five crime families in an enormous case known as the “Ruling Commission.”
    On July 12, 1979, something else happened that would eventually play a major part in that case and haunt the godfathers of New York.
    It was a warm, typical July day. There was a calm and peaceful feeling on the streets of the Ridgewood section of Brooklyn. The three- and four-story row houses, separated occasionally by an ancient wooden frame home, gave the neighborhood a deceptive feeling of small-town America that belied its connection to the surrounding city.
    In the backyards of Ridgewood, Italian grandfathers, retired after years of back-breaking construction work, nurtured gardens of tomatoes, eggplant, and squash that rivaled the Sicilian fields of their youth. Some even found success with grapes that fed the family’s personal wine cellars.
    Joe and Mary’s Italian Restaurant was a Ridgewood landmark known for its old-world home-style cooking. It was also a favorite dining spot for members of the Bonanno crime family. On that summer day in 1979 Carmine Galante, a Bonanno capo, decided to have lunch at one of the backyard tables at Joe and Mary’s. He was joined by