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A Cold Case
By Philip Gourevitch Picador
Copyright © 2001 Philip Gourevitch
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8110-1
CHAPTER 1
ON NOVEMBER 15, 1944, an Army deserter named Frank Gilbert Koehler was arrested for burglary in New York City. Frankie, as he liked to be called, had no criminal record. He had walked off his post at Fort Dix, New Jersey, after suffering unsustainable financial reversals in a crap game in the latrine, and when it was discovered that he was fifteen years old and had lied about his age to enlist, he was sent to children's court, declared a juvenile delinquent, and returned to military control. Six months later, Koehler — AWOL again, and for good — shot and killed a sixteen-year-old boy in an abandoned building on West Twenty-fourth Street. The next day, he surrendered to a policeman on a street corner and was taken to a station house, where he confessed. In consideration of his "extreme youth" and lack of "parental guidance" — he had left home at thirteen, following the death of his father, a burglar — the district attorney reduced his charge from homicide to murder in the second degree. In court, Koehler pleaded guilty, and the judge sent him upstate to spend five years at the Elmira Reformatory. He was released on May 17, 1950, and remained a free man for nine months and twenty-six days until he was found by police, at four in the morning, hiding on the catwalk between the tracks of the Third Avenue elevated train line at Thirty-fourth Street, after robbing a nearby bar and grill at gunpoint. As he was led back to the station platform, Koehler called out to a man standing there in the predawn gloom as if waiting for a train, "Arthur, save me, save me, tell them I was with you." So that man, too, was taken into custody. Koehler and he had indeed been together all night. They'd met at a Times Square cinema where the poster said THRILL CRAZY, KILL CRAZY, and the picture was Gun Crazy, a story of fugitive lovers on a crime spree hurtling to their doom.
A news photograph of Koehler taken minutes after his arrest showed him to be a slight, dark-haired man, rather handsome and sharply dressed in an overcoat, business suit, white shirt, necktie, and handcuffs. When the picture appeared in the Daily Mirror, he was recognized by Carmella Basterrchea, the bookkeeper of a Murray Hill construction company, as one of two gunmen who had, a month earlier, stepped into her office late on a Friday afternoon, then, saying, "All right, lady, this is a heist," and, "Don't move or I'll plug you," made off with her payroll. Koehler admitted to both stickups, and once again he was sent upstate, this time to Green Haven Prison in Stormville, with a sentence of ten to twenty years. He served eleven and a half and was paroled in August 1962 at the age of thirty-three, having spent most of his life "away."
Before the year was out, Frankie Koehler had a wife and legitimate employment in a machine shop. Later, he found union work as a stevedore on the West Side docks, then on the crew at the New York Coliseum on Columbus Circle, and he did not come to the attention of the police again until February 18, 1970. Around eight o'clock on that evening, he was having drinks at Channel Seven, a restaurant on West Fifty-fourth Street, when he got into an argument with the owner, Pete McGinn, and a friend of McGinn's named Richie Glennon. The issue was a woman — the wife of a mutual friend. Koehler had been having an affair with her while her husband was in prison, and she was now pregnant. McGinn declared that knocking up a jailed friend's wife was about the lowest thing a lowlife could do, and Glennon seconded this judgment. Koehler came back with the opinion that they were a couple of scumbags themselves. So it went. Koehler spit in McGinn's face, and the three men were soon out on the sidewalk, where Glennon watched as McGinn and Koehler had at each other and Koehler took a severe beating.
After that, McGinn went home, Glennon returned to the bar, and Koehler picked himself up off the pavement and went his own way for a while before returning to Channel Seven. Glennon was still there. Koehler had a drink with him and proposed that they sit down with McGinn to put their quarrel behind them in a gentlemanly fashion. Glennon agreed, and phoned McGinn to say they were coming over to his place, which was a block north of Channel Seven, in what the next day's News described as a "luxury apartment building ... just up the street from Gov. Rockefeller's New York office."
Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn had known each other from boyhood in the South Bronx, and both had found success in the restaurant business. McGinn's Channel Seven was a popular watering hole for disc jockeys and anchormen from the nearby studios of ABC television and CBS radio, and Glennon owned a bistro on the Upper East Side called The Flower Pot, which was doing well enough for him to have taken the night off. Glennon had been having dinner at Channel Seven with his girlfriend, a nurse, and when he left with Frankie Koehler, she accompanied them. "We went to McGinn's apartment, and rode up in the elevator," she told me nearly thirty years later. "It was the fourth floor. Richie told me to stay in the hall, and I waited out there till I heard these loud bangs. I thought they were fighting again, throwing things around. I heard the noise — I didn't even know they were shots, I just heard bangs — and I opened the door. Frankie Koehler was running away with his smoking gun. I said, 'Where's Richie?' There was Richie on the floor."
Glennon lay on his back with his legs crossed comfortably at his ankles, his overcoat and suit jacket twisted beneath him, his left arm flung out, and the left side of his shirt bunched and soaked in blood from shoulder to waist around a small round hole over his rib cage. His girlfriend didn't notice that Pete McGinn was at the far end of the room, clad only in a bathrobe, with his right foot in a slipper and his left foot bare, lying facedown and dead in a puddle of blood on the parquet floor. "I remember a big dog hopping around," she told me. "It wasn't a small dog. It was a big dog." Beyond that, she was conscious only of Glennon. She didn't want to believe he was dead. She tried to pick him up and ask him where it hurt.
Koehler told her to shut up. He was still hovering over her with his gun, and it occurred to her that he must be afraid. She said, "I'm not gonna tell anybody," and he said, "Don't open your fucking mouth. Just sit there." With that, he left. He took the elevator down to the lobby, fished a handkerchief from his pocket, and pretended to be coughing into it to hide his face as he walked past the doorman. And then Frankie Koehler disappeared.
CHAPTER 2
TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER, on January 6, 1997, Andy Rosenzweig, the chief of investigations for the district attorney of Manhattan, was driving up First Avenue, nosing through lunch hour traffic, on his way to New York Hospital for a stress test. The procedure was routine, one of the mounting burdens of middle age, but Rosenzweig had plenty to be stressed about — on any given day, his squad of more than eighty investigators was at work on hundreds of cases, tracking thousands of leads into virtually every known realm of criminal activity — and at the corner of Sixty-ninth Street, he experienced a jolt of memory that quickened his pulse. That was where Richie Glennon's restaurant, The Flower Pot, had stood. Rosenzweig, who had known Glennon and liked him, was vexed to realize that he couldn't say when he'd last recalled his murdered pal.
Rosenzweig didn't like to think of himself as a forgetful man; in his view of human qualities, forgetfulness ranked as a fundamental flaw. He could live with such failings in others. He had to. But with himself, he was less forgiving, and as the memory of Glennon revived in him, he went to work on it, tracking it back to the early 1960s, when he'd graduated from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and, having no plan — no idea, really, of what to make of himself — he'd found work for several summers as a lifeguard at the Miramar pool at 207th Street and Tenth Avenue. It was the largest outdoor swimming pool in Manhattan, half a million gallons of water, with a high spiraling slide, and a terrace of deep sand called "the beach," and a cafeteria, and a former dance hall that served as a weight gym for the inside crowd. Glennon, a lanky, rugged-looking, blue-eyed former prizefighter became a regular on the Miramar scene in the summer of 1964, Rosenzweig's third season there. Glennon was ten years older than Rosenzweig, and when he first appeared at the pool, he pretended to be someone else, introducing himself around as a champion boxer of the day. He didn't fool anyone for long, but he made an impression. That was Glennon: through the deception, he had made himself known — always a kidder, always coming on as a big shot, always putting one over, an impersonator, always on the move. His hands in particular were never idle, flickering about to the syncopated rhythms of his speech, striking a range of distracting poses.
Yes, he boxed, but Glennon was no champion. In the ring, as a middleweight, he had a mediocre record, thirteen fights, five losses; he was what they called "a ham-and-egger." But just getting in there gave him an aura that he considered worth the beatings. He enjoyed fighting, and did it for free when the occasion presented itself in bars and on the street. He liked to mix things up. He liked to hang out with cops, and he liked to hang out with criminals — liked to be where the action was. He'd served in the merchant marine and worked as a model, and by the time Rosenzweig met him he was earning high union wages as an ironworker, fitting the frames of tall buildings. On the job, he'd hang a sign off the beam with his name and phone number and wave at the girls in the facing offices. And it worked; they'd call him. Rosenzweig, who tended to be as reserved as Glennon was antic, remembered him as a man of mischief, "a colorful character, high energy, funny, a talker, glib, Runyonesque — you know, a tough guy."
To be sure, Rosenzweig had always sensed "something behind the scenes with Richie," a whiff of the illicit. Glennon, he recalled, "was one of those pure New York characters who truly walked the fence between the good guys and the bad guys." At the same time, Rosenzweig had recognized in him a familiar hunger to be "somebody" without quite knowing who. In those days, Rosenzweig couldn't have said how his own qualities were supposed to add up, either. Back home, in the leafy, predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Bronx Park East, his father, a Polish-born cabdriver, and his mother, a Brooklyn-born professional secretary, wanted him to go to college. (After all, his mother told his friends, he had an IQ of 158.) But Rosenzweig was restless; classrooms oppressed him; his mind resisted abstraction, and he felt most at ease among the older, streetwise cops and construction workers who made up the core of his crowd at the Miramar.
His boss at the pool was an Irish Catholic ex-cop named Danny Lynch, who was in his mid-thirties and claimed he'd never met a Jew before and had never wanted to. "Rosen-what?" people at the pool would say when they heard his name. "How do you spell that?" Rosenzweig would answer them, and Lynch would chant the letters to the tune of the Mouseketeers: R-O-S, E-N-Z, W-E-I-G. Lynch was impressed by anyone agile enough to avoid taking the bait without backing down, and during Rosenzweig's second summer at the Miramar, they became best friends. "He was up for us," Lynch recalled. "You couldn't intimidate Andy, physically or mentally." Lynch was no slouch himself. In 1956, as a twenty-one-year-old police rookie just back from military service in Korea, he was made a detective — the youngest ever in the city — after displaying extraordinary reflexes under extraordinary pressure. He told me of the incident, much as he had told it to young Andy Rosenzweig nearly half a century earlier.
"Michael Sudia, a big, tall, six-foot-four, beautiful-looking kid, same age as myself, and a little guy, Felix Durante, had the whole West Side terrorized, doing stickups. They were heroin addicts, and deserters from the Marine Corps, and they'd got in a shooting in the Hotel Whitehall on a Hundredth Street and Broadway. I didn't know it. I was standing down in Riverside Drive, a new cop, on what they call a fixer. That's a fixed post. You have to stand there. This was December, a cold December night, and for some reason they decided to run toward me. I could hear them running down the street. There was no one else around from West End Avenue to the Drive, just a lot of doctors' cars. I figured they'd broke into a car, no big deal. So when they got abreast of me, I stepped out and had my arms out with my nightstick. Sudia put a pistol to my head and said, 'You cocksucker, hand me your gun, or I'll kill you.' So — I'm not sure of the exchange, but I'm pretty sure — I said, 'OK, OK.' And I went into my coat. We had big heavy coats that you're too young to have seen. They wrapped around you, terrible heavy coats. If you could stand up in them all night, you were lucky to walk home. Anyway, when I cleared the holster, I fired through my coat. I shot him six times. You know how many times I hit him? Twice. Once in the heart — he had a tattoo of a heart on his heart — once in the knee. The others passed through his clothing, and our noses were touching, so I guess I was frightened. He was dead by the time his head was by my knees."
Days at the Miramar were a run of such stories, and there were always more cops to be found around the corner at Chambers' bar, where Rosenzweig soon became an after-work regular. Richie Glennon was never at the center of that life, but he made himself at home in it. There was a time when Rosenzweig wanted to get into ironwork, and Glennon sent him down to meet the boss at the union hall. But Jews were not wanted. The boss said, "'Rosenzweig' is not gonna fly around here. Will you use another name?" and Rosenzweig said, "No."
Later, when Rosenzweig followed Lynch's urgings and became a cop and Glennon moved into the restaurant business, they had faded to the periphery of each other's worlds, because Rosenzweig was rigorously straight and Glennon remained a man of many hustles who "never quite separated himself from the underbelly of life" and was known as a "shylock," a loan shark. Still, when Rosenzweig got married in 1967, Glennon attended the wedding, and when Glennon got shot in 1970, Rosenzweig attended his wake. Rosenzweig had seen a good deal of violent death by then, working as a patrolman in the Four-One Precinct — "Fort Apache" — in the Bronx. But Glennon was the first person he had known socially to be murdered, and nothing he'd learned on the job helped to diminish the shock when Danny Lynch called him with the news.
Passing the site of the old Flower Pot brought it all back: Glennon and McGinn — double homicide. It was the talk of Rosenzweig's town at the time, and a curious thing about murder is the way it twists one's memory of the dead into a fixation on the murderer. "Everyone knew this guy Frankie Koehler had shot and killed Richie and Pete," Rosenzweig recalled. "It was like a simple case. It wasn't a whodunit, just, Where is he? It was kind of matter-of-fact. People saying, 'Oh, yeah, they just gotta pick him up. They know where he lives, they know he works at the Coliseum. Frankie Koehler, bad guy, tough guy, West Side of Manhattan, real bad guy.' It was almost like a fait accompli: 'They're gonna find him because detectives do that. They know how to do it.' Every day and every week, and then every few weeks and then every few months, we'd talk about it: 'Aw, jeez, they still have to pick him up.' Maybe a year went by and they didn't pick him up, maybe two years, and you're moving on in life."
TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS. The Miramar pool had been paved over long ago, and a Pathmark supermarket now stood in its place. Somewhere Rosenzweig still had a photograph of himself with Danny Lynch and some of their long-ago crowd gathered around a table at a policeman's retirement banquet in the late 1960s: ten flashbulb-bright faces, all of them cops with their wives and dates, except for Richie Glennon and his girlfriend. Half the people at that table were dead now. "Their peephole is closed," Rosenzweig told me. He himself was fifty-two; his three children were grown; he had recently married his third wife, Mary Kelley, who worked with him at the D.A.'s office as the master of computer searches; they had just bought a weekend house together on the Rhode Island shore; and as he was beginning, warily, to contemplate retirement, he looked back to the time when he had known Glennon as "the formative years," and he felt a sense of debt. He figured that if Koehler had ever been caught, he would have heard, and as an officer of the law, he took the fact that he hadn't heard as a rebuke.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Cold Case by Philip Gourevitch. Copyright © 2001 Philip Gourevitch. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
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