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, and when it was discovered that he was fifteen years old, and had lied about his age in order to enlist, he was sent to Childrens 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 court, he pleaded guilty, and the judge sent him upstate to serve five years at the Elmira Reformatory. He was released on May 17, 1950, and remained a free man for eight months and nine days, until he was found by police, hiding between the tracks of the Third Avenue Elevated train line, after robbing a bar-and-grill at gunpoint. A news photograph of Koehler, taken that night, showed him to be a slight, dark-haired man, rather handsome and dapperly dressed, in an overcoat, business suit, necktie, and handcuffs. When the picture appeared in the next day’s Mirror, he was recognized by the bookkeeper of a Murray Hill construction company as one of two gunmen who had, a month earlier, robbed her payroll. Koehler admitted to both heists, and once again he was transferred 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 of 1962, at the age of thirty-three, having spent half of his life “away.”
Before the year was out, Frankie Koehler had a wife and a job in a machine shop. Later, he found union work 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 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 McGinn declared that carrying on with a jailed friend’s wife was about the lowest thing a lowlife could do. Koehler came back with the opinion that he was a scumbag himself. Then Koehler spat in McGinn’s face, and the two men were soon out on the sidewalk, where McGinn gave Koehler a severe beating. After that, McGinn went home, and Koehler picked himself up off the pavement and went his own way before returning to Channel Seven. Richie Glennon was still there, and Koehler proposed that they sit down with McGinn, to put their quarrel behind them in a gentlemanly fashion. Glennon thought that was a good idea, and he phoned McGinn to say that 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 knew each other from boyhood in the South Bronx, and both had found success in the restaurant business. Glennon owned a bistro called the Flower Pot, on the Upper East Side, which was doing well enough for him to have taken the night off. He had been having dinner at Channel Seven with his girlfriend, and when he left with Frankie Koehler she went with them. “We went to McGinn’s apartment, and rode up in the elevator,” she told me recently. “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 this 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 white shirt bunched and soaked in blood from shoulder to waist around a small hole over his rib cage. His girlfriend didn’t notice Pete McGinn, who was at the far end of the room, behind a plush easy chair, clad only in a bathrobe, with his right foot in a slipper and his left foot bare, lying face down and dead 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 that he was dead. She tried to pick him up, and asked 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.
A MEMORY OF MURDER
Twenty-seven years later, on January 6, 1997, Andy Rosenzweig, the chief investigator for the District Attorney of Manhattan, was driving up Third Avenue, nosing through lunch-hour traffic, on his way to his doctor’s office for a stress test. The procedure was routine, but Rosenzweig had plenty to be stressed about—on any given day at the D.A.’s office, his team 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 distressed to realize that he couldn’t remember the last time he had thought of his murdered pal.
The memory carried Rosenzweig back to the early sixties, when he had graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, and had worked for several summers as a lifeguard at the Miramar pool, on 207th Street and Tenth Avenue. The pool was then the largest in Manhattan, a magnet for the white working classes of uptown and the Bronx. Glennon, who was eleven years older, had been a regular at the Miramar, a lanky, rugged-looking, blue-eyed former middleweight prizefighter. His record in the ring had been mediocre, thirteen fights, five losses; he was what people 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 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 said, “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 secretary, wanted him to go to college. But classrooms made Rosenzweig restless; 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. Later, when he himself became a cop, and Glennon moved into the restaurant business, they had faded to the periphery of each other’s world, because Rosenzweig was rigorously straight and Glennon’s many hustles were said to include loan-sharking. Still, in 1967, when Rosenzweig got married, Glennon attended the wedding, and three years later, when Glennon got shot, 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 a friend, and nothing he had learned on the job helped to diminish the shock of his murder.
Passing 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 that 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, adding, “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 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 (a Pathmark supermarket now stood in its place), and Rosenzweig 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 on the time when he had known Glennon as the “formative years,” and he felt a sense of debt. He figured that if Koehler had 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.
There is no statute of limitations on murder. Although a case may turn cold, the hunt for a killer remains open until he is captured and convicted, or until he is dead, and, while New York has an eighty-seven-per-cent closure rate for murder cases (almost twenty per cent above the national average), Rosenzweig believed that murdered people and their survivors deserved even better statistics. He had always admired homicide detectives, who “handled death on a routine basis.” But he also knew what it meant to police the city—he had been recognized early on as an “active cop,” and as his record of solid and increasingly sophisticated arrests stacked up he had been made a sergeant at twenty-eight and a lieutenant at thirty-five—and he said, “The system doesn’t always work so well.”
Rosenzweig is an understated man, but understated in the implacable manner of Humphrey Bogart, to whom he bears some resemblance: he has the trim proportions; he has the versatile, long, toothy face, at once bemused and brooding, with a smile that bares a hint of a snarl, and a sense of preoccupation in his own private calculus; and his nasal, slightly sibilant speech recalls Bogart’s nervous rhythms. When I asked him if it was true, as I’d heard, that he had once grabbed the Mafia godfather John Gotti on a street in Little Italy; and thrown him against a wall, he said, “There was such an incident.” Then, after a minute, he said, “I threw a lot of people against walls.” I could imagine. His hands are large, with fingers that are thick at the base and taper to a surprising fineness.
I first met Rosenzweig last spring, at the D.A.’s office, where he directed me onto a green leather couch, and sat himself on a little metal folding chair, with his brown suit trousers riding up his shins. On his left ankle was strapped a black Velcro holster with a .380 eight-shot semiautomatic, and as he described how the memory of Richie Glennon’s murder came to him on the way to his medical checkup he told me that Glennon’s girlfriend had never married, and McGinn had been survived by a wife and four young children, who lived in the suburbs. Rosenzweig remembered driving up Third Avenue, thinking, Who speaks for the dead? Nobody. As a rule, nobody speaks for the dead, unless we do.
By “we” he meant cops and investigators, and after his stress test Rosenzweig phoned an old friend from the Miramar pool, a retired detective who’d also been a friend of Glennon’s, and he asked, “Did they ever catch that guy, Frankie Koehler?” The former detective didn’t know, and he sounded chagrined to be reminded that he, too, had lost track of the case. “You’re the D.A.’s chief investigator,” he said, “and you’re asking me?”
That afternoon, Rosenzweig opened a blank notebook and wrote Frankie Koehler’s name on the first page; he made some more calls, and before long he had jotted down a piece of information: “Two tattoos on left arm—a skull-and-crossbones and a heart.” A few days later, he sent a man from his homicide unit up to the Midtown North station house to collect the old files on Koehler. The sergeant there knew Rosenzweig, and he said, “Hey, ask Andy why he’s looking at this. This case is closed, this guy’s dead.”
Detectives do a lot of writing, and one of the most frequently found phrases in their professional prose is “negative results.” After all, the great part of a detective’s working life is spent pursuing seemingly fruitless leads, then writing about what was done, seen, and heard along the way on a form, known in New York police lingo as a D-D-Five. Each new D-D-Five is filed away atop all the previous D-D-Fives for a given investigation, and, sure enough, when Andy Rosenzweig opened the file on the Glennon-McGinn double homicide the top D-D-Five, which was written in May of 1992, bore the heading “Basis for closing case with Exceptional Clearance,” and began, “After an extensive investigation by the undersigned and other Detectives . . . it is the opinion of the undersigned that the subject Frank G. Koehler is dead.”
The word that struck Rosenzweig was “opinion.” For homicide cases to be closed with Exceptional Clearance, the subject’s death must be a matter of fact, substantiated by fingerprints from the corpse, a death certificate, or an obituary. The detective who closed the Koehler case, however, based his conclusion entirely on decades of negative results: “The subject has not surfaced . . . which leads one to reasonably believe that the subject is dead.” Indeed, the detective argued, those who knew Koehler best considered it virtually inconceivable that a man with such a violent disposition and criminal history could have remained alive and out of trouble for so long.
Strikingly, most of the people who had advanced this notion to the detective were Koehler’s relatives—and even they left some doubt. Koehler’s seventy-nine-year-old mother, for instance, who was found at the Blue Angel Motel in Las Vegas, said that she had heard, in the early seventies, that Frankie had been shot and killed; but she also said that she had later been told that he had surfaced in Boston. And the manager of the Blue Angel, one Eula Chesser, told the detective that Koehler’s mother had spoken of Frankie in conditional terms, saying, “If he were alive, the police would never take him alive, in that he had a bad temper.” Koehler’s only brother, Kenny, who had also worked at the New York Coliseum, agreed that Frankie was a rough customer. Still, when he spoke to the detective at a coffee shop called the Top and Top, in Queens, Kenny said that he was sure he would have heard if his brother had died, but he had had no news of the fugitive since the night of the murders, at which time, he said, “Frank went to the Coliseum and robbed a shylock in order to get money to get out of town.” When the detective pushed harder, asking how Frankie Koehler could have survived for twenty years without running into the law, Kenny replied, “Maybe if he completely changed his environment.”
“I don’t fucking believe this,” Rosenzweig remembers saying, as he read the detective’s report. “There’s nothing in here to conclude he’s dead other than that his mother and his brother said, ‘He must be dead. He could never stay out of trouble. Frank was a bad boy.’ ” The detective who had closed the case had a good reputation, and Rosenzweig suspected that he had declared Koehler dead under pressure from his superiors. “That’s clearance on two homicides,” he explained, adding, “It’s a particular squad lieutenant’s advantage to have a high closure rate. Some of them do it legit, some of them cut corners.” But police work was teamwork, and, he said, such was the nature of the system that a low-profile case could just slip through the cracks, and it was “no individual’s fault.”
Rosenzweig is an avid reader, with a taste for European police procedurals, and he once read me a passage that rang especially true to him, from “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” by the Danish novelist Peter Høeg. In it, a man named Ravn, who works at the D.A.’s office in Copenhagen, says of his colleagues—detectives, investigators, and prosecutors—“We were the suspicious ones. We believed that a statement, a confession, an incident, was seldom what it purported to be.” At the same time, Ravn says, the fundamental requirement for a career in the Ministry of Justice is institutional loyalty, which means never turning the “excellent tool” of one’s suspicion on the system itself. And, he concludes, “I can tell you that most people secretly find it a relief to have the state divest them of the trouble of being an independent person.” Rosenzweig had never known such relief. After all, he told me, “Everything we do, there’s a victim attached.”
Rosenzweig couldn’t remember the first time he was called to a murder as a rookie in the Four-One Precinct, but one early scene stood out for him. “Dope people,” he said. “Guy shot his girlfriend in the head, then shot himself in the head.” He was filling in for an absentee that day, and what impressed him was the way his temporary partner responded when the call came for an “aided case”—an injured or sick person. The man wanted to finish his coffee. “Sometimes I don’t even go on these things,” he said. Rosenzweig said, “I think we better go.” His partner called him a “ball-buster,” and began driving—“in not too much of a hurry,” Rosenzweig recalled. They found the murderer-suicide still alive, though barely, and while Rosenzweig kicked the gun away from the man’s hand and set about securing the scene, his partner just stood there dithering. Later, Rosenzweig’s sergeant complimented him. “Nice for a young cop,” Rosenzweig said, but he wasn’t really bragging. He was saying that too often, in his work experience, doing things right amounted to little more than refusing to do things wrong.
“Right is right,” Rosenzweig liked to say; he couldn’t be called a romantic, because he despised self-deception, yet there was an undeniable romance in his sense of vocation; he loved being a cop and an investigator—loved the work itself as much as its purpose. But he remained embarrassed and offended by the system’s capacity to accommodate the perfunctory: the common run of what, on a forgiving day, he would call “nitwits”—not so much those who can’t do any better but those who can’t be bothered.
So it angered Rosenzweig to think that Frankie Koehler might have been granted the fugitive’s ultimate sanctuary of official death. In the D.A.’s office hierarchy, he wasn’t authorized to open a full investigation without the backing of a prosecutor, but he didn’t want to have to explain himself. He decided not to discuss the Koehler case with anybody in the office except his wife, Mary, and he asked her to search her computer databases—death files, Social Security numbers, press archives—for any indication that Koehler had died. When she came back with negative results, he flipped the old case files over and started digging through them from the beginning. “I don’t like to leave things hanging,” he told me, “and I thought it might make it a little less hard to retire if I got this thing settled.”
Rosenzweig tended to enjoy his work most when he was out of the office, exercising his considerable powers as a noticer: looking for trouble, tracking leads, questioning sources, and—if all the pieces added up—making arrests. But he didn’t mind sitting behind a desk when an investigation was at stake. In his experience, paperwork and legwork frequently went hand in hand. In 1974, while stuck in traffic on a service road of the Major Deegan Expressway, in the Bronx, Rosenzweig saw a man in a new yellow Cadillac pull over, park on the sidewalk, and get out—“kind of duded up, and carrying a little paper bag.” Rosenzweig was off duty (on vacation, actually), but he took an interest in the drug trade, and was excited at the sight of little paper bags. When the man started walking, Rosenzweig cruised behind him, then cut a U-turn, and got out of his car. The man wouldn’t make eye contact. “He walks by and he’s whistling,” Rosenzweig said, “but he’s not whistling any tune. I get behind him, and I get ready. When he turns around I’m gonna give him the motion. The motion is just the badge in the hand.” There followed a “big chase, on foot, cars screeching, we’re going over hoods,” before Rosenzweig caught him ducking into a luncheonette. The paper bag, it turned out, contained eight or nine ounces of cocaine; and the suspect, it turned out, had been arrested twice before in New York without anyone taking particular note of his rap sheet: he had escaped from a South Carolina prison while serving a life sentence.
Legwork, paperwork: that had been the end of one man’s life in the outside world, and now, as Rosenzweig turned his attention to Frankie Koehler, he once again began noticing loose threads that quickened his interest. For instance, there were suggestions in the old D-D-Fives that Koehler had continued to frequent, if not to live in, New York long after the murders, and Rosenzweig was particularly intrigued by rumors that Koehler had continued to work at his old job at the Coliseum.
Throughout the sixties and early seventies, the unions at the Coliseum had been controlled by competing organized-crime syndicates—notably the Hell’s Kitchen Irish mob and the Gambino and Genovese Mafia families—and the D.A.’s office had conducted a number of investigations of racketeering there. In fact, membership rolls from Koehler’s union local were still in the office files, and Rosenzweig decided to look them over. He didn’t expect much, and, searching through the hundreds of names, Social Security and union-card numbers, and addresses, he found no trace of Frankie Koehler. But, as he worked his way down the columns of birth dates, he got interested in a man named Frank Fitzgerald, who was registered as having been born on August 25, 1930—exactly a year, a month, and a day after Koehler himself.
Plus one, plus one, plus one: Rosenzweig knew that criminals frequently used such simple mnemonic devices, and retained their first names, when constructing aliases. What’s more, Fitzgerald’s address was in Toms River, New Jersey, which corresponded to another trace in the Koehler file—enough to encourage Rosenzweig to ask his wife to find out what her computer could tell them about Frank Fitzgerald. She reported back that he had no criminal record, but he did have a driver’s license, which said that his eyes, like Koehler’s, were blue, and his height, like Koehler’s, was five-nine.
When Rosenzweig saw the I.D. photo from Fitzgerald’s license, he was astonished by the man’s resemblance to Koehler. But Mary wasn’t convinced; and Rosenzweig, conscious that he wanted Frank Fitzgerald to be Frankie Koehler, feared that his eagerness could be prejudicing his vision. After all, he had only two pictures of Koehler: a portrait taken at Green Haven prison when he was paroled in 1962, and an image produced in 1990 by an F.B.I. computer-animation program, in which that parole photograph had been “aged” to represent a grayed and timeworn version of the fugitive. He began asking sharp-eyed colleagues what they thought of the Fitzgerald and the Koehler pictures. Most people he asked said the likeness was striking, and Rosenzweig’s attitude was “Let’s go get him. Cut to the chase.”
Among the first calls Rosenzweig had made about Koehler was to Tom Hallinan, one of the detectives who originally “caught” the case on the night of February 18, 1970, when he heard the radio call “shots fired,” followed by Pete McGinn’s address. Hallinan had been just a block away at the time, on his way to investigate a burglary, and when he reached McGinn’s apartment the smell of gunpowder still hung over the corpses on the floor. Hallinan is a tall man, with a ruddy, smooth-worn slope of a face. In 1986, he retired from the force as a sergeant in charge of detectives, and he now serves as a director of corporate security at Bell Atlantic, where the walls and shelves of his office are decked with plaques and photos from his life as a cop—twenty-four years, during which he received every major award the Police Department can bestow on its officers except the Medal of Honor. “A great career,” he told me, adding, “Everything was positive. The only negative event was not apprehending Frankie Koehler.” Hallinan had identified the murderer within five minutes, and he had soon assembled an excellent profile of the tangled relationships of Koehler’s extended family, and of his contacts among the career criminals of the West Side, where the brutal Irish racketeers the Westies were making a name for themselves as master murderers and dismemberers. It had seemed only a matter of time until Koehler would be flushed out or ratted on.
But in New York in 1970 the murder rate was twice what it is today, and, after several weeks of full-time work on Koehler, Hallinan was “right back in the squad, catching other cases.” Still, he never lost interest in the fugitive. Although he had heard that Koehler was dead, he wasn’t convinced, so he was delighted when Rosenzweig said that he wasn’t, either. He told Rosenzweig everything he knew about the case, and then he cautioned him, as he had cautioned everyone else who had called him about Koehler over the years. “Whoever’s gonna take him, he’s gonna be armed,” Hallinan said. “Please pass that on. It’s the one favor I ask of you.”
Rosenzweig understood. In his files he had photocopies of Glennon and McGinn’s toe tags from the city morgue, and he had read the medical examiner’s reports of their autopsies. The causes of death were listed for Glennon, who was thirty-six, as “bullet wounds of arms, shoulder, thigh, chest, lungs, and heart”; and for McGinn, who was thirty-eight, as “bullet wounds of chest, arms, thigh, hand, heart, lungs, liver, intestines, right humerus and pelvis.” Investigative work is by nature intrusive, and, as if getting shot to death weren’t enough of a violation to a body; an autopsy knows no shame. Every normality and abnormality of the dead men was described in detail: the track of each bullet through their flesh, bones, and organs; the quantity of mucus in their noses; the weight of their livers, spleens, lungs, hearts, and brains; the condition of their “external genitalia” (in both cases “unremarkable”); the strong smell of alcohol in their stomachs, which contained large amounts of “completely undigested food matter with recognizable fragments of meat and vegetable particles”; and a large round bruise on the back of Glennon’s neck, marked by seven small grooves in “a patterned imprint of abrasions about one mm. apart”—which is how a pathologist would say that Glennon had recently been bitten by another person.
Rosenzweig had also been studying the statement Koehler had given to police when he was arrested at the age of fifteen. Two days before, Koehler and a sixteen-year-old friend named Billy Burns had visited Burns’s girlfriend, Loretta Avalon, who had showed them several of her prize possessions: a pearl that she said was worth five hundred dollars and a .45-calibre Smith & Wesson six-shot revolver. Then she asked the two boys to take her dog for a walk, which they did, only Koehler said, “Me and Billy didn’t want to walk too far. We threw him in a car and left him there.” The following morning, Koehler and Burns returned to Avalon’s apartment, kicked in the door, and took the pearl and the gun and some costume jewelry. They stashed the loot in Burns’s cellar, but a little while later, when Koehler returned alone to their cache, he found it empty. “I felt sad,” he said in his confession. “I didn’t like it.” He went looking for Burns, and when he caught up with him he told him, “I got a buyer for the stuff.” Burns said, “Let’s wait a little while.” At that point, Koehler recalled, “I said, ‘You punk, you know it ain’t down there.’ Then I smacked him. Then he looked up at me sort of scared. . . . I was pretty well sore. He said he gave it back to his girl. So I thought he was bull throwing me. I told him, ‘Let’s go over and knock off the Y.M.C.A.’ So he said, ‘All right.’ So then he said to me, ‘You’re not mad at me, are you, Frankie?’ I said, ‘No, I ain’t mad at you, Billy.’ ”
Koehler led Burns to a derelict building adjacent to the Y.M.C.A. They climbed up the fire escape and entered through a window on the second floor. Koehler let Burns walk ahead of him, then pulled out a gun—procured for him by Burns himself, four months earlier, at the Eighth Avenue fish market—and said, “If you don’t tell me where the pearl is, I will blow your brains out.” When Burns tried to run, Koehler shot him from a distance of about five feet. “He went down on one knee,” Koehler told the cops. “He said, ‘You shot me Frankie.’ I said, ‘You bastard you deserved it.’ ”
Before leaving Burns there to die, Koehler patted him down, hoping to find the pearl. But Burns didn’t have it. He had told the truth when he said he had returned the stolen goods to Loretta Avalon; she had since given them to the police as evidence, and it turned out that the pearl was a fake, made of paste, with a value of a dollar and sixty cents. Koehler was aware of these facts when he made his confessional statement, but he still seemed persuaded that he had been double-crossed, and the closest he came to expressing remorse was to say, “I’m sorry now for a buck-sixty.”
Late in the evening of February 6, 1997, Rosenzweig and a few of his men drove to New Jersey, and, backed by a posse of Toms River policemen, he knocked on Frank Fitzgerald’s door. The house was dark, and after a while he knocked again. Eventually, lights came on, and a man in pajamas opened the door. Rosenzweig recognized a sleep-struck version of the face on Fitzgerald’s driver’s license.
“Frank?” he said.
“Yeah”
“Come here.” Rosenzweig grabbed him by the collar. “You’re under arrest for homicide.”
“Homicide! I never killed anyone. What are you talking about?”
“Are you Frank Koehler?”
“Nooo. Frank Fitzgerald.”
“Are you sure?”
“Swear to God.”
Rosenzweig let go and followed him inside, accompanied by several colleagues. Fitzgerald didn’t deny that he’d worked at the Coliseum, and that there were plenty of bad guys there, but he said, “I stayed away,” and, “I mind my business.” He was coöperative, producing documents to prove that he really was Frank Fitzgerald, and Rosenzweig noticed that he had no tattoos or scars where Koehler was said to have tattoos. Then Rosenzweig met Fitzgerald’s wife, and he found himself thinking, They’re the nicest couple. After twenty minutes, when he and his partners got up to leave, he said, “God bless you,” and shook the Fitzgeralds’ hands. “We were apologetic, as we should have been,” he said. “It was a mistake, and sometimes you make mistakes—and it’s not based on nothing.”
In fact, Rosenzweig told me that the only time he had shot to kill he had done so as the result of a mistake. This was in 1969. He had noticed a man at “a known drug location,” making a transaction in a men’s room. When Rosenzweig accosted him, badge in hand, the guy made a run for it. Rosenzweig went after him, and jumped on him. They went down in “a fierce struggle.” Rosenzweig realized that the man was stabbing at him with a bowie knife. His jacket had been slashed open. “I guess it’s the closest I came—and I came close a few times—to getting badly injured or killed,” he told me, and he said, “That was when I decided to shoot him.” From a distance of no more than two feet, he fired directly into the man’s chest, and watched him fall away bleeding. But the wound was relatively minor. The man was wearing a “miraculous medal” around his neck, and the medal had worked, catching the bullet and saving his life. Later, at the hospital, the man told Rosenzweig that he hadn’t been involved in a drug deal but was merely collecting a gambling debt. He hadn’t explained himself when Rosenzweig attempted to arrest him, because what he saw was a cop coming at him, and he figured that the cop probably just wanted to rip him off—which “wasn’t so far-fetched in those days,” Rosenzweig said.
He still considered himself justified in shooting the man, once they were on the floor and the knife was out. But, thinking back on that moment, Rosenzweig told me, “I don’t think my career would have flourished if this happened now. There was a tolerance back then for people making mistakes—not mistakes of the heart, mistakes of the mind.”
That tolerance is gone, Rosenzweig said, yet while the public calls for restraint, then says, “What’s happening? Crime’s going up again. O.K., let ’em loose again,” the Police Department generally “does a very poor job of articulating what it’s about: to go out on hot days, and in hot situations, and not only put your ass physically on the line—put your career on the line, put your reputation on the line, have your wife and your kids read in the news that you’re under investigation, because people asked you, ‘Get on that shield, go out there, and do that dirty job for us but don’t do it a little too forcefully.’ ”
Rosenzweig will tell you that seeing Gary Cooper in “High Noon” as a teen-ager in the Bronx was one of the great inspirations of his life. But he will also tell you that after seeing the movie many times he did not acquit himself so bravely when he first hit the streets as a cop. The summer of ’66 was a period of riots and unrest in the city, and he hardly had time to learn his way around the Police Academy before he was sent out on patrol. “Alone,” he told me, and he repeated the word. “No partner, alone, no walkie-talkie, and—very important, your most important weapon, perhaps—no knowledge of the law. You’re some kind of I don’t know what—a Hessian, or a soldier, an occupying force, just someone in a uniform, and a gun, looking for trouble. So now you have young Officer Rosenzweig, twenty-one years old, on Forty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, by the New York Times, and someone tells me, ‘Officer, there’s a guy causing trouble up the street.’ So I go up the street, and here’s a guy, a good half a head taller than me and maybe forty pounds heavier, and he’s harassing people. He’s just being a pain in the ass. He’s not assaulting anyone but he’s acting disorderly. He was a discon”—disorderly conduct—“arrest if I knew what I was doing. But I was scared. I was definitely scared. I walk up to him, and I tell him, ‘Hey, cut it out, and move along.’ And he uses some expletive. And—‘I’m telling you to move along’—I’m trying to exert my authority as an officer. I have, like, half the right instincts, but I had only half of them. So I then say to him, ‘Listen, I’m gonna walk back around the corner. If you’re here when I get back, I’m gonna lock you up.’ And he may have used some other expletive, and I walked away.
“And I didn’t come back,” Rosenzweig said. “And it was a rather craven thing to do.” The next evening, off duty, Rosenzweig stopped in, as was his habit, at Chambers, a bar around the corner from the Miramar pool, and sat down to drink beside Dave Cody, a narcotics detective nearly twice his age, whom he looked up to as a mentor. “We were having drinks. Having drinks. Having drinks,” Rosenzweig told me, his voice slowing a bit to imply the rhythm of the rounds. After a while, Rosenzweig said, “Dave, I had a situation last night,” and told his story. Cody was not sympathetic. “You can’t ever fucking do that,” he said. “Don’t ever do that if you want to be a cop. There’s other careers. People are depending on you. You let people down there.”
“I felt that small,” Rosenzweig told me, holding a hand a few inches from the floor. “No, I felt much smaller than that. I felt totally diminished. But, oh God, was that an important lesson for me. I didn’t back up after that.”
Of course, there was such a thing as being too gung-ho, and as a young sergeant in the early seventies Rosenzweig had taken what were then unprecedented measures to have a compulsively aggressive officer expelled from the force as psychologically unfit for police work. He recalled his vigilance in that matter with pride, and yet, twenty years later, he had been relieved when his own son decided not to become a cop. The climate had changed, he told me, but the deeper problem remained: “You’re in this situation where you have to arrest someone because you have probable cause to believe they committed a crime. They don’t want to be arrested, and now they resist you. How much force can you use? Is a punch in the mouth O.K.? Can you hit him on the head with the night-stick? Can you just jab him in the belly? Everything you do is going to look brutal to someone watching. You have to use a minimum amount of force. But what is a minimum? Do you have to use so little force that he gets the best of you, and gets your gun away from you and kills you?
“Think about it,” Rosenzweig said. “I’m not talking about Abner Louima, or the Rodney King case—gratuitous violence against people. I’m talking about people that have to do their jobs. It’s not a pleasant thing.”
As the winter of 1997 gave way to spring, and then summer, Andy Rosenzweig used to tell his friends that, on account of his obsession with Frankie Koehler, he was afraid Mary was about to become his third ex-wife. He was only partially joking. Following his dead-end excursion to New Jersey, he had started taking Mary to eat dinner at the Skylight Diner, on the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Ninth Avenue, because Koehler’s brother, Kenny, lived up the block. Rosenzweig figured that if Frankie Koehler happened to be alive and in a visiting mood he might come in to Penn Station by train, and walk right past the diner’s window. “You never know,” he said.
At the same time, Rosenzweig assigned two men from his bureau to the case: Tommy Pon, a thirty-eight-year-old senior investigator, whom Rosenzweig called “a surveillance wiz”; and Chris Donohue, who was twenty-eight, “an apple-cheeked, spanky-clean-looking rookie.” Rosenzweig also decided that it was time to enlist the official support and subpoena power of a prosecutor, and he turned to Steve Saracco, a veteran Assistant District Attorney, who with his partner Dan Bibb worked exclusively on cold homicide cases. Saracco liked the Koehler story immediately. In cold-case work, he told me, “The majority of cases we look at are not what I believe Thomas Pynchon called glamour grudges. They have no profile.” In fact, he said, “There’s a lot of failure.”
The investigation now consisted largely in retracing the steps of previous investigations: constructing an up-to-date Koehler family tree, subpoenaing Koehler-family phone records, tracing the calls, and determining, each time a phone number was attached to a name with a criminal record, if that name might be an alias for Frankie. “Painstaking,” Rosenzweig said. At one point, his investigators had Kenny Koehler picked up for buying marijuana in a city park and they went through his address book, which gave them even more numbers to work with, including one for a man, identified only as Tex, in the Brighton Beach area. One of Frankie Koehler’s rap sheets had listed his nickname as Tex, and Rosenzweig told me, “I had Mary check that number, forward, backward, inside out, upside down, coded, decoded, and each one of those was then a lead that had to be followed—all for naught.”
By early summer, there was little left to investigate in the New York area, and Rosenzweig and his men turned their attention to a branch of Koehler’s family in California. Rosenzweig was particularly interested in a pair of Koehler’s nephews there, brothers called McMullen, each of whom had been arrested dozens of times: “Burglary, arson, assault—no murders, but these are legitimate full-time criminals.” Not surprisingly, one of the McMullens was in a California jail at the time, and Rosenzweig had Pon get in touch with a local prison investigator to monitor his outside phone calls. “These guys know they’re being taped,” Rosenzweig said. “They have a sign up—‘These calls are taped’—but they still talk.” The imprisoned McMullen never said anything “particularly inculpatory,” but from what Rosenzweig could make out in the prison investigator’s reports there were hints of an uncle somewhere in his orbit.
It occurred to Rosenzweig that Frankie Koehler’s sixty-eighth birthday, which was coming up on July 24th, might be a good moment to have Pon and Donohue go to California and watch the McMullen brother who wasn’t in jail. His name was Danny; he lived in Benicia, a tranquil, low-crime hamlet of twenty-nine thousand people which sits just below the southern tip of Napa Valley; about a forty-five-minute drive from San Francisco; and what he did on Koehler’s birthday was beat up his common-law wife and get arrested one more time.
Pon and Donohue took advantage of this development to question McMullen’s wife and some of his neighbors. Then they called Rosenzweig’s office to ask his advice: Should they check out Frank O’Grady? “Who’s he?” Rosenzweig said. His men explained that Danny McMullen listed two references on his apartment-rental agreement: a relative in Southern California, and a Frank O’Grady, who lived at the Benicia Inn, a low-rent residential hotel. Rosenzweig said, “Go,” and the next day Pon, Donohue, and a local F.B.I. agent named Pete French knocked on O’Grady’s door. A man opened it, and, when he gave his name, Pon and Donohue recognized him as one of Koehler’s nephews from New York. French then introduced himself as a federal agent. “Where’s Frank O’Grady?” he said, and Koehler’s nephew told him, “He’s down in Reno, gambling. It’s his birthday.”
When Rosenzweig came into his office on Monday morning, he found Tommy Pon and Chris Donohue in a despondent mood. They had been so close, they said—they were ninety-nine per cent sure that O’Grady was Koehler—and they’d blown their cover. Rosenzweig sought to rally their spirits. After all, nobody had “got a sniff” of Koehler for twenty-seven years, and, he said, “You pretty much proved he’s alive. That’s what we wanted to do. We’re going to get this guy.” Of course, Rosenzweig, too, was thinking, Where? When?
The next day, Pete French returned to Benicia with some colleagues from the F.B.I., and they did not bother to be inconspicuous. Rather, with their guns on display, they had worked their way up and down First Street, Benicia’s main thoroughfare, and learned that the man who called himself Frank O’Grady—or, formally, Edward Francis O’Grady—was a beloved and ubiquitous character in the town. He was known as New York Frankie, on account of his thick Hell’s Kitchen accent, and the Mayor of Downtown, because he spent his days walking from the Benicia Inn, at one end of First Street, to the other end, where he worked as a part-time custodian in the old Tannery Building, and then back again, lingering for hours along the way to drink coffee and chat with the regulars at the Union Hotel, and at the town’s main café, In the Company of Wolves. He was spoken of as a generous, community-spirited man, always ready to help people in need, and kind to children and small animals. He liked to go fishing off the town pier, and he was an occasional small-time trader in the town’s busy antiques market.
Frank O’Grady had arrived in Benicia in the mid-seventies with a wife, who was also a New Yorker, and for most of that time he had lived with her in a small house downtown. But for the past three years he had been living at the Benicia Inn with a girlfriend named Dolores Kenyon, although he had continued to see his wife almost daily. French and his F.B.I. colleagues had called on both women, and with warrants in hand they had searched their homes and carted away many of their personal papers. O’Grady’s wife told them that she had no idea where he was. Kenyon, who had gone to Reno with him for his birthday, told them that O’Grady had received a phone call Friday night that had upset him, and he’d then left her at their hotel, saying he had to take care of some business.
When French called New York Tuesday afternoon, he told Tommy Pon that Frank O’Grady was definitely Frankie Koehler. That evening, according to habit, Rosenzweig took Mary to the Skylight Diner. “You never know. He could be coming in to Penn Station,” he told her, and she said, “Oh, yeah, here we go again.” But the next day Rosenzweig’s patronage of the Skylight was at least partially vindicated, when his work phone rang and his deputy, Joe Pennisi, told him that an agent from the New York office of the F.B.I. had just called to say that Frankie Koehler was believed to be arriving at Penn Station on Amtrak train No. 48, which was due in at 3:41 P.M.
Rosenzweig didn’t know it then, but Pete French had gone back to Benicia that morning, and, after questioning more people there, had learned that Koehler hadn’t left Reno alone on Saturday; rather, he had driven with Dolores Kenyon to Martinez, a town next to Benicia. There, on Sunday morning, she had said goodbye to him at the train station after he bought a ticket to New York. French had got in touch with Amtrak and learned that there was such a connection through Chicago—a seventy-three-and-a-half-hour trip—and, yes, an E. F. O’Grady was on the passenger list. The time difference between the coasts was such that French had put all the pieces together only half an hour before the train’s scheduled arrival, and he had been holding two phones to his head, speaking simultaneously with Amtrak and with New York. French then faxed some copies of recent photographs of Koehler to the D.A.’ s office, but Rosenzweig and his men were already gone.
Rosenzweig, Pennisi, and Pon reached Penn Station almost exactly at the moment when the train was supposed to pull in. An Amtrak security captain was waiting for them with the good news that the train was running ten minutes late. Rosenzweig wanted the train stopped short of the station. Not allowed, he was told; the risk of a hostage situation was too great.
Four escalators connected the platform to the main terminal, and, with the security captain and four other Amtrak employees, that meant two men on each. When Rosenzweig told me about the moment when the train doors opened, he didn’t say much. He sat forward on his chair, craning his neck in a searching way, and his eyes ticked frantically from side to side, as he saw again the oncoming rush of travellers and tried to pick out a murderer whom he felt he knew intimately, but whom he had never seen, except in a thirty-five-year-old photograph and in a computerized update that he had no reason to trust. “Till my dying day I won’t know for sure, but I think he walked right by me,” he told me, adding, “There were so many people. I’ll always be regretful that I didn’t grab him.”
When the last passengers had cleared off the platform, Rosenzweig searched the train. There were a few stragglers, and he found someone sleeping in the bathroom, but nobody who looked like Koehler. Rosenzweig finally gave up. He got on an escalator, wishing he’d moved on the man who’d caught his eye, and thinking, It was a sign—I’m ready to retire. I’m losing my edge. Then he heard an Amtrak security officer say, “They got him, up in the cell in the office,” and he told me, “I went up there, just jubilant.”
At the foot of one escalator, Tommy Pon had spotted a sturdy old man with scruffy gray hair, wearing a gray baseball cap and gray sweatshirt, carrying a suitcase in one hand and with his other hand holding a handkerchief over his mouth and chin, as if he were about to cough into it. Pon got behind him on the escalator to study him more closely. He noticed that the man’s left ear was cauliflowered, as Koehler’s was in his old parole photograph, and he was struck that while everyone else on the escalator faced forward his man kept looking this way and that. At the top of the escalator, their eyes met, and locked momentarily in mutual recognition. Pon was struck by the look of disgust that confronted him, and he signalled to an Amtrak detective who was standing nearby.
“You got me,” Koehler said when they seized him. “It’s over.” And although Rosenzweig once said to me, “It should have been me catching this guy, if it was a true-crime novel,” he repeatedly praised Pon, Donohue, and French. “I may have been the architect,” he told me, “but they were the craftsmen who completed the job.”
The holding cell at the Amtrak security office was just big enough for two people to sit facing each other. Rosenzweig was so eager to get in there that he had to be reminded to follow the standard procedure for any officer, entering any cell in this country, and take off his gun. Then, he told me, “I walked in, and said, ‘You’re Frank Koehler.’ No one had used the name yet. He said, ‘It’s been a long time since anyone called me that. It feels kind of good, though.’ I said, ‘My name’s Andy Rosenzweig, and I’ve been thinking about you for quite a long time.’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re under arrest for the murder of Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn.’ I said, ‘I want to advise you of your rights.’ He said, ‘I know my rights, don’t bother.’ I said, ‘I want to advise you. Everybody has to be advised of his rights.’ He said, ‘What can I tell ya? If you got witnesses, I’m fucked.’ I said, ‘We got witnesses.’ He said, ‘Well, then I’m fucked.’ ”
THE PRISONER
Once again, Frankie Koehler was a prisoner, but as he understood it he had not been caught; rather, he’d surrendered. In his suitcase he had been carrying a .380 semiautomatic loaded with hollow-point bullets, and as Rosenzweig drove him downtown to the D.A.’s office he said that he had intended to use it. “I saw you guys, every one of you, on the platform. I thought of taking a few of you, and then doing this.” He made a pistol of his forefinger and thumb, and put it to his temple. “But I figured, Aw, what’s the point now? I’m old. You guys probably have families. So maybe I got a little religion. I met some nice people on the train.”
Rosenzweig was glad to find Koehler talkative. “Interrogation is a process,” he told me, and he considered the murderer’s “philosophical” tone a promising overture. He decided to leave the prisoner alone for a while to be finger-printed and to contemplate his predicament before further questioning. Then Rosenzweig began by letting Koehler understand how much he knew about him: his middle name, the names of his parents, his siblings, his nieces and nephews, and many details about his background, including some about his affairs with women, which Koehler made clear he would prefer to keep secret. Rosenzweig didn’t press these sensitive matters. He just wanted Koehler to consider the number of people close to him who could be affected by his capture, and he said, “Let me ask you something. You’re sixty-eight years old. Where were you going to go?”
Koehler told him that he still knew some people in New York, and that he had planned, with their help, to get a few thousand dollars, a new identity, and a new hair style; and then he was going to call the Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin and tell him to write that he, Frankie Koehler, was going to kill a cop a day unless, or until, the F.B.I. promised to stay away from his family. “And I would’ve done it,” he said. “It’d be easy.” Rosenzweig listened with interest, and said, “We got you now, Frank. So why don’t you give it up? Why don’t you try to help yourself a little bit.” Koehler said he didn’t want any help; all he wanted was for the Feds to lay off his wife and family. When Rosenzweig promised to tell the Feds to do that, Koehler slapped the table. “What do you want to know?” he said, and Rosenzweig suggested, “Tell me about the homicides.” Koehler didn’t hold back; he described the killing of Glennon and McGinn with a vividness that seemed to erase the intervening years. And, when he was done, he said it all again to the prosecutor Steve Saracco, in a videotaped confession that is regarded at the D.A.’s office as one of the classic portraits of a criminal personality.
On the tape, Koehler alone is framed by the camera, seated at a large table, wearing the cap and sweatshirt he had on when he was captured. At first, he appears hunched, and restless. His head tilts down, and his blue eyes, underslung by heavy bags, stare out from behind glasses. His hands drum at the table. In every way, his posture and gestures imply sullen forbearance, even boredom, as he is advised once again of his legal rights. But when, at his prompting, Saracco repeats Rosenzweig’s promise, “There is going to be nothing done against your wife,” Koehler sits up straight. His face opens. He raps the table, takes off his glasses, and holds his hands out open before him, as if to say, Come on in.
Koehler does not require much prompting to relate the story of what he calls his “beef” with his victims. He says that he was wrong to fool around with his friend’s wife, but that Glennon and McGinn were nonetheless wrong to reproach him for it. He does not glamorize his own performance in his fight with McGinn: “When I turned he caught me in the nose. I wasn’t in too good shape after that. He threw a punch that I grabbed his hand. I tried to bite his fucking finger off.” His voice, smoke gruffened, with its whining “r”s (“noive” for nerve, “hoit” for hurt), its kicking “d”s “th”s (“dis,” “dat,” and “dose”), and its adamant, shoving rhythms, is pure New York—so pure that it sounds foreign in the very city it came from. For Koehler is a refugee of sorts, from the white, hoodlum milieu of another time, and from a city that no longer really exists. “A period piece,” Rosenzweig called him, and “the ultimate West Side bad guy.” But it is less his accent than the attitude of his speech that defines Koehler’s sensational performance in the D.A.’s video. He calls himself “a professional criminal,” yet, far from being on the defensive, he appears almost to relish bearing witness against himself—not confessing so much as taking credit for his crimes.
“So you left the bar to get a gun?” Saracco asks. “That’s right,” Koehler says, “Premeditated murder, yeah. Don’t worry about it, I’ll give you every fucking thing you want.” Saracco tells him, “I’m not trying to put any words in your mouth,” and Koehler replies, “I know . . . I went and I got the pistol, loaded it up, came back to the bar, and said, ‘Hey, jeez, you know, I wanna talk, let’s talk this over. We’re all friends.’ ” After all, he explains, “They were worried about me. McGinn especially was worried.” Saracco asks why they were worried, and he says, “Maybe they thought I was dangerous.”
“Did they have a reason to think you were dangerous?” Saracco says.
“Yeah.”
“And what would that reason be?”
“I am dangerous,” Koehler says. “Yeah, I’m dangerous.”
Yet he insists that the killings were not inevitable. When he and Glennon arrived at McGinn’s apartment, he says, “I still hadn’t made up my mind to hurt anybody.” In fact, as he tells it, everything might have been fine, if “Glennon with his fucking mouth” had kept quiet. “Even though I had a fight with McGinn, you gotta understand I was more mad at Glennon,” he says, and he repeatedly comes back to this point, explaining that he had despised Glennon for years, and groping to articulate why. “McGinn, I didn’t give a fuck whether he lived or died,” he says. “Glennon I wanted fucking dead.” Koehler’s right hand jabs the air to emphasize each word, but, even twenty-seven years after he killed both men, his antipathy toward Glennon remains so overwhelming that all he can say is “He was a scumbag. He was a piece of shit. . . . I didn’t like this guy. He was an annoyance. I’m trying to explain it as best I can.”
Koehler has no trouble, however, describing the scene in McGinn’s apartment. He and McGinn were seated on a couch attempting to talk to each other, he says, but Glennon—“Mr. Tough Guy”—kept interrupting, and, when he was told to shut up, “He said something about his day in the sun.” Koehler wasn’t sure what Glennon meant, and he didn’t bother to ask. “That done something in my head,” he tells Saracco. “I cocked the gun, got up, hit him in the gut . . . I said to him, ‘Does that hurt?’ He didn’t answer me. I hit him twice more in the chest. He went down.” As Koehler recalls the shooting, his phrases slip suddenly into the present tense: “I’m pounding on him now. He’s a dead man. I ain’t worried about him. I ain’t worried about nothing. I’m pissed. And he’s gonna die. And he died.”
As for McGinn, Koehler says, “If he would have maybe sat still, he would’ve been O.K.” But McGinn had risen from his seat, repeating the words “What did you do?” That made Koehler “a little angry again,” and he got angrier still when McGinn began to raise his hands. “I said, ‘You ain’t gonna make it,’ and I whacked him. I shot him in the belly. He went down. Now I’m pissed off. I gotta tell you, I was very angry. ‘So,’ I said. ‘So you thought this was a fucking joke, you scumbag?’ And I hit him twice in the back.”
“When he’s down?” Saracco asks.
“Yeah.”
“Did he say anything to you? Did he plead for his life?”
“I think he moaned. I think he knew he was dying. I think I heard this moan—when you’re just about to check out, you know.”
When he finished shooting McGinn, Koehler fired twice into Glennon’s corpse—“I dropped two more into the bum,” he says—and he was headed for the door when Glennon’s girlfriend came in from the hallway. This presented him with a dilemma. As he puts it, “What am I gonna do? Whack her? No, I’m not gonna do that. I’m not gonna whack somebody I’m not fucking mad at. What the fuck would I do that for?” Koehler later suggests that he had run out of bullets, but what really seems to matter to him is his power to decide who lives and who dies. McGinn and Glennon are dead, he says, because “I wanted to kill them.” And he says, “Where I come from, when you don’t like someone, really don’t like ’em, and they’re fucking scumbags, you shoot them. It’s no mystery, you know. I don’t shoot people for nothing.”
But it is a mystery. Try as he might—and he does not shrink from the challenge—Koehler cannot really account for himself. Indeed, for all his self-dramatization, he does not question or regret his own murderousness. On the contrary, he appears fascinated by an idea of himself as a dealer of fate. When Saracco asks him about his brother, Kenny, Koehler calls him “a punk,” and says, inexplicably, “He’s alive because I’m very generous. If I didn’t love his kids, I’d whack him in the fucking head. He would’ve been dead long ago.” And later, speaking of his unrealized “plan” to shoot his way through Penn Station, then kill a cop a day with Breslin as his medium, Koehler again expresses the desire to be understood not only as a murderer but also as a sparer of life. Saracco says that he’s glad nobody got hurt at the station that afternoon, and Koehler leans toward his interrogator and tells him, “My choice, O.K.” He seems to regard the fact that he kept his gun out of reach as evidence that he has reformed. “I don’t want to hurt anybody else. I’m tired of it, and I’m not mad at anybody,” he tells Saracco, adding, “I don’t want no medals for it . . . no medals ’cause I’m a nice fellow. It’s just that on the train it was a good ride, I met a lot of nice people.”
By the end of the video, he seems genuinely unburdened, even pleased with himself. “Thank you, Mr. Koehler,” Saracco says, and at the sound of his name Koehler smiles. “I forgot who the fuck I was for twenty-seven years,” he says. “O.K., nice meeting you . . . have a nice life.”
“And they say people mellow with age,” Andy Rosenzweig said, after we watched the Koehler video together this summer. He didn’t doubt that Koehler had led a peaceable existence in Benicia, but he also didn’t care. After all, he said, “The fact that he didn’t snap at Penn Station doesn’t make him a less dangerous person. Most of us, walking around, haven’t killed anyone. He has—repeatedly and efficiently—and he came into town prepared to do it again.” Koehler had presented himself just as Rosenzweig had expected him to be: armed, bloody-minded, and without a jot of remorse. “I’ve seen more than a few, much more than a few, of these unrepentant guys. It’s not a shock to me,” he said, adding, “And, you know, in my time with Koehler, in my office, I did see a flicker of humanity. It was when I told him that he’d left Pete McGinn’s four children fatherless. You had to be looking very closely, but I could see just a little facial twitch. There was something still in this guy. He wasn’t completely a monster, just a murderer, and I took some encouragement from that. If there was any level, however minuscule, on which he felt he’d done wrong, there was at least a chance that he might coöperate and not fight this case in court.”
Even with Koehler’s statement on video, Rosenzweig was eager to avoid the uncertainty of a trial, where it was possible that the confession would be thrown out on technical grounds. Steve Saracco and his cold-case partner Dan Bibb agreed. Koehler’s double homicide was by far the oldest crime for which they had ever brought an indictment, and although they told me that they believed they could win a conviction, they were reluctant to risk seeing him walk.
Saracco and Bibb opened plea-bargaining negotiations by saying that they would settle for no less a sentence than twelve and a half to twenty-five years in prison. Koehler’s lawyer, Murray Richman, a criminal defender whose client list includes many of the city’s leading mobsters, said, Forget it. And so began the slow process of bluff that allows both sides to avoid going to trial by pretending that they wouldn’t mind if they did. For his part, Koehler thought that five years in jail, followed by life parole in California, should be sufficient. “I’m not this bad guy they think I am,” he wrote to his lawyer from his cell in the city jail at Rikers Island. “I never robbed or hurt any old people. I never raped or beat a woman. I never hurt a child. I don’t deal drugs. I don’t use drugs. I’m not a good guy, but to some I was.”
Koehler had been at Rikers since his arrest, reading the Bible and “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” and writing the story of his life in letters to his lawyer. He called his exercise in the memoir a “sort of fun therapy,” and during his most frenzied epistolary period at Rikers he would write for as much as six hours a night. He begins at the beginning of the Great Depression; his father, a burglar, is in and out of jail, and Koehler is sent to live with a solidly middle-class aunt in the Richmond Hill section of Queens, where he enjoys a level of comfort that leaves him unprepared for his return, at the age of seven, to his mother’s care, and to the streets of Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen. “I was getting my ass kicked a lot for a while,” he writes of his abrupt encounter with this hard world. “But I had a good teacher, my mother. She knew more about mayhem than most tough guys in the neighborhood.” She tossed him coins to encourage him to fight, and beat him herself when the spirit moved her, and before long, he reports, “Most everyone walked real soft around me. To help build my tough-guy façade, I learned early on not to show fear and always make the first move.”
School does not figure much in Koehler’s account of his boyhood. The neighborhood is everything, the West Side of the late thirties:
Even in memory, Koehler seems to delight in his early delinquency; “breaking into stores, robbing cars and just running the streets,” and he writes, “I think if I had never seen a gun, things might have been okay.” When he recalls shooting Billy Burns, he notes, “To say I’ve always been sorry is not, or never could be, enough,” but apparently he feels as sorry for himself as he does for Burns, because he is quick to add, “Two kids died that day.” Still, within forty-eight hours of his release from the Elmira Reformatory, Koehler had embarked on the armed-robbery spree that eventually landed him in Green Haven prison. And in 1962, when he was paroled, he entered “the world of big crime.”
At first, he writes, “I stole freight, and quite a bit. That is, trucking outfits were my mainstay.” With time, he got connected at the Coliseum, where a power vacuum between organized-crime factions presented him with an opportunity: “The guy who was taking book was not with anyone, no card game was cut, no crap games, no shylock, numbers wide open, and everything.” Koehler and a partner arranged to preside over all those operations. He was the enforcer, while his partner answered to the bigger bosses, and suddenly, “Life was good, money rolled in, I moved to a nice place, my wife quit her job, and I was more or less on my way.”
Koehler spent his take recklessly, betting on horses, boozing at the Copacabana and Toots Shor’s, and mingling with many of “the major players of the sixties,” including the mobsters who were portrayed in the movie “Goodfellas.” Yet even as he revelled in the excitement, Koehler claims to have grown disgusted with the life of crime. “I was turning into a piece of shit,” he writes. “My ego got bigger each day and the phony in me went right along with it.” And when people around him started getting bumped off by other people around him, or by car bombs, “It was have another drink, and back to this crazy life of silk suits, pinkie rings, and bullshit.”
The end of that life was abrupt for Koehler, brought on by his flight from New York. And at first he found small-town life in California difficult, especially the mornings, when he missed “sitting in a club, a drink in front of me, and talking to guys just like me or worse about other guys just like us, trying to get their piece of the pie.” But with time he came to think of his new existence in tranquil Benicia as a kind of deliverance, and he liked to imagine that if he had grown up in such a place he “would have made it” as an honest, hardworking, God-fearing citizen. Instead, of course, he was sitting in prison, and a striking thing about the thousands of words he produced at Rikers is that he never acknowledges why he is there. Glennon? McGinn? Murder? Not a word.
Koehler simply glides from New York to California, as if one day he had decided for the sheer goodness of it to renounce a way of life which was hurting him with its falseness and futility. In his telling, he does not shoot two men, and take their lives; he saves himself, and gives himself a new life. And, by this measure, killing Glennon and McGinn was the best thing Koehler ever did.
When he arrived at Rikers, Koehler was convinced that he had been “ratted out” by his relatives in Benicia, and he says he pored over the Bible, seeking answers to his “pain and sorrow.” But, he writes, “I found none, I cursed everything, I hated everything, most of all myself for being a fool. For months I felt sorry for myself. I wanted to die so bad. . . . And then the thought would pop into my head, What if I die before I can get even? Day after day, this was all I thought of. There was no answer from God.” So, he says, he turned back to the Bible:
On May 26, 1999, almost two years after his arrest at Penn Station, and two months shy of his seventieth birthday, Frankie Koehler appeared for sentencing before the Supreme Court of the State of New York. When the presiding judge, Michael Obus, asked him if he had anything to say for himself, Koehler, who had grown a scruffy white beard, said, “My apologies are not enough to say to the families. I will probably die in prison. I will—probably, eventually. As a human being, I am sorry for what happened that night, not because I am standing here. That is all I can say.”
Then Judge Obus explained that in view of the defendant’s advanced age, and the difficulties that such an old case would present if it were to go to trial, the prosecution and the defense had reached an agreement in the matter of the People v. Frank Koehler. In accepting the deal, Koehler agreed to waive his right to appeal, making for “a final resolution of the case,” albeit, Obus remarked, with a sentence that “obviously does not meet the seriousness of the underlying conduct of the defendant”: for pleading guilty to two counts of manslaughter, four and a third to thirteen years in prison; and, for pleading guilty to one count of criminal possession of a weapon, six and a half to thirteen years. So the gun rap drew a stiffer penalty than the murders, making it the “controlling sentence,” and, with credit for the time he had already served, Koehler will be eligible to apply for parole in January of 2004.
“Probably, if I was thirty years old, I’d be laughing,” Koehler told me, when I visited him a few months ago at the Gowanda Correctional Facility, south of Buffalo, where he was serving his time. “At seventy, it’s a death sentence.” He was considerably thinner than he had been at the time of his arrest, although he was hardly frail, and his violence was far from spent. “I fight it every day,” he said, smacking his fist into his palm. But perhaps he was right; perhaps he would die in jail. What of it? That didn’t strike me as unfair, and I wondered whether he saw any justice in his finally having been held to account for his murders.
“Justice?” he said. “Justice for injustice.” Then he said, “Is there a justice for taking a life? What would be just?” He couldn’t think of an answer. Leaving justice aside, however, he said of his punishment, “It’ll take my life. So, there you go. That fits the crime, don’t it? And what have they got? They got a fucking body: That’s all they got.”
Koehler seemed to believe that the lashes of his own conscience were all the punishment he needed. “My enemies don’t have to worry, I do a good job,” he told me. After his arrest, a number of people in Benicia—an antique dealer, a hot-dog vender, an artist, an ex-junkie—wrote testimonial letters in support of his fine character; and for a time “Free New York Frankie” T-shirts were sold and worn in the town. Yet Koehler told me that throughout his decades in California he had maintained his underworld connections, periodically dropping back into New York to see “old friends,” and collect payments from them. “There was money coming to me that came to me,” he said cryptically. Rosenzweig had told me that he suspected Koehler of working as a contract killer during his fugitive years, but Koehler sneered at the notion: “I wouldn’t kill anybody for money under any conditions. That’s a scumbag does that.” So I asked him under what circumstances he would kill for free. “The logic in my mind?” he said. “Why would I kill somebody? I would kill them if they were endangering my family, they were endangering my friends, or they were endangering me.”
“These two guys you killed weren’t endangering you,” I said.
“That’s true,” he said.
“Nor was the other guy that you killed.”
“The kid?” he said. “I was a fucking baby, man.”
I reminded Koehler that after he shot Billy Burns he had told Burns he deserved it. “Yeah, he deserved it,” he said. “I figured he’d ripped us off.” As for Glennon and McGinn, he told me, “They didn’t deserve to get killed. All right? I’ll admit to that.” But he added, “What can you say, if you do something real bad? Sorry? No, that don’t cut it. I don’t know what does. I can’t bring them back. If I could I would. Even though I’m in here, I would bring them back—Aw, go fucking do whatever you do, you know. Even Glennon.” He had to think about that for a moment. Then he said, “I wouldn’t like it, but I’d bring him back.”
THE BOOKSELLER
Andy Rosenzweig didn’t make it to court for Frankie Koehler’s sentencing. He had retired from the D.A.’s office twelve days earlier, and he and Mary had moved to the seaside, where they were busy preparing for the opening of their new business—a bookstore in Newport, called Book ’Em. On Rosenzweig’s last day at the D.A.’s office, Tom Hallinan, the original detective on the Koehler case, stopped by to see him, and to watch Koehler’s videotaped confession. “I thought it would bring closure,” Hallinan told me later. “And it did. But I came out of there, and I walked from lower Manhattan to Forty-second Street, because it disgusted me that a lowlife like this here killed those guys like you and I would step on a bug.”
Rosenzweig, too, told me he had “mixed feelings” about the Koehler case. “What’s funny is, I got into it because I thought, I can’t leave this thing open and unresolved, and I was thinking especially that I wanted to put it to rest for the victims’ families and survivors. The thing I didn’t think about was that many of them had long ago found their own ways of dealing with it. So while I was going for closure, I was just reopening it for these people. My idea of laying it to rest was their idea of an upheaval.”
That was certainly how Richie Glennon’s girlfriend had reacted, when several of Rosenzweig’s investigators appeared at her door hours after Koehler was arrested. “Six years ago, they told me he was dead,” she recalled. “When they said he’s still alive, I didn’t believe it. And to bring it all up again—no, thank you.” If the case had gone to trial, she would have been the key witness for the prosecution. She dreaded that prospect. But, she said, “I understood that Frankie Koehler didn’t like being in prison, and I thought, Oh, isn’t that tough? He’d just ruined a lot of people’s lives for nothing.”
Rosenzweig had never spoken directly with any of Pete McGinn’s immediate family, so he was startled, late last year, when an attractive blond woman in her mid-thirties walked into his bookstore and introduced herself as Karen McGinn-Hagen, the youngest of McGinn’s children. She was six years old at the time of the murders, and now, as the mother of two children herself she was visiting Newport, and she wanted to thank Rosenzweig for catching her father’s killer. At Koehler’s sentencing, she had spoken for the family, saying, “Frank Koehler deserves to be punished for every hug, for every morning, for every time the sun shone on his face, for every time he celebrated, for every time he laughed, for every time he cried, for every minute, every day, every year that he lived and my father did not. We, Peter McGinn’s children, lost our father when a coward ended his life.”
McGinn-Hagen had not been aware that the Police Department had declared Koehler dead in 1992. “You couldn’t help thinking about my dad’s murder without thinking the guy was out there and had never been caught,” she told me when I visited her at her home in Connecticut last month. “Then my brother was reading the New York Post on August 4, 1997, and he sees this headline, ‘FUGITIVE NABBED AFTER TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS,’ and he starts reading it, and he says, ‘Oh my God, this is about Dad.’ ” In court, she had stood right next to Koehler when she read her statement, and they had made eye contact. “He looked back at me, which I didn’t expect,” she said, “and it made me feel good that he heard what I was saying, and said something after I did that showed he’d heard.” And although she called the lightness of Koehler’s sentence “horrible,” she said, “There is comfort in knowing he may die in prison.”
McGinn-Hagen had been fascinated to hear Rosenzweig tell the story of the investigation, from the moment he passed Glennon’s old restaurant, the Flower Pot, to the arrest at Penn Station. “There were so many situations that were dead ends, so many times that he could have given up, and he didn’t,” she said. “That made me happy. He never once just put the case back on the shelf, even when it would have been so much easier than keeping going.” For nearly thirty years, McGinn-Hagen told me, Frankie Koehler had loomed in her imagination as a “terrifying” figure, someone “larger than life,” and she said, “It’s funny, but it was almost like a disappointment—but such a relief—to see that he was just this little old man.” Her older sister Maureen, who stopped by during my visit, agreed. “I always wanted that guy’s head on my wall,” she said. “Then I saw him in court, and I thought, Him? He’s just pathetic.”
It is not Andy Rosenzweig’s way to take thanks easily. Tell him he did something well and he’ll start brooding about the ways that it could have been done better, and how if the world weren’t so full of blundering and folly it shouldn’t have needed doing at all. So McGinn-Hagen’s visit left Rosenzweig feeling “all churned up,” and when she was gone he began pestering himself with questions: “Why—really why—did I do this case? Why now? Why not earlier?” He didn’t have answers. “Those questions were a constant for me before, during, and after the investigation,” he said. And they exercised him especially last November and December, because, although he had retired, and settled (like Frankie Koehler) far from the city that formed him, in a quiet little hamlet by the water, he was waiting anxiously to learn whether a grand jury would hand down an indictment on the last big case he had presided over at the D.A.’s office.
Once again, the case had been cold when Rosenzweig reopened it, early in 1997, and, once again, the crime was murder. But this case had been treated—wrongly, in Rosenzweig’s view—as a missing-person’s case. On July 8, 1985, a New York plastic surgeon named Robert Bierenbaum reported that his wife, Gail Katz-Bierenbaum, had left the house the day before, following a marital quarrel, and that she had never returned. Within a year, the case had wound up on Rosenzweig’s desk at the D.A.’s office, but although he thought there was compelling evidence that Bierenbaum had murdered his wife and dumped her remains into the Atlantic from his private plane, a body had never been recovered, and there had been no prosecutorial support for seeking an indictment. For eleven years, the case had been bothering Rosenzweig, and he couldn’t say exactly why he had finally reopened it when he did, except that he felt it would be wrong for him to retire with it unresolved. It had distressed him to learn that Gail Katz-Bierenbaum’s parents had both died in the intervening years, while Bierenbaum had settled in North Dakota, remarried, and fathered a daughter. What’s more, there was still a chance (now ruled out) that a “surgically disarticulated” torso of a woman that had washed up on Staten Island might be linked to the case. So, as soon as Frankie Koehler was arrested, Rosenzweig assigned Tommy Pon to reinvestigate the Bierenbaum disappearance.
Last summer and fall, as the case moved slowly through secret grand-jury proceedings, Rosenzweig monitored its progress with nearly daily phone calls from Newport. And, when he himself was called to testify, the main question that came at him was the familiar unanswerable: Why now—after so many years? “What could I tell them?” he said. “Just that I’m the slowest damn, most tiresomely methodical dot-the-‘i’s-and-cross-the-‘t’s investigator they’ll ever meet.” In early December, Bierenbaum was indicted for murdering his wife. When he surrendered, the front page of the Post ran his photograph under the single word “NABBED!” and Rosenzweig said to me, “Now what am I going to worry about?”
Rosenzweig’s old friends from the Police Department and the D.A.’s office find it hard to imagine how he will adjust to retirement. So I wasn’t really surprised when he told me recently, “I’ve sort of got myself involved in an investigation up here in Rhode Island—well, not sort of, I’m involved.” I wanted to hear more, but he said, “I’ll tell you about it some year.” I had called Rosenzweig at the bookstore that day to read him a letter I had just received from Frankie Koehler, which said, in part:
“Yeah, right,” Rosenzweig said. “Blame it on God.” Then he said, “Hang on.” I heard him put the phone down on a hard surface, and through it I heard him walk quickly away. A few seconds later, he was back. “Sorry,” he said. “I just had to get the license plate of a car I saw passing. It’s this case I’m working on. The crime happened twenty miles away, but you never know.” ♦
