Two men are gunned down and the killer disappears. Thirty years later one cop becomes obsessed with the case and finally tracks him down
Philip Gourevitch
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, was 15, so he was declared a juvenile delinquent and returned to military control. Six months later – AWOL again – he shot and killed a 16-year-old boy, and was sentenced to five years in a reformatory. He was released in May 1950 and arrested again eight months later for armed robbery. This time he served 11-and-a-half years in prison. When he was paroled in 1962, he was 33, and had 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 arena on Columbus Circle. He did not come to the attention of the police again until February 18 1970.
Around 8pm that evening, he was having drinks at Channel Seven, a restaurant on West 54th 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. 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. He 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 phoned McGinn to say that they were coming over to his place.
Glennon, who owned a bistro called the Flower Pot on the Upper East Side, 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. ”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, soaked in blood from shoulder to waist around a small hole over his ribcage. His girlfriend didn’t notice Pete McGinn, who was at the far end of the room, behind a plush easy chair, face down and dead on the parquet floor.
She tried to pick Glennon 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 to the lobby and pretending to cough into a handkerchief, to hide his face, he walked past the doorman.
Twenty-seven years later, on January 6 1997, Andy Rosenzweig, chief investigator for the district attorney of Manhattan, was driving up Third Avenue, and at the corner of 69th 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 realise that he couldn’t remember the last time he had thought of his murdered pal. Rosenzweig recalled him as a man of mischief, ”a colourful character, high-energy, funny, a talker, glib, Runyonesque – you know, a tough guy”. Glennon was a former prize- fighter, male model, merchant marine and ironworker. ”He was one of those pure New York characters,” Rosenzweig said, ”who truly walked the fence between the good guys and the bad guys.”
Rosenzweig had seen a good deal of violent death by the time of the double homicide, working as a patrolman in the Four-One precinct – ”Fort Apache” – in the Bronx. But nothing he had learned on the job helped to diminish the shock of his friend’s murder.
”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.’ 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.”
That afternoon Rosenzweig opened a blank notebook and wrote Frankie Koehler’s name on the first page. ”I don’t like to leave things hanging, and I thought it might make it a little less hard to retire if I got this thing settled.”
One month later, on February 6 1997, Rosenzweig and a few of his men drove to New Jersey and, backed by a posse of local policemen, he knocked on the door of a man named Frank Fitzgerald. Rosenzweig had discovered Fitzgerald in the union rolls from New York Coliseum, where Koehler had worked. The New Jersey man’s birthday was one year, one month, and one day later than Koehler’s – a classic mnemonic device for constructing a criminal alias – and when Rosenzweig and his colleagues compared Fitzgerald’s portrait with Koehler’s, they were astonished by the likeness.
Fitzgerald opened the door wearing pyjamas. ”Frank?” Rosenzweig 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. Fitzgerald didn’t deny that he’d worked at the Coliseum, and that there were plenty of bad guys there. But he produced documents to prove that he really was Frank Fitzgerald. ”It was a mistake,” he told me, ”and sometimes you make mistakes – and it’s not based on nothing.”
Rosenzweig started eating at the Skylight Diner, on the corner of 34th Street and Ninth Avenue, because Koehler’s brother, Kenny, lived up the block. Rosenzweig figured if Frankie Koehler happened to be in a visiting mood he might come 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 38-year-old senior investigator, and Chris Donohue (28) ”an apple-cheeked, spanky-clean-looking rookie”.
Rosenzweig became interested in a pair of Koehler’s nephews in California, brothers called McMullen. One of the McMullens was in jail at the time, and Rosenzweig had Pon get in touch with a local prison investigator to monitor his outside phone calls.
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 68th birthday, which was coming up on July 24, 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 29E000 people about a 45- 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 questioned McMullen’s wife and some of his neighbours. Then they called Rosenzweig’s office to ask if they should check out a man named Frank O’Grady, whom Danny McMullen had listed as a reference on his apartment-rental agreement. The next day Pon, Donohue, and a local FBI agent named Pete French knocked on O’Grady’s door at the Benicia Inn, a low-rent residential hotel. A man opened it, and, when he gave his name, Pon and Donohue recognised 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.”
The next week, French returned to Benicia with some FBI colleagues, and learned that the man who called himself Frank O’Grady was a beloved character in the town. He was known as New York Frankie, on account of his thick Hell’s Kitchen accent. He was spoken of as a generous, community-spirited man 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. For the past three years he had been living at the Benicia Inn with a girlfriend named Dolores Kenyon.
Kenyon, who had gone to Reno with him for his birthday, told them that O’Grady had received a phone call on 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 on Tuesday afternoon, he told Tommy Pon that Frank O’Grady was definitely Frankie Koehler. That night, Rosenzweig took his wife Mary to eat at the Skylight Diner. ”Here we go again,” she said.
But the next day, Rosenzweig felt vindicated when his work phone rang and his deputy, Joe Pennisi, told him that an agent from the New York office of the FBI 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 3.41pm. Rosenzweig, Pennisi, and Pon reached Penn station as the train pulled in. 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 35-year-old photograph and in a computerised 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, but nobody who looked like Koehler. Rosenzweig finally gave up. He got on an escalator, 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.” Tommy Pon had spotted him, a sturdy old man with scruffy grey hair, wearing a grey baseball cap and grey 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.
Rosenzweig went to the small holding cell. He told me, ”I walked in and said, ‘You’re Frank Koehler.’ No one had used the name yet. Koehler 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, ‘What can I tell ya? If you got witnesses, I’m fucked.’ I said, ‘We got witnesses.’ He said, ‘Well, then I’m fucked.”’
Rosenzweig said, ”Let me ask you something. You’re 68 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 hairstyle; 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 FBI promised to stay away from his family. ”And I would’ve done it,” he said. ”It’d be easy.” 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 assistant district attorney Steve Saracco, in a videotaped confession that is regarded at the DA’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. 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. His voice, smoke-gruffened, with its whining ”r”s 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 DA’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 … 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, 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’m dangerous,” Koehler says. ”Yeah, I’m dangerous.”
At McGinn’s apartment, Koehler says, he and McGinn sat on a couch attempting to talk to each other. But Glennon – ”Mr Tough Guy” – kept interrupting, and when he was told to shut up, ”He said something about his day in the sun,” and Koehler says, ”That done something in my head … 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 OK.” 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?” McGinn and Glennon are dead, he says, because ”I wanted to kill them”.
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 27 years,” he says. ”OK, nice meeting you … have a nice life.”
On May 26 1999, almost two years after his arrest at Penn station, and two months shy of his 70th 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. 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 could present if it were to go to trial, the prosecution and the defence had reached an agreement in the matter of the People vs Frank Koehler. In accepting the deal, Koehler agreed to waive his right to appeal, making for ”a final resolution of the case”, albeit, Judge 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 13 years in prison; and, for pleading guilty to one count of criminal possession of a weapon, six-and-a-half to 13 years. So the gun rap drew a stiffer penalty than the murders. Koehler can apply for parole in 2004.
”Probably, if I was 30 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 70, it’s a death sentence.”
Andy Rosenzweig didn’t make it to court for Frankie Koehler’s sentencing. He had retired from the DA’s office 12 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 Rhode Island, called Book ‘Em.
Rosenzweig’s old friends from the police department and the DA’s office find it hard to imagine him in retirement. So I wasn’t surprised when he told me recently, ”I’ve sort of got myself involved in an investigation here in Rhode Island – well, not sort of, I’m involved.” I had called him at the bookstore that day to read him a letter I had just received from Frankie Koehler which said, in part: ”tell Andy I tried to whack myself out with pills … All I got was sick and good sleep for two days. I had gotten a razor blade, but when I looked for it, it was gone. I figure if God wanted me dead, He at least would have left the blade.”
”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 licence plate of a car I saw passing. It’s this case I’m working on. The crime happened 20 miles away, but you never know.”
Philip Gourevitch’s account of the Rwandan war, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, won The Guardian’s First Book Award