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    A Cold Case
    A Cold Case
    A Cold Case
    Ebook128 pages2 hours

    A Cold Case

    By Philip Gourevitch

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A tale of crime and punishment from a prizewinning writer.

    A few years ago, Andy Rosenzweig, an inspector for the Manhattan District Attorney's office, was abruptly reminded of an old, unsolved double homicide. It bothered him that Frankie Koehler, the notoriously dangerous suspect, had eluded capture and was still at large. Rosenzweig had known the victims of the crime, for they were childhood friends from the South Bronx: Richie Glennon, a Runyonesque ex-prizefighter at home with both cops and criminals, and Pete McGinn, a spirited restaurateur and father of four. Rosenzweig resolved to find the killer and close the case. In a surprising, intensely dramatic narrative, Philip Gourevitch brings together the story of Rosenzweig's pursuit with a mesmerizing account of Koehler's criminal personality and years on the lam. A Cold Case carries us deep into the lives and minds, the passions and perplexities, of an extraordinary cop and an extraordinary criminal whose lives were entwined over three decades. Set in a New York City that has all but disappeared, and written with a keen ear for the vibrant idiom of the colorful men and women who peopled its streets, this is nonetheless a book for our times. Gourevitch masterfully transforms a criminal investigation into a searching literary reckoning with the forces that drive one man to murder and another to hunt murderers."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 10, 2002
    ISBN9781429981101
    A Cold Case
    Author

    Philip Gourevitch

    Philip Gourevitch is the author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. He is a staff writer for the New Yorker and editor of the Paris Review.

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    Reviews for A Cold Case

    3.5/5

    45 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is the story of a man who murdered three people in New York City, but whose whereabouts fell off the radar so he was needlessly declared "dead" in order to close this case. Many years later, a New York City detective decides that this case needs to be re-opened because he does not feel that the murderer was really dead. The case is reopened and the murderer is eventually found. This is the story. It's quick and easy to read, but reads more like a magazine article than a nonfiction book. I found the description of the detective much more interesting than that of the murderer.
    • 4/5
      Concise, crisp account of a cop who succeeds in closing a cold case, a double homicide. The perp seems to be a true psychopath who never really feels remorse for his crime, only regret that he finally got caught. It was a New Yorker article and has that feel. Not great, but good.
    • 4/5
      A Cold Case" is a gripping profile of two men on opposite sides of the law: Andy Rosenzweig, a good cop and Frank Koehler, a cold-blooded killer. The title refers to a low-profile, long-buried 27 year-old homicide case that the system let slip through its fingers: a double murder of two men shot dead in cold blood in 1970 in New York by small-time gangster Frank Koehler. Koehler vamoosed and the case-file grew cold. Rosenzweig re-activated the case in 1997.Gourevitch's well-written book is unusual in so far as there is no mystery as to the identity of the killer which is known to us from the outset and no doubt about how the killings occurred. Gourevitch's focus rather, centres on building profiles of Rosenzweig and Koehler, the key players in the drama, opening up their minds and lives, tapping into the forces and influences that shaped these men to be who (and what) they are: Andy Rosenzweig, the dedicated cop; Frank Koehler, the "connected" hoodlum. Gourevich's portrayal of Koehler's criminal mentality and Rosenzweig's dedication to upholding the law, fascinating in itself, vividly depicts the criminal underbelly of New York as it existed in the 60's.
    • 3/5
      Interesting short book, though the second half of it seems to taper away into the mundane.

    Book preview

    A Cold Case - Philip Gourevitch

    PART ONE

    Dead or Alive

    CHAPTER ONE

    ON NOVEMBER 15, 1944, an Army deserter named Frank Gilbert Koehler was arrested for burglary in New York City. Frankie, as he liked to be called, had no criminal record. He had walked off his post at Fort Dix, New Jersey, after suffering unsustainable financial reversals in a crap game in the latrine, and when it was discovered that he was fifteen years old and had lied about his age to enlist, he was sent to children’s court, declared a juvenile delinquent, and returned to military control. Six months later, Koehler—AWOL again, and for good—shot and killed a sixteen-year-old boy in an abandoned building on West Twenty-fourth Street. The next day, he surrendered to a policeman on a street corner and was taken to a station house, where he confessed. In consideration of his extreme youth and lack of parental guidance—he had left home at thirteen, following the death of his father, a burglar—the district attorney reduced his charge from homicide to murder in the second degree. In court, Koehler pleaded guilty, and the judge sent him upstate to spend five years at the Elmira Reformatory. He was released on May 17, 1950, and remained a free man for nine months and twenty-six days until he was found by police, at four in the morning, hiding on the catwalk between the tracks of the Third Avenue elevated train line at Thirty-fourth Street, after robbing a nearby bar and grill at gunpoint. As he was led back to the station platform, Koehler called out to a man standing there in the predawn gloom as if waiting for a train, Arthur, save me, save me, tell them I was with you. So that man, too, was taken into custody. Koehler and he had indeed been together all night. They’d met at a Times Square cinema where the poster said THRILL CRAZY, KILL CRAZY, and the picture was Gun Crazy, a story of fugitive lovers on a crime spree hurtling to their doom.

    A news photograph of Koehler taken minutes after his arrest showed him to be a slight, dark-haired man, rather handsome and sharply dressed in an overcoat, business suit, white shirt, necktie, and handcuffs. When the picture appeared in the Daily Mirror, he was recognized by Carmella Basterrchea, the bookkeeper of a Murray Hill construction company, as one of two gunmen who had, a month earlier, stepped into her office late on a Friday afternoon, then, saying, All right, lady, this is a heist, and, Don’t move or I’ll plug you, made off with her payroll. Koehler admitted to both stickups, and once again he was sent upstate, this time to Green Haven Prison in Stormville, with a sentence of ten to twenty years. He served eleven and a half and was paroled in August 1962 at the age of thirty-three, having spent most of his life away.

    Frank Koehler, under arrest for armed robbery, March 1951. Photograph from the Daily Mirror

    e9781429981101_i0002.jpg

    Before the year was out, Frankie Koehler had a wife and legitimate employment in a machine shop. Later, he found union work as a stevedore on the West Side docks, then on the crew at the New York Coliseum on Columbus Circle, and he did not come to the attention of the police again until February 18, 1970. Around eight o’clock on that evening, he was having drinks at Channel Seven, a restaurant on West Fifty-fourth Street, when he got into an argument with the owner, Pete McGinn, and a friend of McGinn’s named Richie Glennon. The issue was a woman—the wife of a mutual friend. Koehler had been having an affair with her while her husband was in prison, and she was now pregnant. McGinn declared that knocking up a jailed friend’s wife was about the lowest thing a lowlife could do, and Glennon seconded this judgment. Koehler came back with the opinion that they were a couple of scumbags themselves. So it went. Koehler spit in McGinn’s face, and the three men were soon out on the sidewalk, where Glennon watched as McGinn and Koehler had at each other and Koehler took a severe beating.

    After that, McGinn went home, Glennon returned to the bar, and Koehler picked himself up off the pavement and went his own way for a while before returning to Channel Seven. Glennon was still there. Koehler had a drink with him and proposed that they sit down with McGinn to put their quarrel behind them in a gentlemanly fashion. Glennon agreed, and phoned McGinn to say they were coming over to his place, which was a block north of Channel Seven, in what the next day’s News described as a luxury apartment building … just up the street from Gov. Rockefeller’s New York office.

    Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn had known each other from boyhood in the South Bronx, and both had found success in the restaurant business. McGinn’s Channel Seven was a popular watering hole for disc jockeys and anchormen from the nearby studios of ABC television and CBS radio, and Glennon owned a bistro on the Upper East Side called The Flower Pot, which was doing well enough for him to have taken the night off. Glennon had been having dinner at Channel Seven with his girlfriend, a nurse, and when he left with Frankie Koehler, she accompanied them. We went to McGinn’s apartment, and rode up in the elevator, she told me nearly thirty years later. It was the fourth floor. Richie told me to stay in the hall, and I waited out there till I heard these loud bangs. I thought they were fighting again, throwing things around. I heard the noise—I didn’t even know they were shots, I just heard bangs—and I opened the door. Frankie Koehler was running away with his smoking gun. I said, ‘Where’s Richie?’ There was Richie on the floor.

    Glennon lay on his back with his legs crossed comfortably at his ankles, his overcoat and suit jacket twisted beneath him, his left arm flung out, and the left side of his shirt bunched and soaked in blood from shoulder to waist around a small round hole over his rib cage. His girlfriend didn’t notice that Pete McGinn was at the far end of the room, clad only in a bathrobe, with his right foot in a slipper and his left foot bare, lying facedown and dead in a puddle of blood on the parquet floor. I remember a big dog hopping around, she told me. It wasn’t a small dog. It was a big dog. Beyond that, she was conscious only of Glennon. She didn’t want to believe he was dead. She tried to pick him up and ask him where it hurt.

    Koehler told her to shut up. He was still hovering over her with his gun, and it occurred to her that he must be afraid. She said, I’m not gonna tell anybody, and he said, Don’t open your fucking mouth. Just sit there. With that, he left. He took the elevator down to the lobby, fished a handkerchief from his pocket, and pretended to be coughing into it to hide his face as he walked past the doorman. And then Frankie Koehler disappeared.

    CHAPTER TWO

    TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER, on January 6, 1997, Andy Rosenzweig, the chief of investigations for the district attorney of Manhattan, was driving up First Avenue, nosing through lunch hour traffic, on his way to New York Hospital for a stress test. The procedure was routine, one of the mounting burdens of middle age, but Rosenzweig had plenty to be stressed about—on any given day, his squad of more than eighty investigators was at work on hundreds of cases, tracking thousands of leads into virtually every known realm of criminal activity—and at the corner of Sixty-ninth Street, he experienced a jolt of memory that quickened his pulse. That was where Richie Glennon’s restaurant, The Flower Pot, had stood. Rosenzweig, who had known Glennon and liked him, was vexed to realize that he couldn’t say when he’d last recalled his murdered pal.

    Rosenzweig didn’t like to think of himself as a forgetful man; in his view of human qualities, forgetfulness ranked as a fundamental flaw. He could live with such failings in others. He had to. But with himself, he was less forgiving, and as the memory of Glennon revived in him, he went to work on it, tracking it back to the early 1960s, when he’d graduated from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and, having no plan—no idea, really, of what to make of himself—he’d found work for several summers as a lifeguard at the Miramar pool at 207th Street and Tenth Avenue. It was the largest outdoor swimming pool in Manhattan, half a million gallons of water, with a high spiraling slide, and a terrace of deep sand called the beach, and a cafeteria, and a former dance hall that served as a weight gym for the inside crowd. Glennon, a lanky, rugged-looking, blue-eyed former prizefighter became a regular on the Miramar scene in the summer of 1964, Rosenzweig’s third season there. Glennon was ten years older than Rosenzweig, and when he first appeared at the pool, he pretended to be someone else, introducing himself around

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