By Guy Sterling
Newark Star-Ledger
NEW YORK — He was on the run from a mob hit at a Bridgewater motel since becoming a suspect more than a decade ago, slipping around the globe and getting himself listed as New Jersey’s most wanted criminal.
Investigators with any number of law enforcement agencies chased hard, following tips and looking for him in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Florida, Canada, Italy and Costa Rica. He was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” several times. But for more than 10 years, he managed to stay hidden.
Until late Friday.
That’s when Michael Coppola’s charmed life on the lam finally came to an end, when police found him almost under their noses - in New York City. Tight-lipped investigators would not say where in the city he was taken, where he is now or even where they got the information that led them to the alleged hitman.
But authorities expect the onetime acting captain of the Genovese crime family to be returned to New Jersey, perhaps as early as today, to face charges in the 1977 mob killing of Johnny “Coca Cola” Lardiere at the Red Bull Inn on Route 22. He’s also wanted on a federal fugitive warrant.
“I’m glad we finally apprehended him after all this time, and hopefully now justice will run its course,” Robert Leaman, an assistant attorney general assigned to the case, said of Coppola, 60, whose last known address was in Spring Lake.
The arrest of Coppola ends one of the more intriguing chapters in recent organized crime history.
The tale is filled with mobsters boasting of their crimes and turning on each other, the use of state-of-the-art DNA evidence, a state prosecutor underestimating Coppola’s guile and the dogged pursuit of detectives who never let Coppola fully escape their attention, even as he managed to dodge them.
It also includes one of the classic mob lines. As he was approached by his killer outside the motel in the early morning hours of Easter and the hitman’s .22-caliber murder weapon, equipped with a silencer, jammed, Lardiere is said to have jeered: “What’re you gonna do now, tough guy?”
What he didn’t know was the gunman had a .38-caliber handgun in a black ankle holster that he used to finish the job. Both guns were recovered, as was the ankle holster. Investigators found hairs on the holster that the FBI examined for DNA in the mid-1990s with newly developed forensic science.
Coppola, who had been fingered for the killing by Thomas Ricciardi, a mobster-turned-informant, took off rather than submit to a court order to provide blood or saliva that could be checked for DNA to see if there was a match with the hairs.
A warrant for his arrest in the murder was signed by a judge in Somerset County in August 1996, several weeks after he fled.
Ricciardi’s allegations of Coppola bragging about the execution was what got the case reopened. Ricciardi said he first learned of the story behind Lardiere’s murder from his cohorts with the New Jersey faction of the Lucchese crime family.
Coppola later recounted details of the fatal shooting to him in person at a mob party in Newark to celebrate Coppola’s release from prison, Ricciardi told investigators after his own racketeering conviction in 1993 led him to cooperate.
Paul Smith, an investigator with the state Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau who handled the reopened murder case, yesterday said he recommended Coppola be taken into custody to give the DNA sample, but he was prevented from doing so.
He said it was Don Campolo, the bureau’s head at the time, who stopped police from detaining Coppola, opening the door for him to vanish.
“It only would have taken a day or two,” said Smith, now retired. “If there wasn’t a match, I would have shaken his hand on his way out of jail and told him, `Michael, you beat us on this one.’ But we never got that chance.”
“It was unfortunate we had him and let him go,” added Robert Buccino, the bureau’s chief of detectives at the time who today serves as chief of detectives in Union County.
Reached at home yesterday, Campolo said he was simply following court procedures, had the support of his superiors in his decision and wouldn’t change anything he did. He also insisted no one felt Coppola would go into hiding.
“Let’s hope there’s a match,” Campolo added. “That’s what the process is all about.”
Authorities have theorized that Lardiere, 68, of Maplewood was slain after he antagonized some of his fellow mobsters while in custody at a state prison in Clinton. The group was detained after refusing to comply with a State Commission of Investigation subpoena as part of a probe of organized crime.
He showed up at the Red Bull Inn on a weekend furlough from the correctional facility and checked in just after 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 10, getting the keys for Room 235.
Police said Lardiere was shot in the abdomen, chest and head when the gunman emerged from the shadows as he was going to his car for his suitcase. He was discovered with the room key still in his hand.
Smith said Coppola’s face fell when he handed him the court order to give the DNA sample outside his Spring Lake home on Aug. 8, 1996, but that his outlook brightened considerably when he learned he wasn’t going to be handcuffed and brought in on the spot.
Coppola skipped a court hearing the following week, and Superior Court Judge Wilfred Diana in Somerville allowed the state two weeks to find Coppola before signing an arrest warrant on Aug. 27, 1996.
Leaman said detectives were close to apprehending Coppola a couple of times over the years and had reason to believe he’d been out of the country at times. Authorities feel he had help remaining a fugitive for so long, but would not elaborate.
Not long after Coppola disappeared, his wife, Linda, also went missing.
Four years ago, police in Florida asked for the public’s help in apprehending Coppola, saying he’d been sighted on Sanibel and Marco islands and may also have visited local greyhound tracks.
Investigators tracked Coppola’s leased Cadillac to Newark Liberty International Airport, but interviews with airline personnel and checks of flights never produced any evidence he made any trips around the time the car was dropped off.
Coppola has been listed at or near the top of the state Division of Criminal Justice’s 13 most wanted fugitives since the list was drawn up five years ago.
Police also are interested in whether Coppola may be connected to the death of Larry Ricci, a reputed Genovese crime family member who vanished amid an extortion trial in Brooklyn two years ago and whose body was later found in the trunk of a car behind a Union diner.
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