Junior feels the restrictions of his house arrest acutely, while Tony starts putting in hours at his actual job to allay FBI suspicions,…
Plot
After more than a decade of searching, investigators Friday found and arrested the man wanted in the killing of Johnny "Coca-Cola" Lardiere, who was gunned down at 2:34 a.m. on Easter Sunday in 1977 in the Red Bull Inn parking lot on Route 22 in Bridgewater.
Michael Coppola was arrested in New York City and is being charged with first-degree murder. He will be arraigned at 1:30 p.m. today in state Superior Court in Somerville, in the chambers of Judge Paul W. Armstrong.
Peter Aseltine, a press officer for the state Attorney General's Office, said through his secretary that the department will not comment on the investigation, other than to release the time and date of the arraignment.
Coppola, who is reputed to be the onetime captain of the Genovese crime family, disappeared from his Spring Lake home in 1996 after he was asked to submit a DNA sample in connection with the case.
His alleged victim was born Giovanni Larducci, but took the name John Lardiere. In Mafia circles, he was known as "Johnny Cokes" or "Johnny Coca-Cola" — some say it was because he wore Coke bottle-thick glasses when he was young, or because he grew up near a Coca-Cola bottling plant.
Lardiere, 68, was believed to be a lieutenant of Gerardo "Jerry" Catena, once known as New Jersey's top mobster, and reputedly was involved in loansharking and labor activities. He also was linked to the 1971 disappearance of Teamsters Local 945 President Michael A. Ardis.
At the time of his murder, Lardiere, whose last known address was in Maplewood, was being held at the Clinton Reformatory for Women — now called the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Union Township, Hunterdon County — for refusing to testify before the State Commission of Investigation, a body begun in 1969 to investigate organized crime and corruption.
According to Anthony Bruno, a regular contributor to Court TV's "Crime Library" and author of several crime-related books, Lardiere wasn't known for keeping his mouth shut. The man "got under people's skin," Bruno said in 2005. A year after Lardiere was incarcerated, his wife died of arsenic poisoning.
During his more than five-year stay at Clinton, one of the people Lardiere irritated with "his big mouth and in-your-face personality" was Ralph "Blackie" Napoli, a captain in the Philadelphia-based Bruno family, who was also sentenced for refusing to testify before the State Commission of Investigation, Bruno said.
On Sunday, April 10, 1977, Lardiere was granted a 26-hour furlough to observe the Easter holiday, along with Napoli, of Fairfield, and fellow accused mobster Louis Manna of Jersey City. Lardiere borrowed a car from a friend and arranged to meet a prostitute at the Red Bull Inn, Bruno said.
When he arrived outside his motel room, a man came out of the shadows and called out Lardiere's name. According to Lucchese crime family member-turned-informant Tommy Ricciardi, Michael Coppola was standing there, holding a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol fitted with a silencer.
Bruno, who interviewed several investigators and Mafia informants about the murder, said what followed has been talked about in New Jersey Mafia circles since then:
Coppola aimed the gun at Lardiere and squeezed the trigger, but the gun jammed.
Lardiere laughed and then, according to Bruno, said, "the mocking words that would make him famous":
"What're you gonna do now, tough guy?"
The hitman answered by discarding the pistol, rolling up his pants leg and pulling out a .38-caliber revolver from an ankle holster. Lardiere was shot five times — twice in the head.
Police launched an extensive search for Napoli and Manna to warn them of the shooting, but neither man could be found until the end of the weekend, when both showed up at 9 p.m. and returned promptly to prison.
When Ricciardi entered the federal Witness Protection Program and testified for the state in 1996, the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office reopened the case. In the evidence vault, investigators found two items discovered at a nearby U-turn on Route 22: an ankle holster and a baseball cap with several hairs in it.
With new DNA technology available, authorities believed they could now link Coppola to the 17-year-old murder. But instead of arresting him, investigators served him notice to appear in court in Somerville to give blood and saliva samples.
That was a big mistake, said Paul Smith, a retired supervising state investigator for the New Jersey Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau, in 2005.
Smith served Coppola the papers at his Spring Lake home. Coppola never showed for his scheduled appearance on Aug. 13, 1996, before a judge in state Superior Court, Somerville, and went on to be listed as the state Division of Criminal Justice's "Number One Most Wanted Fugitive."
In 2003, investigators in Florida received tips that Coppola was hiding out in the southwest region of the state and released a computer-generated photograph in hopes that local residents might recognize him, but investigators were unable to find him.
Coppola is believed to have communicated with his organized-crime contacts in New Jersey while he was a fugitive. In 2003, two reputed mob members pleaded guilty to conspiracy for communicating with Coppola between August 1996 and April 1999.
Investigators began recording phone conversations between him and former mob contacts, including his former prisonmates, and the investigation continued. No details were available about how investigators found Coppola.
Analysis
Fan-written episode notes for House Arrest from the Episode Guides forum (circa 2002).