In his actual life, retired NYPD Detective Randy Jurgensen busted cop killers, drug sellers and avenue nook goons — however in his reel life he was the man who whacked the godfather’s first born.
Throughout his storied two-decade profession with New York’s Most interesting and past, Jurgensen, 92, labored on greater than 40 Hollywood movies and tv reveals — from taking part in a cop in “The French Connection,” a wiseguy in “Donnie Brasco” and a killer in “The Godfather.”
“I actually turned often called the person who shot Sonny Corleone on the toll sales space and I’m on the poster,” he informed The Submit forward of being honored by the Detectives Endowment Affiliation on Jan. 13 in Manhattan. “I machine-gunned him. That’s how I got here into present enterprise.”
It began within the Sixties with a name from his boyhood buddy, NYPD Detective Sonny Grosso, who informed him to return to the East River to fulfill “French Connection” director William Friedkin.
The director wished Jurgensen to assist make actors Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider into detectives so as to add realism to the 1971 Academy Award-winning film, which was based mostly on a real story a few main heroin bust involving actual life Detectives Eddie Egan and Grosso.
“My job was to take them from the reel world that they lived in and convey them into the actual world that I lived in – and so they got here with me,” he stated.
He taught them the way to break down doorways, frisk folks and deal with “capturing galleries” amongst different issues.
“I made them narcotics detectives,” he stated. “That took weeks and weeks.”
At one level, Friedkin requested Jurgensen to experience within the Pontiac LeMans’ passenger seat throughout the film’s iconic chase scene and function a digicam that was hooked up to the entrance bumper.
Realizing the thrilling stunt would contain the automobile rushing alongside the road like a bat out of hell, Jurgensen stated he advised the patrolmen monitoring the filming seize a cup of joe.
“I went to the cops and I informed them ‘The van over there, the espresso is sizzling. It’s actual good,’” Jurgensen recalled. “And the six or seven of them walked away.”
Jurgensen then climbed into the muscle automobile’s passenger seat, with Friedkin within the again seat and a stunt man driving the automobile.
The cameraman pleaded to get into the automobile, too, however the director informed him no as a result of he had a household – a hazard Jurgensen was nicely conscious of.
“I type of stated to myself, ‘I feel at this time I’m going to die,’” recalled the embellished detective, who served as a U.S. Military paratrooper within the Korean Battle.
The muscle automobile did 65 mph for 19 blocks tracing the elevated B/D subway tracks on 86th Road in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to make the well-known six-minute scene, “careening off a metropolis bus” and dropping a facet mirror at one level, he stated. There have been no lights or sirens, regardless of some experiences, Jurgensen stated.
“Now, we flip the automobile round and … and Billy says, ‘Let’s do it once more,’” he recalled. “I heard click on click on, click on click on. I stated, ‘We’re out.’ Billy stated ‘So what?’”
Through the filming, Jurgensen turned shut associates with Hackman, who performed Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle.
“There’s a line within the ‘French Connection’ the place Roy Scheider comes as much as him with a cup of espresso after they’re standing exterior freezing and says ‘Right here’s vino,’” Jurgensen recalled. “And Gene says, ‘Pour it in your ear.’”
That line turned a operating joke between Jurgensen and Hackman all through their friendship and as much as the Oscar winner’s demise final yr.
Jurgensen stated he realized the actor was slipping when he confused Jurgensen with Grosso at a guide signing a number of years in the past. Grosso had died in 2020.
“I knew that there was an issue as a result of he wrote a guide and he was in New York Metropolis and I stood on-line and I had a cup of espresso and after I received to him I stated, ‘Right here, Gene, right here’s your vino,” Jurgensen recalled. “He laughed after which he started to name me Sonny. I knew proper there one thing was mistaken.”
The hard-nosed detective stated he nonetheless can’t shake one actual life case — the April 20, 1972, homicide of Police Officer Phillip Cardillo, who was lured to Nation of Islam mosque No. 7 in Harlem by a bogus name of an officer in want of help.
As soon as inside, the officers have been overpowered by mosque members and one among them fired a gun and struck Cardillo. On the time, worshippers stated that the cops interrupted their prayers with their weapons drawn.
When the bosses arrived, “They informed all of the white cops to depart,” he stated.
In addition they let the witnesses depart with out interviewing them and didn’t safe the crime scene, he stated. Consequently, there weren’t ballistics or images from the scene.
Jurgensen stepped in because the lead investigator on the racially charged case within the NYPD’s 28 Precinct, however he didn’t have the help of then-Mayor John Lindsay, the police commissioner and different metropolis leaders, he stated.
“I discovered at one level that I used to be the one one searching for the one that shot Phil Cardillo,” Jurgensen stated.
However with the assistance of FBI agent Joseph Pistone, who was the premise for the 1997 mob film “Donnie Brasco,” the detective discovered a sole witness.
The witness was a mosque member who stated he noticed one other member named Louis 17X Dupree shoot Cardillo to demise. Jurgensen arrested Dupree however needed to reside with the witness for 2 years in Upstate safehouses to guard him.
However when the trial occurred, the suspect was acquitted.
“That case took loads out of me,” stated the detective, who’s making a documentary known as “Reel Cop” together with his son-in-law.
In 1975, Jurgensen went to San Francisco and arrested the killers of Patrolmen Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones, who have been shot by members of the Black Liberation Military in an ambush however the metropolis, which was having a fiscal disaster, didn’t have the cash to convey them again.
Fortunately, one of many detectives on the West Coast had a cousin who was an airline pilot.
“We had a gathering and he stated, ‘Put the bastards on this flight, I’m the captain,’” Jurgensen revealed to The Submit. “That’s how we introduced the cop killers again.”
