Real Popeye Doyle wraps up his caseload
Inspiration for award-winning movie dies at 89
Sonny Grosso, who has died aged 89, was a New York detective whose seizure of a huge consignment of heroin inspired the Oscar-winning film The French Connection , in which he was played by Roy Scheider; with his partner Eddie Egan (Gene Hackman), Grosso also contributed extensively to the script, injecting new verisimilitude into the portrayal of police work on the screen.
As seen in the film, the break-up of the drugs ring began by chance when in 1961 Grosso and Egan, after 27 hours on duty, went to relax at a Manhattan nightclub, the Copacabana.
There they saw a dealer they knew, Patsy Fuqa, and on a hunch decided to tail him. So began the unravelling of a trade which had been growing since the 1930s.
Much of the import of heroin into the US was controlled by Corsican gangsters who by the early 1960s were smuggling in 110lb (49kg) of the drug from Marseille every six weeks, contributing to the growing crisis in America’s inner cities. (One of the links in the chain was a Guatemalan diplomat shuttling between Beirut and Europe.)
“Bullets” Egan and Sonny, aka “Cloudy”, Grosso were an unorthodox but complementary pair. The former was Irish, something of a womaniser, a bully, and an egomaniac with a flair for drama.
The film scene in which Hackman dresses as Santa Claus to make an arrest was true to life. This would surprise malefactors, allowing Grosso, who was of Italian descent, to make what would be a record number of arrests by the time he retired in 1976.
“Eddie was always an actor, I was always the producer,” Grosso said of their partnership.
Yet, if he was aware of Egan’s flaws, he was never less than loyal, playing along for instance when Egan invented details for the press — such as having lowered Grosso into a sewer to retrieve a lost key.
The pair eventually broke up the French gang, confiscating an unprecedented haul of 112lb (50kg) of heroin with a street value of US$32 million ($50m).
The bust was chronicled in 1969 by Robin Moore, whose other books included The Green Berets (filmed with John Wayne) and the Xaviera Hollander memoir, the Happy Hooker.
When the director William Friedkin began in 1971 to film a lightly fictionalised version of Moore’s book, he hired Egan and Grosso as consultants. They would spend the day on set, largely in Brooklyn, and work shifts at night.
Grosso was keen that the gritty reality of their lives be properly depicted. So he took Friedkin, Hackman and Scheider with him and Egan on raids in Harlem. “In the beginning they were all shocked by what they saw,” he recalled.
“The first time we hit a shooting gallery” — a place where addicts used drugs — “there were about 20 people shooting up.”
Friedkin was appalled, wailing that he lived only six minutes’ walk away. “No one knew they were actors, and we let them question the dealers and addicts so they got to feel comfortable dealing with them as though they were policemen. That’s why the movie stands up so well, they’d done it for real.”
By the end, Hackman and Scheider were such familiar faces that those being busted would ask if it was for real or for the film. Many were coopted as extras.
Grosso lent Hackman his watch, gun and ring for the role. When filming ended, Friedkin drove the detective to where Francis Ford Coppola was shooting The Godfather and insisted Grosso be hired as its adviser.
“I found locations, showed them how to search, hammered the crowds, drove cars and provided 75 cops as extras, as well as members of my family for the wedding scene,” Grosso said.
As he had in The French Connection, Grosso played a small part in The Godfather. It was also his gun Al Pacino used in the scene in which, having been frisked, Michael Corleone retrieves it to kill two rivals (“They took out the real bullets first,” said Grosso).
“I was once searched when I was
I don’t want to make out this is 007, but it’s a dangerous job.
Sonny Grosso
carrying a gun in my crotch,” he revealed. “I don’t want to make out this is 007, but it’s a dangerous job.”
The French Connection won five Oscars, including for Best Film. Grosso did not go to the ceremony in Los Angeles; he had a fear of flying.
One of four children, Salvatore Anthony Grosso was born on July 21 1930 and grew up in East Harlem, then an Italian neighbourhood. His father, a trucker, died when Sonny was 14, and as the only son he became the breadwinner. He was drafted into the US Army after high school and spent two years in Korea as a radio operator during the conflict before being invalided out with a knee injury.
Grosso drove a postal truck before joining the police in 1954. Posted to Harlem, he found it beginning to be devastated by heroin. Within three years, his record led him to be promoted from patrolman to detective, the fastest it had been achieved.
The fame which came to Egan and Grosso after Moore’s book led to jealousy within the police, according to Grosso, and they were assigned to different departments.
Grosso joined the Major Case Squad, and in 1972, days after The French Connection’s Oscars triumph, broke his leg catching the suspected leader of the Black Liberation Army. He subsequently left the force and worked as an adviser to TV shows such as Kojak.
Grosso also appeared in films and became a producer, notably of the 1980s Canadian TV series Night Heat.
He wrote books about his experiences, among them Point Blank , and Murder at the Harlem Mosque (1977). In 1980 he was reunited with Friedkin and Al Pacino on Cruising.
Sonny Grosso is survived by his partner of more than 40 years, Christina Kraus, a son and three daughters.