The death of Hollywood icon Gene Hackman saddened millions — and a legendary ex-NYPD detective who tutored him in his most famous screen role in “The French Connection” is feeling his loss more than most.
“We were friends for more than 50 years,” retired NYPD detective Randy Jurgensen, 91, said.
Jurgensen met the actor at a warehouse on East 125th Street with a mandate: to turn him and his similarly little-known co-star, Roy Schieder, into believable undercover narcotics cops.
The tutorial resulted in a 1971 Hollywood blockbuster that would win five Academy Awards, including “Best Actor” for Hackman, “Best Picture” and “Best Director” for William Friedkin.
“We bonded almost instantly,” recalled Jurgensen. Part of their connection was the fact both lied about their age to join the military as 16-year-olds.
Jurgensen was given a small speaking part as a NYPD sergeant in the movie. But he drove the chase car in the iconic, nail-biting scene in which Hackman, playing hard-charging Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, relentlessly pursued his would-be assassin under the 86th Street “El” in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst.
Hackman and Jurgensen grew so close, Jurgensen’s sister, Judy, babysat Hackman’s three kids.
Jurgensen helped transform Hackman and Schieder into credible versions of real-life NYPD detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, respectively, squiring the actors to a real homicide scene, drug-filled bars and squalid, junkie-filled “shooting galleries.”
In the 1960s, Jurgensen was working as a plainclothes narcotics cop who prowled Harlem’s underbelly, buying heroin from dealers inside sketchy tenements. He was assigned to assist in the real-life French Connection caper — a sprawling years-long probe of an international dope-smuggling ring.
By 1963, Egan and Grosso had seized 112 pounds of high-grade heroin. (That cache — and hundreds of pounds of other NYPD-seized heroin and cocaine — would eventually be stolen.)
Author Robin Moore would later write “The French Connection: The World’s Most Crucial Narcotics Investigation,” the book that led to the screenplay
Century Fox executives Richard Zanuck and David Brown summoned Egan, Grasso producer Philip D’Antoni and Jurgensen to Hollywood and a deal was struck, with a proviso the film be completed for under $2 million. In October 1971 the film was released, $200,000 under budget.
Jurgensen later became the lead investigator in the famed “Harlem Mosque” case, the April 1972 assassination of NYPD Patrolman Phillip Cardillo, a homicide that led him to co-author, “Circle of Six: The True Story of New York’s Most Notorious Cop Killer and the Cop Who Risked Everything to Catch Him.”
He had a parallel career in numerous Hollywood movies and television shows as an actor and producer, including the 1980 Al Pacino film “Cruising,” based on one of his real NYPD cases, and a role in the 1997 film “Donnie Brasco.”
Egan died in 1995, Grosso in 2020, Schieder in 2008 and Hackman in February.
“I now am,” Jurgensen ruefully noted, “the last living ‘French Connection’ detective.”
