In his real life, retired NYPD Detective Randy Jurgensen busted cop killers, drug dealers and street corner goons — but in his reel life he was the guy who whacked the godfather’s first born.
During his storied two-decade career with New York’s Finest and beyond, Jurgensen, 92, worked on more than 40 Hollywood films and television shows — from playing a cop in “The French Connection,” a wiseguy in “Donnie Brasco” and a killer in “The Godfather.”
“I really became known as the man who shot Sonny Corleone at the toll booth and I’m on the poster,” he told The Post ahead of being honored by the Detectives Endowment Association on Jan. 13 in Manhattan. “I machine-gunned him. That’s how I came into show business.”
It all started in the 1960s with a call from his boyhood friend, NYPD Detective Sonny Grosso, who told him to come to the East River to meet “French Connection” director William Friedkin.
The director wanted Jurgensen to help make actors Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider into detectives to add realism to the 1971 Academy Award-winning movie, which was based on a true story about a major heroin bust involving real life Detectives Eddie Egan and Grosso.
“My job was to take them from the reel world that they lived in and bring them into the real world that I lived in – and they came with me,” he said.
He taught them how to break down doors, frisk people and handle “shooting galleries” among other things.
“I made them narcotics detectives,” he said. “That took weeks and weeks.”
At one point, Friedkin asked Jurgensen to ride in the Pontiac LeMans’ passenger seat during the movie’s iconic chase scene and operate a camera that was attached to the front bumper.
Knowing the thrilling stunt would involve the car speeding along the street like a bat out of hell, Jurgensen said he suggested the patrolmen monitoring the filming grab a cup of joe.
“I went to the police officers and I told them ‘The van over there, the coffee is hot. It’s real good,’” Jurgensen recalled. “And the six or seven of them walked away.”
Jurgensen then climbed into the muscle car’s passenger seat, with Friedkin in the back seat and a stunt man driving the car.
The cameraman pleaded to get into the car, too, but the director told him no because he had a family – a danger Jurgensen was well aware of.
“I sort of said to myself, ‘I think today I’m going to die,’” recalled the decorated detective, who served as a U.S. Army paratrooper in the Korean War.
The muscle car did 65 mph for 19 blocks tracing the elevated B/D subway tracks on 86th Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to make the famous six-minute scene, “careening off a city bus” and losing a side mirror at one point, he said. There were no lights or sirens, despite some reports, Jurgensen said.
“Now, we turn the car around and … and Billy says, ‘Let’s do it again,’” he recalled. “I heard click click, click click. I said, ‘We’re out.’ Billy said ‘So what?’”
During the filming, Jurgensen became close friends with Hackman, who played Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle.
“There’s a line in the ‘French Connection’ where Roy Scheider comes up to him with a cup of coffee when they’re standing outside freezing and says ‘Here’s vino,’” Jurgensen recalled. “And Gene says, ‘Pour it in your ear.’”
That line became a running joke between Jurgensen and Hackman throughout their friendship and up to the Oscar winner’s death last year.
Jurgensen said he realized the actor was slipping when he confused Jurgensen with Grosso at a book signing a few years ago. Grosso had died in 2020.
“I knew that there was a problem because he wrote a book and he was in New York City and I stood online and I had a cup of coffee and when I got to him I said, ‘Here, Gene, here’s your vino,” Jurgensen recalled. “He laughed and then he began to call me Sonny. I knew right there something was wrong.”
The hard-nosed detective said he still can’t shake one real life case — the April 20, 1972, murder of Police Officer Phillip Cardillo, who was lured to Nation of Islam mosque No. 7 in Harlem by a bogus call of an officer in need of assistance.
Once inside, the officers were overpowered by mosque members and one of them fired a gun and struck Cardillo. At the time, worshippers said that the cops interrupted their prayers with their guns drawn.
When the bosses arrived, “They told all the white cops to leave,” he said.
They also let the witnesses leave without interviewing them and didn’t secure the crime scene, he said. As a result, there weren’t ballistics or photographs from the scene.
Jurgensen stepped in as the lead investigator on the racially charged case in the NYPD’s 28 Precinct, but he didn’t have the support of then-Mayor John Lindsay, the police commissioner and other city leaders, he said.
“I found at one point that I was the only one looking for the person who shot Phil Cardillo,” Jurgensen said.
But with the help of FBI agent Joseph Pistone, who was the basis for the 1997 mob movie “Donnie Brasco,” the detective found a sole witness.
The witness was a mosque member who said he saw another member named Louis 17X Dupree shoot Cardillo to death. Jurgensen arrested Dupree but had to live with the witness for two years in Upstate safehouses to protect him.
But when the trial happened, the suspect was acquitted.
“That case took a lot out of me,” said the detective, who is making a documentary called “Reel Cop” with Samuelson Studios.
In 1975, Jurgensen went to San Francisco and arrested the killers of Patrolmen Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones, who were shot by members of the Black Liberation Army in an ambush but the city, which was having a fiscal crisis, didn’t have the money to bring them back.
Luckily, one of the detectives on the West Coast had a cousin who was an airline pilot.
“We had a meeting and he said, ‘Put the bastards on this flight, I’m the captain,’” Jurgensen revealed to The Post. “That’s how we brought the cop killers back.”
The DEA said it would be presenting Jurgensen with an award at the event later this month.
“He never strayed from the mission, always honoring his oath to protect, to serve and to honor,” DEA President Scott Munro said. “We salute him.”
