Edward Arrigoni, a bus company owner from the Bronx who came up with the idea of offering $10,000 rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of gunmen who shoot New York area law enforcement officers, died on Sept. 29 at his home in Greenwich, Conn. He was 91.
His death was confirmed this week by his daughter Jeanne O’Reilly.
Mr. Arrigoni established Cop-Shot in 1984, with him and a group of friends initially contributing $1,000 each in cooperation with the New York Police Department and the Police Benevolent Association. Since then, the organization has distributed some 30 rewards to tipsters who called Cop-Shot’s telephone hotline (1-800-COP-SHOT) with information.
Detectives deemed those anonymous tipsters instrumental in successfully prosecuting suspects who killed or wounded officers from the New York Police Department, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, as well as New York State Troopers and Amtrak police serving in the metropolitan area.
The organization’s eye-grabbing bumper stickers, billboards and bus advertisements — punctuated with a blood-like splatter of crimson — were intended to serve not only as an investigative tool, but also as a deterrent, warning miscreants that bystanders, neighbors and even relatives might be tempted by a hefty reward to turn them in.
Mr. Arrigoni told The New York Times in 1988 that he had for years been donating buses to help family, friends and colleagues visit wounded officers and attend services for those who had been killed. But he had come to believe that that was an insufficient response to tragedies that registered well beyond any one individual or family.
“It seemed like such a passive part I was playing,” he said. (The name Cop-Shot seems self-explanatory, but it’s also a part-acronym for Citizens Outraged by Police Being Shot.)
Edward F. Arrigoni was born on June 30, 1934, in the South Bronx, the grandson of Italian immigrants. His father, Ferdinand, was a garage mechanic who started a station-wagons-for-hire business. His mother, Mary (Collura) Arrigoni, managed the home.
After attending All Hallows High School, a Catholic school in the Bronx, he graduated in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree from Iona College (now Iona University) in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was the first in his family to attend college and later became an Iona benefactor.
After his father’s death in 1964, he inherited what had become, by the mid-1940s, the Parochial Bus Service, shuttling students to religious schools. The company became New York Bus Tours, providing service to area racetracks, to the 1964-65 World’s Fair in Queens and to Shea Stadium from Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.
By 1970, as New York Bus Service, the company innovated by beginning to run express buses between the northeast Bronx and Midtown Manhattan. Mr. Arrigoni retired in 2005 when the company was acquired by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Mr. Arrigoni married Helen Moyna in 1956. She was treasurer of New York Bus Service and died in 1991. His son James died in 2021.
In addition to his daughter Jeanne, he is survived by his wife, Mary Jane (Vouté) Arrigoni; two other daughters, Laureen Cassoli and Karen Arrigoni; four stepdaughters, Kathleen Gudmundsson, Carolyn Murphy, MaryEllen Sutherland and Jean Vouté; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
The post Edward Arrigoni, 91, Dies; His ‘Cop-Shot’ Charity Rewards Tipsters appeared first on New York Times.
