By: Mario Mancini

It all began in the 1960s with a phone call from NYPD Detective Sonny Grosso that would change Randy Jurgensen’s life — and Hollywood history. Grosso told his boyhood friend to head to the East River to meet director William Friedkin, who was preparing to film The French Connection, according to the New York Post’s Tina Moore, who first reported the story.

Friedkin wanted authenticity. The gritty 1971 film, based on a real-life heroin bust involving Detectives Eddie Egan and Grosso, needed its stars — Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider — to move, think, and act like real cops. That’s where Jurgensen came in.

“My job was to take them from the reel world they lived in and bring them into the real world I lived in,” Jurgensen told the Post. “And they came with me.”

As Tina Moore first reported in the New York Post, Jurgensen trained the actors intensively, teaching them how to break down doors, frisk suspects, and survive narcotics “shooting galleries.” It took weeks of hands-on work to turn the actors into believable detectives.

Jurgensen’s involvement went far beyond coaching. During filming of the movie’s iconic car chase scene through Brooklyn, Friedkin asked him to sit in the passenger seat of the Pontiac LeMans and operate a camera mounted to the bumper — a dangerous stunt that became one of the most famous sequences in film history.

Knowing the risks, Jurgensen cleverly distracted the uniformed officers monitoring the shoot, urging them to grab coffee from a nearby van, Moore reported. Once they stepped away, he climbed into the car alongside a stunt driver, with Friedkin riding in the back.

“I sort of said to myself, ‘I think today I’m going to die,’” recalled Jurgensen, a decorated Korean War veteran who earned a Purple Heart.

The car barreled down 86th Street in Bensonhurst at roughly 65 miles per hour for 19 blocks, narrowly missing vehicles, smashing into obstacles, and even clipping a city bus — all without sirens or street closures, Jurgensen said. When the crew ran out of film, Friedkin famously wanted to do it again.

Off-screen, Jurgensen formed a close friendship with Hackman, who played detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle. A line from the movie — “Pour it in your ear” — became a running joke between them for decades, Moore reported.

That friendship endured until Hackman’s death last year. Jurgensen said he noticed something was wrong when the actor confused him with Grosso at a book signing — a moment that quietly signaled Hackman’s decline.

One case haunted him above all others: the 1972 murder of NYPD Officer Phillip Cardillo, who was fatally shot inside a Nation of Islam mosque in Harlem after officers responded to a fake distress call.