Donnie Brasco (11 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
I couldn’t play it entirely safe. Any chance I would get, I myself would snoop around. If the guys were out front in the store or outside, and I was alone for a couple of minutes in the back room, I would always be looking in the desk drawers. There would usually be guns, both automatics and revolvers. There would also be other burglary paraphernalia stashed in there, like wigs and ski masks. If anybody had come in, my snooping would have been fatal. But my job was to find out what was going on, after all. I wasn’t just curious.
If I was who I said I was, I couldn’t just be sitting around listening to their schemes. I had to have some things of my own going.
Early in 1977, I made a few small deals with Vinnie the fence. Vinnie wasn’t a heavy-duty guy. He was a family-type guy, from Staten Island, who used to hang around Jilly’s during the day and then go home to his family at night. He didn’t go out on actual jobs; he wasn’t a tough guy. He just got rid of swag for people.
I wanted to make it look like I was moving stuff here and there to make a few bucks and trying to work my way up the line to bigger fences. Vinnie started me out with perfume.
We arranged a meeting for downstairs from my apartment, outdoors at the corner of Ninety-first Street and Third Avenue. Around noon he arrived driving a rented white Ford Econoline van. It was filled with cartons of perfume—by Lanvin. “I pick this up every week right at the factory where they make it,” he said. “I pay a couple of guys who work there.”
Perfume wasn’t really my line, but it’s not too far removed from jewelry. And mob thieves don’t turn up their noses at anything where they can make a profit. You want to be a good customer, but not so good that you become a mark. I bought one carton of the perfume—Eau My Sin and Yves St. Laurent Rive Gauche—for $220.
The perfume, like everything else I bought in my role, I turned over to the FBI.
A few days later I met him at the Woodbridge Auction on Route 9 in Woodbridge, New Jersey. The auction was like a flea market and drew big crowds. Vinnie had a booth there where he sold swag that he hadn’t sold to other fences. There, with the public and families all milling around, Vinnie would be in his booth selling stuff from hijacks or burglaries. I used to swing over there to see what new stuff he had, or if I had something that he might want to sell out of the auction. He got rid of a lot of swag from that booth.
I even took my wife there once. I got to spend so little time with her in those days that I figured the risk was tolerable. She got a kick out of it. The only problem was that once, right in front of Vinnie, who called me “Don,” she called me “Joe.” But he didn’t seem to pick up on it. And, anyway, supposedly she was just some broad I knew—I could have been using any name with her.
He had some Enigma perfume for me, $250 a case, which contained fifteen boxes. “This stuff retails for forty dollars a box,” he said. I bought a case.
I told him I had made a score, and had fifty to sixty watches and a good haul of fine turquoise jewelry. I showed Vinnie two sample wristwatches—gold Pateau Mitsu Boshi Boeki digitals, which were fairly new at the time, with red faces, worth maybe $80 apiece—and he bought them for $20 each. “I’ll show these to Jilly in Brooklyn,” he said, “and see how many more he wants.”
Most of the “swag” I sold was stuff confiscated by the Bureau, loot recovered from previous thefts but which could not be traced back to the owners. These watches and jewelry were not from the Bureau. I had wanted the stuff in a hurry to make this deal, so I had bought them at a wholesale place on Canal Street. I worked it this way a few times. It meant there was no paperwork, nobody would know where the stuff was going. Like some other things I did, it might have left me open to internal criticism, but I had to make the decisions about my own security and pace. And nothing I did was a shortcut that would damage a case.
Vinnie said that he and his partner were about to make a score on a load of Faded Glory jeans, for which a buyer had already agreed to pay $125,000. “The load is a hundred and twenty-five thousand pairs,” he said, “so it comes out to a buck a pair.”
Three weeks later he called and said he wanted fifteen more watches, which I sold him for $300, and some of the turquoise jewelry. I sold him necklaces and bracelets for $150.
I said, “Did you get that load of jeans?”
“Part of it. The guy who took it, he made a couple other deals. So we only got part. You know how it is.”
These small deals helped me get accepted by the crew at Jilly’s store and by the people they associated with. One of the first things Jilly himself offered me was a white sable coat, part of the haul they had taken in a burglary the night before. “It’s worth eleven grand,” Jilly told me. “You can have it for twenty-five hundred bucks if you want it.”
I passed on that, told Jilly I didn’t think I could move it.
There wasn’t any sense in buying anything expensive that I couldn’t identify, couldn’t eventually trace back to the owner. If you can’t trace an item back to the owner, you can’t prove anything in court. Jilly didn’t tell me where he got the coat, and you don’t ask somebody where they got something like that. Unless he had, say, seven or eight of them—a really big score. Then you might say, “Hey, where’d you make a score like that?”
At that point the only reason I had for buying the stuff was to establish credibility, as I’d done with the perfume. But I didn’t need to spend $2,500 for credibility.
The crew was either talking about, or bringing in, loads every day. Price isn’t always negotiable. Even if a potential buyer feels that the price is too high, that doesn’t mean the sellers will drop the price. The high price probably means that they have to give somebody else an end of it: Whoever they got it from wants
x
amount of money, so for these sellers to make anything they have to put a few bucks on top of that, and they can’t really drop the price. No deal is ever really dead, it just keeps being shopped around.
x
amount of money, so for these sellers to make anything they have to put a few bucks on top of that, and they can’t really drop the price. No deal is ever really dead, it just keeps being shopped around.
Tommy the Chief was a fat hood, probably in his fifties. He brought in a case of crushed salted almonds, the kind used in making ice cream. He told Jilly he had fifty-eight more cases in his cellar, stolen from Breyer’s Ice Cream in Long Island City. He had a list of other stuff he said he could get—cocoa, dried milk, and so on, from Breyers. “We got it set up with one of their guys that works as a roaster inside,” Tommy said. “And we also got the security guard who will be on duty when we go in next week. The haul will be worth a hundred G’s.”
Jilly decided to go for it, to rent three twenty-two-foot trucks to haul the stuff away, and a garage to store the swag in over the weekend, until it was moved to the buyer. They brought one truckload of cocoa to the club. They just parked the truck right on the street, and I helped unload it. In that neighborhood, who’s going to say anything about what goes on at the Acerg store? Two days later the load was sold to some guy in Yonkers.
One night Guido took a crew to burglarize a warehouse. They were going to heist four thousand three-piece men’s suits. They had some kid with them to be the outside man, the lookout. While they were inside, somebody tripped a silent alarm. The owner arrived at the warehouse. The outside man panicked and took off without notifying anybody inside. The crew heard the owner coming in and managed to sneak out the back.
When Guido was telling Jilly this the following day, I wondered what the punishment might be on the kid. The crew boss had a wide range of options. Punishment depended on who the boss was and what kind of mood he was in. If Jilly was really ticked off, they might do a bad number on the guy.
Jilly decided they would go back in the next night. As for the lookout, all he said was, “I don’t want that cocksucker with you when you go back in. He can’t come around no more.”
They went back into the warehouse. They didn’t get all four thousand suits. They got about half of them.
I was always on the lookout for an opening to get to the bigger fences, the guys Jilly’s crew was selling to. But whenever I’d suggest that I might be able to use a couple of contacts, they’d say something like, “Give it to us, we’ll bring it to the guy. Don’t worry about it.” And if I said I might have some big score coming, their reaction would be, “Hey, you got a big load, we can get rid of it for you.” They weren’t about to give up their fences.
There was no acceptable reason for me to push to meet the bigger fences, except by coming up with bigger swag to sell.
I wasn’t spending all my time in Brooklyn. I kept poking around in other directions. While bouncing around the Manhattan night spots with the Colombo guys, I met Anthony Mirra. I was introduced to him in a disco then named Igor‘s, which later became Cecil’s, on Fifty-fourth Street.
I knew who Tony Mirra was. He was a member of the Bonanno crime family. He had done about eighteen years in the can for narcotics and other convictions, and he had only gotten out a year or so earlier. I knew that he was involved in anything and everything illegal to make money—gambling, drugs, extortion, and muscle of the type that leads to “business partnerships.” I knew that he was a contract man, with maybe twenty-five hits under his belt. He was mean, feared, and well connected, a good guy for me to know.
I started hanging out with Mirra while I was still running with the Brooklyn guys. Through Mirra I met a good thief. I needed some more potent swag to bring to Jilly’s crew. This thief had a haul of industrial diamonds. I decided to take a shot with these diamonds. I asked the thief if I could take a few samples on consignment to see if I could “middle” them—be the middle man for selling them off. He agreed and gave me ten diamonds.
Selling stolen property like this would not have been sanctioned by the Bureau. I didn’t want to argue with anybody about it. I decided it was worth the chance.
The diamonds I had were worth about $75,000 on the street. I didn’t really want to sell them to Jilly’s crew, I just wanted to show them what I could do. I decided on a price that would be higher than a good street price—to discourage the sale—but not so high that it would look like something was wrong or I didn’t know what I was doing.
I brought the pouch of diamonds into the store and showed them to Jilly and the guys.
“I hit a cargo cage out at the airport,” I said. “I got a guy inside. I give him a cut. I got a buyer already, down on Canal Street. But if you could sell them, I’ll give you the shot. All I want is a hundred grand out of the deal—seventy—five thousand for me and twenty-five thousand for my inside man.”
“That’s kind of high,” Jilly said, “a hundred grand.”
That price would force them to ask for $150,000 to $200,000 in reselling them.
“Hey, what can I tell you?” I said. “My inside guy that set it up wants twenty-five grand. The guy on Canal Street is willing to give me a hundred grand. I’m giving you a shot because I’m with you guys. I need seventy-five grand. So if you could sell them for more than a hundred, anything over that is yours.”
Jilly said to give him a couple days to check with a guy who was out of town. I did. He checked with the guy and said to me, “He’s willing to go for seventy-five.”
“I can’t do it, Jill. I would only get fifty thousand out of the deal, and it’s not worth it. I’ll just off ‘em to the guy down on Canal Street.”
“Yeah,” he said.
Jilly understood, which was just what I wanted. I had made some moves, got some stones—no cop is going to come up with $200,000 of diamonds to sell—showed them that I knew what I was talking about. If Jilly had come back with an offer of, say, $125,000, I couldn’t have backed out of the deal. I would have had to keep my word and sell them to him. That was the chance I took.
It gave me a jump up in credibility, up from the ground floor.
When I first met Jilly, he wasn’t made. Nobody in that crew was. He told me he had grown up in Brooklyn, had been stealing all his life. His dream was to get made, become a true member of the Colombo family.
One morning in early May, I arrived at the club to see Jilly all dressed up—pin-striped suit, dark tie, the works. You don’t usually hang out in a suit and tie. He looked excited, strutting around. He also looked nervous.
He was just leaving when I came in. “Jill,” I said, “where you going dressed like that?”
“I gotta go somewhere,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it later, when I get back.”
He left, and I turned to Vinnie. “What the fuck’s going on?”
“He’s getting his badge today,” Vinnie said. “He gets made.”
We waited all day for Jilly. When he came back, he was ecstatic, as proud as a peacock. “Getting made is the greatest thing that could ever happen to me,” he said. “I been looking forward to this day ever since I was a kid. Maybe someday you’ll know how it feels. This is the fucking ultimate!”
“Hey, congratulations!” I said. “Who you gonna be with?”
“Charlie Moose.”
Charlie Moose was going to be his captain. “Charlie Moose” Panarella was well-known to law-enforcement people. He was a mean guy, an enforcer. He was a high-ranking captain, and Jilly would now be a soldier in Charlie Moose’s crew, and Jilly couldn’t have been prouder.
That night we all partied together for his celebration. But now everybody treated him with more respect. He was a made guy now.
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