Donnie Brasco (34 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
I went to Milwaukee. Conte and I analyzed the whole matter. We tried to think like wiseguys think.
Two families had put a business together through a sitdown. Now Balistrieri had canceled the agreement without explanation and hadn’t returned phone calls from a top Bonanno captain for more than a month. That was a major discourtesy, meaning he had a major cause. Something had spooked Balistrieri. Conte could get whacked at any time.
We were convinced that for whatever reason, the partnership was finished, Balistrieri wasn’t coming back in. So there was no need to continue with a vending business.
But Conte and I couldn’t just fold it up, either. A citizen like Conte can’t retire from doing business with a mob guy. Once a guy like Lefty gets his hooks into you, he’s going to keep draining you. You run the business, he’s your partner and gets fifty percent. Or you’re going to sell everything and he’ll take fifty percent of that. If you say no to those alternatives, I get a call, as Lefty’s man on the scene, and he tells me to work this guy over, do a number on him. You always have to pay a price for getting out.
At this same time Lefty was pushing for money for a score. There was a load of Betamax videocassette recorders that he could take for $15,000. He could make $18,000 in ten days. But he didn’t have the money. Mike had agreed to lend him $5,000 for ten days, at a price of $2,000. Lefty wanted Conte to invest the rest, $10,000.
We needed to buy some time both to come up with a safe evacuation plan and to avoid Conte having to cough up ten grand. So Conte faked a heart attack.
He checked into St. Luke’s Hospital, complaining of chest pains. They hooked him up to all the machines and gave him medication. Nobody at the hospital was clued in, because you never clue anybody in if you don’t have to—you never know who’s legit and who’s not. Also, we knew that Lefty would call to check up.
I called Lefty to tell him about the heart attack. Lefty called the hospital and said he was Conte’s cousin and wanted to verify that he was a patient.
After a few days of tests, Conte checked out. Lefty was mad when Conte was in the hospital, and he was mad when he got out. Lefty pushed for the $10,000. Conte said he was broke because he had $6,000 in doctor bills.
“He’s so fucking full of shit,” Lefty groans to me. “We fall down in the street with an attack—what doctor bills? Three days in the hospital, six thousand bucks? What’s he think he’s talking to, a moron?”
“He says he can’t come up with the money, Left. The only money he’s got now is his wife’s money.”
“Oh, suddenly it’s his wife’s money? He’s telling fifteen different stories. He says to me, ‘You didn’t come out here and help me with these guys when we had this problem.’ I said, ‘I didn’t tell you to go to bed with different people’s women.’ Mike is blowing his top now. First of all, he says, the guy bullshit you that he’s got a heart attack. And second of all, he ain’t sending you nothing. This guy’s throwing the towel in, so you might as well sell everything over there.”
“I think he’s gonna just keep trying to operate his business.”
“What, without me? I’ll make one phone call. They’ll take it all away from him. Then he’s going to run to the cops and then that’s the end of him. Donnie, we’d of finished this Betamax deal in ten days. And we’d have had winter money, all three of us. The guy’s sick in the coconut, boy.”
The first idea to extricate Conte and close up the vending operation was that he would just take off and disappear. Whoa, I said, we can’t just do it like that, because then you’re really putting the heat on me. I’m in enough trouble already, for bringing him in. We have to have a reason for him to take off. He has to be eased out in such a way as to protect my credibility and my ass, because I will still be out there as Donnie Brasco. So, talking it over with Potkonjak, we came up with the idea that Conte would pull a big score and then decide to keep his end all to himself and not split with Lefty and me. I could back up that reasoning.
It would be a two-stage disappearance. We hatched a story that Conte had a really big score coming up in December with some old friends in Chicago. An art score, because that required special contacts and special outlets that would be harder to check up on. After the score he would have to lie low for a time while the art was disposed of. Then he would surface, say the score had been a big success and that he would have to leave again soon to pick up his cut to divvy up with Lefty and me. At that point he would disappear for good.
A week before Thanksgiving, Conte called Lefty and told him he had this score coming up.
I was with Conte in Milwaukee all during this critical period. Lefty called me the next day. His spirits were raised. “He’s got a big one coming up for next month. He said the three of us will get off.”
“Is that right?”
“He said we’ll be all right for a whole solid year, living like a king.”
In the next weeks Lefty anticipated big money. He changed his social club into a candy store and had his daughter run it. He started a bookmaking business with me and two other partners-each was supposed to chip in $2,500. We looked around the neighborhood at various bars we might buy. He started work on another club that he and I were going to run as a fish-and-chips joint a couple of doors from the candy store. In mid-December we went down to Miami Beach for a few days, staying at the Thunderbird and hanging out at the lounge there and at the Diplomat and at a place called the Top Hat, enjoying the company of a lot of wiseguys that we knew.
Lefty had kept the rental car long enough, so before Christmas, our agents stole it back. Lefty had parked it in a lot, the agents went in and hooked it—just like I used to do. One of the guys drove it back to Milwaukee and stashed it until the operation was over.
“Fucking Puerto Ricans!” Lefty said. “They musta seen the Christmas presents in the back seat, that’s why they took it.” He filed a report with the police.
By the New Year, Lefty was desperate for money. His Betamax deal had gone sour. He was about to be thrown out of the partnership in the new numbers business because he couldn’t come up with his share. He owed $25,000, and Mike Sabella was squeezing him for it.
Then—a total coincidence—Lefty saw an item in the paper about a $3 million art heist in Chicago. “That’s it,” he said, “that’s the one. That’s got to be him.” His end of that score, he figured, depending on the other splits, had to be at least a quarter million.
The first week in February, Conte called Lefty and told him he made the score, but he couldn’t pick up his end in Chicago for another week. Lefty told me to bring Conte in right away for a sitdown with Sabella.
Joined by Conte’s “girlfriend,” an agent going by the undercover name of Sherry, we flew into New York and went first to Lefty’s apartment. Lefty took Conte and me into his bedroom.
“Okay, listen to me now,” Lefty says. “We’re going over to Mike’s joint, and you pay careful attention to everything Mike says, because this went right to the top, and there were a lot of bosses involved in the Milwaukee situation.”
Lefty brought Louise. The five of us went to CaSa Bella.
We went into the bar and were greeted by Mike. Mike and Lefty talked alone for a few minutes, then called Conte and me over.
Mike asked Conte for a complete rundown on the Milwaukee situation, start to finish. He listened without saying a word.
Then Mike says, “I found out what the situation is and I can tell you in three words: They don’t want New York people in Milwaukee. That guy went ahead and shook your hand and made the agreement when he didn’t have the authority. Now, Tony, I don’t talk to a citizen like you. I’m making an exception here. Milwaukee is responsible to Chicago, and Chicago is responsible to New York. Milwaukee has no authority to make an agreement like that without getting permission from the people they’re responsible to.”
“I understand,” Conte says.
“What you don’t understand, Tony, is they are all responsible to New York. Across the street is the boss of bosses. Last Wednesday there was a sitdown there, and Chicago and Milwaukee came in. He made a decision in our favor.”
Since the Bonanno boss, Carmine Galante, was still in prison, we assumed the decision was made by Genovese boss Funzi Tieri, who was the reigning chief of the Commission. The decision, Mike explained, was that Conte could resume his vending business in Milwaukee and that Balistrieri could again become partners if he wished, but if he didn’t want to become partners again, he still couldn’t hinder Conte in any way. If Balistrieri did hinder him, he should immediately contact Lefty. The decision went our way because Balistrieri had made the initial mistake.
“If I had made a mistake,” Conte says, “I would be man enough to go to the individual and apologize.”
Both Lefty and Mike vigorously shake their heads. “A boss doesn’t admit he make a mistake,” Mike says. “The only out he had, because he had made the mistake, was to dissolve the partnership without explanation.”
Mike pushed his chair back from the table—the sitdown was over.
We rejoined Sherry and Louise.
Lefty was glowing. “I feel good tonight for the first time since before the holidays. Lemme tell you something. Because of the situation out there, I didn’t get invited to one Christmas party or wedding or wake or nothing. I didn’t even get a Christmas bonus due to the fact of that there, and how it made me look. Now I feel good.”
The restaurant’s strolling guitarist came by our table. Louise requested the theme from The Godfather. The guy sang it in Italian and then in English.
“This restaurant just reopened a few days ago from remodeling,” Lefty says. “See all that marble? He went for six hundred grand. All from Italy. You know what he had shipped in with the shipments of marble? Junk, heroin.”
Lefty wanted to go up to Château Madrid and catch the floor show. He told Conte that Mike should get $1,000 for his recent efforts. “Mike’ll make out a tab, and give him your American Express.”
Since Mike had to pay taxes on that, Lefty said to add on taxes and tip so that Mike would be able to keep $1,000.
As we were leaving, Mike pulled me and Lefty aside.
“You still vouching for this guy, Donnie?” Mike asks.
“Yeah, Mike, as much as I did before.”
“Okay, I’m holding you responsible.”
Lefty says, “Now, he’s gotta go back and pick up that money? You fly back with him. And then you don’t leave his side. You go with him to pick up the money, and then you come back in here with him and that money.”
“Okay, Lefty, that’s what I’ll do.”
We headed uptown on the FDR Drive. Lefty pointed out some of the sights to Conte and Sherry.
“Right over there,” Lefty says, pointing to the East River, “that’s where we dump the bodies. One time some wiseguys dumped two bodies in there. Couple cops from the Seventh Precinct happened to see the bodies dumped. They didn’t want to be bothered with it. So they took their little boat out and dragged the bodies down the river to the next precinct so they wouldn’t have to investigate the case.”
The next morning Conte and I went down to see Lefty. Lefty presented Conte with an itemized bill for all services to date, totaling $31,500—$17,500 of which was for Nicky Marangello, the underboss.
“Nicky was very strong for us at the sitdown with the bosses,” Lefty says. “And listen. I’m asking Mike for permission to take youse, one at a time, out on a contract job with me so you’ll have the experience, and you can get on the list for being made wiseguys.”
On the flight to Milwaukee, Conte and I assessed the whole situation. The bosses had had this big sitdown and decided after all that Conte was free to run his business in Milwaukee and share with Lefty. What did the FBI need a vending-machine business for? We had accomplished all we needed with that. All told in this operation, we had laid out about $50,000. That included gifts for Balistrieri, and “loans” and cuts from “scores” to Lefty and other wiseguys. For about the salary of one agent, we had enough violations we believed to bring down the Balistrieri crime family. But we didn’t need to spend any more. And if we spent any more time in Milwaukee, there was a good chance that Balistrieri would consider us thorns in his side and have us whacked. We were in agreement. It was time to close up Operation Timber.
Now was the time for Conte to take off—just as if he had grabbed the money from the score and wasn’t going to share it. And I would try to fade the heat off me.
We checked into the Marriott Inn. The next morning, February 7, Conte and I were supposed to drive to Chicago together to pick up his end of the score, then fly straight back to New York with the money. We set it up with the case agent for Conte to disappear. That morning he left; his job in Milwaukee was over.
Later, over the telephone, I told Lefty that we had changed our plans. At about nine A.M., I said, we had packed the car with our clothes and everything, ready to leave, and then he got a call from the guy he was supposed to meet—“the guy with the jewelry,” as we put it in code. The guy said Conte couldn’t bring anybody with him, he had to come alone or he would not get his end. So I said, Conte had gone alone. But his plan was to come right back and pick me up. Now it was late afternoon. He hadn’t showed, I hadn’t heard from him. I was afraid something went wrong.
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