Donnie Brasco (40 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
They stayed. I had caught them early, and they had already pocketed a couple grand off the table. Now Ricky went back at them. He recovered it all.
We went all night. Sonny was pleased with the crowd and the performance and the few G’s that he walked away with. It would help lead to a meeting with Santo Trafficante. He said we should make a deal with owners of other clubs that we’d run Vegas Nights in their clubs, and they could keep the liquor sales and a piece of the Vegas money.
Sonny wanted us to try a lot of things. He asked me if I had any cocaine or marijuana connections in the area, because he wanted to increase his sources. “I used to have some contacts in Miami,” I said, “but lately I haven’t been fucking around with dope. Two or three months ago I was getting it for forty-eight grand a key, but I don’t know what it would be now, or whether I could get back with the same people.”
He said that his man Bobby in Orlando had cars to transport drugs to New York. He wanted us to keep our eyes open for outlets for plywood, paint, and counterfeit designer jeans that he had access to. He wanted me to check around and see if a numbers business would be a good idea, and if it was, he could send a guy down from New York to run it.
“I’ve already got a book set up for the football season,” I say.
“I’m gonna talk to Rusty about putting some family money in here,” Sonny says. “Rusty knows about your work here. I want to bring Stevie down to look at it because he’s handling the money for the family. It’ll probably take a couple of weeks to get it. You’ll have to pay it back at one and a half points.”
Steve “Stevie Beef” Cannone was the consiglieri of the Bonanno family. Naturally I would welcome a chance to meet him.
Sonny said he had a deal going in New York where he had to put up $400,000 for loads of some semipre cious metals that would bring him $1 million. “The guy that owns some factories that produce this stuff is supposed to be giving up these loads to me. He promised a load and he didn’t come through with it. I burned down one of his factories. I’ll burn down another building every time he fucks me around with a load.”
When we were alone, Sonny says, “What’s going on with Lefty? There’s something wrong between him and Rossi.”
The night before Las Vegas Night, we had all gone out to eat, and Lefty had invited some of the hostesses from the club. He ordered several bottles of expensive wine. Then he stuck Rossi with the tab. Sonny didn’t like that. He wouldn’t say anything at the dinner because he’s not going to embarrass a wiseguy in front of citizens. Also, he wanted the facts first.
But I have to be careful about what I say. Anytime I am brought into a situation between wiseguys, it is like walking on eggshells. I don’t want to offend or insult anybody, because I want to keep the operation going. But I have to act like a stand-up wiseguy. Here’s a captain asking me about one of the top wiseguys in his crew. I don’t want him to think I give up a guy right away. On the other hand, maybe it’s a good time to put a clamp on Lefty’s bleeding of Rossi. I lay it off on Rossi.
“Well, Sonny, Rossi’s been complaining to me that Lefty’s bleeding him too much. He doesn’t mind the two hundred and and fifty bucks a week. But all the other stuff—meals, trips.”
“Tell Rossi that other than the two fifty, he doesn’t give Lefty any more money. You tell him that he’s only to answer to me.”
“Okay, I’ll tell him.”
I didn’t say anything to Lefty. If Rossi and I were legitimate badguys, I would have followed Sonny’s instructions to the letter. But I was walking a thread here because I didn’t want Lefty to dump Rossi, which he could have done easily, just by lying to Sonny about him. He could say to me, “He don’t want to give me any more money? Fine, I’ll just tell Sonny x, y, and z, and Rossi’s finished.” I couldn’t appear to be ignoring Sonny’s directive, either. Rossi and I would just have to make it seem that Lefty had backed off on the money thing.
Sonny was joined in Holiday by his right-hand man, John “Boobie” Cerasani, who came down from New York. I had known about Boobie since 1978 because he used to come around Lefty’s. Boobie was taller and leaner than Sonny, balding at the temples, with a hawklike face. He was quiet and smart, a chess lover. He was one mean fucker, very closemouthed, a hard guy to get to know. If you got him to talk to you, he was all right. Sonny wasn’t close to a lot of people. Boobie was his confidant, capable of doing whatever was needed, which included watching Sonny’s back. “I trust Boobie,” Sonny says, “and that’s it.”
Sonny called me from New York. He asked me if I knew anything about paintings. I said I didn’t. He said they had burglarized a Brooklyn warehouse where the Shah of Iran had stored various kinds of expensive artworks and he needed somebody to fence the stuff right away.
“Chico has some contacts,” I say. Sonny had met Chico, the agent who was managing the club. “I’ll ask him if he’s interested and get back to you.”
The Shah had been in the news lately because of his ouster from Iran and his illness. We tried to find out if there had been a report of such a burglary, and there had been none.
I called Sonny back and told him that Chico was interested but couldn’t get up there for a couple of days. Sonny was impatient. He didn’t know anything about dealing this kind of stuff and didn’t want it lying around. We didn’t want to make it look like we were too anxious, that Chico had nothing to do. Sonny said he’d wait.
Chico hooked up with another agent from Chicago who posed as a shady art dealer, and they flew to New York.
Sonny picked them up at La Guardia Airport and, after making some quick turns to clean off possible tails, took them to Staten Isla where the stolen artwork was stashed. The stuff looked impressive—trays and relics of gold, good paintings. Chico took Polaroid pictures of everything, explaining that it was necessary to study the photos and check out the goods for “provenance”—to prove their authenticity.
A few days passed. Still there was no report of any theft. Chico passed word to Sonny that his man couldn’t find a buyer right now. Sonny started to sell some pieces off. There was nothing we could do. The FBI couldn’t seize the goods without revealing our operation.
Sonny came to Florida to pursue some contacts that might lead to an introduction to Trafficante.
Rossi and I were having breakfast with Sonny in the coffee shop at the Tahitian. Sonny brought up the matter of the Shah’s artwork.
“We took over a hundred grand,” he says, “and they didn’t even know it was missing.”
But then they had tried to burglarize the town house owned by the Shah’s sister on Beekman Place, one of Manhattan’s most exclusive neighborhoods. They had a man who supposedly had taken care of the security guards. Sonny waited in the car while a couple others went upstairs to pull the job. He heard a shot and took off.
He went back to his club in Brooklyn. Soon the burglary team showed up. One of them had shot himself in the hand. There had been a scuffle with a guard, and the whole thing was blown. Sonny sent the guy to their regular doctor around the corner, then gave him $500 and told him to get lost for a couple of weeks.
“It was fucking close to a billion-dollar score,” Sonny says. “I don’t even want to talk about it.”
But there was hope because the Shah, who was in Egypt, was fatally ill and would die soon. And when he did, Sonny wanted us to shoot up to New York because they were going to hit that warehouse again.
“You come running right down, brother,” Sonny says. “Take a fucking fast jet. We’ll get all this guy’s stuff when it comes from Egypt.”
But when the Shah died a few weeks later, Boobie called me and told me that the whole thing was on hold.
Angelo Bruno, the longtime boss of Philadelphia, had been hit—the second major boss to be rubbed out in a year. He was sitting in his car when somebody put a shotgun behind his ear. I asked Lefty about it.
“Bruno wanted all of Atlantic City,” he says. “He already had all the services at the casinos, but then he wanted all the gambling. You can’t have all of Atlantic City. The Gambinos got interests there. Trafficante’s got interests. Santo gave Bruno a piece of Florida in exchange for a piece of Atlantic City. We got interests over there. See, when you do things with people, you share. Especially whatever you do in the family, Donnie, you share with your people. In our family, the reason Lilo got whacked is that he wouldn’t share his drug business with anybody else in the family.”
“Is that right?”
“Hey, listen carefully, Donnie. If they can hit a boss, nobody’s immune.”
14
COLDWATER
The FBI had had Santo Trafficante under surveillance for some time. With the prospect of bringing the Bonannos together with Trafficante, Project Coldwater continued that surveillance and added electronic devices at King’s Court. The club had hidden videotape cameras that could monitor the office and the private round table in the main room that Rossi used. There were bugs in the chandelier over the round table and in the telephone. Rossi’s car had a Nagra tape recorder hidden in the trunk.
I moved into a one-bedroom, second-floor apartment in a complex of four-story buildings called Holiday Park Apartments directly across Route 19 from King’s Court, where Rossi also had an apartment. From my window I could see King’s Court. My telephone was wired for recording. Earlier in the Mafia operation, in Milwaukee or Florida, when I had wanted to record a conversation over a phone, I had done it with a simple suction-cup microphone attached to the handset and a regular tape recorder. Now that I had an apartment, I would have visitors, so I couldn’t have any recording devices lying around. A recorder was hidden inside the wall and hooked directly into the telephone line.
On occasion, Rossi or I would wear a “wire,” either a Nagra tape recorder or a T-4 transmitter.
The Nagra I used was four-by-six inches, three quarters of an inch thick, and used a three-hour tape. It recorded only, with no playback capability. The microphone, about the size of a pencil-tip eraser, was on a long wire so that you could hide it anywhere on your body. The recorder had an on-off switch. Prior to using it, you could test it to see that the tape was rolling. But without pulling the tape and putting it on a playback machine, you could not test it for recording.
The T-4 transmitter was half the size of the Nagra recorder—3½ x 2 inches, a quarter inch thick. It had no recording capability of its own. It transmitted sound to monitoring agents positioned in the vicinity who could listen and record. There was no on-off switch. It had a small flexible antenna, one to two inches long, with a tiny bulb on the end, which was the microphone. When you screwed on the antenna, the transmitter was turned on. Fresh batteries lasted about four hours. You could test the transmitter ahead of time by getting a monitoring agent on the phone and asking him if he was picking up your radio transmissions. But as with the Nagra recorder, once you were out on the job, there was no way of telling whether the system was working.
An advantage of the Nagra was that you could record a conversation anywhere without backup agents. The advantages of the transmitter were its smaller size for concealment purposes, and the fact that when you were using it, there were monitoring agents nearby getting direct communications from the transmitter. With a transmitter, if a situation went bad and the undercover agent was in immediate danger, the other agents could be on the scene in moments. With a Nagra you could get in trouble and nobody would know.
But whereas you could record anywhere with a Nagra, in the city the transmitter had a broadcast reach of maybe two blocks. Steel structures could interfere with transmission, as could atmospheric conditions or passing vehicles. The surveillance team could lose you or get out of range. One danger was that it was possible for a T-4 transmission to be picked up and broadcast back over a television set. You could be sitting in a room chatting with a couple of wiseguys when suddenly the TV is broadcasting your conversation back at you. Everybody in the room knows that somebody is wearing a wire.
A disadvantage to any recording or transmitting device was that you risked your life using it. To be caught wearing a wire was usually a death sentence. Also, they didn’t always work. It looks easy in the movies. Just tape the device to your body, go in, and record the incriminating conversation. In reality the devices, while they are supposed to be at or near state-of-the-art in technology, are not infallible. There is always a compromise in efficiency when you try to make things small.
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