Donnie Brasco (43 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
Sonny called at ten o‘clock. I met him in the lounge at the restaurant. We had a drink before we left. I didn’t say anything about having seen Trafficante.
“He’s a dynamite guy,” Sonny says. “He likes me. We got whatever we want. All the doors are open to us in Florida now, just so we do things properly. A fifty-fifty split. If we fuck up, Donnie, the old man will shut every door on us. One of the things we should start looking at, he said, was bingo. He’s big in bingo, but he doesn’t have any in Pasco County. Big money in that.”
In the car, Sonny unwound. “It was a feeling-out conversation,” he says. “I told him, ‘Listen, I’m no sophisticated person. I’m a street person all my life.’ I says, ‘I love the streets, you know. I don’t know nothing about nothing, about gambling or anything.’ I says, ‘Me, I just like to go in the street, rob who the fuck I gotta rob.’ ”
“What did he say?”
“He laughed.”
“He probably likes you because you’re honest.”
“I really respect the man. You show that when you talk.”
“It was a stroke of luck that you met him in New York last week.”
“You know what I told Stevie before? I went down to see him and I says, ‘Hey, Stevie, you gotta come to Florida. I’m telling you now. I never asked you for a motherfucking thing, I’m always alongside you. If you don’t come to fucking Florida with me, I ain’t even gonna fucking come around here no more-just leave me the fuck alone and I’ll do my own thing.’ And I got up and walked out. He called me the next day. He says, ‘Look how lucky we are—the guy is here. We reached right out,’ he says.”
“Is that right?”
“He says, ‘What are you getting mad at me for? I would have come with you,’ he says.”
“So the guy tonight, nice guy to talk to, huh?”
“It’s like me and you talking already, Donnie.”
“That’s great.”
“He was saying stories, you know, about other people. He says other people think like—take this Bruno, for instance, from Philadelphia—he says because you wasn’t born there, Bruno don’t wanna open up the door for you. ‘That’s the wrong thing,’ he says. ‘Like, you come here, I was born here,’ he says, ‘you got something. We’ll work together,’ he says.”
“Well, everybody is gonna be making the money, right?”
“Right, bro.”
We were both happy for the same reason, more or less. I felt deeply satisfied for having engineered a second marriage between two Mafia families.
The next day, Trafficante’s man, Benny Husick, a short, white-haired guy, came to see Sonny about the bingo operation. Afterward Sonny said that Benny ran Trafficante’s bingo parlors. He said that we would start looking for sites with Benny, and that we had to get a building of 8,000 to 10,000 square feet, with air-conditioning. An old supermarket was perfect. He said that we would supply the location and half the money to open it up; Trafficante would supply the equipment and know-how and the other half of the money. We should dream up the name of a charity as sponsoring organization, but the word
Italian
should not be included. Some kind of disabled war veterans group was good, and you could hire a disabled guy to sit near the door to make it look real.
Italian
should not be included. Some kind of disabled war veterans group was good, and you could hire a disabled guy to sit near the door to make it look real.
I started to fill Lefty in on what Sonny had told me about how the sitdown with Trafficante came about, but he knew all about it.
“He was up there in New York,” Lefty says. “What’s the matter, who do you think made all these fucking moves in New York? I did it, not him. Both of us know him.”
“I didn’t think you could sit down with a guy like Trafficante, Left.”
“Uh-huh. Don’t underestimate your goomba.”
Sonny handed me $5,000-fifty $100 bills—to “put on the street” for the loan-sharking operation. He instructed us to “keep the vig,” or interest, and reinvest the capital until it was built into $60,000 to $80,000. Then the split would be me, him, Boobie, and Lefty, with Rossi getting a smaller share.
“For the time being,” he says, “don’t make no loans of more than five hundred bucks. You send two hundred a month to Steve to pay back the family.”
Rossi and I recorded the series year and serial numbers of the bills and turned the money over to the case agents.
Sonny, Judy, and Boobie came down for the Fourth of July weekend. On July 4, Sonny had another meeting with Trafficante. Rossi and I drove Sonny over to Britton Plaza in Tampa, where Trafficante had one of his bingo parlors which his man Husick wanted to show us. Husick took Sonny to the meeting. After his meeting Sonny joined us at the Jack-in-the-Box restaurant.
He was in good spirits. He said that Trafficante liked the dog-track idea, and he told Sonny that he would line up an attorney and an architect. They would be “straight people,” so we shouldn’t discuss mob business with them, Trafficante had told him.
“We gotta get things going,” Sonny says, “because the old man is expecting things to happen. There’s so much fucking money in Florida that if the old man dies, I’ll move right down here and take over the whole state.” He said he was giving up fifteen soldiers in New York, assigning them to other capos, so he could concentrate “on the big stuff in the Florida operation.”
We took a breather. Sonny, Boobie, and I drove out of town to where they had water slides. They give you a little mat to sit on and you climb the stairs fifty or sixty feet in the air and slide down this thing, maybe going twenty miles per hour, and you splash into a big pool at the bottom. We went down every which way—on our bellies, on our backs, making “trains” by locking hands and ankles with each other. We must have spent three or four hours going down the water slides, laughing like kids, taunting each other on who could go fastest.
On Sunday, Sonny, Judy, Rossi, and I took a ride to Orlando so that Sonny could scout the area where he wanted to set up bingo and bookmaking operations, now with the support of the Trafficante organization. Earlier Rossi had said that he had a top Orange County official in his pocket, so Sonny assumed we were under his protection alsa—Orlando was an easy mark.
Then we went to Disney World. It was the first time Sonny had been anyplace like that. We spent the rest of the day, went on all the rides, visited the museums and exhibits, fooled around. We went to a shooting gallery where they had rifles and moving targets. Sonny was a pretty good shot. But Rossi and I were knocking the hell out of everything. “You guys are fucking better shots than I am,” he says. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”
He could relax easier than Lefty could. Lefty was Mafia twenty-four hours a day. Mafia business was always intertwined with everything Lefty did with me. He would never let his guard down. Despite the fact that Sonny was more powerful and more dangerous, it was a relief to be with him. In restaurants or in public, he was a gentleman, not a loudmouth. I didn’t have to carry his bags. Away from mob business, Sonny was just a regular street guy who could laugh and break chops. No business was discussed when we were having a good time.
His girlfriend, Judy, was a good kid, a straight girl, sharp. She didn’t know much about what he did. He never involved her in anything of the business. She was his main girlfriend. He had met her when she was tending bar at CaSa Bella. She was another one of those outsiders that I was sorry about, because of what would happen down the line.
At a roadside stand, Sonny saw little baby palm trees in pots. He decided he wanted some back in Brooklyn, to plant outdoors. “Palm trees would look great up there,” he says. “It would knock people out.”
“Palm trees are for tropical climates,” I say. “They won’t last the winter in Brooklyn.”
“As long as they live through the summertime,” he says, “what’s the difference? Nothing lives forever.”
So we bought five or six and shipped them Federal Express to Brooklyn.
Sonny wasn’t any good at tennis, but he loved to play. He would take the court at King’s Court in his black socks. Rossi and I would play doubles against him and Boobie. Sonny would run around whacking at the ball and hollering at us, “I’m gonna kill you!”
Sometimes he and I would arm-wrestle. Sonny lifted weights. So did I. He was strong, but I had the advantage of leverage, being taller and having longer arms. We would be sitting around the pool or someplace when he would challenge me. He could never beat me. It drove him nuts. I never saw him challenge anybody else. But he never stopped challenging me.
One day Sonny brought a bottle of pills to the club. The pills were called Zooms and they were supposed to enhance your sex life. Sonny gave the bottle to Chico. “These were made by the virgin nuns of Peru,” he tells Chico. “They keep your pecker hard. You’re gonna love them. Give one to Donnie to try too. Let all the guys try it.”
Chico took the bottle home. We knew they were just some caffeine concoction. The next day Chico came into the club. “Wow, they were sensational, those Zooms,” he says to Sonny.
“Great, right?” Sonny says. “You give one to Donnie?”
“Naw, I took them all,” Chico says, “all twenty.”
“You took them all! You must be crazy!”
“The thing is, I just can’t get it to go down now. I push on it and slap it, it won’t go down.”
“You crazy bastard! You can’t use Zooms like they was a fucking toy! They come from Peru! You’re lucky you’re alive!”
Since we were now dealing with Trafficante, we wanted to keep King’s Court clean, relatively. We didn’t want to attract more attention than necessary to the club as a gambling place. So we opened up another club for the card games. It was just a small store, at 1227 Dixie Highway, a couple of miles away. Sonny gave me $500 for the security deposit. We took the card tables out of the back room of King’s Court and sent them off down there, with the poker dealers, and that’s where the nightly games continued.
“We gotta do things right,” Sonny says. “The old man says he has five hundred men down here and they’re not pulling their weight. He’s looking for new blood in this state, and that’s us.”
Rossi had met a guy named Teddy who was a book-maker in the area. Teddy wanted to run the football book for us. We arranged for him to meet Sonny. The five of us—Teddy, me, Rossi, Sonny, and Lefty—sat around the pool at the Tahitian. Teddy said he ran a big-time book. Sonny grilled him. He asked him how long he had been booking, how much action he was taking, how he ran the business, everything.
After Teddy left, Sonny says, “I don’t want to do business with this guy: He thinks he’s too sharp. I think he’d end up trying to fuck us, and then I’d end up having to kill him. For now, let Jo-Jo take the bets over the phone, and Chico can handle payments and collections.”
Sonny was shuttling between New York and Florida for meetings with Trafficante, solidifying his position. On August 8, he and Lefty came down. Sonny called me at the apartment and said for me and Rossi to be at the coffee shop at the Tahitian at three-thirty in the afternoon. “That guy is coming,” he says.
I decided to carry a transmitter.
I met our contact and picked up the transmitter. Rossi and I tested it in my apartment. Rossi put in a call to agent Mike Lunsford, who was on location. I spoke into the transmitter. Lunsford couldn’t hear anything coming over the radio. We tried it again and again as time drew short. Lunsford wasn’t picking up anything.
Rossi says, “What the fuck we got all this fancy equipment for if it doesn’t work?”
It’s hard to explain to anybody how it makes you feel. You risk your life and exposure of the operation by carrying this piece of equipment. You go through maybe a whole day or night with this on you. You think you’ve got some dynamite conversations. But nothing came in on the receiver, or all you got on your tape was beeps and noises, or just silence. It was good equipment. Maybe it was used a lot before they gave it to you. There’s no way to know when it’s going to malfunction.
If I got caught with a transmitter, the first thing these guys would think is that I was an informant. If you’re a cop or an agent, maybe they’ll think twice because you’re doing your job. I had been with these guys four years now. There’s no way they would believe I was an agent. They would think I just turned and went bad. No leeway. They would kill me.
So here I was about to go out with Sonny Black, who was going to meet with Santo Trafficante, and I had a piece-of-shit transmitter. It was better to find out ahead of time. But the more. Rossi and I tried to make it work and the more we talked about it, the more aggravated we got.
Finally I wound up and threw the transmitter at the wall. It hit right next to the window and clanked down on the floor, bent and sprung. “At least nobody else will get stuck with this piece-of-shit transmitter,” I say.
Rossi and I went to the coffee shop. Sonny was sitting at a table with Trafficante and Husick. He motioned for us to sit at another table by ourselves. Husick came over and wanted us to take him to look at a potential bingo site on Ridge Road in New Port Richey. When we came back, Sonny and Trafficante were still talking. Sonny told us to sit at the counter.
Half an hour later Sonny came over and told Rossi to make dinner reservations for three at the Bon Appetit restaurant in Dunedin. “You guys go up to Lefty’s room,” he says.
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