Donnie Brasco (44 page)

Authors: Joseph D. Pistone

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime

BOOK: Donnie Brasco

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Lefty’s room was next to Sonny’s. Lefty was lying on the bed watching TV. Rossi got on the phone as instructed. I was standing in the doorway.

Sonny and Trafficante came walking by. Sonny motioned for me to come into his room. Inside, he introduced me.

“Donnie, this is Santo. Santo, Donnie.” Santo looked at me with narrow eyes through thick glasses. I shook hands with my second Mafia boss.

DRUGS AND GUNS

Sonny wanted me to come to New York to update him on all the various rackets we supposedly had under way—bingo, numbers, gambling. I went to his neighborhood for the first time.

The Withers Italian-American War Veterans Club, Inc., Sonny’s private social club, was at 415 Graham Avenue, at the corner of Graham and Withers Street in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. The neighborhood was quiet, safe, and clean, mostly small shops and storefront businesses in two-story or three-story apartment buildings. It was similar to the neighborhood in the Bensonhurst section to the south, where I had been involved four years earlier with Jilly’s crew and the Colombos. One of the main similarities was that both neighborhoods gave you the feeling that outsiders would be noticed quickly.

The Withers club had a big front room with a small bar and a few card tables, and a back room with a desk, telephones, a sink, and the men’s room.

Diagonally across the intersection, at 420 Graham Street, was the Motion Lounge, another private hangout for Sonny and his crew. There was no sign at the front door. The exterior wall of the club was covered with fake fieldstone siding. The upper floor of the three-story building was sheathed with brown shingles. In the front room of the lounge was the bar, a large-screen projection TV, a pinball machine, a couple of tables. Behind the bar was a big tank of tropical fish. In the back room was a small stage, a pool table, a jukebox, a few card tables. A kitchen was off the back room.

As it was with the clubs in Little Italy, the wiseguys in Sonny’s crew lounged around inside and outside during the summer. Their cars—mostly Cadillacs—were parked and double-parked on the block.

Sonny said I shouldn’t bother with the expense and inconvenience of a hotel; I should stay at his apartment. That was on the top floor above the Motion Lounge, a three-story walk-up. It was a modest, utilitarian one-bedroom place. You entered into a hallway with a small kitchen to the left, a dining room ahead, and a living room with a pullout sofa bed to the right, and Sonny’s bedroom off that. There were no doors. A sort of ladderlike set of stairs led up to the roof, where he kept his racing pigeons.

He didn’t have air-conditioning in the apartment, because the building wasn’t wired for it, and the heat that night was brutal. He kept the windows open, which looked out over the adjoining roof. I slept on the pullout couch in the living room; he slept in the bedroom.

I fell asleep on my back, sweating. I woke up. Something touched my chest. At first, in my daze, I thought it was hands, fingernails feeling for my neck—somebody was going to strangle me.

But it was claws—a rat!

I froze, afraid to open my eyes. Sleeping in the apartment of a Mafia captain didn’t bother me at all. But I am terrified of mice or rats. I shudder when I see them dead or alive. If there is a mouse in my home, my wife or kids have to deal with it.

Now I was going to get bitten by a rat and die of rabies.

I held my breath while I counted down. Then I swung my hand with everything I had and swatted it across the room. The rat thudded to the floor as I hit the light switch.

It was a cat I glimpsed, leaping for the window and disappearing into the night across the rooftops.

Sonny came running in. “What the fuck happened?”

I told him. He started laughing like a son of a bitch. “Big, tough guy, scared of a fucking cat,” he says. “Wait till I tell everybody this story.”

I was shaking. “Sonny, you better not tell anybody this story, not anybody. If you got some fucking air-conditioning in here, we wouldn’t have to leave the windows open and let any fucking animal in the world in here.”

“Okay.”

“Anybody could come in through that window, Sonny, it ain’t safe.”

“Okay, okay.” He went back to his bedroom, still laughing.

At about six-thirty he woke me up. He had already been to the bakery across the street to pick up pastry and had made coffee. We sat around his kitchen table in our underwear, drinking coffee and bullshitting about the business.

He had weights and a weight bench in his bedroom. We lifted weights together.

We went up on the roof so he could show me his pigeons.

He was proud of his racing pigeons. He loved to spend time up on the roof. He had three coops. Both the roof of the building and the roof of his coops were topped with miniature white picket fences.

He told me about blending their food, adding vitamins for stamina. He explained about the different breeds, how you matched different breeds to get birds that could fly long distances. Each pigeon had a band on its leg for identification. He said there were lots of races in different cities. The pigeons would fly home to their coops. Owners had a clock that would stamp the time on the band. He said you could win up to $3,000.

He said he did some of his best thinking up on the roof taking care of his pigeons.

As a kid growing up in that same neighborhood, he told me, he was just a thief in the streets. “I didn’t care about being a mob guy. I was doing good enough.” But then he got to a point where he couldn’t do anything without the approval of the local mob guy in his neighborhood. “So it was easier to join them than to fight them.” He became a hijacker and stickup man, and eventually served time.

He talked about mob politics. The Colombo family was in bad shape because both Carmine and Allie Boy Persico were under indictment. He hinted that the power struggle was heating up within the Bonanno family.

“The whole thing is how strong you are and how much power you got and how fucking mean you are—that’s what makes you rise in the mob.” Sonny would repeat the theme time and time again in conversations with me up on the roof with his pigeons. “Every day is a fucking struggle, because you don’t know who’s looking to knock you off, especially when you become a captain or boss. Every day somebody’s looking to dispose of you and take your position. You always got to be on your toes. Every fucking day is a scam day to keep your power and position.”

When we were around other mob guys, it was different. Sonny acted like a captain and commanded respect. On the street and in other business situations, you could see that he was not only respected but feared. But here, when nobody else was around, we just shot the breeze like two equals. He talked about how much he loved his kids. He was very optimistic about Florida. He encouraged me to move on drug deals. He wanted us to get going on plans for another Las Vegas Night.

He gave me my own key so that I could use his apartment anytime I wanted, whether he was there or not. Sometimes he stayed at Judy’s apartment on Staten Island. From then on I stayed at Sonny’s almost every time I came to New York.

When I went back down to Florida, I sent Sonny a pair of ceiling fans for his apartment. He sent me a big package of canned squid, Italian bread, Italian cold cuts and cheeses, because he knew I loved those things and I couldn’t get the best New York-type stuff where I was in Florida.

Sonny was not satisfied with the volume in our bookmaking and shylock business. He wanted to send somebody down from New York to run it. Rossi and I had a better idea: my friend from Philadelphia, an agent whose undercover name was Eddie Shannon. I had known Shannon since 1968, when he was a detective in the Philadelphia Police Department and I was with Naval Intelligence. He had run an undercover bookmaking business in Baltimore.

“I got a guy that could do the book,” I tell Sonny. “He’s not Italian, he’s Irish, but he’s good.” I filled him in. “Next time you come down here, I’ll have him come down. You can get to know him, talk to him alone. If you like the guy, fine. You make the decision. If you want him to stay with us, he’ll stay, because he owes me some favors.”

“Now we gotta deal with a fucking Irishman,” Sonny says.

Sonny came down and spent a couple of days getting to know Eddie Shannon. Then he says, “I like the kid. He’s sharp, knowledgeable. He’s got a lot of loyalty to you, a stand-up guy. I like that. Get him an apartment down here and tell him to move in.”

Shannon got an apartment in the same complex where Rossi and I lived, the same complex in which other agents received and monitored the microwave video transmissions from King’s Court.

Rossi and I were continually working on potential drug deals. That is, we worked to line them up and then tap-danced to keep them from happening. We had to encourage drug sources by promoting our contacts and outlets, how much we could move through “our” people. We had to keep Sonny and Lefty interested by promoting the capabilities of our drug sources. But we couldn’t let any big deals happen. Nor could we have any busts that would compromise our operation. So the trick was to contact sellers, drag information out of them, keep them on the hook, and keep Sonny and Lefty excited—all while keeping the two sides apart.

Our contacts were ready to provide a wide range of products. We had a local guy with coke to sell at $15,000 a pound. We had a guy peddling Quaaludes for eighty or ninety cents apiece, and grass for $230 to $240 a pound. There was a coke dealer in Cocoa Beach. We had a guy with heroin samples from Mexico, and a twin-engined Piper Aztec he used to fly loads in. One local guy said that if we could find him a plane, he could make $1 million in two months on trips to Colombia where he could get cocaine that was ninety percent pure. He needed $25,000 front money to set it up and would charge $50,000 per trip. This same guy said he could get “ ‘ludes” in South America for twenty cents each. We kept talking to them all, going back and forth with prices, questions, promises, broken promises.

“In my FBI file,” Lefty says to Rossi and me, “it says ‘This man hates junk.’ Right next to my picture.”

We were talking about how many young millionaires there were in south Florida who had made their fortunes in the drug business.

Sonny was always talking about heroin, cocaine, marijuana, Quaaludes. One time he tells me, “Don’t bother with the coke right now. The hard stuff and the smoke is what’s selling big now in New York.” He had one outlet immediately for 300 pounds of grass and another for 400 pounds. “I want a steady source that can provide a hundred pounds a week. I could net ten grand a week from the outlets I got. We’ll have twenty grand to pay for the first load up front.”

On the phone, one of our code phrases for drugs was “pigeon feed.” Over the phone I was telling him about a new connection. He said, “Bring a sample of the pigeon feed up to New York,” so he could have it checked out.

Rossi put a sample in his pocket and we flew to New York. At JFK we were met by Boobie. He introduced us to Nicky Santora. Nicky, an overweight, curly-haired, happy-go-lucky type, was in Sonny’s crew.

Boobie asked if I had the sample.

“The marijuana? Tony’s got it.”

“I thought you were bringing heroin.”

“I thought Sonny meant marijuana. We got our signals crossed, I guess.”

Boobie was upset because he had a friend standing by to test the sample of heroin.

“We’ll bring that on the next trip,” I say.

Nicky drove us to Little Neck, on Long Island, where Sonny was staying temporarily. Nicky talked about the bookmaking business. He had just recently gotten out of jail. “I was convicted for taking four bets over the telephone,” he says. “Can you imagine that?”

Sonny was staying with a guy named John Palzolla in the North Shore Apartments in Little Neck.

Sonny says, “You told me you had a sample of heroin.” “

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, fuck it. Give the sample to Nicky. Maybe he can do something with it.”

Rossi handed Nicky the small plastic bag of grass.

“The guy wants two hundred and seventy a pound,” I say.