Donnie Brasco (49 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
Lefty never mentioned Tony Conte. There was no hint that Lefty or anybody else in the room knew anything about informants or undercover agents involved in the Milwaukee operations. It was as if Tony Conte never existed.
Sonny’s “Brooklyn problems” kept him from going to King’s Court for New Year’s Eve. I stayed in Brooklyn too. It was important for me to spend as much time with him as I could. I slept at his apartment. We took care of the pigeons together. We hung out at the club and the Motion Lounge, played gin. We went across the street for espresso at the Caffe Capri, a little shop with ornate white grillwork over the front windows and five or six small tables inside. Once in a while we’d go to Manhattan, to Little Italy, maybe take in a crap game on Mott Street.
It was obvious that I got more respect from the crew now because I was Sonny’s man. I was always with Sonny when I was in New York. Guys in the crew talked more freely around me.
Sometimes when we were up on the roof with the pigeons, Sonny would lean on the railing and look out over the rooftops of the neighborhood where he had lived all his life. I wondered what he was thinking about.
He didn’t mention that Tony Mirra was raising a stink over me, insisting that I belonged to him and not to Lefty and demanding a piece of King’s Court. I wasn’t supposed to know about this because this was mob business and I wasn’t a made guy. Lefty told me as a favor. Sonny knew, but he didn’t say a word.
We walked out of Peter Luger’s Steak House in Brooklyn. Sonny stopped at the door for a minute to talk to someone he knew. I went on to get the car, which we had parked on the street.
A block away, a guy walked up to me. He came straight up to me and stopped right in front of me. He looked like a normal guy. Then I saw he had a knife. He stood close, like we were going to have an intimate chat, and pressed the tip of the blade against my belly.
“Gimme your money, slow.”
I am more afraid of a knife than a gun, if the guy knows how to use the knife. He was welcome to my money.
Sonny came walking up from behind me and kept right on walking past us, evidently thinking I was talking to somebody I knew and it was none of his business. Suddenly he spun back and delivered a pow erhouse right at the base of the guy’s skull. The guy dropped like a stone and lay there.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Sonny says, “before you get into any more trouble.”
A week into the new year, I went back to King’s Court to push through plans for the Las Vegas Night and help set up another meeting between Sonny and Trafficante.
Lefty was irate because I was reporting things to Sonny before I told him. I had told Sonny that we lost $2,400 on the book. Any loss for us was a loss for Lefty too.
“You didn’t call me this morning,” he says over the phone. “You were supposed to call me last night. You can’t pick up a phone?”
“I missed you, then I called the club. Didn’t he tell you I called?”
“The man never told me nothing. He’s playing games with me. He knows I’m feuding with him because I don’t like what’s going on. I’m hurting, I’ll tell you. I’m feuding and fighting with everybody because I can’t get along with these people. I can’t pay my bills. ”
“I called Boots’s joint and asked for you, and you weren’t there so he put Sonny on.”
“How come he didn’t tell me a goddamn thing? Let me tell you something. You’re losing a lot of prestige because I’ll tell you why. I’ve been scheming all day about there’s something wrong. I hope you bail out next week, because we’re not gonna owe a dime because whatever we owe next week, everybody is chipping in. This year is a different ball game or I’ll send my own men down there.”
“Why you getting mad at me? What’s going on up there?”
“That don’t concern you, Donnie. You’re nobody as far as what we’re talking about, him and I. You’re on the outside. At least I give you the satisfaction of me telling you I’m arguing with him. You don’t make no phone calls, what I gotta put a stop with you. I think it’s gonna come to a head, and we’re gonna break up with him and youse all belong to me.”
“That’s all right, I don’t care.”
“I gotta know where I’m at, that’s all I’m telling you. Lot of people invest a lot of money out there. I ain’t like him. Throw a broad at him and he’s happy.”
Lefty never really went out chasing women. Sonny did a little more chasing, a fact that gnawed at Lefty.
“You know me when I go out of town with you,” Lefty says. “I don’t bother nobody, and I act the part of a man. Broads don’t bother me. How the fuck could you invite your own sweetheart that you live with, then next day want to bring a cunt in? Boobie says, ‘You bringing your wife down?’ I says, ‘Hey, Boobie, don’t ever classify my wife with Sonny Black’s girls. My wife’s got too much class. I bring my wife when
you
bring your wives. Judy would understand, she’s a good kid. But a
tramp?
The guy’s sick, he’s definitely sick.”
you
bring your wives. Judy would understand, she’s a good kid. But a
tramp?
The guy’s sick, he’s definitely sick.”
While he was talking, the recording system on my phone was malfunctioning. I was afraid he would pick it up, so I brought it up first. “You hear this static?”
“Forget about the static.”
“It’s hard for me to hear.”
“We’re not talking about static! Let me explain something to you. When you had the problems with Mr. Mirra, he gave you up and he threw it in my lap. You know what hurted me, a slap in the face? I was there New Year‘s, wished Sonny and everybody luck. Mirra calls him up. And he takes the phone call. But listen, I’m not a phony. As long as I’m around, you’re around. We don’t accept no girls, shit like that.”
“Why didn’t he tell you I called?”
“He didn’t tell me nothing because he thinks he’s King Farouk. The whole world is disgusted with him.”
“Hey, if we get stuck, he’s gotta come up with the money.”
“He has to come up with it. But that ain’t the idea.
He didn’t tell me a goddamn thing. I says, ‘You better stop bothering people.’ That’s all I told him, and I walked away from him. I said, ‘Nobody understands you anymore.’ I’ll straighten this whole thing out. It’s all bullshit. Let’s stop this fucking nonsense. That’s all
I can tell you. Say hello to Tony.“
I finally managed to get hold of Trafficante’s man, Husick, and set the date for the Las Vegas Night: January 17.
Rossi, Shannon, and I met with Captain Donahue in the office at King’s Court. Rossi told him that we had scheduled another Las Vegas Night and that important people would be there from both New York and Florida, so he wanted to make sure there wouldn’t be any problems. Donahue assured us he would take care of everything.
Rossi handed him $200, “a little something for Christmas.”
Lefty wasn’t coming down for Las Vegas Night. He had been sick off and on for a month with flu or colds.
“It’s fucking eight degrees here,” he says over the phone. “Fucking weather don’t wanna break. That’s why I’m scared to come out. I might get sick down there. Or drop dead on the fucking plane.”
Also, Sonny had directed him to go to Miami instead, to consummate a deal for two keys of cocaine.
Two days before the event, Rossi, Shannon, and I picked up Sonny and Carmine at the airport. Sonny handed Rossi a brown paper bag. In it was $10,000 to be used as the “bank” for the Las Vegas Night. “Don’t let this out of your sight,” Sonny says.
Sonny had asked me to take $1,000 out of the shylock money for him. I handed him the ten $100 bills.
“Let’s go to a mall,” he says. “I want to find a card shop.”
“Somebody’s birthday or what?”
“I want to buy a card for Santo.”
We drove to the Gulfview Square Mall in New Port Richey. He picked out a card that had a message about being such good “friends.”
“This is cute,” he says.
Made guys refer to each other as “friends,” the same as saying “members.” Sonny tucked the $1,000 inside the card.
On the day of the Las Vegas Night, Trafficante came to the Tahitian Motor Lodge and went to Sonny‘s room. We had the room bugged. Right away Trafficante said, “We can’t talk in the room.”
Afterward Sonny told us that everything was in order, and the money split for the night would be a third to us, a third to Trafficante, and a third for the guys that they brought up from Miami to work the games.
“He loved the card,” Sonny says.
Everything was set up in the club. I had an antique slot machine in my apartment, and we decided to put it in the club for the night. There wasn’t any money in it. It was just for fun. Captain Donahue had been paid, and he said he would make sure that the cars were all patrolling on the other side of the county.
We had a crew of six to work the games, plus our regular bartender and hostesses. We had a guy on the door. To get in the front door, customers buzzed from outside. The person at the door looked out the peephole to see who it was, make sure it was members or friends. Rossi and Shannon were going to sell chips and handle all the money out of the back storage room. I was going to work the front, collect the chips from the tables, and bring them back.
Rossi wrapped up Sonny’s $10,000 in a box with Christmas paper and hid it in the furnace room, which adjoined the storage room. In there he also hid $2,000 of FBI money in the bottom of a brown paper bag under Christmas tree lights. He had a .22 Derringer Magnum pistol in a wallet holster. He hid that by taping it to the back side of the furnace. He kept his Walther .32 in a briefcase next to him.
The Las Vegas Night started at seven P.M. Sonny and Carmine were there representing New York. Husick and other cohorts were there representing Trafficante. By midnight the action was strong, the room was crowded with maybe a hundred gamblers. They were lining up in the storage room to buy chips. We already had a profit of several thousand dollars, and it was growing.
At one-fifteen A.M., I was in the storage room with the line of people buying chips. The warning buzzer sounded. Immediately I herded the customers out and locked the door behind me, leaving Rossi and Shannon locked in with the money and receipts.
I went to the front door. Nick, the guard, had hit the alarm buzzer. “Donnie, there’s two uniformed cops outside.”
I saw them through the peephole. They were Pasco County Sheriff’s officers; one was a sergeant. “Don’t open the door yet.” I figured there was nothing to worry about since we had paid for protection, but I walked around the room to make sure there was no money on the tables, no cash anywhere, just chips.
Sonny was at our round table with Husick and others. I whispered to him, “There’s two sheriffs guys outside. I’m going to talk to them, see what’s going on.”
I opened the front door. “Hi, Officers, what’s the problem?”
“We had a complaint that there was a disturbance at the club,” the sergeant says.
“No disturbance, no problems at all.”
“Mind if we come in?”
I ushered them in. “Have something to eat? Drink?”
“I got an anonymous telephone call,” the sergeant says, “and the caller stated that he had been gambling here and had lost a lot of money playing blackjack.”
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