Donnie Brasco (50 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
“There’s no gambling here. We’re running a charity event. Everything is chips. Nobody lost any money here.”
He wanted to see the office. I walked him through the lounge.
“You got some pretty big people here,” he says. “Some of the best clientele in Tarpon Springs.”
“Well, people like to contribute to charity and have a good time.”
The other cop came into the office. “I just won money on your slot machine. That’s gambling.”
“What are you talking about?”
He said that he had put a quarter in the machine and won a quarter back. He said that before they came in, he could see through a crack in the doorway that people were playing the slot machine and gambling at the tables.
“Come on, you couldn’t see in here.” The way the club was laid out, you couldn’t see anything from the doorway. “And anybody can see that that’s an antique slot machine.”
“What are you, some fucking smart guy?”
“No. People are having fun and we’re not bothering anybody.” I couldn’t let them push me around in front of Sonny. I couldn’t let it get out of hand, either.
“Why are you bothering us? Why don’t you leave us alone?”
“Who’s the owner of this place?” the sergeant says.
“I don’t know.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m just a customer, here to contribute to charity.”
“Why you doing so much talking? You the spokesman around here?”
“Because I answered the door and let you in and you’re asking me questions. Somebody’s gotta answer your questions.”
“What’s your name?”
“Donnie Brasco.”
“A fucking New York guinea, aren’t you?”
“Well, I am from New York and I am Italian.”
“You guys like to come down here and take over. Let me see some identification.”
“I don’t carry any.”
“What’s your Social Security number?”
“I don’t have one. I don’t work, and if you don’t work, you don’t need a Social Security number.”
“You are maintaining a gambling place here. I’m gonna close the place down. I’m gonna call for a search warrant.”
“I can’t give you permission to use the phone.”
He picked up the phone and dialed.
I hurried out to tell Sonny what was going on.
“Okay,” he says, “get all the people out the back way.”
I and the hostesses got everybody out of the club through the French doors while the two cops were in the office.
Sonny sat by himself at the round table, scowling. “That fucking Rossi. I thought he had the guy paid.”
“He did, Sonny. I was right there when he talked to the guy. I saw him pay him off, and the guy said everything was taken care of.”
“Tell him to get the fuck out here.”
I knocked on the storage-room door and called Tony and Eddie out.
Rossi went over and sat down with Sonny and started to apologize.
“Don’t say a fucking word,” Sonny says. “You fucking embarrassed me in front of everybody. The old man’s people here. People from Miami. You’re just like all the others who say they’re gonna do the right thing, and then they fucking embarrass me. I could fucking choke you, slit your throat.”
Rossi turned angry.
I stopped him. “Tony, you better not say anything. Just let him cool down and I’ll talk to him.” I turned to Sonny. “It’s really not his fault.”
Sonny gave me a hard look. “Donnie, don’t you say a fucking word to defend this fucking guy. It was Tony’s responsibility. If we find out that cop fucked us, we’ll chop him up. I’m going back to Brooklyn. I don’t know what I’m gonna do about the future with this thing. Tony, you better come up with that fucking ten grand I gave you.”
The sergeant came out. “Where’d everybody go?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess they figured it was time to go home.”
“Either of you other guys got I.D.’s? How come none of you guineas carry I.D.’s?”
The other cop stopped Shannon at the front door. Reinforcements arrived, more cops. It was now a full-fledged raid.
“All right,” the sergeant says, “you three are going to jail.”
“What are you talking about?” Rossi says.
“Failure to show identification.”
“This is private property.”
“Another New York smart guy. Handcuff them,” he says to another cop.
“Maybe our I.D.’s are over in my apartment,” I say, “because all three of us were there this afternoon, and maybe we left them there.”
They led Rossi, Shannon, and me out in handcuffs and drove us over to the apartments and walked us upstairs to my place. We were stalling and breaking balls. We were supposed to be badguys, so we were playing it like we were badguys. Plus, these cops deserved it. Rossi and Shannon sat on the couch while I went into my bedroom and looked around. “Well, mine isn’t here, and I don’t see theirs, either.”
“You guys are really fucking wiseguys,” the sergeant says. “That’s all right. You’re going to jail.”
Now it was about two-thirty in the morning. They took us back to King’s Court.
Sonny was still sitting at the round table, smoldering like a volcano about to go.
“Him too,” the cop says. “We take all you New York guineas in, you’ll understand a little better how we do things down here.”
They put the cuffs on Sonny.
I wanted to smack these cops for hassling us, insulting us, for being unprofessional. Rossi and Shannon were both ex-cops. We all knew what proper procedures were for cops.
There was nothing wrong with these cops uncovering an illegal operation, which was the gambling at King’s Court. But our undercover operation was being jeopardized because a couple of them were taunting us unnecessarily. What if Sonny blew up? What if somebody got trigger-happy because of all the insults and bullshit?
They marched the four of us out in handcuffs—three FBI agents and a Mafia captain.
Sonny leaned toward me. “Where’s your identification?”
“Trunk of my car.”
“Show it. Otherwise we’re all gonna be in jail. We need somebody out on the street to get us out of the can.”
In the parking lot I say to the cops, “Hey, I just remembered where my ID is. It’s in the trunk of my car. I put it there so it wouldn’t get stolen.”
Shannon says, “Mine’s in my glove compartment, I just remembered.”
The cop had to take my cuffs off so I could open my trunk. “This is the last chance you get,” he says.
Shannon and I produced our driver’s licenses and were released.
Sonny was in the back of a patrol car, his hands cuffed behind him. The window was down. “Donnie.”
I went over. The cops were talking together on the other side of the car.
“I got a knife in my pocket. Take it or they’ll hit me with a weapons charge too.”
I reached in through the window and into his jacket pocket and pulled out the long folding knife and slipped it into my pocket.
“Hey!” a cop hollers.
I had a frozen moment: Maybe he thought he saw a gun, or that I was cutting Sonny loose.
“Get away from that car! You don’t want to be rearrested, do you?”
“No, sir.” I got in Rossi’s car and followed the sheriff’s cars to the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in New Port Richey.
In the small jail they booked Sonny for resisting arrest and Rossi for gambling. I asked the officer what the bail was. He said it was $1,000 for Sonny and $5,000 for Rossi.
At four A.M., it was too late to find a bail bondsman, which was the route we wanted to take to protect our identities. Eddie and I headed for the Tahitian, to find Carmine.
I told Carmine what had happened after I got everybody out of the club.
“Donnie, all I got on me is a thousand dollars,” he says.
We went back to the jail. They were photographing and fingerprinting Sonny.
“Tony,” I say, “I only got enough money to bail one out, and it ain’t you.”
Shannon started laughing, I started laughing. Tony didn’t laugh. They finished up with Sonny, we paid the bail.
“See you tomorrow,” I say to Tony.
When they searched Sonny at the jail, they had found his driver’s license in his pocket. It had his real name on it, but the name didn’t mean anything to them. As his occupation he had given, “route salesman, self-employed.”
On our way to the hotel, Sonny was ripping mad. I couldn’t get him to cool down about Rossi.
“Yesterday the Old Man gave us the Pasco County territory to do whatever we wanted,” he says. “Now look how fucking embarrassed this leaves me. I’ll fucking strangle Tony.”
“We had a lock on it, Sonny. Somebody must have snitched.”
“Find out. Whoever gives us the snitch, we’ll pay. Then we’ll whack out the snitch.”
“We’ll try to find out.”
Sonny and Carmine took the next flight out to New York. We got hold of a bail bondsman and bailed Rossi out.
We went to the club. The sheriff’s boys had wrecked the joint. The money from the night was gone—Sonny’s $10,000, the FBI’s $2,000, about $8,000 in profits. They had taken both of Rossi’s guns. They had emptied the desk and dumped everything all over. They had even torn apart boxes of Christmas ornaments and scattered them around. They had taken the slot machine.
Rossi was not in a good mood, anyway, after a night in that rattrap jail, and now this. “I’m gonna grab that fucking sergeant and smack him in the mouth. I want to go down there and tear that fucking station apart.”
We were all steamed. We ourselves had conducted a lot of legal searches. You just search for what your warrant says, you don’t wreck a place. We were out $20,000, half of which was Bonanno family money. We had embarrassed Sonny, and now there was the threat to kill the snitch. And we had to worry about whether the cops might stumble onto our real operation and blow our cover. We had to worry about what really had happened to cause the raid.
The anonymous phone tip was a ruse because nobody lost much money and there were no hassles. But somebody had turned us in. We narrowed it down. Rossi had some beefs with another club owner who complained that we stole his business. Rossi was pretty sure that was the guy. But so what? We couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t tell Sonny. We had to keep Sonny from finding out.
The next day I called Sonny with a progress report: It was possible the charges would be lowered or dropped because of an illegal search, but the prosecutor wouldn’t know for two or three days.
“You make sure Tony gets me that ten grand back,” he says. “I don’t care how he gets it.” He wanted the bail money to repay Carmine, and he wanted his driver’s license back. “What happened that they came to begin with?”
“Sonny, it was a fluke.” I told him that Captain Donahue had been on the street until midnight and everything was okay. Then somebody lost a few bucks at the blackjack table, got pissed off, went outside, and called the cops. I figured it was safest just using the story the cops gave us.
“Listen, Donnie, there’s a big gift in it if he can give us the guy who called.”
“That’s what we’re working on now. In fact, Tony was on the phone with the captain for a couple hours yesterday.”
“What’s he doing on the fucking phone? It could be that guy we’re talking about, and he could be wired. That’s Tony’s voice, that’s better than fingers. Tell Tony to meet the guy in person. Let’s start getting smarter instead of stupider.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a tap on the phone, you hear it? There’s an echo.”
My recorder again. “It’s this phone here, Sonny. They were supposed to come and change the wire, but they didn’t come yet.”
Sonny wouldn’t talk to Rossi for about three weeks. I had to hear from Lefty every day about how I fucked up because I didn’t keep a better control of Rossi to make sure he didn’t fuck up.
“Get the fucking money from Tony,” he tells me. “Remind fucking Tony that he’s nothing without us. And listen, Donnie, forget about how it’s not Tony’s fault. You should be looking out for me, not Tony.”
Finally Sonny said he had to have the money and told me to take it out of the shylock money and both of us bring it to New York.
Rossi and I each carried half the money. Sonny and Boobie met us at JFK, and we handed them the $10,000.
“Okay,” Sonny says. “Now, I want you guys to start making connections for coke and heroin—especially the H, because I got the outlets up here. Also, I bought a machine to make Quaaludes, so find some connections for the powder to make them with.”
Eventually the charges against Sonny were dropped. Rossi, however, was supposed to go to trial. We got it put off and put off until the entire operation was over.
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