Donnie Brasco (58 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
“That’s why it costs so much,” I say. “So he’s gotta come out of the fucking woodwork. He had connections down here for that stuff.”
“I never saw him before,” Maruca says.
“I met him three or four times,” Sally says. “And I remember his mouth.”
“The only time he does anything is when the coke is up,” I say. “Otherwise, forget about it.”
“Our guy over there said that he’s capable of anything,” Sally says.
“He might come in and start fucking shooting,” I say.
“He come into the O.K. Corral,” Sally says, “he didn’t care.”
“You gonna be around here?” I say. “Because I’m gonna be down here for a few days looking for this kid, so if I need something, you know . . . Can I get you over here?”
“Use my home number,” Maruca says. “I’ll come running. You want me heavy, just say, ‘Come heavy.’ ”
“Okay.”
“Just tell him it’s chilly out, get dressed,” Sally says.
“Okay.”
“You don’t wanna say that,” Maruca says. “Just say, ‘I’m buying a car and I want you to check it out.’ ”
“Okay. Nobody down here knows me. I’ll know him, but he doesn’t know me at all, so I can go in a lot of these joints. I’m at the Holiday Inn down here at the beach.”
“How long you gonna be down?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’d like to go home sooner if he could clean the dishes up,” Sally says. “For once we’re independent, completely. There’s no fucking dictators.”
“That’s right,” I say.
“Hope Lefty’s in favor,” Maruca says.
“Forget about it,” I say.
After the meeting I called Sonny to report.
“You’re gonna have to do a lot of traveling back and forth for me,” Sonny says. “Say hello to that fucking clownzo with holy underwears.”
I called Lefty. He knew that Puma wasn’t in Florida—he was in New York.
“I met here yesterday with him,” Lefty says. “Everything is straightened out with him.”
I told everybody that I was hitting a lot of joints looking for the kid. I did show my face around. I wasn’t worried about running into him—or having somebody run to me with a tip that he was around the corner—which would have put me in a bad situation. After all, the mob was looking for him. So was the FBI, which hoped to snatch him off the street for his own protection, at which time I could tell Sonny that I had done the job. If the mob and the FBI couldn’t find him, I didn’t have much to worry about.
The only thing some of the people at the Bureau were concerned about was that as word got round that I had the contract on Anthony Bruno, he might start looking to whack me out.
Sally and I stayed in the Miami area for about a week. Then Sonny called me. “I don’t think he’s down there. I think we got him up here in New York. So you go on back to Tampa.”
A couple of days later, during my routine daily call, Lefty says, “What’s happening?”
“Nothing. Just out seeing if I could hustle anything up, make some bread.”
“I hope so. I hope so.”
“Nothing going on?”
“No,” he says. “Just buy today’s Post, that’s all.”
“I don’t get it down here until tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow you get it. Give me a call in the morning.”
The article in the
New York Post
had the headline:
MOB SNUFFS OUT AMBITIOUS BOSS.
New York Post
had the headline:
MOB SNUFFS OUT AMBITIOUS BOSS.
The article said that the body of Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato had been found in a shallow grave in a vacant lot in Ozone Park, Queens, and described the body as “bullet-riddled.” A couple of kids had been playing, and they say a cowboy boot sticking out of the ground.
Two close associates of his were missing and presumed dead. I found out that the day before the article, the New York Police Department had notified the FBI that the body was positively identified as Sonny Red, and that he had died of gunshot wounds.
I called the next morning. “I saw that article.”
“Yeah. Heh! There’s a lot of warm heat over here. Forget about it.”
“Over that?”
“Yeah. Over a lot of things.”
“We’re all right, though, huh?”
“Lotta heat. But I can’t say nothing. Our phones over here are no good no more, you know?”
Now that there was open warfare, with key family members being murdered, Headquarters wanted to pull me out and close the operation. They wanted to close it right away, by June 1. More murders were expected. Jules Bonavolonta felt that since I was close to Sonny and had been given a contract, I myself was a target to get whacked. I could understand their concern, but I didn’t agree with it.
I was so close to getting made and becoming a real wiseguy that I could taste it. Soon Rusty Rastelli would be out of prison. I was sure that Sonny planned to move fast on it. He gave me the contract so that I would have that credential when he put my name up. He needed as a close ally a soldier he could trust and who could face other wiseguys as an equal. Sonny had already said that I would be doing a lot of traveling for him. As a made guy, I would have enormous clout as his emissary. I would be able to sit down with anybody. As a wiseguy, I would be Sonny’s partner. Sonny could have used me almost like an ambassador, an intermediary with other families.
The help I could give to other investigations, as a made guy, was limitless. When it ultimately became known that I had penetrated the mob and become a made guy, it would humiliate the Mafia and end forever the myth of the Mafia’s invincibility. I wanted to stay under until at least August.
There were arguments against becoming a made guy. Some felt that if I became made, I would have less flexibility and independence. I would no longer be excused for “dumb mistakes,” which were really things I had done, moves I had made or not made, for the benefit of the investigation. I would have to do what they told me to do. I could be ordered to commit crimes. Jules was one of those against my staying in and getting made.
Primarily the question boiled down to safety. Nobody thought I was safe enough any longer. They felt that we had already made a bundle of important cases, and it wasn’t worth the risk of staying under just to make a couple more. I felt safe enough. As much as it hurt to face ending the operation after five years, I had to accept the decision.
We had a meeting outside Washington, D.C., at the Crystal City Marriott. Rossi, Shannon, Jules, me, various supervisors, and Headquarters people and case agents. There were several other operations involved in one way or another with ours, and that made it rather complex to end our operation cleanly. We needed to give these other operations time to bring their work up to a point where they could do without me in the picture. They went around the table. Everybody was asked to cut estimated time. If somebody needed a month, they were asked to wrap up in two weeks. After going around and around, we got a fix on the amount of time needed by everybody concerned.
We set a date to end the operation: July 26.
Shortly after that, we had another meeting to finalize the ABC’s of closing up. That was in New Jersey, at the Howard Johnson’s near the George Washington Bridge. The two big items on the agenda were to determine what telephones we wanted to put wiretaps on, and which Bonanno guy we should approach first to tell of my true identity.
The two matters were related. Nothing about our operation would be made public until we had indictments, months down the line. In the meantime, when the operation ended on July 26, agents were going to reveal my role to the Bonannos so that they didn’t go after me as an informant. Historically the mob did not seek vengeance against cops and judges, because that brings down too much heat on the mob. The second reason was that we wanted to stimulate a lot of telephone conversations that would contribute to the evidence of mob business, locations, conspiracy, who was who.
To pick up these conversations we needed wiretaps. For wiretaps we needed court orders. For court orders we needed to provide as much up-to-date supporting information as possible. We needed to be specific. You can’t just walk into a court and get a hundred wiretaps. We needed to finalize these decisions now, so we could get the court orders and install the taps by the time I came out.
We pinpointed the most important phones to tap, those used most by the most important people, where the most business was transacted.
Then we turned to who to tell first. Almost everybody at the meeting said it should be Lefty. He was the most involved with me on a daily basis. He would get on the phones and scream to everybody and let slip all kinds of information.
I insisted that it had to be Sonny. Sonny was the top Bonanno guy on the street now. He was calm and cool and rational. Lefty would get on the phones and scream to everybody about everything under the sun. But Sonny would make more important calls and would be more specific. Sonny’s orders would be more serious and would be taken more seriously. There was no question about it, it had to be Sonny.
They agreed on Sonny. Then the question was: Who should tell him? Some thought I should tell him. There was no way I would be the guy to tell him. That would be the worst kind of slap in the face. It would be rubbing salt into raw wounds. It would be unfair and unnecessary. It should be other FBI agents, including somebody Sonny has met before so that he will believe what he is told.
Everything was set. I went back to work.
Now the job no longer was to penetrate deeper into the family. I was simply to work for as much information as possible in the six weeks before I had to come out. Actually that wasn’t so simple. I still had to play my role. I still had to maintain my personality and character—I couldn’t start looking especially eager to learn things all of a sudden. For the mob it was business as usual, and it had to seem like that with me, too; which included navigating through the family warfare.
Some people at Headquarters wanted us to branch out all of a sudden and start asking questions of other people about other people, for some last-minute intelligence. But we resisted those requests. If we made a mistake of pushing too hard, suddenly we wouldn’t even have six weeks anymore. We might have to pull out in a day.
Boobie’s daughter was going to get married, and we were all invited to the wedding on June 20. I went up to New York on June 15 to be with Sonny and the crew. They were still looking for the kid, Anthony Bruno.
On my way into the Motion Lounge I ran into Nicky Santora. I said, “The kids’s not in Miami, Nicky. We scoured the fucking place.”
“We got a few feelers out now. We’ll know this week. He might have crawled into a hole and stayed for a while. But when he comes out, we’ll get him.”
I went over to Manhattan to the Holiday Bar to see Lefty. We went out for a walk on Madison Street. He was aggravated with everybody, and a walk on the street was the only place he could really let his hair down. He wasn’t getting a proper split of profits, he was being ignored or unappreciated or mistreated. His longtime loyalty wasn’t counting for anything. Boobie was a phony; Joey Massino had all the men and money in the world and didn’t know how to do anything; Sonny was greedy.
“They got all the connections and I’m a jerk-off. Who’s gonna pay me? Sonny’s trying to hold me back. Push me for like two hundred a week here, two hundred a week there, to pacify me. Meanwhile he’s making like thirty thousand a week. Sooner or later he wants to get rid of me by making me a captain, but I gotta do it in Miami. He gives me a couple thousand, then I’m gonna go to Miami. Meanwhile they’re knocking it down. Boobie’s got fifteen hundred a week in salary. And they got all the junk. They took it all.”
“How come you’re not in on that?”
“Why? Because he’s a greedy cocksucker,” he says, meaning Sonny.
“You did all the work for him.”
He grunts. “Donnie, they gave me the contract now on the kid. Once I do that, the guy can go fuck himself.”
“They found that one body, huh?”
“Yeah. That was a mistake. Joey Massino, he’s the one fucked it up. Sonny’s really hot about it.”
Sonny Red’s body, like the others, was supposed to have been chopped up and gotten rid of properly, not buried quickly and whole.
“You have no idea,” Lefty says. “The guy choked.” He put a hand to his throat in the gesture used about athletes who don’t come through in the clutch.
“How’d you manage Big Trin?” I ask, “huge as he is?”
“I couldn’t move him. Boobie could. Trin was all cut open and bleeding. There was little pieces around from the shotgun. Boobie got blood all over him trying to pick him up. I couldn’t believe how strong Boobie is. He don’t look it. But I was amazed. Boobie could move him. Then they cut him up and put him in green plastic garbage bags.”
He said that the guys in on the hits were himself, Jimmy Legs, Nicky Santora, and a guy named Bobby Capazzio. When they came out of the building, Jerry Chilli told them that the kid was right around the corner.
“I said, ‘Bobby, let’s go over there.’ He says, ‘No, no, no, Lefty. Sonny Black told you to go to Brooklyn.’ The kid was around the corner, Donnie. We could have boxed the corner.”
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