Donnie Brasco (61 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
When Nicky and I had left, Rossi told the help that they were getting a surprise two-week vacation with pay because we were going to close the club for renovations.
I was alone with Nicky at Denny’s. There wasn’t much time. I decided to take a shot at learning something about the murders of the three captains. I came in from an angle, asked about a couple of Colombo guys who had disappeared.
“They got clipped,” Nicky said. “They were skimming drug money. They were mixed up in that with Sonny Red.”
“That must have been something,” I said, “that thing with him and Philly Lucky and Big Trin.”
“I never saw anything like it in my life, Donnie. Big Trin was so huge. When that shotgun blast hit him, about fifty pounds of his stomach just went flying.”
“What was it like with the other guys?”
“We’ll talk about it later, Donnie.”
Shannon and Rossi had walked in. I couldn’t signal for them to leave. Nicky had not met Shannon before this weekend. He clammed up.
We had breakfast and went back to the Tahitian. Nicky and Sonny packed up, and Rossi and I took them to the airport. On the way Sonny kept drilling into us how we had to keep things going now that he was back on the right track with Trafficante, how we had to hustle for drug connections and build up the shylocking and gambling, and get going on the bingo and the dog track. Everything was really going to roll now.
Nicky realized he had forgotten something. “Donnie, I left my blue suede jacket in the motel room. It’s got some important address books in it that I need. Do me a favor and pick it up right away and send it to me?”
“Sure thing, Nicky.”
We dropped them off at the airport. I felt relief and discomfort at the same time. I figured that I probably wouldn’t see Sonny again, not even in court. I believed he was history. I couldn’t make any big deal out of the good-bye.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I said.
I went back to the Tahitian and got Nicky’s jacket out of his room, along with two address books and a pocket-size folder with personal papers and cards. I turned the stuff in to agent Mike Lunsford.
We cleaned out our apartments. The furniture was rented, so it was just a matter of gathering up personal stuff.
King’s Court was locked up. The case agent would deal with it.
Later in the day Rossi flew to Washington, D.C., for his debriefing. I had to fly directly to Milwaukee to testify before the grand jury on the Balistrieri case. That case, like many others, had been held in abeyance until we wrapped up the whole operation. Eddie Shannon flew with me, just for double protection. After that I would go to Washington, D.C., for debriefing. For a couple of weeks I didn’t have a chance to go home. After I went home for a few days I went to New York to start working with the U.S. Attorneys on the indictments.
I am not inclined toward soul-searching, and during this period I didn’t have time to brood, anyway. I had some uncomfortable feelings because I felt close to Sonny Black. I felt a kind of kinship with him. But I didn’t feel any guilt of betrayal, because I’d always maintained in my own mind and heart the separation of our worlds. In a sense we were both just doing our jobs. If he had found out who I was, he’d have whacked me out. He would have done it in the traditional way. He wouldn’t have talked to me about it. He’d have set me up. Who kills you in that business is somebody you know. Maybe he would have had Lefty do it. Maybe he would have done it himself. It would have been cold-blooded.
Sonny was good at what he did. He wasn’t a phony. He didn’t throw his weight around. He was a stand-up guy. For reasons that are hard to explain, I liked him a lot. But I didn’t dwell on the fact that I was going to put him in the can, or that he was going to get killed because of me. That’s the business.
I knew that both Lefty and Sonny loved me in their own ways. Either would have killed me in a minute. It didn’t have to be because I was an agent. They could have thought I was an informant. I could have lost a decision to Mirra, and they could have been ordered to kill me. They would simply have done it.
The difference between our worlds was that I wouldn’t kill them. I would just put them in the can. I had a gut feeling that Sonny was going to be killed by his own people over this situation. I didn’t like being responsible for anybody getting killed. But it wasn’t my rules; it was their rules that would kill him. I didn’t write those rules. Those rules were written by their society, not mine.
So I felt bad, but I didn’t dwell on it. Nothing I did in my job was affected by any feelings I had for Sonny or anybody else. That was my discipline. Some guys have trouble dealing with that aspect. When one of my friends who had been working undercover was preparing to go to court, he said he couldn’t look the defendants in the eye because he felt guilty for having deceived them. You just did your job, I told him.
You can’t have those personal feelings in this business. I was not there to be buddy-buddy with these guys. I would not allow myself to become that emotionally attached. In my situation, my life was on the line every day.
On the first day after Sonny and Nicky went back to New York, Lefty tried to reach me in Holiday. On the second day, the agents visited Sonny Black.
Doug Fencl, Jim Kinne, and Jerry Loar went to the Motion Lounge.
Sonny knew Agent Fencl, and that was important. Agents working “straight up” will on occasion drop in on mob guys like Sonny just to let them know they are around watching them, available to them if they ever get jammed up and want to share information. Some months before, Sonny and Lefty and I had been talking about ways of insulating ourselves against the law, and it was their opinion that the ones you really had to worry about were the FBI agents. Sonny said that a couple of agents stopped in the Motion Lounge once in a while, and he mentioned Fencl. “He’s a nice guy, a gentleman. He doesn’t bullshit. He just tells me exactly what’s on his mind.”
So Fencl was one that Sonny would be likely to trust and believe. The agents showed Sonny a photograph taken especially for this occasion. It showed me together with these three agents. They asked Sonny:
“Do you know this guy? He’s an FBI agent. We just wanted to tell you.” They didn’t offer him a deal, because a deal is always implicit, and a direct offer to a guy like Sonny would have been insulting to him.
Sonny gave away nothing by his expression or tone of voice. “I don’t know him, but if I meet him, I’ll know he’s an FBI agent.”
We tracked what happened after that through wiretaps and informants.
Just as anticipated, Sonny’s first move after the visit was to call together the main men of his crew. Lefty, Boobie, and Nicky came to the Motion Lounge to meet with Sonny. Sonny told them there was no way I was an agent, that if the FBI had me, they must have kidnapped me and were maybe even brainwashing me.
For more than a week they kept the story to themselves while they looked for me. They reached out to the King’s Court area, even called some of our waitresses. Lefty went to Miami, and he and Maruca scoured the area, checked all the hotels and haunts. They sent two guys from New York to Chicago, Milwaukee, and California to see if they could come up with anything.
After ten days Sonny called Santo Trafficante and told him about the agents’ visit and what they had said. He didn’t offer interpretations or explanations. He sent word to Rusty Rastelli in prison. And then he called Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family, the boss of bosses.
The mob held several meetings in New York over this, making a damage assessment. They distributed pictures of me, snapshots taken over the years with Lefty or Sonny or others, all over the country, and all the mob families were put on alert to watch for me.
The bosses considered what to do. They decided to put an open-ended—open to anyone—$500,000 contract on me. There was a suggestion that they hit everybody in the mob that had anything to do with me. Obviously certain people were going to fall, but there was nothing we could do about it. You can’t get a warrant to snatch anybody off the street, even for their own protection, without definite information that the person is going to get killed. Nobody’s name came to us as a definite target.
Except mine. The FBI dispatched teams of agents to visit all the top Mafia bosses they could find and tell them face-to-face, Hands off this agent, he beat you, it’s finished. If they hurt me, all the resources of the Justice Department would be focused on going after them—I and the FBI were not going to be intimidated.
On August 14, seventeen days after the agents had told Sonny about me, the bosses called a meeting in New Jersey. Sonny went to the meeting. I was not surprised. His options were either to turn informant, or to run, or to go to the meeting. He went to the meeting and disappeared.
Once we found out that Sonny was missing, I told Jerry Loar, “When you see them start taking his pigeon coops down, you can close your case on Sonny Black, because then he’s history.” About a week later a couple guys were on that roof taking the pigeon coops down.
A month later Sonny’s girlfriend, Judy, called the New York office of the FBI, wanting to talk to me. When I got in touch with her, she said she was scared for Sonny and for herself, and she wanted very much to get together and talk to me about things. I said okay, and that agents would be in touch with her to arrange it.
We had to be careful, even with Judy, because of a possible setup. We needed a controlled situation. So we decided to have the meeting in Washington, D.C. Two agents picked her up, flew down with her, and brought her to the Marriott right by National Airport.
We went to the dining room to have dinner. The other agents sat at a table across the room.
She said she was frightened and worried, and she missed Sonny.
I said, “Judy, the chances are that Sonny is not coming back. My recommendation is that you not associate with any of those people anymore. They’re not really your friends. Get on with your life.”
“I know that now,” she said. “But I had a good time with Sonny. I really liked him.”
“So did I.”
She was very sad, and she cried a little. “Donnie, I always knew that you weren’t cut out for that world because you carried yourself different, you had an air of intelligence, you know? I knew that you were much more than just a thief. You were a good friend to Sonny and me. Sonny didn’t have any ill feelings toward you.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
She said he had told her about the agents coming to talk to him, and he didn’t believe what they told him—there was no way I could be an agent, because of the things we had done together, the conversations we’d had, the feelings we’d had. “You know what he said? He told me, ‘I really loved that kid.’ He was really broken up when he found out that you were an agent, but he said that wouldn’t change the way he felt because of the type of guy you were. You did your job and you did it right.”
“I always liked Sonny,” I said. “That hasn’t changed with me, either.”
“He told me he had this meeting in New Jersey. But that was all. Later I found out that just before he left for the meeting, he gave Charlie, the bartender, all his jewelry and the keys to his apartment and everything. The only thing he took with him were his car keys.”
“He knew he wasn’t coming back,” I said.
“Yeah. Am I going to have any problems, you think?”
“No, I’m sure you won’t. Don’t worry about anything. Nobody’s going to bother you. Just get on with your life and stay away from those people.”
At the end, she said she felt better, was resigned to the fact that Sonny wasn’t coming back, was glad for our talk.
“Call me anytime,” I said.
We figured Sonny, Lefty, and Tony Mirra were the most obvious targets for mob hits because of me. Mirra, because he was the first guy to bring me into Little Italy, the first Bonanno guy I hung around with, and also because they thought he was a snitch. Our information was that they thought that his fight for me at the sitdowns was all a ploy, that he and I were actually working together for the FBI to advance my infiltration into the mob. Lefty and Sonny were obvious targets because of my association with them.
But the only definite contract we got word on was on Lefty. He was the only one we could protect from his own people. On August 30, a Sunday, agents snatched up Lefty just as he came out of his apartment building.
Mirra didn’t get hit until March 1982. His body was found in a car in a parking lot at the corner of North Moore and West Streets, outside the building where Bonanno consiglieri Steve Cannone lived. Somebody had shot him four times in the head. He had $6,700 in his pocket.
On August 2, 1982, I started testifying in Room 318 of the Southern District Federal Courthouse in the racketeering trial of U.S. vs. Dominick Napolitano, et al.
On August 12, 1982, a badly decomposed body was found in a hospital body bag in a creek near South Avenue in the Mariner’s Harbor section of Staten Island. The body had been buried. Recent heavy rains had uncovered it and washed it up. The person had been shot. The hands had been chopped off—an indication of a Mafia hit and a special signal that the victim had violated mob security.
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