Donnie Brasco (9 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
Getting established is a subtle business, a matter of small impressions, little tests, quiet understandings.
Albert lived in Brooklyn. But he loved Manhattan. One night there was a big snowstorm and he didn’t want to drive home to Brooklyn. So I let him stay over in my apartment. From then on he was always trying to weasel in, to stay over at my apartment so that he didn’t have to drive home to Brooklyn. I wanted to keep cultivating him, but I didn’t want him parking in my apartment.
Between trying to get myself set up, establish credibility, and hanging around with Albert and others, I hardly got home at all during the month of December—maybe two or three evenings up to Christmas. So I was especially intent on getting home at a reasonable hour Christmas Eve, to spend that and part of Christmas Day with my family. I planned to knock off early Christmas Eve and get home by maybe eight o‘clock. I had bought presents for everybody and stashed them in the trunk of my car.
In order to get home to my family, I started celebrating Christmas early in my Don Brasco world. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, we started bouncing around to the various spots, having drinks and wishing people we knew Merry Christmas. Chuck, who was a bachelor, and Albert, who didn’t ever like going home, brought along a couple of girls they had been going out with.
One place led to another. I had to act like I wasn’t in a hurry to get anyplace. It was after ten o‘clock. We were going down Eighty-sixth Street, heading for Carmello’s. The street was pretty empty. On the corner there was a guy still selling Christmas trees. I happened to mention, “It’s Christmas, and I don’t even have a Christmas tree in my apartment.”
Albert yells, “Pull over! Pull over to that guy there—he’s got trees! I’m gonna buy a tree!”
I pull over at the corner. Albert jumps out and goes over to where the guy has Christmas trees. The guy has only three or four trees left. They are barely trees, more like sticks tied together. Albert picks one out and brings it over to the car. I never saw anything so scraggly. There was a trail of needles from it on the sidewalk. The top was bent over.
“What are you gonna do with that?” I ask.
“Let’s put it up and decorate it in your apartment!” “Come on, I got no decorations. All the stores are closed.”
“We’ll find something to decorate it with,” he says, “won’t we, girls?”
“Yeah, yeah!” they say.
“We can’t let you be alone on Christmas Eve,” Albert says.
So we go up to my apartment with this scrawny tree. When we stood it up, you could see that it was even missing some branches. “I got no stand to put it up in,” I say.
“We’ll use this!” he says. I had one of those big water-cooler bottles that I threw pennies in.
They put the tree in that. Then the two women rummaged around in the kitchen and came back with some tinfoil. They started making Christmas balls and decorations out of tinfoil. They hung these things on what few branches there were. Every time they hung a tinfoil bird up, a million needles fell on the floor.
“We couldn’t let you go without a Christmas tree,” Albert says. “Bad enough you don’t have a date on Christmas Eve.”
They all proceeded to make sure I enjoyed Christmas Eve and wasn’t lonely. They sang Christmas carols until after midnight, sitting around this ugly tree, Albert and the girls all boozed up.
I was thinking about my kids, and all the presents in the trunk of my car, and I was angry for letting myself get into this situation.
I said, “Come on, everybody, that’s enough, I’ve had it with Christmas.”
They wanted to keep partying. I took Chuck aside and said, “You gotta get ‘em outa here. I want to go home.”
So he herded them up and left. I waited about a half hour, then I went down to the garage, got my car, and headed home.
I managed to have Christmas morning with my family. I was back on the job in the afternoon. Five more Christmases would pass by before I would have a normal one with my family.
Things began to happen, some movement. Shortly after the first of the year, 1977, Albert introduced me to some active Colombo guys. We were out bouncing, and we went to Hippopotamus, the popular disco at Sixty-first Street and York Avenue. A lot of mob guys hung out there.
Albert said he’d like to introduce me to a Colombo guy that did a lot of business with swag.
He brought me over to a table and introduced me to a guy. “Jilly, this is Don, a friend of mine.”
Jilly was maybe five years older than me, average build, 5’9”, 160, with dark hair, prominent nose.
We sat down and talked for a while, and Albert told Jilly and the guys with him that we had been hanging out for a few months. Jilly headed up a crew that hung out mainly in Brooklyn. He said I should stop by his store over on 15th Avenue and 76th Street in the Bensonhurst section.
“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that,” I said.
For a couple of months now I had been playing this game of trying to be noticed without being noticed, slide into the badguy world and become accepted without drawing attention. You push a little here and there, but very gently. Brief introductions, short conversations, appearances one place and another, hints about what you’re up to, casual mannerisms, demeanor, and lingo that show you know your way around—all these become a trail of credibility you leave behind you. Above all, you cannot hurry. You cannot seem eager to meet certain people, make certain contacts, learn about certain scores. The quickest way to get tagged as a cop is to try to move too fast. You have to show that you have the time to play it by the rules of the street, and that includes letting people check you out and come to you.
You have to have confidence in how you’re handling yourself, because while you’re playing this game, much of the time you don’t know where you stand. Nobody tells you you’re getting in solid or getting to know the right people or heading in the right direction. Nobody tells you if you’re safe. You have to sense it. Badguys on the street are sensing you. You can be wrong. Obviously, so can they. But the street is no place to doubt yourself.
These initial months were not a time of high excitement in terms of events. But I felt excitement. I had a foothold. Nobody in the outside world knew where I was or what I was doing, hour by hour, day by day. On the street, people didn’t know who I was or what I was really doing. I was on the job and on my own. There was excitement in that.
One night I came out of Carmello’s and started to drive downtown to make the rounds of the regular spots. I thought a car was following me. To check it out, I didn’t try to shake them right away. I just led them on a wild-goose chase for a while. I went across the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee, New Jersey, turned around, and came back. The other car stayed with me but made no move.
It had to be some sort of law-enforcement unit. Nobody else would have reason to follow me. My assumption was that there was an informant in Car mello‘s, or one of the other places, who had passed on the information that there was a new guy hanging around, making friends with badguys, a guy who obviously doesn’t work and yet has money to spend. Or else they could have been spot-checking the place, surveilling it, and they saw my car there a few times, with out-of-state tags, saw me come and go, and got into it that way.
Law-enforcement units—New York Police, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, all the others—have organized crime figures under surveillance all the time. It is standard practice. None of these outfits—including the FBI, for the most part—knew who I was. So if I started coming into their picture, buddying up with badguys, naturally I would become a suspect just like the rest of them.
If it wasn’t cops, it could be wiseguys checking me out. I didn’t want anybody on either side tailing me. If I was going to meet my contact agent, or going home to see my family, a tail could have blown the whole operation. So every time I left a place, I was tail-conscious. I always “cleaned” myself. I never went directly to my destination. I would ride around, keep checking my rearview mirror to see if I was being followed, lose any suspicious cars with a series of turns and double-backs. When I parked someplace, I would notice whoever parked near me, and anybody who came in a place with me.
The first time I was rousted, I was near Carmello’s. I hadn’t had time to get rid of the car tailing me. They pulled me over. A couple guys in plainclothes with drawn guns ordered me out, told me to put my hands on my head. They patted me down, checked inside the car. They didn’t find anything on me or in the car. When they were finished, they said it was a routine license check because I had Florida plates on the car.
The only thing it was routine for was wiseguys, because they get rousted all the time. That’s why you don’t usually carry a gun. These guys here who rousted me didn’t even identify themselves. I don’t know who they were.
I was tailed a few times, stopped and searched a couple of times. It was an inconvenience, but it also made me feel that I was doing the job right.
I drove over to Brooklyn, to Jilly’s store at 7612 15th Avenue. The neighborhood was very clean, quiet, working-class, two- and three-story residential buildings with a lot of storefronts on the ground floors. Jilly’s store was in the middle of a block of glass fronts. There was a small grocery store, and the Park Ridge Pharmacy on the corner.
A big sign over the door of Jilly’s store read ACERG. Jilly’s last name was Greca, his store was the name spelled backward. The store part was the front room. Plain metal racks of expensive clothes, mostly women’s stuff: leather jackets, pants, blouses. Everything was marked cheaper than it would be at a regular store. The store was open to the public, but nobody would be coming there from Manhattan. It was a neighborhood store in the kind of neighborhood where outsiders are spotted in a minute.
Everything was cheap because it was all swag. Jilly’s crew were hijackers, burglars, all-around thieves. The store sold their loot.
5
BROOKLYN: THE COLOMBOS
The Acerg store was in the front, and anybody in the crew could act as salesman. There was a back room with a desk and a couple of card tables. That’s where the crew hung out during the day. That’s where I was introduced to a few guys, ranging in age from maybe late twenties to early forties, who were sitting around playing gin and bullshitting. First names and nicknames only: Guido, Vito, Tommy the Chief, Vinnie, and so on.
I started hanging out there with Jilly’s crew. Because I was “known” by other people that this crew knew, and because I was introduced to them by somebody they knew, they were pretty open around me.
Although these were lower-echelon guys in the mob, they always had something going. They always had money. They were always turning things over. They always had swag around. Swag was always going in and out. Everybody dressed well. Ninety percent of what they wore was swag. Latest styles. Sports shirts, slacks, sweaters, and leather jackets. If they had jeans on, they were always designer jeans.
You name it, they stole it. Jilly’s crew would hit warehouses, docks, trucks, houses. There was nothing they wouldn’t consider stealing. They considered all the time. There wasn’t one hour of one day that went by when they weren’t thinking and talking about what they were going to steal, who or what or where they were going to rob. There was always a load to go after, or somebody else’s load you might get a piece of, always something to hustle.
When they got up in the morning, they didn’t think about going to work and punching a time clock. They didn’t think about spending time with their wives or girlfriends. The mob was their job. You got up, went to the club or wherever you hung out, and spent your day with those guys.
You’ve got to be up all day figuring out what you’re going to do that night, what scores you’re going to go out on. The day basically was: You got to the club at ten-thirty or eleven o‘clock in the morning, then sat around all day and discussed scams and scores and hustles, past and future. Somebody would have an idea about a burglary or hijack, and they’d kick it around to see if it was worthwhile. Or somebody else had pulled a score and was looking to get rid of jewelry, furs, or whatever. And they’d discuss the possibility of “middling” it—taking the swag and reselling it.
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