by Joe Pistone
Table of Contents
ALSO BY JOSEPH D. PISTONE
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 - HOLLYWOOD
CHAPTER 2 - DEEP COVER DONNIE
CHAPTER 3 - THE DEEP END
CHAPTER 4 - “YOU’RE GOING TO GET MADE”
CHAPTER 5 - FIRST BLOOD
CHAPTER 6 - BEHIND THE LEGEND
CHAPTER 7 - UNDER OATH
CHAPTER 8 - ON THE ROAD
CHAPTER 9 - THE PIZZA CONNECTION, PART 1
CHAPTER 10 - THE PIZZA CONNECTION, PART 2
CHAPTER 11 - SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT
CHAPTER 12 - THE MAFIA COMMISSION CASE
CHAPTER 13 - THE MAFIA’S WORST YEAR
CHAPTER 14 - FALLOUT IN PHILLY
CHAPTER 15 - DONNIE BRASCO AT HOME AND ABROAD
“THE RETREAD”
SCOTLAND YARD
MY BLACK AND WHITE WORLD
SIBERIA
CHAPTER 16 - THE LUCCHESE FAMILY
CHAPTER 17 - GASPIPE IMPLODES
CHAPTER 18 - THE MAFIA COPS
CHAPTER 19 - THE MAFIA COPS’ POSITION
CHAPTER 20 - THE MAFIA COPS CONVICTED
CHAPTER 21 - THE COLOMBO FAMILY AND THE SCARPA DEFENSE
CHAPTER 22 - HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD
CHAPTER 23 - THE LAST DON
REST IN PEACE
EPILOGUE
Photography Credits
INDEX
Copyright Page
ALSO BY JOSEPH D. PISTONE
Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia
The Way of the Wiseguy
The Good Guys
Deep Cover
Snake Eyes
Mobbed Up
ALSO BY CHARLES BRANDT
I Heard You Paint Houses
The Right to Remain Silent
This book is dedicated to the men and women in Law Enforcement and the
U.S.Armed Forces who risk their lives every day to make the world a safer
place to live in.
—J.P.
As always, for Nancy.
—C.B.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my publisher, editor, and agents for making this book possible. Also, my co-writer Charlie Brandt (a prince of a man) for putting up with my late return calls. Thanks to all my dear friends (too numerous to name) for their belief in me. And a special thanks to my family for their support in whatever adventure I undertake.
—Joe Pistone
Preface
When I give lectures or teach seminars around the world, I get a lot of questions about the state of the American Mafia—which is principally the Five Families of New York City. My answer always leads to more questions, and there is never enough time to fully explain what happened to the American Mafia and how it got that way.
I decided to write this book in an effort to do justice to these questions and to show how what we did back in the day—on the street, in the social clubs, and in the courtrooms—has led to the situation today, in which the Mafia is nothing more than a weakened, exposed shadow of its former self.
This sequel to my bestseller—Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia—also gives me an opportunity to reveal certain details for the first time anywhere, details that I could not discuss in the original Donnie Brasco because, in 1988, I did not want to compromise the numerous trials that would come over the next decade and my testimony in them. In 1981, I still had much unfinished business to do after coming out from my six-year deep cover penetration of the Mafia.
At the time I wrote the first book, many of the crimes I discussed continued to pose a mystery; many of the murders were still whodunits. Over the past twenty-five years, with the toppling and falling of the Mafia dominos, trial by trial, nearly all of these mysteries have been completely solved, and I get to analyze them here.
The way I see it, the most important domino to fall was the first one, the one that set the rest in motion. It was the first of the cases to go to trial—the 1982 Bonanno family trial. Had we lost that first trial—in which we used a then-novel legal theory to apply the evidence I gathered as Donnie Brasco—there would have been no subsequent trials, and none of the good news I report in this book would have occurred. Everything was at stake in that first battle of the Mafia trials war: all we had done, all we hoped to do, and my very safety. You see, the weaker we made the Mafia as we marched on from that first victory, the more we destroyed it and its ruling Commission—which had put a price on my head—and the better my family and I felt.
As I look at the ravaged state of New York’s Five Families and its Mafia Commission today, I feel more than satisfied that my unfinished business is finally finished—at least as far as the American Mafia is concerned.
Introduction
by Charles Brandt
Has America witnessed a more heroic or exciting lawman than this book’s subject? Who springs to mind? Wyatt Earp? Wild Bill Hickock? Eliot Ness? Much of what many legendary lawmen got credit for doing is more myth than reality. But if one swallows their résumés as gospel, these legends still don’t measure up to the prolonged heroism, tactical brilliance, and pure mental toughness of a young Italian-American FBI Special Agent from Paterson, New Jersey, named Joseph Dominick Pistone—aka Donnie Brasco, Mafia gangster.
What follows here touches on the dangers Agent Joe Pistone braved his way through and the monumental destruction his testimony caused the Mafia in trial after trial from the early ’80s through today. Posing as a jewel thief to whom he gave the fictitious name “Donnie Brasco,” and with no rulebook to follow and no indispensable introduction to the Mafia, Agent Pistone infiltrated the Colombo Mafia family in 1975. Six months after first contact, using his infiltration of the Colombos as his self-made introduction, he infiltrated the Bonanno Mafia family. Agent Pistone soon became a working member of the Bonanno family, abandoning his own personal life, living the daily life of a Mafia crewmember, following his capo’s orders, and obeying the tangled web of medieval rules that govern the Mafia’s secret subculture.
After six eventful years as Donnie Brasco, Agent Pistone was proposed by his Bonanno capo, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, for the rare honor given to very few Mafia associates—induction into the Mafia as a made man. Following the simultaneous assassination of three powerful Bonanno capos—Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, Dominick “Big Trin”Trinchera, and Phillip “Phil Lucky” Giaccone—on May 5, 1981, Pistone’s capo, Sonny Black, became the acting street boss of the Bonanno crime family. To nip a potential civil war in the bud, Sonny Black gave Donnie Brasco the contract to find and kill Sonny Red’s son, capo Bruno Indelicato, who was supposed to get whacked along with the other three but missed the meeting.
Because Donnie had become such a close intimate of Sonny Black, often sleeping at Sonny’s apartment, the enemies on the other side of this potential gang war might target Donnie Brasco for a bullet. Agent Pistone’s FBI handler throughout the operation, retired Agent Jules Bonavolonta expressed the dilemma. “While Joe would be pretending to look for Bruno so he could whack him and leave him in the street, a bunch of other guys would be looking for Joe so they could whack him and leave him in the street. The only difference between Joe and the other guys was that the other guys wouldn’t be faking it.”
By the time Sonny Black gave Agent Pistone this murder contract in mid-1981, Pistone had spent close to six years immersed in the role of Donnie Brasco. Much to Agent Pistone’s disappointment, the FBI decided to pull him from his deep cover and reveal his role to the Bonannos before he could be made—or ki
lled. In the ensuing years, Pistone’s grueling court appearances on the witness stand were an indispensable element of the biggest, longest, and most significant Mafia trials in history, including the Bonanno Family cases, the Pizza Connection Case, and the Mafia Commission Case. Other major cases—such as the Mafia Cops Case—came later and were a direct result of the chaos caused by these initial cases.
Through his testimony, Agent Pistone was revealed to America as a towering super hero. A man who commits a single act of bravery can be considered a hero; the super hero lives a day-to-day life of constant bravery. For six years, Agent Pistone committed individual acts of bravery from moment to moment. His life was one of constant courage in the face of constant risk of death or harm, including torture.
Many of the made men in the Mafia that Agent Pistone was closest to were super villains—poisonous snakes poised to snap and kill without provocation. Pistone described Tony Mirra, his first Bonanno family mentor, as, “Loud, obnoxious. The meanest man I met in the Mafia.” Pistone described Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, his next mentor and the man with whom he had the most intimate contact, this way: “You could tell Lefty was a stone cold killer just the way he looked at you.” Agent Pistone always had to be super vigilant around Lefty to keep his make-believe stories straight. “Lefty would recall conversations we had eight months earlier, and he would remember them verbatim.” Pistone described his capo, Sonny Black, as follows: “When you met him you knew you had to respect him. If you didn’t, he’d whack you.”
After Agent Pistone’s mission had moved from the mean streets to courtrooms around the country, the record of convictions became so staggering and so unique that the name he chose for his undercover role, Donnie Brasco, became a law-enforcement term in its own right. After 9/11, for instance, at least one media commentator remarked that what America needed to fight terrorism is “a ‘Donnie Brasco,’ someone to infiltrate Al-Queda.” Former CIA Director George Tenet attempted to explain his agency’s inability to predict the attacks by saying, “. . . We didn’t have a Donnie Brasco.” Like being an Einstein, a Casanova, or a Benedict Arnold—the latter undoubtedly being how the Napoleons who ruled the Mafia viewed Donnie Brasco—being a Donnie Brasco is now a part of our language.
During my years as a prosecutor, which ended about the time Agent Pistone first infiltrated the Mafia, I marveled at the courage of the undercover cops who brought their cases to my office. While sometimes the operation involved buying swag (stolen goods), mostly these brave men were narcs. They posed as addicts; their goal was to buy drugs and bust the dealers. To make a case that a judge wouldn’t toss out on a technicality, they needed to buy one-on-one, person-to-person. And to make such a direct buy, they needed to penetrate past the justly paranoid screening tactics of drug dealers. Initially, a druggie informant had to vouch for the narc to the dealer. (An introduction was something Agent Pistone did not have the luxury of when infiltrating the Mafia.) The narc had to dress and act like a drug addict, hang around with druggies, and live the druggie life a number of hours a day for a couple of weeks per case. When the dealer was arrested, the narc was exposed and his usefulness as an undercover was over.
If a narc made a mistake, the typical result would be that the dealer would become suspicious and refuse to sell drugs to the narc. Having said that, these buybust operations were and still are dangerous assignments. Every once in a while, a narc somewhere in America gets shot to death when the dealer is actually interested in robbing money and not in delivering product.
In Delaware in the early ’70s we never lost a man to a drug dealer’s bullet, but we lost at least two to the drugs to which they daily were exposed. In order to prove himself a drug addict, a narc sometimes—at the very least—had to smoke a joint offered to him by the dealer. Just as a man might not know he has a potential gambling addiction until a casino is built near his home, so a man might not know he has a potential drug addiction until he takes his first hit. One of the narcs I knew became a heroin addict; the other became a cocaine addict. Typically these matters are swept under the carpet and, unless the drug-addicted cop commits another crime, they go unnoticed and unappreciated by the public—a public that expects its police to risk their health, indeed their very lives, to protect them. These largely unreported drug-addiction tragedies are part of the hidden costs of the shift in police tactics caused by court decisions of the ’60s and ’70s beginning with Mapp v. Ohio in 1961 (the Supreme Court decision that banned evidence gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure). Unable to search dealers and users in the street, confiscate their drugs, and arrest them on mere suspicion alone, narcotics squads became forced to rely on the dangerous and inefficient tactics of infiltration, buy and bust.
When I first read Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, I read it with this insider’s knowledge and experience in mind. As if I were watching a highway pileup in slow motion, I was caught up with bated breath, hoping Agent Pistone and his family would survive the ordeal. It was and remains the best and most authentic true crime book I ever read. By the book’s jacket alone I saw that Agent Pistone’s infiltration was not of the genus of deadly and dangerous infiltration of a drug dealer’s world, which would normally last just a matter of days. It was a distinctly more deadly and dangerous infiltration, day after day, of an organization of professional killers—an organization that punishes its own members unexpectedly with two bullets behind the ear, as the courts would say, on “mere suspicion alone.” As agent Pistone said, “There were moments I thought I was going to be killed.
“If you badmouth a boss to anyone,” Pistone told me, “even jokingly, and it gets back to the boss, there is a good chance your best friend in the family will be ordered to shoot you in the back of the head when you least expect it.” Before he became Bonanno boss in 1992, Big Joey Massino whacked a Mafia soldier for wisecracking that the Gambino boss—Big Paul Castellano—resembled Frank Perdue of the Perdue Chicken company, who used to appear regularly in TV commercials.
Even if you hadn’t badmouthed a boss but someone thought you had and it got back to the boss—again, “on mere suspicion alone” and without being given a chance to explain—you very likely would be shot and killed by the cold-blooded professional beside you, whose job description includes killing people who don’t show sufficient respect, whatever that means.
If you asked a question perceived to be inappropriately nosey you might be suspected of being a rat, trying to gather evidence for the government. “Mere suspicion alone” of being a rat requires little reflection on the part of a boss in ordering your execution. As the Teamsters official and confessed Mafia hit man Frank Sheeran expressed to me, “When in doubt, have no doubt.”
And, worse for your long-neglected wife, your children, and your parents, you might simply disappear. Your real family would have the agony of waiting and worrying while you failed to return and your body failed to surface. Certainly, whatever method your close friends used to kill you, and whether they disposed of your body or left it to be discovered as a message to other soldiers in the Mafia, your murder would likely never be solved.
These unfathomable rules, even the unintentional breaking of which had deadly consequences, are rules Agent Pistone had to learn on-the-job by trial and error, all the while posing as someone who already knew the way of the wiseguy. No one before Agent Pistone had ever attempted to infiltrate the Mafia at this level to study its structure and learn its rules, to understand the mindset of the made man. Agent Pistone has since taught these secret rules to all law enforcement, as well as to the rest of us.
Mafia rules aside, many of the men Agent Pistone hung out with at the social club, dined with at the best restaurants, played cards with, drank with, and committed crimes with, were psychopaths who might kill a newcomer like Donnie Brasco on impulse.
For those 2,100-odd days of his existence as the Bonanno crewmember Donnie Brasco, Agent Pistone also had to nav
igate the murky waters of the bureaucracy of the FBI. His daily undercover performance as Donnie Brasco had a multitude of producers and directors ready to assert their authority. Luckily for him and for us, Pistone had as his chief handler Agent Jules Bonavolonta, a supervisor with a talent for his job and the willingness to play the bureaucracy while Agent Pistone played the Mafia.
Nearly every facet of the operation, from the first day to the last, was carried out in uncharted waters. In his day-to-day activities, how far could an agent go in breaking the law—like a narc taking a drug—in order to keep up appearances, gain trust, and advance up the ladder? (“To this day, I never took a drug in my life,” Pistone asserted.) Under which hazardous conditions should his back be covered by agents hiding nearby, who might be spotted and get his cover blown? How often and under what circumstances should he break cover to report to his handler? After all, he couldn’t take notes, everything had to be memorized and verbally reported. When should he risk instant death by wearing a cumbersome wire that might be spotted? When could he see his family? Agent Pistone literally wrote the book on how to look, think, and act like a Mafia crewmember while passing along ongoing intelligence reports from the enemy camp and making cases against made men and the Mafia itself that would stand up in court in the face of rules and procedures that often seemed to favor criminals and their frequently abusive defense attorneys.