by Joe Pistone
Another example of how Johnny looked out for the crew happened during shooting in Florida. The reason we were shooting in Florida had to do with some Mafia work I did as Donnie Brasco in order to ensnare Bonanno family members in illegal activities with a Florida Mafia family.
By way of background, in 1970 Congress passed into law the RICO section of the Organized Crime Control Act. RICO—an acronym for “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations”—is a crucial piece of legislation written by Notre Dame Law School Professor G. Robert Blakey, a prominent consultant to the federal government and expert in wiretapping legislation from the 1960s forward. RICO was enacted specifically to take aim at Mafia bosses. In the past, the most that the government could hope to do was to convict an individual mobster it caught breaking the law. The government could not convict the chain of command and get to the bosses pulling the strings, nor could they successfully try groups of Mafia made men or bosses together. In fact, in the early sixties, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had to have simultaneous grand juries running for each of the five New York Mafia families. But the Mafia code of omerta—the code of silence—kept the grand juries from getting any evidence to define the structure of the Mafia and the bosses in order to prove conspiracies were taking place. The brilliance of the RICO Act was that it made it a serious crime for anyone to be a member of a “criminal enterprise,” a corrupt organization, engaged in a “pattern of racketeering.” If the government could prove a person was a part of the conspiracy and could prove two crimes from a list of typical Mafia crimes like murder, drug trafficking, extortion, gambling and loan sharking, then the RICO Act could help them get a conviction.
I had the goal of gathering sufficient evidence to establish a RICO charge against the Bonanno family, as well as the other New York Mafia families by association. From my relatively low position in the Mafia I was lucky to be able to broker Bonanno family alliances with other families. These alliances would provide crucial proof of the “pattern of racketeering” by the “criminal enterprise”—the Bonannos and the other families’ membership in the corrupt organization known as the Mafia, also called La Cosa Nostra (translated from Italian: “this thing of ours”).
One of the families I brokered the Bonanno family into an alliance with was the Santo Trafficante family in Tampa, Florida. Among other crimes, the primary criminal conspiracy was that the two families became partners in illegal gambling and drug distribution at a private club called King’s Court. It was in a big octagonal building on five acres near Tampa. King’s Court was equipped as an illegal gambling casino with crap tables, roulette wheels and blackjack. What neither Mafia family knew was the fact that the King’s Court club was set up by the FBI.
When we shot the interior of the gambling casino at King’s Court, it was extremely hot in Florida. We couldn’t use air conditioning because the sound equipment would pick up the hum. We had a ton of extras in the scene. The extras were playing guys and dolls gambling at King’s Court. Every time the director yelled “Cut!” to shoot the scene over, he made the extras stay frozen in their positions. That way we wouldn’t have to go through the effort of trying to get the extras back in the exact position they were in. Because of this policy, the extras couldn’t break for food or water. Johnny Depp saw this and understood what was going on. He told an assistant director that if every extra wasn’t given a bottle of water at all times he wouldn’t go on with the scene.
All the actors were considerate of the crew and of each other. Michael Madsen, Anne Heche, James Russo, Bruno Kirby—they were all a pleasure to work with. Nobody had an attitude. Even though I had prepared a lot with each actor before any shooting began, they each checked with me regularly because, every morning when they showed up, they had to change their personalities and become somebody different. Now that was something I understood and could relate to.
Al Pacino especially checked with me on a regular basis to ask about the style of speech and mannerisms of Lefty Guns Ruggiero, the real person, as Al developed the character of Lefty. The hard work that Al put into creating his character was truly impressive. Yet even the actors in the smallest of roles checked with me. They didn’t necessarily want carbon copies of the real people; part of each actor’s art is to put something of his or her own into the character. For example, Al’s take on Lefty was to dress Lefty down. In real life, Lefty, who was very smart in the ways and history of the Mafia, was a real sharp dresser. His winter coat was cashmere. But Al saw a way to bring to the audience another side of Lefty’s character—something bordering on pathetic—by wearing a distinctively un-sharp plaid jacket with a fur collar.
While I’m talking about the jacket, I don’t want to forget to commend the hard work of the costume people. I worked with them many hours to get the details down of the actual clothing the real people wore, from the wiseguys in the crew to the FBI agents who handled me.
As you may know, the movie, based on the book of the same name, was not 100% accurate. The book, of course, was 100% accurate in terms of relating what happened throughout the Donnie Brasco operation, with the exception of certain matters of a sensitive nature that were left out or couldn’t be told at that time. The movie was about 85% accurate in detail, but 100% accurate in overall impression of wiseguy life and the work I did. An example of an inaccuracy in the movie is the scene in which I smack my wife. I can’t imagine doing that in real life. Also, Al Pacino’s character of Lefty does some things that Sonny Black actually did in real life. And the ending, when Lefty leaves his apartment en route to a sit-down meeting, the audience is led to believe that he would soon be whacked—and that never happened. However, it all falls under the jurisdiction of dramatic license.
Most importantly, I never had that sense of sentimentality toward Lefty that the movie portrayed me as having. I never felt any need to save Lefty, nor did I experience a feeling of guilt that maybe I was doing something cold-blooded by “betraying” Lefty’s trust. Johnny Depp has a line in the film, “All my life I’ve tried to be the good guy, the guy in the white fucking hat. And for what? For nothing. I’m not becoming like them. I am them.”
It may sound harsh, but throughout my six years undercover as Donnie Brasco, and to this day, quite the contrary is true. I maintained an unwavering belief in my original mission. I never experienced any doubt, uncertainty, or reservation. I did not make Lefty a Mafia gangster. Lefty chose to be a hoodlum and worked hard to become a made man in the Mafia. Lefty and his Mafia underground nation is America’s enemy. I was an American FBI agent. Lefty broke the laws of my country. Every single day of his adult life, he either broke them or spent time trying to figure out how to break them. The Mafia is a criminal organization full of bad people who hurt good people for profit. Take my word for it: I saw it every day I was with them. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. In the end, I was proud to bring Lefty to justice, and I’m even more proud of the devastating short- and long-term effects on the Mafia that people have credited, in part, to my work.
Was there any residual post-traumatic “Brasco” lurking in my psyche? As Lefty Guns Ruggiero said countless times a day, “Fuggeddaboudit.”
In getting a book deal in the first place, and then a movie deal, I dealt with people who made wiseguys look like pillars of virtue. For the book deal, I had to interview writers who were famous for writing about the Mafia. I was searching for one who would take my words and stories and court testimony and put them into book form. With author after author, I got the feeling that it was going to be their book and not mine. Finally, I found the right man for the job, Richard Woodley, a talented writer and a terrific man. We clicked. At one point when I asked his opinion regarding something about the book, he even said to me, “Joe, this is your book, not mine.” At the end of our meeting, we shook hands and made a deal. I then had a meeting with a top publishing house that had offered top dollar on the book. At that meeting, their top guy told me he didn’t want me to use Richard Woodley. I explained that I had signed Woo
dley with a handshake, and Woodley knew that was my word.
“I’ll give you $50,000 more,” the publisher’s top guy said, “if you don’t use Woodley.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “I made a deal with him.”
“Do you have a contract with him?”
“No, I have a handshake.”
“Hell, that’s nothing. That’s not a contract.”
“To me it is.”
“It’s just a handshake. You mean you are going to give up $50,000 extra on a handshake?”
“It’s my word and I have to get up in the morning and look myself in the mirror and live with myself.”
My agent and I walked the hell out and went with another publisher who treated Richard Woodley and me and our book with dignity. Just as a way to do business, I wondered what that first publisher thought I’d think of the original offer he had made if he could so easily come up with an extra fifty grand just like that—more than my annual salary undercover. It didn’t matter; I wouldn’t have to deal with him again.
The movie industry is even worse. Fly-by-night guys would make offers that could tie up the book in an option for a year with almost no money down but with the promise of an enormous payday at the end. They would wave outrageous figures around, figures that meant nothing, but were intended to tempt me into letting them own my book so they could shop it around and make the best studio deal for themselves. And these guys would never look me in the eye. At least a gangster looks you in the eye and tells you he is going to steal from you.
Another high school buddy of mine, Lou DiGiaimo, a basketball and football teammate, had become a casting director. Lou hooked us up with the excellent people who ended up making the movie, a movie we were all very proud of and which featured a dynamite Academy Award-nominated script by Paul Anastasio.
And what made the movie so satisfying, at least in my eyes, was the same thing that makes an investigation a success: attention to detail. For the sake of accuracy, we even walked the old Greenpoint neighborhood, despite the fact that the exterior scenes of the film would be shot in a less-crowded neighborhood—Brooklyn Heights near the Brooklyn Bridge.
I had spent so many hours of so many days hanging around the front room of the Motion Lounge at the corner of Graham and Withers, that it felt like home when I gave the set designers a tour of the neighborhood. I could almost picture Boobie Cerasani and Nicky Santora still in the back room manning the phones in the Motion Lounge for Sonny Black’s sports betting and numbers racket. During my last months with Sonny Black’s crew, I lived with Sonny in his third-floor apartment over the Motion Lounge. Now I was there as technical adviser for the film—a job, believe it or not, that required a ton of work. I was adviser to every department at all times, conversing with the director, setting up scenes. Would they say this? Would they do that? What would the reaction be to such and such?
At one point, the film personnel and I were on the street where Sonny Black kept his pet pigeons—on the roof of the Motion Lounge. Sonny loved those pigeons the way some people love their favorite dog as if it were their child. He talked to his pigeons and gave them special feed. He had ninety-five of them, and had a name for each one.
Seventeen days after he reported to the Mafia Commission that I was an FBI agent, the bosses called Sonny Black to a meeting. It was the Mafia’s version of a golden parachute that a corporate officer gets when he’s fired—except instead of huge wealth via stock options, Sonny would get whacked. On his way out the door, he gave his watch and house keys to Charlie, the bartender at the Motion Lounge, and said, “I’m going to a sit-down. I don’t know if I’m coming back.”
But he went to the meeting anyway to face his punishment. And sure enough, they killed him and chopped his hands off to show that his murder was retribution for allowing me, Agent Joe Pistone, to infiltrate the Bonanno family as Donnie Brasco. They chopped off the hands that touched me and that made the significant introductions of me to the top bosses of other Mafia families. The hit itself, on an otherwise loyal and trusted friend and partner and fellow Mafia member, was executed to set an example of what happens to anyone who causes the kind of harm to Mafia family bosses as he did—that is, introducing them to an undercover agent. In the movie, for dramatic purposes, they show Lefty stashing away his personal effects as he heads out the door to a meeting to be killed. But it was Sonny Black who did that. Lefty’s planned hit was picked up on an FBI wiretap and he was arrested on a Sunday afternoon and taken off the street on his way to his death and the cutting off of his hands. He would die some years later of natural causes.
Sonny Black’s body had been buried in a shoddy way—most likely on purpose so it would be found like a lost letter—with a message to Mafiosi everywhere not to ever let an agent infiltrate again. The body itself was discovered in November, three months after Sonny disappeared. A man out for a walk with his dog spotted it in a swampy section of Mariner’s Harbor, Staten Island. However, the body lay on ice in the morgue and remained unidentified for several months. I learned that Sonny’s body had been identified and his hands cut off during a break in my testimony in the Bonanno family trial, the first of the many Mafia trials my six years of undercover work had produced. It was a year after he had disappeared. But in my heart I knew Sonny was history a week after he disappeared—when they tore down his pigeon coops from the roof of the Motion Lounge.
By the time the film crew and I walked the streets outside the Motion Lounge in preparation of making the film, the old hijacker Big Joey Massino had become the boss of the Bonannos. We weren’t on the street to do any actual filming, but rather to show the set designers what the real street looked like. They wanted absolute authenticity, just like the actors, the director, the producers, and everyone else involved in the picture. You don’t realize until you get involved—at least I didn’t realize until I got involved—but it takes a couple of hundred people all working together like an army to put together the film that you see. Every department has to break the script down to whatever their expertise is: pre-production, wardrobe, prop master, cameraman, photographer, and an assortment of assistants. And every single person that I worked with took their assignments to heart and wanted to make the best picture they could make.
The director was responsible for putting all these individual pieces together. If a scene was shot and it didn’t feel right, he’d shoot it again. Sometimes thirty seconds of what you see on screen may have taken fourteen hours to shoot.
The gangsters in Sonny Black’s crew—including me—hung out at the Motion Lounge for hours on end, day after day, scheming and plotting to steal or otherwise break the law. It was repetitive and mind numbing. The whole thing is about what can be ripped off on that particular day. Like hunters who eat what they kill, the average Mafia gangster is constantly hunting so he can eat. The social club, where they hatch many of their schemes, is also where they derive their camaraderie, their sense of belonging to a family, of being part of a crew, of being teammates. It may sound strange, but when I was with them—people with names like Boobie, Jimmy Legs, Boots, Mr. Fish, etc.—I felt that sense of belonging, too, from time to time.
The thing that bothered me most about being back on that street for the first time in fifteen years since coming out, was that I knew many of the hunters had never left. They were still here in this very neighborhood. Living here. Hanging out here. Hunting here. I also knew from FBI informants that I still had a half-million dollar Mafia contract on my head, and while I kept my face out of the media, these guys didn’t have to see my picture to recognize me. I couldn’t fully relax. I was a little bit on guard. I found myself glancing up at the roofs for any activity, and shooting an occasional glance behind me. I checked out anybody who passed us. You never knew about any of these guys who might still be around, what’s going to click in them. Because all it takes is for something to click. Maybe somebody wants to look good in Big Joey Massino’s eyes.
As we strolled and I pointed out locatio
ns to the crew—a different kind of crew than I had been used to in this Brooklyn neighborhood—shopkeepers started to come out and greet me. “Donnie, how you been?” It was as if I had never left. And they were still calling me Donnie. They were shaking my hand. They obviously didn’t care who from the old crew might see them greeting me. It relaxed me. And it was a kick to still be called Donnie. Why not? That’s who they knew. In a way, it was a tribute.
More and more people came out of their apartments and houses to see what was going on. “Hi, Donnie, how’s it going?” They had big smiles on their faces as if I had just gotten home from the Army. “I liked your book,” a couple of them said.
I suddenly felt like a celebrity in the eyes of the movie people I was with. And when a truck slowed down, and the vaguely familiar tough-looking truck driver stopped and rolled down the window and yelled, “Hey Donnie,” I waved back and yelled, “Hey, how you doing?”
“You rat motherfucker, you!” he hollered, rolled up his window and drove off scowling.
CHAPTER 2
DEEP COVER DONNIE
IF ONLY MAFIA ACTIVITY were just a Hollywood invention. But of course, it’s real. And I not only witnessed it in action, I lived to tell about it. Until now, I haven’t exposed much detail about the daily activities I witnessed, not even in my first book, Donnie Brasco. At the time that book was published, there were still many trials pending involving many alleged crimes committed by many alleged members of the alleged Mafia—none of which I could discuss. Now, over twenty years later, and with over 200 proven wiseguys convicted of those crimes—including the “Last Don,” Big Joey Massino, who was finally convicted in 2005—those allegations are fact and I can talk.