by Joe Pistone
It was 1980. I was sitting on a beat-up unmatched hard wooden chair inside the Motion Lounge playing cards with the crew and breathing in secondhand smoke when Sonny Black walked in with Big Joey Massino. I had been undercover for five years, and had been a part of Sonny Black’s crew for about a year. From the minute I went undercover I knew that sooner or later I could come face-to-face with somebody I had locked up and it could mean death for me. A scare had already happened once before during my first six months undercover when I was with Jilly Greca’s crew in the Colombo family in Brooklyn. I crossed paths with another guy named Joe I had also locked up—but he wasn’t a made guy and he wasn’t a very bright guy and he gave me no notice. But Big Joey Massino was far from dumb. As a soldier before he got promoted to capo, he had headed a world-class hijacking ring. It was in that setting that I first made Big
Joey’s acquaintance.
Hijacking, in the sense that I’m using it here, is a term for the robbery of big tractor-trailers and their loads of consumer goods. Hijacking was a Mafia monopoly. There was no freelance hijacking permitted in New York City. A criminal couldn’t just go out and decide to hijack a truck because, if he did, he’d have to deal with both the Mafia and law enforcement (mostly the FBI, but also the local police.) And guess who the would-be freelance hijacker was more afraid of? The five New York Mafia families—Bonanno, Genovese, Gambino, Colombo, and Lucchese—controlled the lucrative business of hijacking and they let nobody else in on the racket. Irish need not apply—unless Mafia-approved. The top hijacking crews in the city when I was working straight-up as an agent in hijacking in 1973 were crews belonging to the then-soldiers Big Joey Massino, Sonny Black, and John Gotti. Because they were part of the Mafia, all those crews had to deal with was the FBI. It was their job to steal a load, sell it, and keep one step ahead of us.
When Sonny Black walked in the door in 1980 with Big Joey Massino—all of three hundred pounds of capo—I had no options. I couldn’t keep one step ahead of anybody. I was in a room full of gangsters with only one way out, and that was the way Big Joey came in. I was a sitting duck. Could my luck hold up twice against the Joes of the underworld who might recognize me?
Big Joey and Sonny had on new black leather jackets I recognized from a load of swag (stolen goods) we had just gotten in. But matching jackets was where any physical similarity between the two ended. Sonny was in relatively good shape. In fact, he and I used to work out together. Big Joey Massino, on the other hand, was known as “Big” Joey because of his girth. I doubted he could button his new jacket. But fat or not, he was a powerful cold-blooded killer and a made man who had made his bones—that is, committed murder, turned a human being into a pile of bones—many times over.
Like I said, in 1973, a couple of years before I went undercover, I had been working straight up as a street agent in the hijacking squad. Seven years before Big Joey walked into the Motion Lounge, I had been part of an eight-man FBI team that raided a warehouse and arrested the hijackers, including their crew leader, Big Joey Massino. I couldn’t remember if I had actually put the cuffs on Big Joey or handled him during the booking and fingerprinting process at the FBI office in New York City on East 69th Street. At any rate, when he walked into the Motion Lounge, I recognized Big Joey instantly. You couldn’t miss him if you tried.
As I sat there on that hard seat gambling with my fellow crewmembers, I had one main hope stirring inside me—that Big Joey, like the other Joe, would not recognize me. The only problem is that these guys make it their business to study the faces of agents and cops. That way they can recognize them in the future. Because the possibility that he had once studied my face ate at my gut, I also had a fall-back hope. I hoped that if Big Joey did recognize me he had a clear-cut memory that I was an FBI agent, the last person on earth the Mafia should get caught killing.
The last thing on earth I wanted was for Big Joey to have a less-than-clear-cut memory, a memory that was twisted in some way harmful to me. For example, if he saw me sitting there playing cards and had a memory that he had seen me before consorting with the G (what they called the government), like a suspected rat I could have a secret and silent problem. He could secretly communicate that vague memory to Sonny Black and insist that I be whacked on the spot on mere suspicion alone. Or he could wait a day or two to communicate that thought. And Sonny could wait a day or two to act on that communication. People could sit down and talk about their own suspicions of me and I would have no idea. I would walk into the Motion Lounge in a day or two and never walk out.
When I first started hanging around the Mafia joints, sitting at the bar drinking, waiting to be included in their conversations, hoping to impress them with my knowledge of jewelry itself and the heisting and fencing of jewelry, I wore a mustache. Ordinarily a mustache was not allowed in the FBI, but since I was the first agent to go under on a long-term basis they let me wear a mustache. I thought it was a good idea to wear one in case I ran into anyone who might recognize me from before I went under. By the time I met Lefty Guns Ruggiero I had an eight-month-old mustache and had gotten used to it. But when I came under Lefty the Bonanno soldier’s domain, he ordered me to shave it. The Mafia, like the FBI, wants its men clean-shaven. So there I was as clean-shaven as an FBI agent. I didn’t even have a mustache to hide behind.
The only thing I had going for me besides the passage of time was that over the years I had begun to look like a wiseguy, even though I wasn’t one yet in the strict sense of having been made. My face had the look. And not all wiseguys have it. There’s something about the look on certain wiseguys that dominates their features. The nose and chin and other distinguishing characteristics take a back seat to that look. It’s not even a menacing look. It might be that it’s a quiet, supreme confidence, along with a studied secretiveness, a mouth that doesn’t move much, and eyes that are always aware without staring. It’s a face that says: I’m always scheming and I’m always right and you’re always wrong.
Then the moment of truth arrived. Everybody in the room knew Big Joey Massino except me.
“Joey, Donnie is a friend of mine,” Sonny said.
“What do you say, Joey,” I said looking up from my cards and into his eyes. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Donnie,” is all Big Joey said.
There was no don’t-I-know-you-from-somewhere look or question. Big Joey the hijacker gave no hint of awareness that he was looking at anyone he recognized from anywhere else. Big Joey and Sonny settled in at a table in the corner to huddle over whatever. They looked as deadly serious as they could look, at least to me. Looking back, I wonder if maybe they were already plotting the historic hit on the three Bonanno capos, which came about a year later.
For me, there was no sigh of relief, not even on the inside. My gut still gnawed. With my poker face I settled back into my card game. I waited a few minutes and looked at my watch.
“I’ve got to call my girlfriend,” I said and laid my cards down. “I’ll be back.” I went outside as if to use the outside payphone, waited a half second, and quickly walked back in to see if I had suddenly interrupted any conversation that was going on behind my back. Everything appeared normal, which was the best I could have hoped for.
“I just remembered, she’s working tonight,” I said. “Deal me in.”
My luck held up; Big Joey never did make me.
My participation in Mafia hijacking has always been an open sore for me, something I have hesitated to talk about until now. Any involvement in hijacking was very much unauthorized by the Bureau. Before I went under I had targeted the hijackers, and at any moment during my years under I could have found myself being targeted by the hijackers. Meanwhile, I had to prove myself to the hijackers, which I did. And the personal risks involved to me, both from the Mafia and from the law, were worth what I had to do for the sake of the mission. How else could an undercover agent possibly do it? What did the Bureau expect when they put me under and extended my operation from a six-month stint
to an indefinite period as I produced results? In order to work a single day undercover as a criminal and a gangster I had to gain the trust of the criminals and the gangsters, and there is only one way to do that. You’ve got to do what they do. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
An actual hijacking works in one of two ways: a give up or a take away. In a give up, the corrupt truck driver lets the wiseguys know that he will have a particular load available for a staged hijacking. A quiet place along the driver’s normal route is predetermined for the give-up hijacking, usually in an industrial area. The driver gets out with the motor running and gives up the load. He also gives up his driver’s license.
The purpose of taking a driver’s license in a real take-away hijacking is to scare the driver into not ever identifying his hijackers. You know where he lives and he knows you know where he lives once you take his driver’s license with his address on it. In a give up, the driver doesn’t need to be scared, but the license is taken so that it looks like a real hijacking to the police or the FBI.
You’d have a pistola with you, but there’d be no reason to flash it on a give up. You’d carry a gun because you’re a gangster and that’s what gangsters do. You never know what’s going to happen. Sometimes the driver asks to be cracked and somebody gives him a shot in the jaw to give him a bruise. Later on he’d get $500 or $1,000 depending on who he was hooked in with. For a very profitable load he might get as much as $5,000.
The take away is basically the same thing except that the driver is not in on it beforehand. There is usually inside information, maybe from the driver’s company, that he will be on such and such a route. The driver might be in a diner eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and somebody keeps an eye on him while his rig is stolen. It’s wired up in no time; just open the door and start it up. The doors are rarely locked because they’d rather that you take it when it’s parked than take it from them at a red light. Unless it’s a diesel, which gives the driver no option but to lock it. It’s not good for the engine on a diesel to start and stop. Diesel tractors are started up for the night and not shut off. So if he’s driving a diesel he’s got it running while he’s inside eating and his rig is locked. In the case of a diesel, he might be stopped on his way out of the diner. A jacket is opened to reveal a gun and the driver automatically hands over his keys and license. The truck drivers want no trouble, and neither do the wiseguys.
Even a take-away hijacking at a red light, a traditional armed robbery, is done very smoothly. It’s done in a location with little or no car traffic, again in an industrial area. The wiseguys will watch a place such as a trucking depot or truck traffic at the waterfront docks. They especially watch for refrigerated trucks. Then they follow the truck to a red light. One guy gets up on the passenger side and flashes a pistola. Another guy gets up on the driver’s side and confronts the driver. This guy on the driver’s side takes the driver out of the tractor with the tractor still running, gets the driver’s license, and gets back in behind the wheel. This guy on the driver’s side is always the one indispensable guy who can drive a big rig. Coincidentally, I worked my way through college by driving eighteen-wheelers. The other guy gets in from the passenger side.
When the light turns green they drive away. Meanwhile, there is a car with two or three crewmembers in it right behind the tractor-trailer. The trail car follows the tractor-trailer to the drop, runs interference all the way, and keeps a lookout for cops. Everybody is careful to obey the traffic laws.
The drop is a big empty warehouse or a garage in an industrial area. If law enforcement doesn’t burn the drop, it would be used again and again. The rig with its load will stay at the drop for as short a time as possible.
One lucrative load of the day was coffee, like Maxwell House in cans, ready to be put on the shelf. Shrimp, for some reason, having more to do with who the inside contacts were, was a big item then. The Mafia totally controlled the Fulton Fish Market near the Brooklyn Bridge. It was natural for a Mafia-controlled fish wholesaler to sell a load of shrimp and then tip off a hijacking crew and arrange for the load to be hijacked back so they could sell it again. Clothing was big, like men’s suits, and so were over-the-counter pharmaceuticals like shaving cream, deodorant, aspirin and the like. Yes, like in the movies, even Schick razor blades were a targeted score.
A typical load that I might be involved in was worth eight hundred thousand to a million dollars at retail. The crew boss, typically a soldier, would get close to half of that when he sold it as swag. He would come along on the hijacking and be the man in charge. But nobody higher than a soldier would ever go out on a hijacking. The crewmembers, almost always mere associates, would get a few thousand for their effort.
In the Mafia, all money flows upstream. So the boss of the crew, a soldier, would usually have to float half of the money upstream to his capo and so on, all the way to the top. If a crew boss got caught lying about how much money he got for a particular load, he’d get whacked. But they did take the chance and lie on occasion to their capos if they needed money, say for their own gambling debts, or if they had some real sucker pay more than the going rate for a load of whatever.
Also, before the crew boss went out on a hijacking or did any kind of other criminal score, he had to get approval from his capo. That way the capo knew to expect an envelope with money in it. If a crew boss got caught doing a score without first telling his capo, the crew boss might be given a chance to explain, but he might not. The penalty for doing it again would certainly be death.
Lots of times the load would be sold in advance of the hijacking. There was a supermarket manager in Queens, for example, who let the crew I was with know that he would take all that the crew could deliver. In that case, the rig would be brazenly driven from the hijacking right to the supermarket where it would be left there for the manager to unload. The manager would stock the shelves with his new inventory and sell it, pocketing the money himself. The manager, or one of his men, would then “dump out” the entire rig, parking the tractor and attached trailer on a city street to be found later, again in an industrial area.
If the load weren’t pre-sold, the whole rig would be driven right into the warehouse drop and then all those involved in the hijacking would take off. The load would be watched for a day or two to make sure that a snitch had not given it up. It would be unloaded as it was sold, and then the rig would be dumped out. If the whole load got sold as is, often the buyer would come with his own tractor and pick up the trailer, putting a different license plate on the back of the trailer. Our crew would then take the stolen tractor and dump it out on the street. Whoever bought the load would dump out the trailer after they emptied it at their own store. And nobody had to tell anybody how it was done or what to do. It was all strictly routine.
When I was on the lawful side of hijacking in 1973, we were losing eight loads a day to the Big Joey Massino, Sonny Black, and John Gotti crews. They tore us up. We had snitches that particular agents had cultivated. The snitch might be working off criminal charges or he might be getting thousands of dollars for his information. Or both. We had good snitches inside the crews. Still, we were lucky to recover all or parts of only half of all the loads that were stolen. And we never knew whether what we were recovering consisted of loads or parts of loads that couldn’t be sold anyway—in which case we were the ones buying the swag.
If as a straight-up street agent I ever paid an informant for swag, it certainly wouldn’t have been the first swag I ever bought. I grew up in a neighborhood in Paterson, New Jersey, which is basically a suburb of New York City. In any gin mill you hung out in, somebody always had swag for sale. You could get your complete wardrobe in a neighborhood bar: shoes, pants, shirts, even underwear and socks. The suit I wore my first day to the FBI was swag. I had bought it years earlier. The buying of swag stopped for me when I went into naval intelligence before the FBI, but I still had the suit and it was a nice suit.
As an undercover agent you try not to br
eak the law, but as I said, I had to fit in and stay in character in order to stay alive. There are only so many times you can bring in gold watches and precious stones and claim you stole them. You’re going to have to be a team player, leave the social club, and go out in the street with your fellow teammates. You have to cut off whatever personal feelings you have about crime and crime victims, the feelings that drew you to law enforcement in the first place. And you have to justify your actions by rationalizing that as long as you’re there at a hijacking with men with guns on them, at least you’re in a position to prevent violence to innocent victims.
I left Jilly Greca’s Colombo crew and cultivated Bonanno family connections, in part, because the Colombos had more of a cowboy mentality. I couldn’t be in a position where random violence for the sake of violence was likely to occur. The Colombos I was with tended to do a lot of house burglaries. Usually, some drug addict son of well-off parents would tell his drug dealer where the valuables were kept, how to get in, and when his parents would return from their travels. The drug dealer would then tell his drug trafficker, usually a connected or made Mafia guy. The kid would get a small cut from the score, which he would put right into his veins or up his nose. But these house burglaries were one-shot deals, usually done on Long Island, and they were fraught with danger. I got the feeling that the least valued and most expendable crewmembers did more of the house burglaries.
You do too many house burglaries and it’s only a matter of time before you have to take a bust. If local cops cruised by at the wrong time and I got arrested hauling a safe out of a house, I never knew how the local district attorney would treat me. What if the local Mafia family controlled the local DA? Worse, who knew what spontaneous violence would happen if the parents walked in the door unexpectedly and surprised us? I think house burglaries should be classified as crimes of violence. A lot of murders occur during house burglaries gone wrong. I might not be able to act quickly enough to prevent a sudden killing of a homeowner. In addition to having such a thing on my conscience, I’d be guilty of felony murder. Everybody in on the burglary would be guilty of any death that occurred.