Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business

by Joe Pistone

  Bingo, bingo, bingo. “The Bonanno family” is seen once again engaged in a pattern of racketeering and agreeing to commit murder.

  In Florida, during the time of that very last meeting with Sonny Black and Santo Trafficante, I had a brief conversation with Nicky Santora in a coffee shop. Since it was the last day of Donnie Brasco’s life, I could risk being blunt in asking nosey questions. I knew from Lefty that Nicky had been present at the May 5th hit, and I asked Nicky what the hit on the capos was like. I mentioned that Lefty had told me that after they hit Big Trin in the gut with a shotgun blast, his body was too big and heavy for Lefty to move. Nicky said, “You should have seen when they shot him; fifty pounds of his stomach went flying.”

  Both Lefty and Nicky had made jokes in front of me regarding a Zip who was brought in as one of the shooters in the three capos’ hit. His name was Santo Giordano. During the blaze of guns, Santo Giordano had been accidentally shot by friendly fire. The shooting left Santo Giordano permanently paralyzed, and that goof-up was a source of comedy for Lefty and Nicky. Barbara, Louis, and I were confident that when I testified about Lefty and Nicky’s wisecracks, the jury would be unlikely to find them as funny as Lefty and Nicky had.

  Two days before I took the stand to provide all this detailed testimony, an informant in Buffalo told the FBI field office in Buffalo that the Commission had decided to hit my wife and daughters because the Commission couldn’t get to me. Was this true or was it timed to rattle me before I took the stand? Either way, I took it seriously. At the time, my family was in an unknown locale under an assumed name; but no secret is impossible to find out. I thought of the Zips and how they killed the wives and children of informers in Sicily.

  As soon as Jules told me the shocking news that my family was in jeopardy, I told the lead prosecutor in the Bonanno family trial, Barbara Jones, that I was going to the White House to pay a visit to Big Paul Castellano, the so-called Boss of Bosses, to inform him that “if anybody touches my wife or kids or any other member of my family, I will go after you personally. I will kill you myself.” I told Barbara that I had no intention of hurting her case, but that ultimately my family came first. Barbara said that she wished I wouldn’t go, but that she couldn’t tell me “who to talk to and who not to talk to.”

  Jules assured me that he would handle it, and he sent agents to see Big Paul. If I couldn’t be there to do it myself, I hoped that one of the agents would tell Big Paul what I’d said—that I would hold him personally responsible and that I would kill him if any member of my family had any problems from anybody.

  Big Paul assured the agents that nothing would ever happen to my wife and children or any other member of my family. I believed him because we both knew my family had not crossed over the line into their territory. I was the only one who had done that. I believed him because Big Paul had neglected to include me in the assurance he gave to the agents who visited him. The failure to take the bull’s-eye off my back boosted his credibility for me in this matter. We already knew from informants that despite the earlier visits by the agents to the heads of the five families, the contract on my life had not been lifted.

  For the first time, the moment I took the witness stand and went under oath, I proudly announced my real name—Special Agent Joseph D. Pistone—to the Mafia and the media. After I testified, directly recounting the defendants’ criminal incidents and the defendants’ statements that supported our RICO indictment, each one of the defense attorneys took turns cross-examining me, working me over in ways that are no longer even permitted for cops who interrogate criminals. Looking back, maybe subconsciously to keep my serenity, I may have made believe I wasn’t Italian.

  During the cross-examination of me, one of the defense attorneys brought out a tape recording that occurred while Lefty and Tony Mirra fought over who had the rights to me. The tape included these two lines of my conversation with Lefty:

  “Mirra wants to get you killed,” Lefty said.

  “Why don’t we just kill him?” I said.

  This cross-examination was designed to embarrass me and make me look bad in the jury’s eyes—to make me look like a killer. But you have to wonder what the defense attorney was thinking. If I was serious in saying that to Lefty, then wasn’t Lefty also being branded a serious killer in the eyes of the jury?

  I always tried to keep my answers simple. Lefty had unwittingly given me expert advice on how to testify when, at that midnight meeting at Lynn’s bar, he had prepared me for my meeting with Mike Sabella after the fiasco over Tony Conte’s disappearance following the bogus art theft in Chicago. Keeping it simple, I said what should have been obvious to anyone: that my suggestion that we kill Mirra was made to enhance my credibility with Lefty. In my role as a wiseguy, that is what I would be expected to say. Their world is all about retaliation. Besides, I knew Lefty would not and could not kill Mirra, a made man, a soldier with his own capo, without getting approval for the hit at the top levels of the family, and maybe getting himself hit for even asking. Clearly, the statement—“Why don’t we just kill him?”—was tactical and not practical.

  A related topic on which the defense lawyers cross-examined me was Mirra’s charge that I had stolen $250,000 in drug money. The timing in this cross-examination couldn’t have been worse. My wife, under the circumstances, had gotten used to making important decisions without consulting me. The very day I was grilled about stealing $250,000 is the day my wife went out and bought a new car without telling me. My sole enemy in the Bureau had a field day with that coincidence. He wanted to open an investigation into the matter that would be conducted by inspectors from the Bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility, the FBI’s equivalent of Internal Affairs in the NYPD. I was still on the witness stand when Jules told me about this situation. He had to nip that in the bud. I can laugh now, but there was nothing funny about it at the time.

  I was on the witness stand for over two weeks in that first case, with Lefty giving me the evil eye throughout. We heard from his cellmate that, after my first day on the witness stand, Lefty said, “I’ll get that motherfucker Donnie if it’s the last thing I do.” A bystander in the audience looked at me and pulled an imaginary trigger. We had him barred from the courthouse.

  During a recess on August 12, 1982, while I was still on the witness stand, we got the news that Sonny’s body had been identified. A body had been found nine months earlier in Mariner’s Harbor, Staten Island, with both hands chopped off at the wrist. It was now confirmed that that body was Sonny Black’s. On the one hand, I was sad for the mess Sonny had made of his life by volunteering to join the Mafia. On the other hand, I was glad for his family that they finally had proof that he was dead.

  The jury returned its verdict on August 27, 1982. All the Bonanno family defendants were convicted except Boobie Cerasani, who was acquitted by a fluke. The jury had voted to acquit him on one count, and to convict him on all the rest, but they didn’t understand the jury form and checked acquittal as to all counts for him. After the trial, when they realized what they had done, a couple of jurors tried to get the judge to change Boobie’s verdict to guilty on all but one charge. It was too late for that, and Boobie skated, for the time being.

  Out of the Bonanno family trial, Lefty got a 15-year sentence. Nicky Santoro got a 15-year sentence. Mr. Fish Rabito got a 13-year sentence. The rest got sentences of less than ten years. Sonny Black would have been convicted, but. . . .Tony Mirra would have been convicted, but. . . .

  It was a joyous victory for the prosecution team, the Bureau, the Department of Justice, and all the agents and cops who did the often-tedious investigations, interviews, cultivation of informants, and physical and electronic surveillance such a case demands. A jubilee was held in a church hall across the way from the federal courthouse. I put in an appearance, but I can’t explain how I felt. As gratified as I was, I just didn’t feel like celebrating. Maybe the only reservation I had about what I had done to Sonny and Lefty was that I saw no reaso
n to gloat about it. My team won the game and their team paid the price.

  Also, I think it’s like when you see news clips of prisoners of war getting off a plane. You see their families greeting them on the tarmac and looking far more celebratory than they do. I don’t want to exaggerate, but in a funny way, I had been a prisoner of war for six years. And I still wasn’t out. There were many more trials to go.

  CHAPTER 8

  ON THE ROAD

  LIKE MOST PEOPLE, when I think of the Mafia, I think of New York City, and not just because I was with two New York families, the Colombo and the Bonanno. When Hollywood makes a movie about the Mafia, it is invariably about the Mafia families in New York City—Goodfellas, Mean Streets, The Godfather, and that movie with Johnny Depp and Al Pacino.

  As everyone now knows, there are Mafia families throughout the country. But these families are tiny compared to the five New York City families. Places like San Francisco or St. Louis, at their peak, had maybe a dozen or so made men. The closest in size and power to a single New York family is the Chicago family, but Chicago has only one family, and Chicago itself is one-fifth the size of New York.

  When the ruling Commission of the Mafia was established in 1931, it was comprised of seven bosses: the bosses of the five New York families, the Chicago boss, and the Buffalo boss. In time, the Commission pared down and evolved into just the five New York families. Off and on starting in the 1960s, it would go down to four of the five whenever the Bonanno family would get into trouble and get the boot. They were the only New York family to ever get the boot. And when that would happen, the Bonanno family would not only lose its vote, but the Bonanno boss would lose out on their share of any joint ventures the other families’ bosses would have going. This isn’t money that had to flow upstream; it was already upstream, and it was big money.

  You have to understand that when the Commission was formed and the country was split up into about 27 families, one of the main motivating factors in doing so was self-preservation of the bosses. Sure, the Commission was intended to settle disputes like a warped United Nations—keep the bloodshed from arousing the public—and maybe it has over the years. But there’s also been a lot of talk about the Commission being formed to function like a board of directors of a corporation. Yet I don’t see the bosses looking out for the Mafia per se like a board of directors looks out for a corporation. I see the bosses looking out for themselves when they formed the Commission. With a Commission in place, unless an ambitious capo had Commission members on his side, he would be hard-pressed to kill his boss and take over because the Commission would come down on him. If the kings in Europe got together and formed a Commission of kings a few hundred years ago, there might still be a few kings in power overseas.

  Unless the Commission itself sanctioned a hit on a boss, or sanctioned a takeover of a family whose boss was in jail, nobody had better try. When Philly boss Angelo “the Docile Don” Bruno was whacked in 1980, each of the Philly family capos involved was tortured and killed, some with money stuffed in their mouths to signify their greed. When Carmine Galante got out of jail and asserted himself as Bonanno boss while the official boss, Rusty Rastelli, was in jail, Carmine got whacked. None of the bosses on the Commission wanted to condone the concept that a boss could be deprived of his lucrative position just because he ended up in the can. After all, if not for the Commission, they could be next.

  When I was under, in addition to the five New York families who comprised the Mafia Commission, all the old-time bosses of the families within driving distance from the city gravitated around New York and formed partnerships and alliances with the New York bosses. During my time with the Bonanno family, Philly boss Angelo Bruno and New Jersey boss Sam “the Plumber” DeCavalcante were known to be very close to the Commission bosses. Northeastern Pennsylvania boss Russell Bufalino kept a hotel suite in New York and owned a Mafia hangout in the theater district, the Vesuvio Restaurant. Bufalino would drive over two hours to New York every Thursday with Frank Sheeran. On occasion, I would be asked by Jules to drop in at the Vesuvio to try to pick up whatever intelligence I could, as Bufalino was known to be very close to the Genovese family.

  When I surfaced in 1981, the eyes and ears of the Commission were fixed on the Bonanno family. The Bonanno bosses were humiliated and the family got the boot, which really meant that the boss, Rusty Rastelli, got punished because his underlings had allowed me to infiltrate and spy.The Bonannos would stay off the Commission until soon after 1991, when Big Joey Massino replaced Rusty Rastelli as boss. Big Joey got upped to boss, the proper way, when Rusty died in prison. At the time he died, Rusty Rastelli was serving a sentence based on a conviction from a trial in which I had testified, and Big Joey was still in jail as a result of the same trial.

  Big Joey Massino got out of jail in November 1992 and resurrected the family’s stature and reputation in the 1990s and into the next century. Big Joey, with the help of his underboss and brother-in-law, Good-looking Sal Vitale, epitomized the old school New York City Mafia gangster and ran the Bonanno family in an old-school New York City style in the decade from 1993 to 2003. Big Joey had gotten his back up off the canvas in 1993 and began winning rounds. The press routinely referred to him as “The Last Don.” In that decade, the Bonanno family was the only family that did not have a single made man roll over and become a cooperating witness for the government.

  I had to watch from the sidelines while all the damage I did to the Bonannos—at the Bonanno family trial, a racketeering trial involving Local 814, and the Pizza Connection Case heroin trafficking trial—seemed to get quickly repaired after Big Joey Massino got out of jail in 1992. It was frustrating to see the family doing so well in what Lefty called “the underworld field.”

  From the beginning, even before I came out and we began to assess what we had, Jules and I literally dreamed of a day when we would go after the heads of the five New York families in one major trial. It would be a monumental task and lots of work needed to be done by other undercover agents and cops, electronic surveillance experts, straight-up agents in the FBI, detectives in the NYPD and the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, and federal and local prosecutors. Like the team that makes a movie happen, everybody would have to work diligently in their own role for such a trial to ever take place. We had our vision, and we had the RICO law, and we were all determined.

  Until that dream could come true we had plenty of other work to do to complete the unfinished business of the Donnie Brasco operation.

  Despite the importance of New York City to the Mafia, there always was and still is a Mafia criminal enterprise spread north into places like New England, Buffalo, and Canada; south into Florida and New Orleans; midwest into Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and even Youngstown, Ohio; and west into Arizona, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area.

  Trying to make a dent in all this, we moved on to Milwaukee with our RICO theory battle-tested and proven to be an effective weapon against the Mafia. In Milwaukee we would be using RICO to go after a family boss for the first time. Remember, we couldn’t go after the Bonanno family boss, Rusty Rastelli, because he had been in jail the whole time I was under and gathering evidence. However, I had had direct contact with Frank Balistrieri, the boss of the Milwaukee family, as well as his brother, his two sons, and his underboss.

  In Milwaukee, before we took the Balistrieris to trial, the prosecutor asked me to go down to the lockup and talk to Lefty to see if I could get him to turn. I think the prosecutor thought we needed more evidence against Mike Sabella, the former Bonanno capo under Carmine Galante who had first met with the Chicago made men as an entrée to Balistrieri. I had had no direct involvement with Mike Sabella on the paving of the road to Milwaukee for Lefty, the other undercover Tony Conte, and me. That was a definite hole in the case against Sabella.

  “Lefty turn? I wish,” I said. “There’s no way Lefty will ever turn. At least not for me. Lefty hates my gut
s with a passion. One look at me and he’d be more inflamed. Besides, he thinks I’m the gangster, not him. Lefty’s just not built that way; he’d rather die.”

  The prosecutor decided to try to talk to Lefty himself. He went down to the lockup and asked Lefty if he would agree to talk to me. Lefty let out a stream of expletives that made it clear that he would kill me if he could get his hands on me. Years later, Lefty got cancer in the only lung he had left. The English Ovals he smoked nonstop had caught up with him. Rather than have to take care of him in prison, the feds released him to die at home in 1993. We learned from an informant that Lefty had gone straight to Big Joey Massino, who was boss at the time and had just gotten out of jail himself, and asked Big Joey to order somebody to whack me. Agents went to Lefty and, while he denied that he had done such a thing, he wasn’t very convincing. When the agents went to Big Joey, the boss only said, “Don’t worry about it. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  Our primary theory in Milwaukee was that Balistrieri was the boss of the criminal enterprise known as the Balistrieri family of the Mafia, and that he had partnered with the Bonanno family in the persons of Lefty, Mike Sabella, and Donnie Brasco to coerce saloons and restaurants to use only the partnerships’ vending machines—or else. The underlying crime here was extortion. Balistrieri’s underboss, Steve DiSalvo, took part in the planning of the partnership. Balistrieri’s sons, John and Joseph, both lawyers, drew up the legal agreements and also played active roles in the planning of the partnership.

  In front of the jury when I was on the witness stand, Balistrieri’s lawyer badgered me to answer the question of where I lived. Of course, I wouldn’t answer any part of that question. He went from asking me to reveal my address to asking for the city in which my family and I lived, to asking for the state, then finally to asking for the region of the country. I refused to answer each and every time he asked. Again, I wondered what this belligerent defense attorney thought the jury would be thinking. Clearly, every time I refused to answer where I lived, the jury understood why I was refusing—his client was a dangerous Mafia boss, that’s why. But the lawyer went on, I guess scoring points in the eyes of his beaming, belligerent client. Maybe he was trying to send a threat to the jury implying that if I were afraid to give my address, they should be afraid to convict.