Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business

by Joe Pistone

  Finally, the judge took a recess and ruled that I could give the false answer of “California,” because that was the state that the gangsters I dealt with thought I was from. Before we brought the jury back in, the judge was handed a slip of paper by one of the court bailiffs. It was a note from the jury asking the judge to instruct the lawyer to stop badgering the witness.

  Despite a tremendous effort by the prosecutor, we lost Mike Sabella. His attorney wisely disassociated himself from the rest of the defense, and our case against Sabella, in those early days, was unique. RICO was such a new concept that things like jury instructions were still being fine-tuned. I don’t think the jury understood the idea that, for us in the Bonanno family to go into another family’s territory, we had to get permission, and that Mike Sabella securing this permission was a crucial part of the pattern of racketeering.

  Everyone else was convicted. Milwaukee boss Frank Balistrieri got 13 years at his sentencing in 1984. After that trial, I supplied intelligence and background against him for a trial in Kansas City involving the skim from Las Vegas, based on the errand-boy job he had offered me to pick up the skim and deliver it to Kansas City. He got another 10 years in Kansas City.

  My contribution in Kansas City was behind-the-scenes, but it still felt the same to make some contribution that led to bad news for the Mafia. With the huge contribution of bugs and the defection of the president of the Teamsters union, Roy Williams, as a cooperating witness, the government prosecutors in Kansas City nailed the bosses of Kansas City and Chicago, in addition to Balistrieri.

  The Vegas skim had been the bosses’ biggest source of money since it didn’t have to flow upstream; it already was upstream. Errand boys reporting directly to the bosses for years had been walking into counting rooms in Las Vegas with empty suitcases and walking out with hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Now it was over. They could skim in the future, but not as systematically, blatantly, or as lucratively. And not for long.

  Out of the Milwaukee trial, Lefty got more time, boosting his total to 20 years. Underboss Steve DiSalvo and Balistrieri’s subservient lawyer sons, John and Joseph, each got 8 years.The brothers closed their law practice and were disbarred. Years later I heard from an agent in Milwaukee that one of the sons got his license back and is again practicing in Milwaukee.

  Noted crime writer and Mafia authority, Jerry Capeci, wrote in his Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Mafia,2nd Edition, that when Balistrieri was released prematurely from prison due to ill health, and soon after died, his daughter Benedetta sued her brother Joseph claiming that the son had grabbed the father’s stash of hidden cash and refused to declare it as part of the estate and share it with her. Joseph called his sister “pathetic.” Jerry Capeci also observed that after Balistrieri got released early and died, “A few members soldiered on, but for all intents and purposes, the small Milwaukee family was done.”

  Again, I was inwardly proud of the job the undercovers known as Tony Conte and Donnie Brasco, and our FBI handlers, had done. We permanently brought down two families: the Milwaukee Mafia family (led by Frank Balistrieri), and the Balistrieri family of Mafia members. We also exposed the Chicago family as the seat of power in that part of the country. And, for the first time ever, prosecutors applied RICO to a Mafia boss and nailed him with it. This fact alone was a huge advance in the fight against the Mafia. With this success, we were one step closer to applying RICO to all the bosses sitting on the Commission.

  Next we turned to the grand jury in Florida. Because we had so much evidence in Tampa, the U.S. Attorney in Miami decided not to indict anyone for the crimes we had against them in Miami. My impression during that time frame was that the RICO law was such a novel concept that it might have influenced prosecutorial decisions.

  When the indictment came down in Tampa, it triggered the bribed cop, Captain Joseph Donahue, to kill himself. It was sad. He was a small fish in a sea of sharks, but as with the rest, he volunteered to be a crook with a badge. No draft board drafted him.

  Meanwhile, we had a very big fish on the line in Tampa. Santo Trafficante had been a major Mafia power his whole life. His father had run the Tampa family and, upon his death from natural causes, the title of boss went to Santo. Santo had a hand in nearly every major moment of Mafia history in the last half of the twentieth century. Santo Trafficante had been arrested at the famous Apalachin meeting in New York state in 1957 (where he was arrested with 56 other mobsters during a convention to discuss Mafia power hierarchy). He was in Cuba when Castro’s revolution prevailed; Castro confiscated Trafficante’s gambling and property interests and tossed him in jail. Trafficante admitted that he was an active participant in the CIA-Mafia plot to assassinate Castro, as well as in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Trafficante is still suspected of being involved in the assassination of JFK. Trafficante was arrested with a number of Mafia bosses in the Stella Restaurant in Queens in what came to be known as the Little Apalachin meeting. And, of course, Trafficante was ensnared in the Donnie Brasco operation, the first FBI deep penetration of the Mafia.

  Despite this high profile, Santo Trafficante had never been jailed in the United States. We couldn’t wait to bring that towering figure down.

  But we would never get the chance. Almost from the outset, Trafficante realized he was done for. His health began to fail and, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1987, he finally died, never to have gone to trial on the case that would have nailed him and jailed him. In the end, we took plea bargains from Boobie Cerasani, who had skated on a fluke in the Bonanno family trial, and from Trafficante’s right hand man, the white-haired Benny Husick. In federal court in Tampa, Boobie got five years and Benny got three years.

  Back in New York, then-capo Big Joey Massino had returned from his two-year exile in the Pocono Mountains. The U.S. Attorney’s Office, under the tough and talented prosecutor Laura Brevetti, had put together a RICO case against capo Massino, boss Rusty Rastelli, and former underboss Nicky Glasses Marangello; the top officers of Local 814 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union that was supposed to be representing the moving and storage industry workers in New York; and officers of three of the big New York moving companies.

  Massino, Marangello, and Rastelli were accused of being in league with the Local 814 officers in charging the moving companies an under-the-table premium for labor peace. The criminal payoff scheme guaranteed no strikes, no fire bombings, no beatings, and in some cases, the right to hire nonunion workers and fire union workers. The money for the payoffs was put together through rigged bids that inflated the cost of moving jobs and by paychecks for employees who didn’t exist. The Local 814 union bosses split the payoffs they received from the moving companies with the Bonanno bosses. Because Rusty was in jail, his share was given to his brother Carmine, who just happened to be a Local 814 shop steward—that is, an officer whose job it was to represent and protect his union brothers and sisters.

  The moving company officers were charged in the indictment with rigging bids. Ironically, one of the moving companies involved had moved the FBI from its offices on East 69th Street to the Federal Plaza downtown. Due to a rigged bidding process, the company was able to overcharge the FBI $5,000, which was split with the Local 814 officers and the Bonanno family officers. This was actually one of the predicate crimes charged in the applicable RICO case.

  Although I had no first-hand experience with the underlying criminal acts, I had the opportunity of testifying in that trial for Laura Brevetti as an expert on the structure of the Mafia’s criminal enterprise, and on the functions and responsibilities of Rastelli, Marangello, and Massino in that enterprise.

  During the five-month trial, there was a lot of buzz about the planning of a movie based on the book, Donnie Brasco. At a recess, Big Joey asked me, “Donnie, who are you going to get to play me in the movie?”

  “That’s the trouble we’re having, Joey,” I said. “We can’t find an actor fat enough to play you.”

  I had the occasion on O
ctober 15, 1986 of seeing Rusty Rastelli become the first New York boss to go down—with a little help from the Donnie Brasco operation. Rusty Rastelli, then 69, got twelve years added to the sentence he was already serving. In effect, it was a life sentence by degrees. My old boss would die in jail in the summer of 1991. His eventual successor, Big Joey Massino, then 44, got a ten-year sentence. No doubt he’d miss the fresh mountain air of the Poconos and maybe wish he’d stayed away a little longer. Nicky Glasses Marangello, then 74, got an eight-year sentence, again, the equivalent of a life sentence. Rusty’s 65-year-old kid brother Carmine got six years.

  At the end of the Local 814 trial, one of the defense lawyers for one of the other defendants came to the authorities and told us that he heard Big Joey Massino mutter under his breath that he was going to put a contract out on Laura Brevetti. Laura took a well-earned vacation.

  Unfortunately, when we took Big Joey Massino to trial on the Bonanno family charges that he had lammed out on in 1982, we were dealing with a man whom I didn’t really know. Although Sonny had introduced me to him at the Motion Lounge, and I had been present for conversations involving Big Joey, I had never had a one-on-one conversation with him until that discussion about who would play him in the movie. His underboss and brother-in-law, Good-looking Sal Vitale, had been added to the indictment, and before I set foot in court I had never met him, either.

  The major predicate crime against the future Bonanno boss, but not his underboss, was a conspiracy to kill the three capos on May 5, 1981. This charge—conspiracy to kill—did not allege that Big Joey actually participated in the massacre itself. This distinction became important later on in the life and times of Big Joey Massino. Meanwhile, at this trial, my information had been limited to the things Lefty and Sonny told me about Big Joey’s participation, and neither one was in Big Joey Massino’s crew. Specifically, Sonny had told me that Big Joey vetoed my participation in the hit, and Lefty told me that Big Joey screwed up the job of burying Sonny Red’s body.

  In the end we didn’t have enough direct evidence against Big Joey, and he was found not guilty of the major conspiracy to kill the three capos. Big Joey Massino and Good-looking Sal Vitale were found guilty of the relatively minor charges based on evidence of crimes I had nothing to do with, but on appeal, in a legal test regarding interpretation of the new RICO law, the guilty verdicts on the charges they were convicted of were tossed out as being barred by the statute of limitations. It was a bitter pill. However, the court had scheduled the Local 814 case first. The moving company union case had gone to trial before Massino’s part of the Bonanno family case. So, I could take a little bit of consolation from the fact that we already had convicted Big Joey and he wasn’t walking.

  The man Lefty had called a “jerk-off ” had been smart to go on the lam and miss the first trial. That gave his lawyers a chance to study the trial transcripts and confer with the defense lawyers in the Bonanno family trial to learn their impressions of the witness’s demeanors, strengths, and weaknesses. By the time we took Massino to trial, his lawyers had seen all the government’s evidence in the first trial and could prepare for it.

  Watching him get paroled on the Local 814 case in 1992 and watching him take charge and rebuild the Bonanno family was one of the bad breaks of the operation. I couldn’t afford to take things like that personally. I had to keep moving on, not looking back. But Big Joey Massino belonged in jail for as long as we could put him in jail. That would come later.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE PIZZA CONNECTION, PART 1

  IN HIS BOOK, THE GOOD GUYS, Jules Bonavolonta wrote, “The press was calling it ‘the Pizza Connection Case.’ It was the product of a massive narcotics investigation. . . . The case had grown out of an effort that Joe Pistone and I had initiated back in 1982.”

  I agree with that statement. But I’d like to add that, by the time the case went to trial three years later in 1985, I believe the trial was the product of way more than “a massive narcotics investigation.” Jules and I might have planted the seed based on intelligence I had gathered, but the Pizza Connection Case grew to fruition through the tireless vision of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York—Rudy Giuliani—and his staff, especially Assistant United States Attorneys Louis Freeh and Robert Stewart.

  By the time the seeds of the Bonanno family narcotics intelligence I had gathered matured, it bloomed into one of the longest and most expensive criminal trials in American history, and the largest international heroin-smuggling case to this day.

  The intelligence that I passed along as I got it, often without knowing its full significance, concerned the Zips under Toto Catalano who worked on a stretch of Knickerbocker Avenue on the Queens-Brooklyn border. The FBI Special Agent in charge of Sicilian issues, Carmine Russo, called the intelligence I provided about the Zips, “an unbelievable revelation.”

  Some say the Sicilians got their nickname “Zips” because they talked fast in Italian, so fast that even the Italian-American gangsters who did speak Italian couldn’t keep up with them. Some say they got the nickname from a slang Sicilian word meaning peasant. Growing up in Paterson, I had heard Sicilians, including me, referred to as Zips. And since all Italians spoke fast Italian, not just the Sicilian Italians, I would go with the peasant theory. But one thing I knew, you didn’t call them Zips to their face.

  The Zips were fearsome, hardcore Mafia men who were made in Sicily before they ever got to New York and Knickerbocker Avenue. To understand the mindset of a Mafia soldier, you have to understand that his head is filled with a minestrone soup of motives to voluntarily surrender his freedom and his life to the Mafia, including but not limited to: (1) being under the umbrella of the boss’s political and legal connections, (2) being protected from other rival criminals, (3) being provided opportunities to make money that might be beyond his own intelligence or ability to make on his own, (4) being able to instill fear in those he deals with outside the family, and (5) being provided an opportunity to advance within the Mafia family structure and acquire the rewards of money, prestige, and power that are yours when you are made.

  The Zip in Sicily had these motives in spades. He did not live in a land of opportunity the way we know it, where Sicilians like Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio could not only prosper, but could be considered the best in their chosen fields. In Sicily, the padron owned the land and made the rules, and had done so for centuries. The common man was often a peasant who was the product of peasants since time immemorial. Political corruption abounded, and the government seemed to be in league with the powerful. The Mafia held out the hope of security, protection, and money way beyond a peasant’s dreams. And the peasants worked cheap.

  The Zips on Knickerbocker Avenue were born and raised to be secretive, clannish, and willing to do anything for the boss. That the Zips stuck together and did not mix well with the rest of the Bonanno family was one of only a million grudges and resentments the American Mafia held toward the Zips.

  My first contact with them was in my early days with the Bonanno family when I hung out with Tony Mirra. He took me to Nicky Glasses Marangello’s social club, Toyland, and pointed out the Zips, including Toto Catalano, Cesare Bonventre, and Baldo Amato. He told me that Toto was one of two Zip capos. The other was Sally Fruits Farrugia. He told me that Cesare Bonventre, a young, tall, good-looking ladies-man type, was related to Carmine Galante, and that Bonventre and Baldo Amato were Galante’s bodyguards. He explained that the Zips were brought into the country to wholesale heroin that Carmine Galante smuggled in from Sicily. This operation was Galante’s, and nobody shared in it. Galante took all the profit and used the Zips for hits.

  “They’re perfect for doing work,” Mirra explained, meaning murder. “Nobody knows them. They got no records. They keep to themselves. They are the meanest mothers around. They whack cops and judges. They’ll whack a little kid in the playground if the boss tells them.”

  I never asked questions about anything that didn
’t pertain directly to me, but I didn’t have to ask much about the Zips. The Zips were a bone of contention for the American Mafia members. The Americans hated the fact that the Zips were made in Sicily and came over here with letters of introduction and were put into the Bonanno family as made men with their own capos. Since Mafia soldiers like to complain, the information eventually found its way to my ears.

  “The boss set a lot of them up in junk,” Mirra told me. “They get the junk sent and distribute it to wherever the boss says.”

  This first bit of unbelievable intelligence that I provided about the Zips and heroin smuggling, was a “eureka” moment for the Bureau. We had seen the Zips coming in and living on Knickerbocker Avenue. We knew that some of them were smuggled in from Canada and others had come in legally, but we had no idea who was behind it or what purpose they served.

  When all the information came together, it all fit. It fit what was presently going on, and it fit the Mafia history that the experts in the Bureau knew about.

  The influx of Zips to New York escalated when Carmine Galante got out of jail in 1974, and that fit, too. The New York police had known Galante at least since the summer of 1943. Galante was the prime suspect that year in the murder of a journalist, Carlo Tresca. Tresca wrote articles for the Italian-American community, writings that were very critical of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. We were at war with Mussolini’s Italy at the time. In fact, 1943 was the year the Allied soldiers invaded Sicily and fought the Italians and the Germans for control of that island gateway to the rest of Italy. Even when I was a kid in Paterson, there was at least one New York newspaper in the Italian language, Il Progresso. You’d see old-timers reading it. Back in 1943 there was even more of a demand for Italian-language journalism. The story of Carlo Tresca is that his writing got under the skin of Mussolini. At the time, Vito Genovese was on the lam in Italy to avoid arrest for a murder. Mussolini asked Genovese to hit Tresca, and Genovese got Galante to shoot Tresca on the street in New York City. A car with license plates that were traced to Galante was reported leaving the scene, but the NYPD could never make a case against Galante for that hit.