When there was nobody else at the bar, I opened the pouch and showed the stuff to him.
“If you’d like to hold on to these for a couple days,” I said, “you can try to get rid of them.”
“What’s the deal?” he asked.
“I need $2,500 total. Anything over that is yours.”
He didn’t ask if the stuff was stolen. He didn’t need to, because it was understood. During the course of recent conversations I had given him the impression that I wasn’t on the legit. So it was obvious. You say as little as possible in a situation like this. Actually, of course, the stuff was from the FBI, things that were confiscated during investigations and used strictly for this type of purpose.
He took the items and held on to them for three or four days. Then one night he said, “Don, some people want it, but I can’t get you the price tag that you want.”
Now, I don’t know if he’s testing me or what. You never take it for granted that somebody trusts you. I could have said, “Well, get me what you can for it, and I’ll give you a piece.” But that’s not the way you work. Things have a certain street value, and a street guys knows what that is. I knew what the going rate for swag was from dealing with my informants before I went undercover. So I could talk sense about price for diamonds, gold, jewelry with anybody, whether I was going to buy or sell. So if I have swag worth $2,500, I stick with that. If you say, “Okay, just give me $800,” then they might doubt that you know what you’re doing.
So I said, “Okay, just give it back, no big deal. I’ll be getting more stuff, so maybe we can do business another time.”
He said, “Anything you come across, Don, let me see it. If I can get rid of it, I will. I can move a lot of stuff. I come across a lot of swag.”
“The only things I’d be interested in,” I said, “are jewelry or good clothes for myself.” But I never bought anything from him.
I did place some bets through him. He talked about Nicky, the bookie, told me about his business. And I placed some bets on the horses.
All of this served the purpose of solidifying my place.
My agent friend, Chuck, had an undercover operation going in the music business: records and concerts. Sometimes we’d hang out together, back each other up—as when he would come with me to Carmello’s. Chuck was putting on a concert at the Beacon Theatre on Broadway, featuring the soul singer James Brown. He asked me if I’d give him a hand. That would help him and would also help me—it would show the mob guys downtown that I was doing something, that I was a mover.
He had sucked into his operation a couple of connected guys with the Colombo crime family. He introduced me to one of them, a guy named Albert. “Connected” means that you associate with Mafia members, do jobs with them, but do not share in all the rewards and responsibilities of an actual Mafia member. A true Mafia member is a “made guy” or “straightened out,” or a “wiseguy.” Albert’s uncle was a made guy in the Colombo family.
Albert was a half-ass wiseguy—just a connected guy, not a made guy. He was a big guy, maybe 6’ 2”, about thirty years old. He was a con artist dealing in paper—a stocks-and-bonds type guy. I didn’t think he ever did anything very heavy. He was a bullshit artist.
But he was not a bad guy to hang around. Chuck introduced me to Albert so that maybe I could get some introductions into the Colombo family. So I started running sometimes with Chuck and Albert, bopping around different night spots. Albert liked to hit all the in spots, discos, and restaurants.
When the James Brown concert was coming up, Albert and a couple of his buddies from Brooklyn came up with the great idea that they were going to stick up the box office. He came to Chuck and me and said, “Look, near the end of the concert, when the box office closes, let’s stick it up.”
He wanted to stick up our own box office. Chuck and I couldn’t allow guys with guns to come in and do that, but we couldn’t just veto it, either, without drawing suspicion. We really didn’t know how the hell the thing was going to go.
We told Albert, “Look, if these guys come in and knock off the box office, that’s less split for us, because we’re gonna cop this box office, anyway. We can split it three ways. If you bring in your two friends to stick it up, that’s a five-way split.”
He went back to his guys with that explanation, but they wanted to do it, anyway. They wanted it all.
It was the day before the concert. We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t tip off the cops, because the tip would have been traced right to Chuck or me.
“What should we do?” Chuck says to me.
“I don’t know,” I say, “this is your operation. I’ll go along with anything you want to do as long as we don’t jeopardize my operation.”
Chuck had an idea. “I think I’ll hire a couple of off-duty cops, just have them hang around the front of the lobby, like for crowd control, and maybe it’ll deter these guys.”
He hired the off-duty cops. They arrived in uniform and stood around. Albert and his friends showed up. “What the fuck’s with these cops?” Albert said.
I said, “I don’t know. Probably they’re on the job and figured they’d stick around and hear James Brown. I don’t know.”
“What the fuck,” Albert said to his friends. “How can we stick up the place with cops around?” They discussed it for a few minutes, standing outside, watching the cops in the lobby. They decided it was a no-go.
So we slipped that one. And it helped me out, because now I could tell guys that I had a piece of this guy, Chuck, who’s got this Ace Record Company in his pocket.
I was trying to get home to my wife and daughters at every opportunity, even if it was just for breakfast. I would often just end up the night and head across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey to spend a few hours at home. My wife and I socialized very little when I was home, and our few social friends were Bureau people. And while of course they knew I, too, was with the Bureau, they didn’t know what operation I was on.
I was very friendly with an agent named Al Genkinger in the New York office. All during the time I was undercover, Al and his wife stayed close to my wife, took care of anything that came up. Anything my wife needed, she would get in touch with them. That was a comfort.
We told neighbors and others that I was a salesman, on the road a lot.
My daughters were already developing the habit of evading conversations with others about what I did, or even of asking me questions about my work. They would say, “What do you do when you go to work?” And I would say, “I just do my work like anybody else.” After a while they stopped asking.
They were becoming cheerleaders at school. My oldest daughter had boyfriends. My wife and I became friendly with a lot of boys on the athletic teams. We went to high school wrestling matches on Wednesdays when I could make it home. She went without me if I couldn’t make it.
I set up a weight lifting program for some of the guys in our basement. I had been a weight lifter for a long time. They ate it up. They didn’t ask personal questions. They would come over regularly and follow the program I set up. My wife made pizzas.
It seemed I was home very little. My wife and daughters were not happy with the extended absences, especially when I didn’t give much explanation. We didn’t know it then, but that period gave me the best home time that I would have over the next five years.
I bopped around with Albert and got to know him pretty well. I took him up to Carmello’s a few times, so he could see that guys there knew me. It’s the kind of thing that feeds on itself: He sees that people know me and acknowledge me, so he feels he can introduce me to other people who know him. It enhances my credibility to be hanging out with a connected guy whose uncle is a wiseguy in the Colombo family. For his part, Albert sees that I’m accepted where I go, so it’s good for him to be seen with me.
Getting established is a subtle business, a matter of small impressions, little tests, quiet understandings.
Albert lived in Brooklyn. But he lov
ed Manhattan. One night there was a big snowstorm and he didn’t want to drive home to Brooklyn. So I let him stay over in my apartment. From then on he was always trying to weasel in, to stay over at my apartment so that he didn’t have to drive home to Brooklyn. I wanted to keep cultivating him, but I didn’t want him parking in my apartment.
Between trying to get myself set up, establish credibility, and hanging around with Albert and others, I hardly got home at all during the month of December—maybe two or three evenings up to Christmas. So I was especially intent on getting home at a reasonable hour Christmas Eve, to spend that and part of Christmas Day with my family. I planned to knock off early Christmas Eve and get home by maybe eight o‘clock. I had bought presents for everybody and stashed them in the trunk of my car.
In order to get home to my family, I started celebrating Christmas early in my Don Brasco world. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, we started bouncing around to the various spots, having drinks and wishing people we knew Merry Christmas. Chuck, who was a bachelor, and Albert, who didn’t ever like going home, brought along a couple of girls they had been going out with.
One place led to another. I had to act like I wasn’t in a hurry to get anyplace. It was after ten o‘clock. We were going down Eighty-sixth Street, heading for Carmello’s. The street was pretty empty. On the corner there was a guy still selling Christmas trees. I happened to mention, “It’s Christmas, and I don’t even have a Christmas tree in my apartment.”
Albert yells, “Pull over! Pull over to that guy there—he’s got trees! I’m gonna buy a tree!”
I pull over at the corner. Albert jumps out and goes over to where the guy has Christmas trees. The guy has only three or four trees left. They are barely trees, more like sticks tied together. Albert picks one out and brings it over to the car. I never saw anything so scraggly. There was a trail of needles from it on the sidewalk. The top was bent over.
“What are you gonna do with that?” I ask.
“Let’s put it up and decorate it in your apartment!” “Come on, I got no decorations. All the stores are closed.”
“We’ll find something to decorate it with,” he says, “won’t we, girls?”
“Yeah, yeah!” they say.
“We can’t let you be alone on Christmas Eve,” Albert says.
So we go up to my apartment with this scrawny tree. When we stood it up, you could see that it was even missing some branches. “I got no stand to put it up in,” I say.
“We’ll use this!” he says. I had one of those big water-cooler bottles that I threw pennies in.
They put the tree in that. Then the two women rummaged around in the kitchen and came back with some tinfoil. They started making Christmas balls and decorations out of tinfoil. They hung these things on what few branches there were. Every time they hung a tinfoil bird up, a million needles fell on the floor.
“We couldn’t let you go without a Christmas tree,” Albert says. “Bad enough you don’t have a date on Christmas Eve.”
They all proceeded to make sure I enjoyed Christmas Eve and wasn’t lonely. They sang Christmas carols until after midnight, sitting around this ugly tree, Albert and the girls all boozed up.
I was thinking about my kids, and all the presents in the trunk of my car, and I was angry for letting myself get into this situation.
I said, “Come on, everybody, that’s enough, I’ve had it with Christmas.”
They wanted to keep partying. I took Chuck aside and said, “You gotta get ‘em outa here. I want to go home.”
So he herded them up and left. I waited about a half hour, then I went down to the garage, got my car, and headed home.
I managed to have Christmas morning with my family. I was back on the job in the afternoon. Five more Christmases would pass by before I would have a normal one with my family.
Things began to happen, some movement. Shortly after the first of the year, 1977, Albert introduced me to some active Colombo guys. We were out bouncing, and we went to Hippopotamus, the popular disco at Sixty-first Street and York Avenue. A lot of mob guys hung out there.
Albert said he’d like to introduce me to a Colombo guy that did a lot of business with swag.
He brought me over to a table and introduced me to a guy. “Jilly, this is Don, a friend of mine.”
Jilly was maybe five years older than me, average build, 5’9”, 160, with dark hair, prominent nose.
We sat down and talked for a while, and Albert told Jilly and the guys with him that we had been hanging out for a few months. Jilly headed up a crew that hung out mainly in Brooklyn. He said I should stop by his store over on 15th Avenue and 76th Street in the Bensonhurst section.
“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that,” I said.
For a couple of months now I had been playing this game of trying to be noticed without being noticed, slide into the badguy world and become accepted without drawing attention. You push a little here and there, but very gently. Brief introductions, short conversations, appearances one place and another, hints about what you’re up to, casual mannerisms, demeanor, and lingo that show you know your way around—all these become a trail of credibility you leave behind you. Above all, you cannot hurry. You cannot seem eager to meet certain people, make certain contacts, learn about certain scores. The quickest way to get tagged as a cop is to try to move too fast. You have to show that you have the time to play it by the rules of the street, and that includes letting people check you out and come to you.
You have to have confidence in how you’re handling yourself, because while you’re playing this game, much of the time you don’t know where you stand. Nobody tells you you’re getting in solid or getting to know the right people or heading in the right direction. Nobody tells you if you’re safe. You have to sense it. Badguys on the street are sensing you. You can be wrong. Obviously, so can they. But the street is no place to doubt yourself.
These initial months were not a time of high excitement in terms of events. But I felt excitement. I had a foothold. Nobody in the outside world knew where I was or what I was doing, hour by hour, day by day. On the street, people didn’t know who I was or what I was really doing. I was on the job and on my own. There was excitement in that.
One night I came out of Carmello’s and started to drive downtown to make the rounds of the regular spots. I thought a car was following me. To check it out, I didn’t try to shake them right away. I just led them on a wild-goose chase for a while. I went across the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee, New Jersey, turned around, and came back. The other car stayed with me but made no move.
It had to be some sort of law-enforcement unit. Nobody else would have reason to follow me. My assumption was that there was an informant in Car mello‘s, or one of the other places, who had passed on the information that there was a new guy hanging around, making friends with badguys, a guy who obviously doesn’t work and yet has money to spend. Or else they could have been spot-checking the place, surveilling it, and they saw my car there a few times, with out-of-state tags, saw me come and go, and got into it that way.
Law-enforcement units—New York Police, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, all the others—have organized crime figures under surveillance all the time. It is standard practice. None of these outfits—including the FBI, for the most part—knew who I was. So if I started coming into their picture, buddying up with badguys, naturally I would become a suspect just like the rest of them.
If it wasn’t cops, it could be wiseguys checking me out. I didn’t want anybody on either side tailing me. If I was going to meet my contact agent, or going home to see my family, a tail could have blown the whole operation. So every time I left a place, I was tail-conscious. I always “cleaned” myself. I never went directly to my destination. I would ride around, keep checking my rearview mirror to see if I was being followed, lose any suspicious cars with a series of turns and double-backs. When I parked someplace, I would notice whoever parked near me, and anybody who came in a place with
me.
The first time I was rousted, I was near Carmello’s. I hadn’t had time to get rid of the car tailing me. They pulled me over. A couple guys in plainclothes with drawn guns ordered me out, told me to put my hands on my head. They patted me down, checked inside the car. They didn’t find anything on me or in the car. When they were finished, they said it was a routine license check because I had Florida plates on the car.
The only thing it was routine for was wiseguys, because they get rousted all the time. That’s why you don’t usually carry a gun. These guys here who rousted me didn’t even identify themselves. I don’t know who they were.
I was tailed a few times, stopped and searched a couple of times. It was an inconvenience, but it also made me feel that I was doing the job right.
I drove over to Brooklyn, to Jilly’s store at 7612 15th Avenue. The neighborhood was very clean, quiet, working-class, two- and three-story residential buildings with a lot of storefronts on the ground floors. Jilly’s store was in the middle of a block of glass fronts. There was a small grocery store, and the Park Ridge Pharmacy on the corner.
A big sign over the door of Jilly’s store read ACERG. Jilly’s last name was Greca, his store was the name spelled backward. The store part was the front room. Plain metal racks of expensive clothes, mostly women’s stuff: leather jackets, pants, blouses. Everything was marked cheaper than it would be at a regular store. The store was open to the public, but nobody would be coming there from Manhattan. It was a neighborhood store in the kind of neighborhood where outsiders are spotted in a minute.
Everything was cheap because it was all swag. Jilly’s crew were hijackers, burglars, all-around thieves. The store sold their loot.
5
BROOKLYN: THE COLOMBOS
Donnie Brasco Page 6