The Acerg store was in the front, and anybody in the crew could act as salesman. There was a back room with a desk and a couple of card tables. That’s where the crew hung out during the day. That’s where I was introduced to a few guys, ranging in age from maybe late twenties to early forties, who were sitting around playing gin and bullshitting. First names and nicknames only: Guido, Vito, Tommy the Chief, Vinnie, and so on.
I started hanging out there with Jilly’s crew. Because I was “known” by other people that this crew knew, and because I was introduced to them by somebody they knew, they were pretty open around me.
Although these were lower-echelon guys in the mob, they always had something going. They always had money. They were always turning things over. They always had swag around. Swag was always going in and out. Everybody dressed well. Ninety percent of what they wore was swag. Latest styles. Sports shirts, slacks, sweaters, and leather jackets. If they had jeans on, they were always designer jeans.
You name it, they stole it. Jilly’s crew would hit warehouses, docks, trucks, houses. There was nothing they wouldn’t consider stealing. They considered all the time. There wasn’t one hour of one day that went by when they weren’t thinking and talking about what they were going to steal, who or what or where they were going to rob. There was always a load to go after, or somebody else’s load you might get a piece of, always something to hustle.
When they got up in the morning, they didn’t think about going to work and punching a time clock. They didn’t think about spending time with their wives or girlfriends. The mob was their job. You got up, went to the club or wherever you hung out, and spent your day with those guys.
You’ve got to be up all day figuring out what you’re going to do that night, what scores you’re going to go out on. The day basically was: You got to the club at ten-thirty or eleven o‘clock in the morning, then sat around all day and discussed scams and scores and hustles, past and future. Somebody would have an idea about a burglary or hijack, and they’d kick it around to see if it was worthwhile. Or somebody else had pulled a score and was looking to get rid of jewelry, furs, or whatever. And they’d discuss the possibility of “middling” it—taking the swag and reselling it.
All day long, while they schemed, they’d sit in the back room at the Acerg store and play gin and smoke cigarettes and cigars. I don’t smoke. They never opened a window. Even with air-conditioning, it got to be pretty dense. There might be two games going, depending on how many guys were in there. I don’t even like to play cards. You play gin—never any other game—for maybe ten cents a point. Even while you’re sitting around playing gin, you’re still talking about making a dollar, what the hustle of the day is. Maybe you go over to somebody else’s club, play gin there, or talk up some scheme. Maybe you talk to somebody about a score you’re trying to set up or trying to get a piece of. If they had a potential job to case, a couple guys would go out during the daytime and look it over.
If they weren’t scheming and dreaming, they were telling war stories, reminiscences about their time in various jails and prisons. Everybody did time in the can. It was part of the price of doing business. They knew all about different jails, cell blocks, guards. I had enough phony background set up to establish my credentials as a serious criminal, to show that I was tough enough to do time if I had to without turning rat. But I never claimed to have done any prison time because I didn’t know those places, and that could have just tripped me up. If you do three to five years you get to know the guards—what guard’s on what tier. You get to know the inmates, guys who are doing fifteen to twenty, guys who are still there. They knew the lingo and the slang. Everybody remembers those relationships and that time.
My thinking is, if it’s not necessary to have done something, don’t claim to have done it. When these guys talked about prison time, I just listened like an ordinary citizen.
For lunch somebody would go out to bring in Chinese food or hero sandwiches. Maybe around four-thirty or five o‘clock, the guys would split, go home to their wives or whatever, have supper, then go back out on the street, pulling off their scores or bouncing around the night spots or doing whatever they did.
On Tuesdays we went to Sally’s club for lunch. Sally was an old-time wiseguy, a capo in the Colombo family. He had a social club on 17th Avenue, not far from Jilly’s. Sometimes we’d hang out over at Sally‘s, divide the time between there and Jilly’s. But every Tuesday afternoon Sally cooked a big lunch for our whole crew of about eight, and his own, altogether maybe eighteen or twenty guys. He had a regular kitchen, and he would cook meatballs, macaroni, sausages, peppers, everything. For this lunch we would set up a long folding table. We would sit at the table all afternoon eating lunch, drinking jugs of homemade red wine that Sally produced, and bullshitting.
My day would pretty much follow the same routine as theirs. I’d get to the club between ten and eleven and hang out all day with these guys. By late afternoon or early evening, I’d go back to my apartment, maybe take a nap for an hour, get up and shower, and about nine o‘clock or so go back out on the street to wherever it was we were going to meet. Sometimes I would go back to Brooklyn, sometimes bounce around in Manhattan; sometimes with them, sometimes by myself in places where people had gotten to know me through these guys.
But even when we’d cruise around to the different night spots, the talk was always on whatever scams or hustles were going on or coming up. What they did for a living was on their minds more than it was with ordinary people. They never put that aside. Nobody ever had enough money, no matter how much they had, and it was always feast or famine. Half the time their schemes came to nothing. Or worse, they went bad in the execution and cost them either money or jail time. But that didn’t cool their dedication. They did not have a sense of humor about their failures, or those schemes they came up with that were hare-brained. They stuck to their routine.
A small-time fence named Vinnie, who hung around Jilly‘s, was overweight and had a bad heart, for which he took some pills—maybe nitroglycerin. One afternoon we were all in a card game. It was a hard game, for quite a few bucks. And at the same time they were kicking around the prospects for a house burglary over in Bayonne, New Jersey.
All of a sudden Vinnie falls down on the floor, gasping for breath and grabbing at his chest.
“Hey, you guys,” I say, “Vinnie’s got a problem.”
Nobody moves. They keep playing cards. Vinnie is gasping and grabbing, and still nobody moves.
“He’s having a heart attack!” I scramble over to him. “We gotta get him to the hospital! Come on, somebody help me with him!”
“Aw, he does that all the time,” one of the guys says. “He’s just having one of his regular attacks. Let him pop a few pills, he’ll get over it.”
This was one of the situations that often came up where I wanted to fit in with the badguys, but I still had my own sense of morality.
I can’t just let the guy croak. I manage to get him up and out to my car. I drive him to the emergency room. A couple of hours later he comes out. “I ran out of my medication,” he says.
We drive back to Jilly’s. They are still playing cards. “See?” somebody says. “We told you he’d be all right.”
It was easy to get lulled by this daily routine with these guys. Most of the time it was boring. They were not Phi Beta Kappas, but they were very streetwise. Just under the surface of their routine there was always something lurking that could trip me up. While I was constantly taking mental notes in order to report relevant information to my contact agent, I had to be alert for traps. Most of these guys were, after all, killers.
The FBI wouldn’t let me actually go out on hijackings and burglaries, because the crew went armed. There was too good a chance somebody would get shot. In these pioneering days, thinking upstairs in the bureaucracy was very conservative. Somebody suggested that if I went along on crimes where guys were packing guns, I might be liable for prosecution myself.
The guys woul
d ask me to go out on jobs with them. I would find ways to back off. I would tell them, “Hey, packing a gun and all that stuff, that’s too cowboy for me. I’ll help you out later on with the unloading.” And they had enough guys so that adding me didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t like I was crucial. Plus the fact that for every man that doesn’t go along on a job, that’s less split they had to do on the proceeds.
They bought it. But if I had tried to push for myself to go along, get all the information I could about the score, and then back out of it—that would have made them very suspicious. I was always up-front with them. I stayed low-key, and it was no big deal that I was around.
But once they got a little used to me, they let me sit in on their planning sessions. I’d go out with them when they cased a score. And gradually I started imposing myself. They would come and ask my advice on certain scores. I would sit down with them and go over the plans of the job, pick out flaws in it. That showed them that I knew something about what I was doing. In some cases when I could show them what was wrong with pulling a job, it deterred them from pulling them—part of my job, after all.
It was a delicate situation. I couldn’t initiate or encourage crimes. Yet to be permitted to hang around I had to participate in some fashion. The Bureau didn’t have any firm guidelines for everything I could and couldn’t do. I was pretty much on my own. It required some tap dancing.
I helped unload stuff at the store. They would hijack any kind of truck, from eighteen-wheelers down to little straight jobs. They would seize the truck, unload the stuff into smaller trucks or vans, and take it to the “drop,” which might be a vacant warehouse or factory, and bring samples to Acerg to show prospective buyers. The load would be parceled out to fences who could get rid of it.
When they hijacked a truck, they would usually just tie the driver up. But most of the hijacked loads were giveaways—setups. The drivers of the heisted trucks would be in on the heist for a percentage. The crew would go wherever they got the information that a guy had a good load on. Most of the heists were in the city. They’d pull them right on the streets in Brooklyn. Some were in Jersey.
Their burglaries were all over—in the city, out on Long Island, over in New Jersey, in Connecticut, in Florida. Stuff came from the airports all the time. Jilly had a steady supply from JFK International Airport, utilizing somebody inside the cargo operations.
I’d unload cases of coffee, sugar, frozen food, whiskey, bags of cocoa, truckloads of sweaters, blouses, jackets and jeans. They would take anything. The best loads were food loads—shrimp, coffee, tuna—because you can get rid of that stuff anywhere, like restaurants and supermarkets. Frozen shrimp and lobster were favorites. Pharmaceuticals—over-the-counter stuff like razor blades, aspirin, toothpaste—were prime targets because so many stores wanted them and the markup was great, even on the straight market. Clothes were good, especially leather, and women’s clothes. Liquor was always a big item, especially around Christmastime. There were women’s leather gloves, ski gloves, even a load of hockey gloves.
The commodity didn’t make any difference, as long as they could sell it. Now, something like men’s hockey gloves—where would you move them? They might have gotten stuck with them. But it was a load they could take, so they took it. It doesn’t cost anything to steal hockey gloves.
Managers at places like restaurants and supermarkets had to know the stuff was hot, because the price was below anything on the wholesale market. But they bought it, anyway. Some of the best places. When you see how that works, it changes your view of some of the bargains and discount stores. It makes you more cynical. Sometimes the circle was very neat. They would burglarize an A&P warehouse one night, sell the cases of coffee and tuna to other stores a couple of days later.
TVs and VCRs were big. Robbing boxcarloads of them from the railroad freight yards was nothing unusual. They had a railroad employee who would give them a bill of lading and point out the right boxcar. Just back up a truck and load it.
When they hit houses, they were usually looking for jewelry, stocks and bonds, cash, or guns.
Anything that wasn’t tied down, they would steal. Those were the days when Mopeds—motorized bikes or motor scooters—were popular. They would steal Mopeds off the street and rent them by the day out of the store.
I maintained a low profile, the way I’m comfortable. I didn’t volunteer more about myself than was necessary ; I didn’t ask questions that didn’t need to be asked—even though information I wanted was often just out of reach. But I knew that certain things I did would catch the eye of people or have people talking. I had to be patient, just let things develop.
Guido was Jilly’s right-hand man, and he was a tough guy. He was tougher than the other guys in this crew. He looked different too. An Italian with blond hair and blue eyes. He had a mustache. Because he wasn’t a made guy, he, like me, could have a mustache. He was about 6’1”, 200 pounds. Late thirties. His arms were tattooed with snakes. He wore tinted glasses. He told me he had been in and out of jail most of his life, for various offenses. He was a shooter, but he had never been convicted of murder. Guido’s crew under Jilly was sophisticated enough to operate with walkie-talkies. Jilly told me he thought Guido was too much of a cowboy, took too many risks, but that he had done a lot of “work” for the Colombos, meaning he had participated in hits.
If Guido was your friend, he would be with you till the end. If he was your enemy, forget about it—he would get you. Everybody showed respect for Guido.
One day soon after I started hanging out with the Jilly crew, Guido and I were riding around in my car.
He said, “Hey, Don, what’s that squeak?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t bother me.”
“Yeah, it’s a squeak,” he said, leaning forward and cocking his head, “in the dashboard.”
We got back to Jilly‘s, and I pulled up at the curb across the street.
He said, “I’ll take that dashboard off and find that squeak and fix it.”
“Hey, Guido, don’t waste your time. It don’t bother me.”
“It bothers me. It won’t take long.”
Guido always carried a set of burglar tools in a toolbox in his car. He went and got them and crawled in under the dashboard and started taking it apart.
I said, “Why go through all this trouble just to find a squeak? It’s no big deal.”
In five minutes he had the whole dashboard off. He looked all over behind it. “It’s okay,” he said. He started putting it back in place.
“Well, what the hell did you take it apart for?” I said.
“To tell you the truth, you’re new around here. I just wanted to see if your car was wired up or anything. It’s clean.”
“Well, fuck you,” I said. “You think I’m a fucking cop with a fucking recorder in my car? Why don’t you just ask me, face-to-face?”
“Take it easy, Don. We gotta be careful, that’s all. There’s lots of operations they got going on around here. You’re just new to us, that’s all. Forget about it.”
Actually I wasn’t all that surprised to have somebody snooping around to check me out. If they did it once, they could do it again. So for all the years I was on this undercover job, while I would eventually have reason to wear hidden transmitters and tape recorders and would ride around in other agents’ cars which were equipped with recorders, I would never have my own car wired.
I couldn’t play it entirely safe. Any chance I would get, I myself would snoop around. If the guys were out front in the store or outside, and I was alone for a couple of minutes in the back room, I would always be looking in the desk drawers. There would usually be guns, both automatics and revolvers. There would also be other burglary paraphernalia stashed in there, like wigs and ski masks. If anybody had come in, my snooping would have been fatal. But my job was to find out what was going on, after all. I wasn’t just curious.
If I was who I said I was, I couldn’t just be sitting around listeni
ng to their schemes. I had to have some things of my own going.
Early in 1977, I made a few small deals with Vinnie the fence. Vinnie wasn’t a heavy-duty guy. He was a family-type guy, from Staten Island, who used to hang around Jilly’s during the day and then go home to his family at night. He didn’t go out on actual jobs; he wasn’t a tough guy. He just got rid of swag for people.
I wanted to make it look like I was moving stuff here and there to make a few bucks and trying to work my way up the line to bigger fences. Vinnie started me out with perfume.
We arranged a meeting for downstairs from my apartment, outdoors at the corner of Ninety-first Street and Third Avenue. Around noon he arrived driving a rented white Ford Econoline van. It was filled with cartons of perfume—by Lanvin. “I pick this up every week right at the factory where they make it,” he said. “I pay a couple of guys who work there.”
Perfume wasn’t really my line, but it’s not too far removed from jewelry. And mob thieves don’t turn up their noses at anything where they can make a profit. You want to be a good customer, but not so good that you become a mark. I bought one carton of the perfume—Eau My Sin and Yves St. Laurent Rive Gauche—for $220.
The perfume, like everything else I bought in my role, I turned over to the FBI.
A few days later I met him at the Woodbridge Auction on Route 9 in Woodbridge, New Jersey. The auction was like a flea market and drew big crowds. Vinnie had a booth there where he sold swag that he hadn’t sold to other fences. There, with the public and families all milling around, Vinnie would be in his booth selling stuff from hijacks or burglaries. I used to swing over there to see what new stuff he had, or if I had something that he might want to sell out of the auction. He got rid of a lot of swag from that booth.
I even took my wife there once. I got to spend so little time with her in those days that I figured the risk was tolerable. She got a kick out of it. The only problem was that once, right in front of Vinnie, who called me “Don,” she called me “Joe.” But he didn’t seem to pick up on it. And, anyway, supposedly she was just some broad I knew—I could have been using any name with her.
Donnie Brasco Page 7