Donnie Brasco

by Joseph Pistone

  One morning Jilly was sitting at the desk in the back room, scribbling on some papers.

  “Gotta fill out these applications,” he said.

  The application was for a loan from the Small Business Administration. He told me that they had a guy in the SBA who approved loans. So Jilly would fill out an application with all fake stuff, any kind of junk information: Joe Crap the Ragman, phony business, phony address. Then he’d send it in and this guy would approve it. At that time the SBA was going strong; there was all kinds of money. So if the application looked decent and the amount requested was not so exorbitant as to attract anybody’s attention, they wouldn’t do any big check on it. So Jilly would ask for like $20,000. The guy they owned on the inside would approve it, get the $20,000, take five off the top for himself, and pass on $15,000 to Jilly.

  The great thing about it was you didn’t have to pay it back. Since everything on the application was bogus, how would they ever find you? Jilly pulled this off a couple of times.

  Another day I got to the club and Jilly wasn’t there. I asked Vinnie, “Where is everybody?”

  “Jilly and Guido got a contract,” he said, “and they’re out looking for the guy they gotta hit.”

  You don’t ask questions about a hit. If they want you to know, they’ll tell you. But my job was to get information if possible. When Jilly came back, I asked him, “Where were you guys?”

  “Me and Guido had to look for somebody,” he said.

  “Anything going on?” I asked, as if it might be some kind of score.

  He proceeded to talk about an upcoming hijacking. I tried to wrangle the conversation back to the guy they were looking for, but he wouldn’t talk about it. It wasn’t unusual that he wouldn’t tell me. Who was I? At the time I was just a guy who had been hanging around a few months, let alone an FBI agent. You don’t just tell anybody if you have a piece of work to do.

  I don’t know if that particular hit came off or not. Whacking somebody is something that you don’t talk about. In my years with the Mafia guys sometimes they would would sit around and discuss how much work they’d done in the past—“work” meaning hits. But ordinarily they never discussed openly any particular individual they hit, or an upcoming one. If something went wrong, they might sit around later and laugh about it.

  One time I was hanging out with Lefty Ruggiero at his social club in Little Italy, and he and a bunch of guys were laughing about a job. They had gotten a contract to hit a guy. They tailed this guy for a week, looking for the right opportunity. Then they were told the contract’s off, don’t hit the guy. And it turned out it was the wrong guy they were following. They would have hit the wrong guy. To them it was the funniest thing in the world. “What the fuck you think of that? We’re following the guy for a week and it’s not even the right guy—ha, ha, ha! We’re out every fucking night following this jerk-off. Piece a fucking luck for him, right? Ha, ha, ha!”

  On the Fourth of July weekend Jilly had a cookout for everybody. He had a house down at the Jersey Shore, in Seaside Heights, a block from the beach, and he had all the guys down with their wives and girlfriends.

  I went to Fretta‘s, the Italian meat market in Little Italy, and bought sausages and cold cuts and cheeses and took it down there for the cookout.

  I wasn’t married, of course. Supposedly I had a couple of girlfriends here and there, but I never brought any of them around. The guys used to get on me sometimes about never bringing a girl around, but I told them there wasn’t anybody I cared enough about.

  I always wear an Irish Claddagh ring that my wife gave me. It has hands holding a heart, and a crown on it, symbolizing love, friendship, and loyalty. Nobody had ever mentioned the ring.

  We were sitting outside at this picnic table, and one of the guys’ girlfriends says, “That’s a nice ring you got on, Don. That’s an Irish Claddagh ring, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aren’t those rings for love? Aren’t they used as wedding rings?”

  “Yeah, sometimes,” I say. One of the guys asks about it, and I go into the history and so forth.

  Then she says, “Well, what are you wearing it for? I didn’t think you were married or anything.”

  “No, I’m not. But one of the few girls I was ever in love with gave it to me. Then a couple months later she jilted me. I keep wearing it because I don’t ever want to forget her.”

  One of the guys looks puzzled. He says, “You sure you’re not married?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I just can’t figure it out. You mean, you loved that girl so much that you keep wearing that ring after she jilted you?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “I just didn’t think you were the type of guy that could love anybody. You know, the way that you’re here, you’re there, you got no allegiance, no ties to anybody.”

  “Well, there always comes a time in somebody’s life when there’s a girl that you love, somebody that’s special, so I’d rather remember it than forget about it. I just want to wear the ring, that’s all. What’s the difference to anybody else?”

  The only time I take the ring off is when I work out lifting weights. I wore it during the whole operation. And that was the only time anybody ever mentioned it.

  What with hanging out with Jilly’s Colombo crew and with Mirra and Ruggiero’s Bonanno crews and going to Florida to work with Joe Fitz on Sun Apple, I wasn’t getting home much at all. I missed the school sports seasons and watching my daughters cheerlead. I missed two of the girls’ birthdays. I wasn’t home for my birthday, either. I wasn’t home for our sixteenth wedding anniversary—to celebrate, my wife went out with a couple named Howard and Gail who had been close friends of hers for a year before I even met them. I was home maybe two or three nights a month.

  And when I was home, I was a little harried, trying to make up for lost family time but unable to put mob business out of my mind completely.

  I managed to make it to my younger brother’s wedding. It was a regular big Italian wedding, lots of cash and checks. After the wedding the bride and groom were leaving directly for their honeymoon. They didn’t want to take all this money with them. He asked me to take care of it until they got back. “Who could be safer to leave all this with,” he said, “than my brother the FBI agent?”

  I put this big envelope of cash and checks under the front seat of my car and headed back to New York City.

  A week later my brother asked me for the envelope. It wasn’t in my apartment. It wasn’t anywhere. It was still under the front seat of my car. I had been all over the place since then, to different neighborhoods in the city. My car had been parked on streets and in garages. I had totally forgotten about the money.

  None of my family knew the depth of my involvement. My brother later told me that he began to suspect that I was into something heavy when I forgot about his money. The distractions of my job were causing friction in my family.

  The situation was tolerable because it was temporary. A few months undercover. But now we had passed the six-month limit to the operation. I hadn’t reached the big fences. But unexpectedly I was getting deeper into the mob, with my association with Bonanno members Mirra and Ruggiero in Little Italy and their introduction of me to others. My undercover assignment was extended indefinitely.

  Physically I was often feeling tired. But the daily challenge stimulated me. I felt good about how things were going.

  All this time I was trying to remember everything. Since I didn’t take any notes—didn’t dare to take any notes or write anything down, even in my apartment—I had to remember. Anything of a criminal nature discussed in conversation, any new guy that came through the clubs, the different deals and scores and the different guys involved and amounts of everything—I had to try to remember it all. Eventually federal court cases would depend on the accuracy and credibility of my memory.

  It was a matter of concentration. That and little tricks. Like remembering license-plate numbers or
serial numbers on weapons in series of threes. The frustration always was that I couldn’t ask a lot of questions, which is one of the things I was trained to do as an FBI agent. A lot of the things I had to remember were things I overheard, and I couldn’t ask for these things to be repeated, or for what I thought I heard to be confirmed. When swag came in and out, I couldn’t ask to look it over more closely, or where it came from, or who it was going to. I had to hope those facts were volunteered. I had to be just a hang-around guy who wasn’t more interested than was good for him.

  Concentrating on conversations was draining. Most of the talk was idle, simplistic bullshit about the most mundane things—getting a haircut or a new pair of Bally shoes; how the Mets or Giants were doing; how the Chinese and Puerto Ricans were ruining neighborhoods; how much better a Cadillac was than a Lincoln; how we ought to drop the bomb on Iran; how we ought to burn rapists, each guy would gladly strap the perverts in and pull the switch himself. Most of these guys, after all, were just uneducated guys who grew up in these same neighborhoods.

  But they were street-smart, and the thread of the business ran through everything all the time, and the business was stealing and hits and Mafia politics—who was up, who was down, who was gone. Somebody might be talking about a great place to buy steaks at a cut rate and in virtually the same sentence mention a hit, or somebody new getting made, or a politician they had in their pocket. These tidbits would lace conversation continually but unpredictably, and they flew by. If I wasn’t always ready, I would miss something I needed to remember. And I couldn’t stop them and say, “What was that about paying off the police chief somewhere?”

  What’s more, to be above suspicion I had to adapt my conversational style to theirs. Occasionally I would change the subject or wander away from the table purposely, right in the middle of a discussion about something criminal that might be of interest to the government—precisely to suggest that I wasn’t particularly interested. Then I would hope the talk would come around that way again or that I could lead it back, get at it later or in another way. It was a necessary gambit for the long term.

  And then I would have to remember facts and names and faces and numbers until I could call in a report to my contact agent.

  That’s why when I would get home for my one day or evening in two or three weeks, it would be difficult to adjust and focus deserved attention on my family. Especially when they didn’t know what I was doing and we couldn’t talk about it.

  One hot August afternoon I was in the store when they came in from a job. Jilly, Guido, Patsy, Frankie, and a couple of other guys, one of them named Sonny. Jilly was nervous as hell. I had never seen him so nervous.

  “We hit this house in Bayonne this morning,” he told me. “The guy was a big guy [I wasn’t sure whether he meant physically big or important] and I thought I was gonna have to shoot the motherfucker because he wouldn’t open the safe. I had my gun on him, and I said I was gonna shoot him if he didn’t open it up or if he tried anything. I really thought I was gonna have to shoot him. Finally he opened it and we handcuffed him and the woman and taped his mouth shut.”

  He was visibly shaken, and I didn’t know why, because he’d been out on any number of similar jobs.

  They had opened a black attaché case on the desk in the back room. Without making a point of sticking my nose into it, I could see jewelry—rings and earrings and neck chains—some U.S. Savings Bonds, plastic bags of coins like from a collection, a bunch of nude photographs of a man, and a man’s wig.

  Also in the case were sets of handcuffs of the type you can buy in a police supply house, several New York Police Department badges they probably stole someplace, and four handguns.

  “We posed as cops to get in,” Patsy said. “Tell him about the priest.”

  Sonny said, “I was in the getaway car across the street from the house, with the motor running. I happened to be in front of a church. I’m sitting there waiting for the guys to come out, and this priest comes walking by. And he stops to chat! ‘Isn’t it a lovely day,’ this priest is saying to me. And he goes on about it. I can’t get rid of him. I don’t know how the guys are gonna come out of the house, running or what, and this priest is telling me about the birds and the sky. I couldn’t leave. Finally he said good-bye and walked away. I could still see him when the guys came out.”

  Jilly handed me a small bunch of things. “Get rid of this junk, will you? Toss it in a dumpster in Manhattan when you go back.”

  It was stuff from the robbery they didn’t want, and didn’t want found in the neighborhood: a pink purse, a broach and matching earrings, the nude photos, a

  U.S. passport.

  What I wanted was the guns. They were stolen property that we could trace back to the score and tie Jilly’s crew to it. And we always wanted to get guns off the street.

  “If you want to move those guns,” I said to Jilly, “I got a guy that I sold a few guns to from my burglaries, so maybe he’d be interested in these.”

  “We should get $300 apiece for them,” he said.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He gave me the guns: a Smith & Wesson .45; a Smith & Wesson .357 Highway Patrolman; a Rohm .38 Special revolver; a Ruger .22 automatic. Whatever else the owner was, he was not a legitimate guy. Two of the guns had the serial numbers filed off. They were stolen guns before Jilly’s guys got ahold of them. Generally, filing the numbers off doesn’t cause us too much of a problem. Most of the time the thieves don’t file deep enough to remove all evidence from the stamping process. Our laboratory guys can bring the numbers back up with acid.

  The next day I put them in a paper bag and walked over to Central Park at Ninetieth St. My contact agent, Steve Bursey, was waiting for me. I handed him the bag. We decided we would try to get by with offering Jilly $800 for the guns. You never give them all that they ask in a deal. First, it’s government money, and we don’t want to throw out more than we have to. Second, you want to let them know that you’re hard-nosed and not a mark.

  The next day I went back to the club and told them that my man offered me $800.

  “That’s not enough,” Patsy said. “You said you could get twelve hundred bucks.”

  “I said I’d try,” I said. “The guy is firm at eight hundred. ”

  “No good.”

  With some deals I would have just said okay and given the stuff back. But not with the guns. I didn’t want to give the guns back. “Look, I got the guns, I got eight hundred on me. You want it or you don’t.” I tossed the money down on the desk, trusting to their greed when they saw the green. There was some squabbling.

  “We could have got more somewhere else,” Patsy said.

  “Hey, if you can get more, take the fucking guns and bring them somewhere else. But who’s gonna give you more than two hundred apiece for guns that are probably registered and have been stolen and the numbers filed off? You think I didn’t push for all I could get? There’s eight hundred of my own money. You want the deal, I’ll just collect from him.”

  “Okay,” Jilly said. He picked the money up and gave $100 each to Guido, Frankie, and Patsy as their share, and $100 to me for peddling the guns.

  I handed in my $100 to Agent Bursey. So the guns cost the FBI $700.

  Guido was bitching about a bunch of people that had recently been made in the Colombo family. He mentioned both Allie Boy Persico and Jerry Lang. Allie Boy was Alphonse Persico, the son of Carmine “The Snake” Persico—sometimes referred to as Junior—who was the boss of the Colombo family. Jerry Lang was Gennaro Langella, who some years later would become underboss of the Colombo family and acting boss when Carmine The Snake went to prison.

  “I’ve done more work than half the guys that were made,” Guido said, meaning that he had been in on more hits, which is one of the prime considerations in getting made, “and I ain’t got my badge. That kid Allie Boy is just a wiseass punk. He never did a bit of work to earn his badge. The only reason he got made is because his old man i
s boss.”

  “You better shut up,” Jilly said. “People walking in and out of the store all the time, we don’t know who hears what. We’re gonna be history from that kind of talk about the boss’s son.”

  I was standing outside Lefty Ruggiero’s social club on Madison Street in Little Italy when Tony Mirra came by and told me to drive him to Brooklyn.

  That set off an alarm in my gut. Although it was known that I was moving between crews of two different families, that kind of freewheeling eventually draws suspicion. Pretty soon, if you don’t commit to somebody, they think you can’t be trusted. Suddenly Mirra, a Bonanno guy and a mean bastard, wants me to go with him to Brooklyn where I have been hanging out with Colombo guys. Was he taking me there for some kind of confrontation?

  In the car Mirra said he had an appointment with The Snake.

  Recollections came rushing into my head. The guy in Jilly’s that I recognized as somebody I had once arrested—had he known me, after all? Guido’s remarks about Allie Boy Persico—had those remarks about his son gotten back to The Snake? The recollections didn’t make me feel good. Was I going to be grilled about Jilly’s crew, things I had heard, what I was doing there?

  If The Snake had heard about the complaints, was I going to be pressured to rat out the people doing the complaining? If I was pressured for information, would it be some kind of test?

  My mind was racing as we cruised over the Brooklyn Bridge. I tried to sort out the possibilities and options. I definitely would not rat anybody out. That was for sure. If I turned rat on anybody to save my own skin, I would have to pull out of the operation, anyway, because my credibility would be blown. So if I was pressured to rat anybody out, I would just take the heat and see what happened. If they were testing my reliability, I would pass the test, and that would put me in solid.