Donnie Brasco

by Joseph Pistone

  All through 1977, Lefty didn’t tell me his last name. I knew his name, of course, but he didn’t tell me. I didn’t tell him mine. I knew him as Lefty and Bennie. He knew me as Donnie. I used to go to his house on Sundays or at night and eat with him and Louise. I’d watch TV with them. I’d lie on the couch and fall asleep. He never told me his last name or asked me mine. The first time we traveled together and checked into a hotel, he said, “What name do you want me to put down for you?” That was how he found out my name was Brasco. And the first time I had to check him in someplace, that was when I asked him what his last name was.

  All during this time I was passing on to the Bureau more intelligence about the structure of the Bonanno family and other families: how they operated, who was who and what rank, information on the Mafia nationwide, intelligence we’ve never had before from an agent on the inside. I was continuing to pick up information on the Sicilian mafiosi that were being brought over, how Galante and Carlo Gambino were collaborating on setting them up in pizza-parlor businesses in the East and the Midwest and leaving them there until the bosses needed them to do something. How these “zips” were being used as heroin couriers and hit men.

  To ease the tension I used to try to run every day, and lift weights at the health club in my apartment building. I didn’t know any wiseguys at the time who were doing that. It was okay, I was just considered a health nut. On most Sundays I would try to go to Mass. Wiseguys didn’t do that, either.

  Lefty was treating me like we were pretty close. He saw me as a good earner. I didn’t portray myself as somebody having a big bank account or big business because I didn’t want to get tagged as a mark. I wanted to get tagged as a working thief. I portrayed myself just like they were—you make a score, you live good for two or three weeks, then you’re back to scrounging again. He saw just enough money come out of me to suggest that I could make a lot. He needed that, because he was in trouble.

  “I owe a lot of fucking money,” he told me. “I’m in hock a hundred and sixty thousand to Nicky. I can’t get no place with that debt hanging over my head. It’s like I’m spinning my wheels. We gotta make some money.”

  Unlike most wiseguys, Lefty had not served time in prison. He had been arrested many times for extortion and theft but had always beaten the rap. Lefty’s real problem was that he was a degenerate gambler. If he made $2,000 one day, he would blow $3,000 at the track the next day. I knew him to lose as much as $10,000 in one day at the track or an OTB (Off-Track Betting) parlor. If he went through that and had $2 left, he’d bet that too. He preferred bookies because at OTB, if you win, you pay them a percentage right off the top; with bookies you don’t pay them anything if you win, and they pay better odds than the state does.

  I’m the world’s worst gambler. I couldn’t win at craps, at cards, or at the track. I wouldn’t bet on anything ever if it weren’t for this job. But Lefty was worse. He had no more skill, his luck was just as bad, but he was the typical gambling addict. The big killing was just around the corner.

  Sometimes we’d pop down to Florida for a little vacation. We’d hit the dog tracks and the horse tracks. He didn’t know much about the dogs. We might win or lose $100 or $200. Mostly we lost. He didn’t know much about the horses, either. We didn’t get inside tips. Lefty would just handicap by the program.

  One time we were at Hialeah and we went for the “pick six.” For the first five races we invested a couple of thousand on long shots and won every time. The sixth race was worth about $30,000 if we picked right. So we figured that in this last race we’d bet the favorite, to be safer. The favorite lost. So we blew a shot at $30,000.

  His reaction was: “Finally we bet the chalk horse, the fucking horse loses. That other horse hadda come from nowhere. Thirty fucking thousand we coulda won.”

  “Well, we only lost a couple grand,” I said. “Ain’t the question, Donnie. The point is, we had it right in our fucking hands!”

  His problem was so bad that it had delayed his becoming a made guy. He told me that when I first met him, he wasn’t made yet, and that was because he hadn’t paid off his gambling debts. He whittled them down some, and because of that he was able to get made shortly after I met him, in the summer of 1977.

  But now he was in hock again for this huge amount, and that meant that everything he made from the bookmaking or anything else, Marangello was taking Lefty’s piece right off the top to apply to the debt, and Lefty never had anything, except what he could hide. The nature of the game was that everybody always pled poverty, anyway, so you could never be sure whether Lefty was broke or not.

  I brought around just enough money to convince Lefty that I was a good earner, with potential that he could develop. Together we could make our fortune, as Lefty saw it.

  He encouraged me about my future in the mob.

  “The thing is, Donnie, you gotta keep your nose clean. You gotta be a good earner and don’t get into trouble, don’t offend, don’t insult anybody, and you’re gonna be a made guy someday. Now, the only thing is, they might give you a contract to go out and whack somebody. But don’t worry about it. Like I told you, I’ll show you how. You got the makings, Donnie. You handle yourself right, keep your nose clean, keep on the good side of people, I’ll propose you for membership.”

  Lefty says, “Come on, we got to go up to Sabella’s.”

  It’s a hot July night. We go to CaSa Bella but we don’t go in. There are five or six other guys standing outside on the sidewalk, guys I recognize as being under Mike Sabella. We stand on the sidewalk with these other guys.

  I ask Lefty, “Why the hell are we standing here?”

  “We’re out here to make sure nothing happens to the Old Man. He’s in there.”

  The Old Man is Carmine Galante, the boss of the Bonanno family. He just recently got out of prison. I look in the restaurant window and I can see him sitting at the table reserved for big shots; he’s hawk-nosed, almost bald, has a big cigar in his mouth. Sabella and a few others are seated with him.

  “What’s the big deal?” I say. “What’s gonna happen to him?”

  “Things are going on,” he says. “There’s a lot of things you don’t know, Donnie. Things I can’t talk about.”

  “Well, why can’t we go inside and make sure nothing happens to him in there, where at least we could sit down?”

  “Donnie, Donnie, listen to me. You don’t understand nothing sometimes. In the first place, Lilo don’t sit down with anybody except captains or above—bosses. He don’t sit down with soldiers or below, like me and you. He doesn’t have anybody around him except people he wants. You can’t even talk to this guy. You got to go through somebody higher, somebody that can talk to him. He don’t want nobody in the restaurant except those people in there, and that’s it. ”

  “Okay, if you say so.”

  “You don’t know how mean this guy is, Donnie,” Lefty goes on quietly. “Lilo is a mean son of a bitch, a tyrant. That’s just me telling you, it don’t go no further. Lot of people hate him. They feel he’s only out for himself. He’s the only one making any money. There’s only a few people that he’s close to. And mainly that’s the zips, like Caesar and those that you see around Toyland. Those guys are always with him. He brought them over from Sicily, and he uses them for different pieces of work and for dealing all that junk. They’re as mean as he is. You can’t trust those bastard zips. Nobody can. Except the Old Man. He can trust them because he brought them over here and he can control them. Everybody else has to steer clear of him. Theresalot of people out there who would like to see him get whacked. That’s why we’re here.”

  This happened a few times, Lefty and I going down to CaSa Bella to stand guard outside while Carmine Galante held meetings inside. Lefty was nervous, out there on the sidewalk. He and the other guards, except me, were carrying guns in their waistbands under their shirts. He watched people and cars going by. He watched windows across the street.

  I wasn’t comfortable, either. Here I
was, an FBI agent, worried about getting whacked on this sidewalk on Mulberry Street because I was trusted enough by these mobsters to be standing guard over the feared boss of the Bonanno family.

  Every few days I would call in to my contact agent. There was a special telephone line installed in the New York office for my calls only, and it would be answered by my contact agent. I would give him a rundown on what had been going on and what was coming up. Sometimes, for other operations, he would ask me to find out what’s going on at this or that club, who’s showing up or what’s being discussed. If I needed anything checked out—like a name or what a guy was into—he would take care of that for me. Any information I gave him that was noteworthy and that might be useful as evidence would be typed up as what we call “302s.” Once in a while the contact agent would bring along a handful of these reports for me to initial.

  Once or twice a month, depending upon my circumstances, I met with a contact agent to get an envelope of cash for me to live and operate on. We would meet only briefly, usually just a couple of minutes. Often we met at museums—like the Guggenheim or the Metropolitan on Fifth Avenue. We would just be browsing, looking at the exhibits, he’d slip me the money. Sometimes we met on a bench in Central Park. Sometimes at a coffee shop.

  We were approaching the end of 1977, and I had been undercover now for more than a year. The Bureau was about to close down the “Sun” part of Sun Apple in Florida, just settle for what Joe Fitz had been able to get so far without risking him down there any longer for minimal gains.

  Once in a while my supervisor asked me how I felt, if I wanted to go a little longer. I felt fine. I wanted to keep right on going.

  There were a couple of new considerations. I now had a good foothold with Lefty and the Bonannos. I was in pretty solid. The Bureau had started other undercover operations around the country. We could use my new mob credentials to establish credibility of other undercover agents in some of these other operations. I could be brought around to vouch for these other agents—attest that they were “good” badguys. Badguy targets of these other operations could check me out: I’m a friend of Lefty’s in New York.

  It would be easier for me to do this if I wasn’t based in New York City, under Lefty’s thumb and eye on a day-to-day basis. If I moved someplace else while remaining Lefty’s partner, I could more easily slip around to these other undercover operations without having to ask permission to go out of town and without having Lefty knowing of my every move and questioning me about it. Also, conceivably I could bring Lefty out to these other operations, introduce him, hope that he might horn in, establish a link with the Bonannos that would form a conspiracy under the law.

  I could still regularly come back to New York for two or three weeks at a time, continue to develop my association with Lefty, and maintain the partnership.

  The other consideration was my family. Earlier I hadn’t been too concerned about protection of my family. I would get home to our house in New Jersey maybe one night every ten days or two weeks. I was always careful and covered my tracks. But by the fall of 1977, I was beginning to think that if I continued to get deeper into the mob, eventually my family was going to have to move away. There was always the chance of momentary carelessness that could be disastrous. I knew I was under surveillance by cops because I was being followed. Three or four times I was stopped and searched—for no apparent reason. Suppose I didn’t shake them off my tail sometime and they followed me right to my house? Or what if Lefty or some other wiseguy decided to follow me?

  It was time to get my family out of there. That would eliminate that problem. And if I was going to be transferred out to another area, we might as well combine the two.

  Through December and into January, I discussed this with my supervisor. He took the matter to headquarters. It was a pretty simple proposition. We decided to make the moves on February 1.

  My family was used to moving. We had already moved four times for my job. But now my daughters were at an age where attachments to friends and boyfriends were more important. We had close relatives in New Jersey. When we moved back there for my earlier transfer to the New York office, we had supposed we would be staying. Nobody wanted to move again. My wife understood that it was necessary, without knowing the details. We didn’t have big discussions about it, because I didn’t present it as a choice. I was being transferred. They still didn’t know how deeply involved I was with the Mafia. They didn’t know the move had to do with their safety.

  The FBI then had fifty-two offices throughout the country. They gave us the choice of five areas in which to relocate. As far as my work was concerned, where we lived didn’t matter because I would still be assigned to the New York case, and otherwise I would be roaming to different parts of the country. My wife and I picked an area.

  I managed to get home late Christmas Eve and spend most of Christmas Day at home. In January, my wife and I took a trip to find a new house. We found one right away—smaller than our house in Jersey but in a pleasant neighborhood. The next week we put our New Jersey house up for sale. I had a friend who was a mover. I told him we needed to move and that he shouldn’t talk about it.

  There were lots of family tears shed over the move. Nobody wanted to stand in the way of the work I was doing, but neither did anybody really know what I was doing. Had my family known more, they might have been more tolerant of my situation. But if that would have decreased the weight on me, it would have been at the cost of more fear to them.

  For me and my colleagues in the Bureau, there had been no expectation that this job would go on so long. Now there was no guess at how long it would continue. What started with the idea of getting to fences had become penetrating the Mafia in Little Italy and now had evolved to me representing the mob in other places. It could have been mind-boggling except for the fact that we didn’t know where we were headed, and so we had no good perspective on where we were. The only certainty was that to continue at all I had to continue full-out. Donnie Brasco had the momentum.

  The FBI had a couple of situations in San Diego and Los Angeles that they wanted me to look into. I told Lefty I had decided to go back to California—where I had supposedly spent a lot of my earlier jewel-thief life—for a while. “You know, Left,” I said, “I’m not making all that much money here right now. Why don’t I go out there and start making some good scores, you know, and come back and forth? You could even come out there, hang out for a couple weeks, see if we couldn’t get something going.”

  He thought that was a good idea. So I took off for California.

  In L.A., we had an agent going by the undercover name of Larry Keaton. Larry was a longtime friend of mine. He was trying to get in tight with some thieves who were engaged in all kinds of property crimes: thefts of stocks and bonds, checks, cars—the whole spectrum. These badguys were not necessarily Mafia, but some of them were ex-New Yorkers, and naturally they were respectful of wiseguys and connected guys.

  They liked to hang out at a particular restaurant, and Larry would mix with them, trying to get in deeper. It happened that a bartender from a New York restaurant came out on vacation, and he hung out at this L.A. restaurant and was friendly with some of these badguys. Larry didn’t know anything about this bartender. He thought maybe he was a badguy too. Since the bartender was from New York, Larry thought it was just possible I might know him.

  It so happened that I did. It was a coincidence that on occasion Lefty and I went to La Maganette, a restaurant on Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street—not a Bonanno hangout, just a place where he and I and a couple other guys would go have a couple drinks and eat. We got to know this bartender, Johnny. Johnny wasn’t himself a badguy, wasn’t into anything, but like a lot bartenders, he knew who was who. He knew who Lefty was, and that as Lefty’s partner I was a connected guy. So this was a chance for me to give Larry some credibility with these badguys.

  I went to this L.A. restaurant where Larry was hanging out and saw Johnny there. “Hey, Johnny,�
� I said, “how you doing?”

  “Donnie, how you been? What’re you doing out here?”

  “Hanging out, looking around.” Larry was in the group, so obviously he had already met Johnny. “I see you know Larry here. Larry’s a friend of mine. We may be working on a deal together.”

  We chatted a little while, and the job was done. I knew that Johnny would tell the badguys there that I was a connected guy back in New York, and that Larry was a friend of mine, so he was all right.

  On and off I would hook up with Larry like that to help him gain credibility. Sometimes we’d go to the track with some badguys, things like that. I was just somebody to introduce. I never worked on his cases. He took it from there. He started making a bunch of cases. It was the type of operation where the government was continually arresting people as Larry brought in the evidence. Eventually he had to testify in court several times and got a load of convictions.

  In the middle of this, Larry had occasion to come to New York to pursue yet another case of stolen stocks. I was also back in New York at that time, on one of my regular trips. Larry called Johnny the bartender to tell him he would be coming in. They set up a meet at P. J. Clarke‘s, on Third Avenue because that’s where Johnny liked to hang out in the afternoon.

  So I hooked up with Larry and we went down to P. J. Clarke’s together. Johnny had a table in the back of the room with a bunch of people. We joined them.

  Johnny introduced us around, and we were sitting there an hour or so.

  Now, Larry is black. That means that in some badguy situations he was conspicuous. But he was smooth enough to make it work.

  I see a guy headed for our table. Suddenly Larry whispers to me, “Let’s get outa here. Back door, quick.” He stands up and says to Johnny, “I just forgot, we got an appointment.”