Donnie Brasco

by Joseph Pistone

  I went back and told Lefty that Tony said he would lend us the money. And I dropped another seed: “Tony’s got quite a few bucks, I think, to invest in this vending-machine business he wants to start.”

  All that concerned him was that the guy would lend him the G-note. “All right,” he said with his customary gratitude, “we gotta get back to New York right away and get this straightened out about my kid.”

  We flew back to New York the next day. Lefty had to make a lot of phone calls and go to a couple sitdowns to try to settle the beef. He told them that Tommy didn’t know who the guy was, didn’t know he was connected, that he had just gotten a tip from somebody that the guy was carrying diamonds. So it was all just a big mistake. It cost Lefty five grand, just as a pacifier, to settle that beef.

  “What about that guy with the money?” Lefty asked me. “When you gonna get that grand for me?”

  It was time to set the Milwaukee hook.

  9

  MILWAUKEE

  “What about that grand you were gonna get for me from that guy?” Lefty asks. “When you gonna get it?”

  We were eating a delicious dinner of veal cutlets in his apartment.

  “I’m gonna call the guy, but I wanted to talk to you first. There may be some money in it. He says he’s just been a working stiff at a factory for several years, and he’s saved up quite a bit. Now he wants to go into the vending-machine business. His wife gave him a load of money for it, to go with what he saved. But he’s running into some problems. I figure if we could help him out, maybe we could get a piece of the business or something.”

  “The guy’s all right?”

  “He was all right when I knew him in Baltimore. I never had any problems with him.” Whenever I introduced another agent in, my escape hatch was that I never vouched for him one hundred percent—I knew the guy, he was all right to me, you draw your own conclusions. In case anything went wrong down the line, that protected me and the operation.

  “Where’d you say he was?”

  “Milwaukee.”

  “Milwaukee! Is he connected?”

  “No. He don’t know anything about the mob.” Lefty slaps his fork down. “He’s crazy, Donnie. Doesn’t the fucking guy know you can’t operate a vending business anywhere without connections? Especially Milwaukee. They’re crazy out there. It ain’t like in New York, Donnie, where they may just throw you a beating to chase you out. Out there they’re vicious. They answer to Chicago, you know. They blow people up. Donnie, if this guy’s a friend of yours, you better tell him to get the hell out of that town. Why don’t you tell him to move the business back to Baltimore? Baltimore’s controlled by the crews from Philly and Jersey. They’re easier to deal with.”

  “The guy’s been living out there for a while, Lefty. He’s got his family there and everything. He doesn’t want to leave.”

  “Tell him to forget about it. How much money does the guy have?”

  “Something like a hundred, two hundred grand.”

  That touches his soul. “You said his name is Tony? Look, you better let me talk to him. You go out there and get Tony and bring him back. With the thousand he said he’d give me. I actually need more than a grand, Donnie, so tell him to bring two. And we’ll talk.”

  I went out to Milwaukee and met with Tony and the case agent, Mike Potkonjak. They filled me in on the extent of Frank Balistrieri’s stranglehold on Milwaukee. The main thing we would try to do was get New York into a meeting with Balistrieri so as maybe to become business partners, with Conte’s Best Vending Company the business.

  In the years I was under, I would never collaborate with or introduce another agent into an operation unless I knew him ahead of time and trusted his skills and toughness completely. Every agent I introduced in had been a top street agent before going undercover. We are trusting each other with our lives.

  Conte was experienced on the street but inexperienced with the mob. He was an unpretentious Midwestern guy who could, if he wanted to, give the appearance of being a hick. Tough as he was, he was no city slicker.

  Conte and I went over the situation very carefully. We spent time discussing how to act, when to talk and not to talk, and so forth. I stressed: Don’t try to impress upon Lefty that you know anything about the mob. We’re going to play this realistically—you’re ignorant about the Mafia. Naturally you know there’s a mob. You know that I’m mobbed up. But even though you’re supposed to be Italian (he was not), you didn’t grow up with the mob, so you don’t know how everything works. You don’t know what it means to talk out of turn. You don’t know what the proper channels are. You don’t know the rules. You don’t know anybody, you don’t know about being connected, you don’t know about protocol. That way you’ll get away with more. If you make a mistake, we fall back on your ignorance.

  I was the intermediary in fact and in fiction, the buffer. But he was the guy with the vending-machine business. He would deal with Lefty on the business matters.

  As always with undercover agents, we would use our undercover names when dealing with each other even in private. Tony and Donnie. That way you never slip out of character.

  We flew into New York at night and drove down to Monroe Street, near Lefty’s. I called him from the phone booth on the corner of Cherry and Monroe. “We’re downstairs,” I tell Lefty. “Come on down, I want you to meet this guy. I got some bread for you.”

  “Leave the guy in the car. You just stay by the phone and I’ll be right down.”

  He comes down. I hand him the cash.

  “It’s only five hundred,” I say.

  “Donnie, you said you was coming up with a thousand. I was counting on a thousand.”

  “He had to pay for the plane fare and everything, Left. He said that’s all he could come up with on short notice. The guy promises a thousand, he shows up with five hundred. What do you want me to do, Left? It’s better than nothing.”

  Down the block, under a streetlight, Conte is leaning against the car, looking around at the sights. He is wearing white shoes and a white belt. He is an avid golfer.

  Lefty glances at him. “All right. I don’t want to see this guy right now. Tomorrow you come by the house. You can fill me in on the background, and we’ll go from there.”

  Conte and I were staying at the Sheraton Centre. That night I told Conte, “I think we got him.”

  The next day around noon we headed down to Little Italy. Conte had never been there. He wanted to go to Vincent’s Clam Bar on Mott Street to try some calamari and scungilli. I dropped him off and went to Lefty’s.

  Lefty was more interested now because Conte had actually come to New York to see him and had actually given him some money. I gave Lefty the rundown on Conte’s situation in Milwaukee.

  “Milwaukee is bad,” he says. “If this guy doesn’t get connected, there’s a good chance they’ll kill him out there. But if he’s got the kind of money you say he has, maybe we can work something out. If we do this, we got to give Mike a cut, then we got to give the people in Milwaukee a cut, so we got to make sure he’s got the money and he’s willing to give up the money. How much would he be willing to give us a week if we get him the shot to operate his business out there?”

  “I don’t know, Left. You got to talk to him about that.”

  “Okay, meet me tonight seven-thirty at La Maganette, and I’ll talk to him. Where is he now?”

  “Vincent’s. He wanted some calamari.”

  “Donnie, you crazy bastard. If he’s dressed anything like he was last night, he looks like a fucking hoosier. They’ll think he’s a cop or something at Vin cent‘s, and he’ll get himself whacked. Go down and get him out of there.”

  That night we went to La Maganette. I introduced Conte to Johnny the bartender. Then Lefty came in. He ignored Conte. Conte was at one side of me; Lefty went to the other side to talk to me.

  These preliminaries are all part of the protocol about not talking directly to a new guy from the outside until it is time for
proper introductions. Lefty asked me if I had explained to Conte about how things would work if we became partners with him, and I said I had mentioned it.

  “Okay, let me talk to him,” Lefty said.

  After introductions Lefty says, “Did Donnie tell you about how tough it is to open that business in Milwaukee?”

  “Yeah,” Conte says. “But I don’t want to move. Milwaukee’s a nice small town. I feel comfortable there, with my family, friends. And the vending people out there don’t service the machines very well. Eventually I can pull together a couple hundred grand. I think with hard work I could develop a real good business.”

  “You’re not connected with anybody out there?”

  “I don’t know anybody special. I’m trying to do this on my own.”

  “Tony, I’m surprised they let you get this far without muscling in on you. I’m surprised they haven’t killed you already. They’re a crazy bunch, Tony. They can’t be controlled by New York or anyone else. They’re controlled from Chicago. You know Gene Autry, the singing cowboy actor? A few years ago he tried to open a restaurant in Chicago without permission. He was advised against it by the Chicago mob. He did it, anyway. On the night of the opening the Chicago guys came in. They told all the customers and waitresses and bartenders and everybody to leave. They used three bombs and blew up the entire place. Autry went back to the West Coast. Now, Tony, you sure you know what you wanna do?”

  Tony looks shocked. “Hey, I don’t want to get involved in any rough stuff. Screw it, Lefty, if somebody’s going to get killed, I’ll just take what I can get from it and get out, just quit my business rather than get into that stuff.”

  “Now hold on, hold on. I didn’t say it was impossible. See, you come to me in the nick of time. Don’t be rash. How much money you got invested so far?”

  “I got about twenty grand tied up in the business, another thirty grand on hand.”

  “If you quit now, how much would you get back out of it?”

  “Probably eight to ten grand by selling my truck and machines.”

  “So it wouldn’t pay you to quit. See, if I get involved, you’re safe. Understand? Once my name is in there. Now, I want to contact another guy, my boss, and run it down to him. If he’s interested, I’ll come out to Milwaukee and look everything over. Then if I like it and he likes it, he will go to the Old Man about it, who is in prison. If he likes it, we contact the people who have the power in Milwaukee. If they’re interested, there would have to be a sitdown with them. It’s their town. They might say that they don’t want you out there. Then you have to pack up and leave. Or they might like the idea and then go partners with us—you run the business and they’re fifty-fifty partners. Or they could just tell you to get out of town but still give you back your whole twenty-grand investment out of respect to the New York family. Understand?”

  “It’s pretty complicated, Lefty. All I know is, I don’t want to take a big loss, but I don’t want to get killed, either. I’ll give it a try if you think you can help me out.”

  “Good. You let me worry about all this here. Now, there’s one thing. I need twenty-five hundred up front. I give fifteen hundred of that to my boss, Mike. Then I got travel expenses and all that. Understand?”

  “That’s a lot of up-front money for me right now, Lefty, because the business isn’t going.”

  “That’s just for good faith. You keep your business and your life, that’s a good investment. You’ll have peace of mind, Tony.”

  “Okay. I have to go home to get the money.”

  “I’ll have Donnie go back out there with you, look the whole thing over. Because you can’t afford to let much time go by on this here.”

  When we’re leaving the bar, Lefty says quietly to me, “Make sure he has what he says, Donnie, and that he does what he says.”

  I went out to Milwaukee with Conte. Lefty, as a made guy, would have to have his captain’s permission to check out something in somebody else’s territory. As a connected guy with the Bonanno family, I could go out on Lefty’s permission alone. It’s a very delicate situation when you’re dealing between two families, especially when you’re trying to go into another family’s territory and open a business that that family has a sole lock on. If you don’t do things right, you start a war and get people killed.

  The Milwaukee boss might be tempted into a deal like this because he might appreciate having another good man out on the street working for him, and he might like having a good link to New York. There’s always a chance you’ll want a favor done.

  Lefty had not mentioned the name of Balistrieri, so we proceeded as if we didn’t know who the power was.

  By now Conte had a two-room office at 1531 North Farwell Avenue, a neighborhood of apartment buildings and bars. He had business cards. “THE BEST VENDING CO. Prompt Service is the ‘Best’ Way. Anthony Conte, President.” He took me around to neighborhood bars and restaurants and clubs where Balistrieri had his vending machines. We wanted to be seen together giving the impression that we were doing what we were supposed to be doing, in case Lefty or anybody else checked up or asked questions.

  He told the owners how he was starting a new business and wanted to bring in his machines. The owners of the places said they didn’t want to change companies. Some of them said they didn’t want any trouble with the company they already had. Nobody mentioned Balistrieri, but we knew what they were talking about. After a couple of days I called Lefty and told him the situation looked good. I told him that Conte had an office, a truck, a few machines, some good potential outlets.

  He said he would get permission from Mike Sabella and come out right away. “Did you send the twenty-five hundred?” Lefty asked. “Because I got to give Mike fifteen hundred before I come.”

  To send a soldier into another family’s territory, Sabella had to get permission from Bonanno boss Carmine Galante. Galante was back in prison for parole violation. As a known mobster, Sabella couldn’t be on the visitor’s list. Somebody on the visitor’s list was the courier for information back and forth between Galante and his captains. Word came from Galante that permission was granted for Lefty to visit Milwaukee.

  In Milwaukee, we recorded Lefty for the first time. For his Milwaukee operation, code-named Timber, Conte’s car was wired with a Nagra tape recorder. I never had my car wired in New York because of how my dashboard had been taken apart by the Colombo guys in Brooklyn. Recording of conversations by the FBI is not done lightly. When an agent makes a recording, he must turn it in to the FBI and have it logged as an official document. Even if there turns out to be nothing important said, once the recording is made, the cassette must be dated and initialed by the agent. And subsequently, when a case comes to trial, the tape is made accessible to defense attorneys.

  On the night of June 21, Tony and I picked up Lefty at Chicago’s O‘Hare Airport and drove him to Milwaukee. Lefty and I checked in at the Best Western Midway Motor Lodge on South Howell Avenue. The next morning the three of us met for breakfast prior to taking a tour of the city so Lefty could assess the town and the possibilities.

  “My people are checking this whole thing out,” Lefty told Conte, “who’s who up here and everything. And my boss is gonna be entertaining people in New York now, who he’s sending for.”

  Lefty and Mike Sabella had begun the long, careful process of getting the Milwaukee and New York mob families together. Nothing is done directly. You go through friends of friends. In New York, Sabella was reaching out for the network of Bonanno people and intermediaries that would lead properly to the Balistrieri people in Milwaukee. There would be a lot of wining and dining at CaSa Bella, Lefty pointed out, and that would cost money. It would cost Conte money.

  Lefty begins instructing Conte right away. “First thing is you got to get a beeper. See what doctors got? That’s a beeper. Every successful businessman has it. It’s the most fantastic thing going. You’re in the car, you got that on you, a machine goes bad someplace and they try to reach you,
you pull over to the side and make your call. You don’t lose three or four hours. Also, I need to be able to reach you twenty-four hours a day. Call the telephone company and tell them you want a beeper and they’ll fix it all up.”

  “I’ll call them right away,” Conte says.

  Lefty takes out a pen and scribbles on a napkin. “Now, I’m gonna give you five numbers where I can be reached day and night. If anybody bothers you, anybody approaches you, you throw a name at them. You tell them you got a partner in New York, on Mulberry Street, and he’s very well connected.”

  He hands the napkin to Conte.

  We ride around the business and industrial areas of the city. Conte points out the strips of motels, bars, and restaurants where he figures he should get business. “Look at the bars here,” Lefty says. “It’s like Hoboken.”

  “They like their beer here,” Conte says. “All these places got machines already, but they’re not happy with them. But they don’t want to change.”

  “Let me explain something to you,” Lefty says. “I know the machine racket better than the back of my hand. I been in that racket for thirty years. This town is connected, you better believe it. When you put your machines in, anybody approaches you, first little beef you get, you say I got a partner in New York. But it ain’t gonna be the owner that approaches you. He’ll be a working man. You say to the guy you want a name. You say you’re being very nice about it, if he’ll give you a name, then you will contact your partner in New York and give him that name and everything will be straightened out. You listening, Donnie?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Because this is important, this here. Tony, you tell the guy, ‘Don’t be foolish and make a mistake.’ If he tells you to get your fucking machine out, you say,

  ‘Hey, look, don’t make a mistake in telling me things like that. Because it’s only a two-hour ride from New York, and my man won’t stand for it.’ You tell him your man is very reputable, known in the five boroughs, known all over the country. Jesus Christ Almighty, I’m known all over the fucking world. You say, ‘I’ll have my man up here in two hours.’ And you show the guy you got a beeper, too, you can be reached twenty hours a day. They come up with a name, we’ll meet. You’re out of the picture and they can’t make a move until it’s all checked out.“