Before dawn, Conte and I met with Hill and Potkonjak in a room at another hotel outside of town.
“I’d really like for you to go through with it,” Hill says, after we’d kicked it around. “You know what you’re throwing away.”
“There comes a point where I’ve got to start thinking about my family.”
Hill says, “What would it take for you to change your mind?”
They couldn’t make my job easier or safer. Half facetiously I say, “More money.”
He thought he could get me a raise. He called Headquarters in Washington. He explained the situation and asked that I be raised one grade, to supervisor, which would mean a couple thousand dollars more in salary.
Headquarters said no. They couldn’t advance me to supervisor because I wasn’t doing supervisory work, which meant either working in a Headquarters office in Washington or having a squad of men under you in the field. Hill pleaded that they not stick to technicalities, but they held firm.
That took me off the hook. I wasn’t going to take the job, anyway. But if Headquarters didn’t care enough to bend the rules for this opportunity when I was putting my ass on the line every day, at least I didn’t have to feel guilty.
Now I had to come up with a reason that Lefty would buy. Lefty would have to come up with yet another one to give Balistrieri.
Balistrieri wouldn’t be too upset because he had just that night made the offer and hadn’t yet contacted New York, and I hadn’t gotten involved in details. Lefty could just tell him that something came up with family business—the kind of dodge these guys use all the time because you can’t question that.
One thing that I had in my favor, seen through any mob guy’s eyes, was that no cop would ever turn that job down. So I would be above suspicion in that regard. Lefty would go cuckoo no matter what I said, but I could think of only one reason he would believe: simply that I would not stay cooped up in Milwaukee for twenty straight weeks, especially when it included the damn cold winter. He would scream, but he would believe it. He wouldn’t tell Sabella anything because it would be embarrassing. I had been his partner for more than a year, I had never embarrassed him, we still had prospects in Milwaukee, he would get over it.
Lefty came down to the coffee shop for breakfast, still bubbling over about how much money we were going to make.
I told him I had thought it over and changed my mind, and why.
He went bananas. “You wanna be a fucking playboy and lay around in California all the time! You worry too much about your girlfriend! You worry about getting pinched! Everything’s a joke to you! We’re blowing two hundred fucking grand!”
He was yelling in front of everybody in the coffee shop. When he calmed down, he said to Conte, “Tony, you get in touch with Frank. Go down there today and tell him that Donnie can’t take the gambling job because Mike just called this morning and he wants him free to be back and forth to New York for another job.”
He wouldn’t look at me. “Go to California and don’t bother me. I’m too mad to talk to you now. Go fuck with the broads on the beach and call me in a couple days when I cool down. Tony, take me to the airport.”
Lefty had been pushing Conte to rent him a car through Best Vending and have the business pay for it. It was a typical wiseguy way of thinking: Muscle into any business that you can, get a weekly cut, and squeeze out any extra perks you can.
Conte had been stalling. Now we reconsidered. Lefty had been good for the investigation. By cultivating him and keeping him happy, we had shortcut a lot of effort. He got us a sitdown with Balistrieri, got us the partnership. If he hadn’t come out to Milwaukee, Conte would be dead.
So we figured, what the hell, let’s rent him a car and let him keep it for a couple of months. Conte rented him a maroon Thunderbird and drove it to New York and presented it to him.
Mike Sabella wanted to talk to me. Lefty hadn’t told Mike that I had turned down the gambling job. “Don’t say nothing to upset him,” Lefty says. “He got enough in his mind. Work on his restaurant is gonna cost him six hundred grand now. Yesterday he smacked the contractor and almost killed him. And with the feast, there’s a new guy down there from the precinct, and he ain’t gonna allow no wheels down there, and Mike is blowing his top because of that.”
“Wheels” were roulette wheels, a major source of profit at the Feast of San Gennaro.
We went to CaSa Bella. Mike told me, “Don’t advertise what we got going in Milwaukee, because we don’t want everybody in New York to know about it. Permission came from Lilo and Nicky, and we want to keep it between bosses. Frank has Fort Lauderdale sewed up. We’d like to get into that action, through Frank. We don’t want any other crews fucking up our deal.”
He wanted to keep all the information among just Lefty, himself as our captain, boss Carmine Galante, and underboss Nicky Marangello.
Then suddenly everything changed. The Balistrieris started avoiding Conte. They weren’t giving him leads on routes to buy. They weren’t returning his calls. There was no explanation. Conte and I went to see John Balistrieri, Frank’s son and lawyer, to try to dope out what the hang-up was.
We met with John at his office. Conte did the talking because this involved his business. He didn’t bring up the problem directly, just tried to sense the situation. He reiterated Lefty’s invitations to all of them to come to the Feast of San Gennaro and be wined and dined by the New York crew. John was courteous. He said his father was tied up with some kind of grand jury matter lately, but he was sure his father wanted to come if he could get free, and they’d get back to us.
John seemed friendly, but he didn’t say what we wanted to hear, which was why they had retreated from business dealings with Conte. And they didn’t get back to us.
Lefty’s reaction was, “Maybe Frank’s just got his balls twisted over that grand jury. They were gonna bury him. Then twenty-three guys went in there and took the Fifth. Maybe that’s what’s been taking his mind up. But listen, you should’ve never gave up that goddamn bookmaking thing with him. And that would’ve only been a start, for chrissake. Then he starts sending you around to Vegas and Florida and Kansas collecting money. You messed the whole thing up. You should’ve listened to me. We would’ve been on easy street.”
The situation with Balistrieri didn’t improve. Nobody would return Lefty’s calls now, either. And finally Mike got involved, putting out inquiries through channels. Nothing. Even his calls were not returned.
Two weeks later, in early September, Conte got a letter from Balistrieri’s lawyer-sons dissolving the partnership with Conte.
Lefty called me back to New York. We met at Lynn‘s, a restaurant on East Seventy-first Street.
“It don’t make no sense to me,” Lefty says. “Maybe they think he’s a shady character. Maybe they’re afraid to put money in his hand because he’s a swindler. They won’t even pick up a phone for nobody over there, understand? This is an introduction through you. What is the story on this gentleman? I can’t explain this situation to anybody. You gotta tell me what the story is.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Left. I knew the guy ten years ago, he was okay.”
“Maybe he’s a ladies’ man. Listen, Donnie, last time he was in New York, he brought that car in, I took him to a joint, he bought drinks for three ladies in there. I lectured him about that. Now I hear that he made a play for one of Frank’s girlfriends out there, in one of his joints. Is that true, Donnie?”
“How the hell do I know, Left? I ain’t with him night and day. I never saw him do anything.”
“You know the way Mike feels about somebody that insults a wiseguy’s wife or girlfriend: That’s worse than being a rat or a pimp. Mike and I are embarrassed now because we introduced him to Frank. I’m in jeopardy over here. And you brought him in. You got to do something about this, Donnie.”
“What you want me to do?”
“You say you knew him in Baltimore. Go to Baltimore and check him out. Find people wh
o knew him. Maybe he’s a snitch. We don’t know who the hell he is. If you check him out okay, maybe we can still salvage the situation out there.”
So I went to Baltimore. Of course, I didn’t do anything. I hung out for a few days, then went back to New York.
I told Lefty I had found a few guys who knew Conte in the old days, that he’d never done anything wrong as far as they knew, that he wasn’t a “wire”-which is a snitch or informant—he never got out of line with the ladies, didn’t insult people.
“All right,” Lefty says, “now we gotta get this guy in here and talk to him. Go out to Milwaukee. Bring him in.”
I went to Milwaukee. Conte and I analyzed the whole matter. We tried to think like wiseguys think.
Two families had put a business together through a sitdown. Now Balistrieri had canceled the agreement without explanation and hadn’t returned phone calls from a top Bonanno captain for more than a month. That was a major discourtesy, meaning he had a major cause. Something had spooked Balistrieri. Conte could get whacked at any time.
We were convinced that for whatever reason, the partnership was finished, Balistrieri wasn’t coming back in. So there was no need to continue with a vending business.
But Conte and I couldn’t just fold it up, either. A citizen like Conte can’t retire from doing business with a mob guy. Once a guy like Lefty gets his hooks into you, he’s going to keep draining you. You run the business, he’s your partner and gets fifty percent. Or you’re going to sell everything and he’ll take fifty percent of that. If you say no to those alternatives, I get a call, as Lefty’s man on the scene, and he tells me to work this guy over, do a number on him. You always have to pay a price for getting out.
At this same time Lefty was pushing for money for a score. There was a load of Betamax videocassette recorders that he could take for $15,000. He could make $18,000 in ten days. But he didn’t have the money. Mike had agreed to lend him $5,000 for ten days, at a price of $2,000. Lefty wanted Conte to invest the rest, $10,000.
We needed to buy some time both to come up with a safe evacuation plan and to avoid Conte having to cough up ten grand. So Conte faked a heart attack.
He checked into St. Luke’s Hospital, complaining of chest pains. They hooked him up to all the machines and gave him medication. Nobody at the hospital was clued in, because you never clue anybody in if you don’t have to—you never know who’s legit and who’s not. Also, we knew that Lefty would call to check up.
I called Lefty to tell him about the heart attack. Lefty called the hospital and said he was Conte’s cousin and wanted to verify that he was a patient.
After a few days of tests, Conte checked out. Lefty was mad when Conte was in the hospital, and he was mad when he got out. Lefty pushed for the $10,000. Conte said he was broke because he had $6,000 in doctor bills.
“He’s so fucking full of shit,” Lefty groans to me. “We fall down in the street with an attack—what doctor bills? Three days in the hospital, six thousand bucks? What’s he think he’s talking to, a moron?”
“He says he can’t come up with the money, Left. The only money he’s got now is his wife’s money.”
“Oh, suddenly it’s his wife’s money? He’s telling fifteen different stories. He says to me, ‘You didn’t come out here and help me with these guys when we had this problem.’ I said, ‘I didn’t tell you to go to bed with different people’s women.’ Mike is blowing his top now. First of all, he says, the guy bullshit you that he’s got a heart attack. And second of all, he ain’t sending you nothing. This guy’s throwing the towel in, so you might as well sell everything over there.”
“I think he’s gonna just keep trying to operate his business.”
“What, without me? I’ll make one phone call. They’ll take it all away from him. Then he’s going to run to the cops and then that’s the end of him. Donnie, we’d of finished this Betamax deal in ten days. And we’d have had winter money, all three of us. The guy’s sick in the coconut, boy.”
The first idea to extricate Conte and close up the vending operation was that he would just take off and disappear. Whoa, I said, we can’t just do it like that, because then you’re really putting the heat on me. I’m in enough trouble already, for bringing him in. We have to have a reason for him to take off. He has to be eased out in such a way as to protect my credibility and my ass, because I will still be out there as Donnie Brasco. So, talking it over with Potkonjak, we came up with the idea that Conte would pull a big score and then decide to keep his end all to himself and not split with Lefty and me. I could back up that reasoning.
It would be a two-stage disappearance. We hatched a story that Conte had a really big score coming up in December with some old friends in Chicago. An art score, because that required special contacts and special outlets that would be harder to check up on. After the score he would have to lie low for a time while the art was disposed of. Then he would surface, say the score had been a big success and that he would have to leave again soon to pick up his cut to divvy up with Lefty and me. At that point he would disappear for good.
A week before Thanksgiving, Conte called Lefty and told him he had this score coming up.
I was with Conte in Milwaukee all during this critical period. Lefty called me the next day. His spirits were raised. “He’s got a big one coming up for next month. He said the three of us will get off.”
“Is that right?”
“He said we’ll be all right for a whole solid year, living like a king.”
In the next weeks Lefty anticipated big money. He changed his social club into a candy store and had his daughter run it. He started a bookmaking business with me and two other partners-each was supposed to chip in $2,500. We looked around the neighborhood at various bars we might buy. He started work on another club that he and I were going to run as a fish-and-chips joint a couple of doors from the candy store. In mid-December we went down to Miami Beach for a few days, staying at the Thunderbird and hanging out at the lounge there and at the Diplomat and at a place called the Top Hat, enjoying the company of a lot of wiseguys that we knew.
Lefty had kept the rental car long enough, so before Christmas, our agents stole it back. Lefty had parked it in a lot, the agents went in and hooked it—just like I used to do. One of the guys drove it back to Milwaukee and stashed it until the operation was over.
“Fucking Puerto Ricans!” Lefty said. “They musta seen the Christmas presents in the back seat, that’s why they took it.” He filed a report with the police.
By the New Year, Lefty was desperate for money. His Betamax deal had gone sour. He was about to be thrown out of the partnership in the new numbers business because he couldn’t come up with his share. He owed $25,000, and Mike Sabella was squeezing him for it.
Then—a total coincidence—Lefty saw an item in the paper about a $3 million art heist in Chicago. “That’s it,” he said, “that’s the one. That’s got to be him.” His end of that score, he figured, depending on the other splits, had to be at least a quarter million.
The first week in February, Conte called Lefty and told him he made the score, but he couldn’t pick up his end in Chicago for another week. Lefty told me to bring Conte in right away for a sitdown with Sabella.
Joined by Conte’s “girlfriend,” an agent going by the undercover name of Sherry, we flew into New York and went first to Lefty’s apartment. Lefty took Conte and me into his bedroom.
“Okay, listen to me now,” Lefty says. “We’re going over to Mike’s joint, and you pay careful attention to everything Mike says, because this went right to the top, and there were a lot of bosses involved in the Milwaukee situation.”
Lefty brought Louise. The five of us went to CaSa Bella.
We went into the bar and were greeted by Mike. Mike and Lefty talked alone for a few minutes, then called Conte and me over.
Mike asked Conte for a complete rundown on the Milwaukee situation, start to finish. He listened without saying a word.
> Then Mike says, “I found out what the situation is and I can tell you in three words: They don’t want New York people in Milwaukee. That guy went ahead and shook your hand and made the agreement when he didn’t have the authority. Now, Tony, I don’t talk to a citizen like you. I’m making an exception here. Milwaukee is responsible to Chicago, and Chicago is responsible to New York. Milwaukee has no authority to make an agreement like that without getting permission from the people they’re responsible to.”
“I understand,” Conte says.
“What you don’t understand, Tony, is they are all responsible to New York. Across the street is the boss of bosses. Last Wednesday there was a sitdown there, and Chicago and Milwaukee came in. He made a decision in our favor.”
Since the Bonanno boss, Carmine Galante, was still in prison, we assumed the decision was made by Genovese boss Funzi Tieri, who was the reigning chief of the Commission. The decision, Mike explained, was that Conte could resume his vending business in Milwaukee and that Balistrieri could again become partners if he wished, but if he didn’t want to become partners again, he still couldn’t hinder Conte in any way. If Balistrieri did hinder him, he should immediately contact Lefty. The decision went our way because Balistrieri had made the initial mistake.
“If I had made a mistake,” Conte says, “I would be man enough to go to the individual and apologize.”
Both Lefty and Mike vigorously shake their heads. “A boss doesn’t admit he make a mistake,” Mike says. “The only out he had, because he had made the mistake, was to dissolve the partnership without explanation.”
Mike pushed his chair back from the table—the sitdown was over.
We rejoined Sherry and Louise.
Donnie Brasco Page 23