Lefty was glowing. “I feel good tonight for the first time since before the holidays. Lemme tell you something. Because of the situation out there, I didn’t get invited to one Christmas party or wedding or wake or nothing. I didn’t even get a Christmas bonus due to the fact of that there, and how it made me look. Now I feel good.”
The restaurant’s strolling guitarist came by our table. Louise requested the theme from The Godfather. The guy sang it in Italian and then in English.
“This restaurant just reopened a few days ago from remodeling,” Lefty says. “See all that marble? He went for six hundred grand. All from Italy. You know what he had shipped in with the shipments of marble? Junk, heroin.”
Lefty wanted to go up to Château Madrid and catch the floor show. He told Conte that Mike should get $1,000 for his recent efforts. “Mike’ll make out a tab, and give him your American Express.”
Since Mike had to pay taxes on that, Lefty said to add on taxes and tip so that Mike would be able to keep $1,000.
As we were leaving, Mike pulled me and Lefty aside.
“You still vouching for this guy, Donnie?” Mike asks.
“Yeah, Mike, as much as I did before.”
“Okay, I’m holding you responsible.”
Lefty says, “Now, he’s gotta go back and pick up that money? You fly back with him. And then you don’t leave his side. You go with him to pick up the money, and then you come back in here with him and that money.”
“Okay, Lefty, that’s what I’ll do.”
We headed uptown on the FDR Drive. Lefty pointed out some of the sights to Conte and Sherry.
“Right over there,” Lefty says, pointing to the East River, “that’s where we dump the bodies. One time some wiseguys dumped two bodies in there. Couple cops from the Seventh Precinct happened to see the bodies dumped. They didn’t want to be bothered with it. So they took their little boat out and dragged the bodies down the river to the next precinct so they wouldn’t have to investigate the case.”
The next morning Conte and I went down to see Lefty. Lefty presented Conte with an itemized bill for all services to date, totaling $31,500—$17,500 of which was for Nicky Marangello, the underboss.
“Nicky was very strong for us at the sitdown with the bosses,” Lefty says. “And listen. I’m asking Mike for permission to take youse, one at a time, out on a contract job with me so you’ll have the experience, and you can get on the list for being made wiseguys.”
On the flight to Milwaukee, Conte and I assessed the whole situation. The bosses had had this big sitdown and decided after all that Conte was free to run his business in Milwaukee and share with Lefty. What did the FBI need a vending-machine business for? We had accomplished all we needed with that. All told in this operation, we had laid out about $50,000. That included gifts for Balistrieri, and “loans” and cuts from “scores” to Lefty and other wiseguys. For about the salary of one agent, we had enough violations we believed to bring down the Balistrieri crime family. But we didn’t need to spend any more. And if we spent any more time in Milwaukee, there was a good chance that Balistrieri would consider us thorns in his side and have us whacked. We were in agreement. It was time to close up Operation Timber.
Now was the time for Conte to take off—just as if he had grabbed the money from the score and wasn’t going to share it. And I would try to fade the heat off me.
We checked into the Marriott Inn. The next morning, February 7, Conte and I were supposed to drive to Chicago together to pick up his end of the score, then fly straight back to New York with the money. We set it up with the case agent for Conte to disappear. That morning he left; his job in Milwaukee was over.
Later, over the telephone, I told Lefty that we had changed our plans. At about nine A.M., I said, we had packed the car with our clothes and everything, ready to leave, and then he got a call from the guy he was supposed to meet—“the guy with the jewelry,” as we put it in code. The guy said Conte couldn’t bring anybody with him, he had to come alone or he would not get his end. So I said, Conte had gone alone. But his plan was to come right back and pick me up. Now it was late afternoon. He hadn’t showed, I hadn’t heard from him. I was afraid something went wrong.
“Maybe they killed him,” Lefty says.
“Hey, please, Left.”
“Listen, you stay put. Don’t go out to eat or nothing.”
“Lefty, where the hell am I gonna go? It’s snowing like a bastard here. Cold as hell. I got forty bucks in my pocket. I got the clothes on my back. Everything else went with him in the car. He took the plane tickets for the flight back to New York. I’m stranded here.”
“He seem worried about anything?”
“He was in a great mood. He said he was glad we had the meeting with Mike and that we could go. ahead with the business. He was glad that you’re not pissed at him anymore.”
“I’m blowing my top here. You weren’t supposed to leave his side. That’s why you’re there. Call me in an hour.”
I called an hour later.
“Nothing, Left. You think he got pinched?”
“I don’t think he got pinched. Maybe it’s his heart, he’s in the hospital. Who knows? If you would’ve been concentrating on what you’re supposed to do, this wouldn‘t’ve happened. When you come back, you have to go into five years’ probation over here with these guys. They’ll make you come down every day, every night. You make one mistake, you get chased out.”
“All right.”
“All right nothing. You gotta listen. You stay put. Now you’re stuck there, no clothes. Good thing you can order food in the room. He knows all this. He’s gotta come back. That guy called me up again fifteen minutes ago.”
“Mike?”
“He says, ‘What do you mean you don’t know what’s going on?’ I says, ‘Well, he got tied up out there.’ You put me in fucking mean positions with these guys.”
“Maybe he was scared.”
“Why should he be scared?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t even know how to talk to people, feel people out. I mean, you don’t know nothing. I’ll tell you one thing. There ain’t a punk in the street that hangs out with a wiseguy could get away with what you two guys done. Forget about it. Youse won’t last five minutes in the city of New York. Because you got different ways of thinking. And nothing bothers you. What are you laughing at?”
“I’m not laughing. I’m coughing. I got a cold. It’s freezing here.”
“Don’t go to sleep, because every hour on the hour we’re gonna call.”
An hour later I say, “I think this guy got clipped.”
“What makes you say a thing like that?”
“The guy’s all happy about going and everything, got all my clothes in the car. It takes four hours to drive down there and back. It’s not like him. He would’ve called.”
“I don’t believe he’s got clipped. Now don’t start getting me crazy. I say he got hung up in Chicago.”
All night long it goes on. The next morning I say, “Lefty, listen. I just got a phone call. Guy says, ‘Is Tony there?’ I say he stepped out for a minute. Guy says, ‘I’m a friend of his. I was supposed to meet him yesterday in Chicago and he never showed up, and I wondered if you know where he is.’ Probably the jeweler guy. He never got to him.”
“Then you listen to the radio over there. Go downstairs and buy the papers. Because nothing happened to this guy. Because it’d be a big splash out there. They publicize everything. Ain’t you got a television? Leave the news on all the time.”
“But he’s in Chicago, right? This is Milwaukee. That’s a hundred miles away.”
“So Milwaukee ain’t got news? Anything goes on in Chicago, Milwaukee gets.”
“Maybe the law doesn’t know about it.”
“Let me tell you something. That’s Tony checking on if you’re still there. He put a guy on the phone.”
“Why would he be checking?”
“I don’
t know what’s in the back of his head.”
An hour later I tell Lefty, “The guy called back. He said, ‘Don’t wait around for your friend because he’s not coming back.’ ”
“Why would he say that?”
“How the hell do I know? I’m just sitting here answering the phone. It’s twenty-four hours already.”
“He’s not coming back,” Lefty says. “Because this is Tony in Chicago making that call! Getting his friend to do that. But not even have the decency to say your clothes are at the airport or something, right?”
“Just said not to wait for my friend.”
“You’ll get a phone call in a couple hours to see if you left. Next time he calls you, you say, ‘You tell fucking Tony just to leave my fucking plane ticket and my fucking clothes at the airport. We don’t give a fuck if he never comes back into New York.’ Open your mouth, Donnie. Talk like me. See what he says.”
“All right.”
After a pause he says, “Could this fucking guy be a fucking agent?”
“Who?”
“Tony.”
“I don’t know, Left.”
“I know you don’t know! That’s your famous words. I’m so fucking mad. I don’t even wanna get mad at you right now. I’m fifty-two, and I’m willing to spend the rest of my life in jail over this, because I’m gonna do what I gotta do with this son of a bitch because he fucked me pretty good. I’m facing shame in this neighborhood. The only way I can redeem myself is by doing what I gotta do with this guy. I take an oath on my dead father on this thing.”
“We’ll get it squared away, Left.”
“Ain’t the question, get it squared away. I can track this guy down anyplace I want. I took three photos of him in Chicago. I’m getting a thousand made up. I’ll ship them out throughout the country—Phoenix, Min neapolis, Chicago. When I put word out on this fucking motherfucker, forget about it. So he lays up six months to a year. That don’t mean shit. He’s gotta come out of the woodwork. And when he does, nobody gonna touch him until you and I get out there. I’m giving my fucking life’s work to this guy. He embarrassed me.”
“He embarrassed me too.”
“Forget about you. I can’t go on Mulberry Street because I implicated myself with a jerk-off.”
“He’s probably got the money stashed somewhere by now,” I say.
“I don’t care about the money no more. Only thing I care about now is I’m gonna track this guy down and get satisfaction.”
“I think the guy got whacked, Left, I’m telling you. He’s not gonna go for twenty-four hours and not call.”
“I don’t believe it’s a hit. If they’re gonna set him up, they’ll set him up in Milwaukee. I figure Tony don’t wanna come up with this bread.”
“But if it was one of the guys he pulled that job with,” I say, “somebody that wanted his end, too, then you can kiss it all good-bye.”
“I ain’t kissing anything good-bye. If there’s no write-up about this guy, and he don’t come in, we’ll track him down no matter where the fuck he goes. It’s the two phone calls you got I don’t like. It doesn’t make sense. Because nobody advertises that they’re doing this. They ain’t gonna call up. What do they give a fuck about you? Donnie, you’re gonna do something now. You’re gonna rent a car. Use your credit card. Go two places. The airport in Milwaukee, then Chicago and that airport. The car has gotta be in the airport. If his car’s in the airport, then you know he took off without us.”
“I find the car, then what?”
“Then I come out there. We’ll break the trunk to see if his body’s in there or your clothes is in there.”
I allowed six hours for the round trip to Chicago and a check of the airports. All day I sat in the motel room watching television inside and the snow outside, not ordering anything from room service, not answering the phone—as if I weren’t there.
That night I called Lefty. I told him I went to the airports, I didn’t find his car. But in Chicago I had described the car to the parking-lot attendants and asked if they saw it. One of them said he did see a white Cadillac like that the night before. He said the cops were towing it out, and he heard them talking about blood on the seat. “I think the guy got whacked, Left.”
“I don’t think he got whacked. Something’s fishy.”
“Left, I can’t keep hanging around here. I got no money. I got the same clothes on I had on two days ago. I got to jump the bill and get out of here.”
“All right. Come in. Lay low. Don’t let Mike see you. I tell you this, Donnie. If I didn’t love you how much I love you, you’d be fucking dead. Mike don’t love you like I do.”
I left Milwaukee. I still had to face the music back in New York. I still didn’t know what had spooked Frank Balistrieri. But if we had covered our tracks as well as I thought, I might get punished, but I wouldn’t get whacked.
12
SONNY BLACK
I wasn’t punished. I wasn’t put on probation. Mike Sabella gave me the cold shoulder, but since I wasn’t a made guy, I was excused for a couple of errors in judgment. Lefty never let me forget how I let Conte and $200,000 get away. For a few months I moved around the country, ostensibly checking out scores for Lefty and me.
I was in Miami in July when Lefty called and told me to go out and buy the New York papers. “You’ll be in for a big surprise,” he said.
Carmine Galante had been hit. The Bonanno family boss had been out of Atlanta federal prison for only a few months. When I used to stand guard for him with Lefty outside CaSa Bella, I worried about getting whacked. Now there was Galante himself on the front page, lying dead on his back in a pool of blood, his cigar still clenched between .his teeth. He had been shotgunned to death by three men while having lunch in the rear courtyard of Joe and Mary’s Italian American Restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue—the street where the zips hung out—in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. The restaurant owner and a friend were also killed. Two other guys were identified as having been with Galante at the lunch: Galante’s bodyguards, Baldo Amato and Caesar Bonventre, two of the “zips” I had seen around the Toyland Social Club. They had fled after the shooting.
I called Lefty. “Wow,” I said.
“There’s gonna be big changes.”
“Well, where do we stand with everybody?”
“I can’t talk over the phone. Come in right away.”
When a boss gets killed, that’s not the end of it. If one faction got permission from the Commission to take out a boss, rival factions, or those loyal to the dead boss, must be brought into line or wiped out. There will be a winning side and a losing side. Sometimes it takes years before one side wins and the killing stops. I didn’t know how the factions lined up and which side Lefty would end up with now. Lefty had hated Galante, but you couldn’t go just by that. Supposedly the zips were Galante’s chosen people. But two of his prime zips were with him when he got whacked, and that said setup. So I didn’t know where anybody stood, which means I didn’t know where I stood, either.
I met Lefty on Madison Street, outside the candy store.
“Rusty Rastelli is the new boss,” Lefty says, “even though he’s still in the can. We’re gonna be under Sonny Black. He was made captain. He’s taking over Mike’s crew.”
Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano was with the Brooklyn Bonanno crew. I had seen him around once or twice, but for the most part the Brooklyn guys hang out in Brooklyn, the Manhattan crew in Manhattan. Sonny had been in prison for hijacking most of the time I had been on this job.
“What about Mike?” I ask.
“Him and Nicky were both supposed to get whacked, but they got passes because a lot of people liked them. They made a deal to get knocked down instead.”
Sabella and Marangello accepted demotion. Now they were just ordinary soldiers of Lefty’s rank. They were lucky.
“So where does all this leave us?” I say.
“We got no problems. I thought I was gonna get whacked.”
&
nbsp; After Galante got hit, he said, he got a call from Sonny Black. Sonny, even though knowing that Lefty was under Mike Sabella, directed him to come to a midnight meeting at the Motion Lounge, Sonny’s hangout at Graham and Withers Streets in Brooklyn. And Lefty wasn’t to tell anybody where he was going.
“I figure they’re gonna whack me, too, because I was always close to Mike,” Lefty tells me. “And he’s telling me I can’t tell my own captain I’m going over there. But I got no choice because I know that Sonny Black is now a power. I don’t know what the fuck’s coming down when I drive out to Brooklyn to see Sonny.”
The meeting was friendly. Sonny told him all that had happened—who’d been knocked down, who the new captains were, and so forth. Joey Massino, the fat guy I had seen hanging around social clubs, was made captain. Sal Catalano, another Toyland guy, was made street boss of the zips, the imported Sicilians. And Caesar Bonventre, the slick young zip who was with Galante when he got whacked, was made captain—at twenty-eight, the youngest in the family. Sonny gave Lefty a choice to go with him or with Joey Massino. But Sonny wanted him.
“So I says, ‘Yeah, I’ll be with you.’ ”
In mob business you ask questions about aspects that pertain only to you. Normal curiosity is not normal curiosity for a wiseguy. A wiseguy does not go around asking who clipped the boss. Look too curious and you draw attention to yourself. If the cops did break something, the first thing everybody thinks is that there was an informant. I didn’t want anybody saying, “Why was Donnie so curious about everything?”
I didn’t go out of my way to learn what intelligence the FBI might have been getting about the murder from informants. I didn’t want to know more than I could logically know as a connected guy. It could be just as risky to know too much as to know too little. I didn’t want the burden of having to sort out what I should know from what I shouldn’t.
The murder of a boss doesn’t get talked about much on the street. Business policy doesn’t change. There’s only one policy in the mob: You earn money and you kick your money upstairs. Only the personalities change, and ordinary wiseguys or connected guys don’t have anything to say about that. You go about your business while the power is sorted out by leaders of the factions.
Donnie Brasco Page 24