“Chico has some contacts,” I say. Sonny had met Chico, the agent who was managing the club. “I’ll ask him if he’s interested and get back to you.”
The Shah had been in the news lately because of his ouster from Iran and his illness. We tried to find out if there had been a report of such a burglary, and there had been none.
I called Sonny back and told him that Chico was interested but couldn’t get up there for a couple of days. Sonny was impatient. He didn’t know anything about dealing this kind of stuff and didn’t want it lying around. We didn’t want to make it look like we were too anxious, that Chico had nothing to do. Sonny said he’d wait.
Chico hooked up with another agent from Chicago who posed as a shady art dealer, and they flew to New York.
Sonny picked them up at La Guardia Airport and, after making some quick turns to clean off possible tails, took them to Staten Isla where the stolen artwork was stashed. The stuff looked impressive—trays and relics of gold, good paintings. Chico took Polaroid pictures of everything, explaining that it was necessary to study the photos and check out the goods for “provenance”—to prove their authenticity.
A few days passed. Still there was no report of any theft. Chico passed word to Sonny that his man couldn’t find a buyer right now. Sonny started to sell some pieces off. There was nothing we could do. The FBI couldn’t seize the goods without revealing our operation.
Sonny came to Florida to pursue some contacts that might lead to an introduction to Trafficante.
Rossi and I were having breakfast with Sonny in the coffee shop at the Tahitian. Sonny brought up the matter of the Shah’s artwork.
“We took over a hundred grand,” he says, “and they didn’t even know it was missing.”
But then they had tried to burglarize the town house owned by the Shah’s sister on Beekman Place, one of Manhattan’s most exclusive neighborhoods. They had a man who supposedly had taken care of the security guards. Sonny waited in the car while a couple others went upstairs to pull the job. He heard a shot and took off.
He went back to his club in Brooklyn. Soon the burglary team showed up. One of them had shot himself in the hand. There had been a scuffle with a guard, and the whole thing was blown. Sonny sent the guy to their regular doctor around the corner, then gave him $500 and told him to get lost for a couple of weeks.
“It was fucking close to a billion-dollar score,” Sonny says. “I don’t even want to talk about it.”
But there was hope because the Shah, who was in Egypt, was fatally ill and would die soon. And when he did, Sonny wanted us to shoot up to New York because they were going to hit that warehouse again.
“You come running right down, brother,” Sonny says. “Take a fucking fast jet. We’ll get all this guy’s stuff when it comes from Egypt.”
But when the Shah died a few weeks later, Boobie called me and told me that the whole thing was on hold.
Angelo Bruno, the longtime boss of Philadelphia, had been hit—the second major boss to be rubbed out in a year. He was sitting in his car when somebody put a shotgun behind his ear. I asked Lefty about it.
“Bruno wanted all of Atlantic City,” he says. “He already had all the services at the casinos, but then he wanted all the gambling. You can’t have all of Atlantic City. The Gambinos got interests there. Trafficante’s got interests. Santo gave Bruno a piece of Florida in exchange for a piece of Atlantic City. We got interests over there. See, when you do things with people, you share. Especially whatever you do in the family, Donnie, you share with your people. In our family, the reason Lilo got whacked is that he wouldn’t share his drug business with anybody else in the family.”
“Is that right?”
“Hey, listen carefully, Donnie. If they can hit a boss, nobody’s immune.”
14
COLDWATER
The FBI had had Santo Trafficante under surveillance for some time. With the prospect of bringing the Bonannos together with Trafficante, Project Coldwater continued that surveillance and added electronic devices at King’s Court. The club had hidden videotape cameras that could monitor the office and the private round table in the main room that Rossi used. There were bugs in the chandelier over the round table and in the telephone. Rossi’s car had a Nagra tape recorder hidden in the trunk.
I moved into a one-bedroom, second-floor apartment in a complex of four-story buildings called Holiday Park Apartments directly across Route 19 from King’s Court, where Rossi also had an apartment. From my window I could see King’s Court. My telephone was wired for recording. Earlier in the Mafia operation, in Milwaukee or Florida, when I had wanted to record a conversation over a phone, I had done it with a simple suction-cup microphone attached to the handset and a regular tape recorder. Now that I had an apartment, I would have visitors, so I couldn’t have any recording devices lying around. A recorder was hidden inside the wall and hooked directly into the telephone line.
On occasion, Rossi or I would wear a “wire,” either a Nagra tape recorder or a T-4 transmitter.
The Nagra I used was four-by-six inches, three quarters of an inch thick, and used a three-hour tape. It recorded only, with no playback capability. The microphone, about the size of a pencil-tip eraser, was on a long wire so that you could hide it anywhere on your body. The recorder had an on-off switch. Prior to using it, you could test it to see that the tape was rolling. But without pulling the tape and putting it on a playback machine, you could not test it for recording.
The T-4 transmitter was half the size of the Nagra recorder—3½ x 2 inches, a quarter inch thick. It had no recording capability of its own. It transmitted sound to monitoring agents positioned in the vicinity who could listen and record. There was no on-off switch. It had a small flexible antenna, one to two inches long, with a tiny bulb on the end, which was the microphone. When you screwed on the antenna, the transmitter was turned on. Fresh batteries lasted about four hours. You could test the transmitter ahead of time by getting a monitoring agent on the phone and asking him if he was picking up your radio transmissions. But as with the Nagra recorder, once you were out on the job, there was no way of telling whether the system was working.
An advantage of the Nagra was that you could record a conversation anywhere without backup agents. The advantages of the transmitter were its smaller size for concealment purposes, and the fact that when you were using it, there were monitoring agents nearby getting direct communications from the transmitter. With a transmitter, if a situation went bad and the undercover agent was in immediate danger, the other agents could be on the scene in moments. With a Nagra you could get in trouble and nobody would know.
But whereas you could record anywhere with a Nagra, in the city the transmitter had a broadcast reach of maybe two blocks. Steel structures could interfere with transmission, as could atmospheric conditions or passing vehicles. The surveillance team could lose you or get out of range. One danger was that it was possible for a T-4 transmission to be picked up and broadcast back over a television set. You could be sitting in a room chatting with a couple of wiseguys when suddenly the TV is broadcasting your conversation back at you. Everybody in the room knows that somebody is wearing a wire.
A disadvantage to any recording or transmitting device was that you risked your life using it. To be caught wearing a wire was usually a death sentence. Also, they didn’t always work. It looks easy in the movies. Just tape the device to your body, go in, and record the incriminating conversation. In reality the devices, while they are supposed to be at or near state-of-the-art in technology, are not infallible. There is always a compromise in efficiency when you try to make things small.
We undercover agents were not always given the equipment with the ultimate in advanced secret technology—stuff that spies may have. Eventually we testify in court, and we have to reveal the details of the electronics equipment we used in the investigation. Spies don’t go to court, so what they use won’t be revealed. Electronic stuff that the government wants
to keep secret will not be given to undercover agents to use in making cases that go to court.
All these devices have delicate recording capabilities. That means that they pick up all sound. A device hidden on your body will pick up your own belches, the rustling of your clothing, and everything else in a room or nearby-conversations, shuffling of feet and chairs, radios and TVs, air-conditioners, street noise. Because of their paranoia that there are bugs planted everywhere, mob guys, whether in hotel rooms or cars or wherever, always turn on the TV or radio to cover the conversation.
Then, if everything else is just right, you still can’t insist that people talk about what you want them to talk about when you want them to talk about it. Our rules governing recording and transmissions were that once you’ve turned a device on, you leave it on for an entire conversation, and that conversation-recorded over the telephone or on the scene or by other agents monitoring your transmissions-is turned in as evidence. It doesn’t matter whether the conversation turns out to be irrelevant or whether it contains irrelevant sections; the whole thing is provided to the courts. While only relevant parts of conversations may be presented as testimony, the entire conversations are available to the defense attorneys so that they can’t claim we were being unfairly selective—trying to distort conversations-in what we recorded on the scene.
You turn on the recorder or transmitter prior to arriving at the scene. It may be hours before the conversation gets around to what you want to hear. Tapes run out. Batteries run down.
You have almost no control over conditions. You can’t test on the scene for sound levels. You can’t arrange people as you would like to for recording. You can’t ask them to raise their voices. You can’t control extraneous sounds that muddy the reception. You might go through hours of conversation laying the groundwork for the conversation you want. Finally he’s telling you everything you want to know. Then when they play the tapes at the Bureau, you got only half the conversation or maybe nothing—you don’t know that until it’s over. You can’t reconstruct that conversation. You can’t go back to the badguy and say, “You remember that conversation we had yesterday? Let’s talk about that again, and this time let’s not walk by that same building because there’s too much steel in it.... And let’s not walk too fast because the car that’s recording this is getting out of range.” Or,
“Let’s go over it again because last time the batteries were bad or the spindles were worn or the tape was dragging.”
That kind of frustration was to me more of a burden, more pressure than all the other undercover work.
I didn’t like carrying any device. It was difficult to hide anything. I was in solid with these guys, and there was always the traditional hugging and kissing of cheeks. There was horseplay, wrestling around. I was with these guys day and night. With Lefty it was twenty-four hours a day. I stayed in hotel rooms with him, changed clothes in the rooms, stripped to swimming trunks to go sit around the pool.
When I did use a recorder or transmitter, I never taped one to my body. The only time I did that was way back in 1975, at the beginning of the heavy-equipment theft operation. I carried the Nagra or T-4 loose, usually in my jacket pocket. With the Nagra I preferred not to risk running the microphone up under my clothes, so usually I wrapped the cord around the machine and stuck the whole thing in my pocket. When I wasn’t going to be wearing a jacket, I would put the Nagra in my cowboy boot. Then I would have to run the microphone cord up under my clothes and tape the mike to my chest.
I never wanted to keep the devices around. There was always a chance somebody would bust into your apartment or car. So when I wanted to use one, I made arrangements to meet the case agent somewhere for a pickup, and afterward for a drop.
The obvious overall advantage to wearing a wire is that you may get a crucial conversation that makes a case. That’s what makes it worth the risk. It was up to me whether I wanted to wear a wire or not in any situation. Altogether, beginning with Project Coldwater, I probably wore a wire a dozen times.
Sonny was pushing for an introduction to Trafficante. He sent Lefty down to Holiday on a mission to try to set up an introduction through intermediaries. We thought Lefty might talk about important people and procedures. It was too hot for a jacket. I put a Nagra in my cowboy boot.
He had told me that we were going to fly to Miami to meet the son-in-law of Meyer Lansky, the notorious mob mastermind of money and gambling businesses, who supposedly was a friend of Trafficante’s.
At breakfast I say, “I’m still not clear why we’re going down there.”
“Because I wanna see this guy,” Lefty says. “He’s in Miami Beach. He’s gonna introduce me to that guy there who’s going to introduce me to the main guy over here.”
Lefty was complaining as usual about Rossi not giving him enough money. Rossi had booked his round-trip flight from New York but had not offered to pay for his trip from Holiday to Miami, or for expenses he might incur.
“Just sit him down and explain to him what’s going on,” I say.
“That’s your job to tell him. This thing here is his idea.”
“I know it’s his idea, but he hasn’t made any fucking money yet, either.”
“I don’t need this aggravation. Just tell him we’re going to see Meyer Lansky’s son-in-law. Just tell him he’s got to give me the money.”
Lefty had sent Rossi over to the club to look for his Tampa-New York return-flight ticket. He said he had lost it somewhere. But he hadn’t lost it. He confided to me that he wanted to test Rossi’s reaction.
When Sonny had been down to see the club earlier, he had noticed that Rossi’s car had Pennsylvania tags and told Lefty he was suspicious about that. Lefty asked me, and I explained that it was a rented car, so the tags are whatever the car has on it when you pick it up.
But Lefty wanted to check him out a little more. Rossi had booked the New York-Tampa round-trip flight for Lefty on his American Express card. By pretending to lose the ticket, Lefty wanted to see how Rossi reacted. If he was an agent, Lefty reasoned, he would get nervous because he would probably have to account for the ticket to his office, plus he would be worried that somebody “in the underworld business” might meanwhile find the ticket and check out the American Express number to see if it was a government number.
When I had a chance, I clued Rossi in so he could end the search. He told Lefty he would just cancel the ticket and order another one.
We went to the club. Rossi says, “Nothing for nothing, Lefty, but just so I understand, you want me to pay for your ticket to Miami, right?”
“Well, who we going down there to see? I’m gonna see this guy in order to make a move out here. I’m not gonna make this move for myself. Once this guy gives you the green light, you can go anyplace you wanna go. That’s his father-in-law. I meet the old man, he calls this guy over here, and then I get a proper introduction. Now, you gotta give me my regular two-fifty to take back to New York. And a buck and a half to entertain this guy over there.”
“In other words,” Rossi says, “you’re gonna meet with old man Santo.”
“No, he’s over here. Gonna meet first old man Meyer Lansky. See, you can’t get an introduction to this man over here unless he sends you over here. He makes one phone call in front of me: ‘Hello, how are you? A dear friend of mine, he’s gonna visit you such-and-such a day at three o’clock.‘ Now I go here. I explain what I’m gonna do in this town. And this is the moves I want to make. I say, ’Do we have your blessings, or do we have to go further with it?‘ Most likely he’ll say, ’You got my blessings.‘ That’s the proper way of doing things. You can’t do it no other way. Now we clear all the middlemen out, all the bullshitters. Now you do what you fucking want in this fucking town. Ain’t nobody can approach you and say,
‘Hey you, what are you doing here?’ Know what you tell them? ‘Go see this fellow—if you can see him, which I doubt.’ “
“So you’re arranging a meeting,” Rossi says, drawing
him out to get it on the tape, “with Santo.”
“That’s it, I’m making a whole fucking move. Listen. We stood three days in a fucking room-Donnie could tell you-in Chicago. Three days they made me lay in. Finally: ‘Come on, get in the limousine, let’s go.’ I didn’t know where the fuck I was going, but I got in the limousine. They took me to a big, big fucking cabaret. It was closed. It was the off-season. ‘Wait here.’ And from there went to a fucking restaurant. ‘Wait here.’ Then the main guy come out. He said, ‘Come on, let’s go in the office. You’re well recommended.’ And that was it.”
I say, “He wants to make sure that when we make these moves, we get protection from anybody that wants to come in.”
“I know that,” Lefty says.
“Not you, Left. I’m not talking to you. Tony’s got to know it.”
“The thing is, Lefty,” Rossi says, “nothing for nothing, but I gotta start earning.”
“Just a minute,” Lefty says. “Are we opening the doors for you right now? Another thing, we gotta get a tent for here. Free food, free drinks. Gambling in the tent. Why should you lose a Friday night business in the club? That’s the biggest mistake you made. And what about a Sunday afternoon?”
“We gotta operate in the bigger cities,” Rossi says, “like Orlando.”
“They own Orlando too. That’s the first thing I’m gonna get is Orlando.”
“And Tampa,” Rossi says.
“He owns Tampa. This is what the fuck I’m making a move for. I was with the fucking people all day yesterday, in New York.”
“Don’t misunderstand,” Rossi says. “I’m not trying to be disrespectful. I got a lot of respect for you. But I got to work hard in my life. Stealing ain’t easy today.”
“Well, let me tell you something, my man. Just a starting point. You just caught the off-season. You got the football season. Donnie’s going out and help you. You’re gonna have a lot of fucking action over here. You can’t close on Sundays, though, because Sunday’s your biggest fucking day.”
Donnie Brasco Page 28