Donnie Brasco

by Joseph Pistone

  “But you still can’t go on betting on the fucking come, you know,” Rossi says. “Eventually you got to start earning. And the big money is still not here.”

  “It’s in Tampa,” Lefty says. “And what the fuck you think we’re going to fucking Miami for? You think I like to ride in motherfucking planes? I don’t like restaurants, for number one. I don’t like traveling in a suitcase, for number two. Donnie knows what I like. Fucking weekends I’m home watching fucking TV, me and my wife. I don’t even want to go to a fucking joint. I don’t even go to Mike’s no more because I’m sick and tired of a fucking joint.”

  “You understand what I’m saying.”

  “I understand. All right, Donnie, go get your clothes. Let’s get the fuck out of here, do what we got to do. You know what I would like, Tony? I can make it myself. A nice cold spritzer.”

  Johnny Spaghetti picked us up at the airport in Miami and took us to Joe Puma’s Restaurant, Little Italy, at 1025 E. Hallandale Beach Boulevard in Hallandale, just outside Miami. Joe Puma was a Bonanno guy who had been under Mike Sabella until the Galante hit, then was put under Phil “Philly Lucky” Giaccone. Lefty wanted me to meet Puma and Steve Maruca, another made guy. Maruca had recently been released from prison. He was more intimidating than Puma. He was a rugged-looking guy, about 6’2”, with a big voice and big hands.

  Puma and Maruca were both under Philly Lucky. There was nothing wrong with us getting together with guys under another captain, but with the unstable circumstances of the Bonanno family at the time, I didn’t know what was up with Lefty wanting me to meet these guys, what it might mean, who was on what side in the factions maneuvering for control under Rusty Rastelli. But I knew that Puma and Maruca were important in the family.

  Lefty was exploring another route to Trafficante, through a relative of Santo Trafficante’s. Supposedly he would introduce Lefty to the relative, who would introduce him to Santo.

  Neither of the meetings came off. Both guys were out of town.

  Sonny called and told me that he and Boobie were flying down for Memorial Day weekend. I call Lefty to tell him. That set him off about his turf.

  “What do you mean, Sonny’s coming down tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know. I asked him if he had talked to you, because I wanted to make sure you knew about it. He said, ‘Don’t worry, there’s no problem with Lefty, I’ll see him tomorrow before we go.’ ”

  “I don’t believe this fucking guy over here. This is my fucking operation.”

  “Left, I’m gonna be with you, you know that.”

  “Ain’t the question. Why’s he coming down there?”

  “Maybe he wants to come down for a vacation.”

  “Don’t give me that fucking bullshit, maybe he wants. He ain’t supposed to be in that town without me. Who’s paying for his fucking plane fare?”

  “I guess we are, but he said he’ll straighten it out tomorrow.”

  “Don’t con me, pal.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Who the fuck are you to accept confirmation on his plane ticket?”

  “Lefty, I’m gonna argue with him?”

  “Yeah, you cocksucker.”

  I hang up on him.

  He calls right back. “You fucking motherfucker! You don’t hang up on me!”

  I can imagine his veins bulging. “Don’t ever call me cocksucker, Lefty.”

  “I call you what I want! I call you a cocksucker, a—”

  I hang up.

  He calls right back. “Lemme talk to Tony.”

  I give the phone to Tony.

  “That fucking son of a bitch cocksucker better understand who he’s talking to, Tony. Nobody treats me that way, hanging up. You better talk to that guy.”

  “Lefty, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tony says.

  “Lemme talk to Donnie.”

  I get back on the phone and he resumes.

  “I told you nobody goes on the expense sheet. You tell that motherfucker Tony that he owes me $500 and he sends me $500 tomorrow. I’m gonna shoot that motherfucker in the head. There’s something wrong over here, pal. I’m going to Brooklyn tomorrow and I’ll have all the answers. Who’s your fucking boss?”

  “You are.”

  “I’m your boss. I’ll get the answers in Brooklyn before he leaves. I want you by the phone at the club, twelve o‘clock. Make sure that other motherfucker’s on the extension phone. I want both you guys on the phone when I call.”

  “I’ll make sure he’s there.”

  “When I get through with Sonny, right then and there, if he can’t give me the right answers, I’m gonna tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “Ain’t nobody knows that I got three fucking grenades. Ain’t no motherfucker could ever live after I get through with them. If this guy gives me the wrong answers tomorrow, I’ll blow the fuck everybody up.”

  “Lefty.”

  Sonny and Boobie came down. They sat with Rossi and me in the lounge at the Tahitian. I had a Nagra in my boot.

  “I don’t want to get caught in the middle with Lefty,” I say.

  “I spoke to him,” Sonny says. “See, when I say to you, ‘Don’t say nothing,’ don’t say nothing. Lefty stood up for me when I was away. And I’d never do nothing to hurt him. He’ll go all the way with you. He’s a tremendous guy, a dynamite guy, but he tends to dramatize. He called me back after he talked to you. He was fucking whacked. Now, I don’t have to tell nobody what I’m doing. So you don’t tell him nothing. I’ll tell him what I want him to know. I’m never telling him what conversations take place. He knows me too long. I never do nothing underhanded. If I take down any money from here, he gets his end and he goes home to sleep.”

  “He’s done a lot for me, too, in six years,” I say, “but I don’t want to have arguments with him over you. Anything we do, I’m always gonna give him a piece of my end. I don’t want him to think that I’m fucking him.”

  “Donnie, you know the story with this crew. When I went away, they put me on the clothesline.”

  “I know.” When Sonny was in the can, his crew had deserted him. He was separated from his wife, but he had four kids he wanted taken care of. Money supposed to go to his family wasn’t paid.

  “They didn’t want to bother with me, this crew,” Sonny says. “They were afraid. But when the boss told him to keep his fucking mouth shut about me, he stood up. So now I come back home, the whole fucking story changes. Now we got all the power. So I brought him right back.”

  “He’s a stand-up guy. There ain’t no two ways about it.”

  “But you can’t tell him nothing. He gets them two fucking wines in him and then—well, he’s trying to help you, but he’s hurting you. Now, see, everything is politics. Five years ago, I give you my word of honor, I’m gonna put two guns in my fucking pocket for whoever calls me. But today you can’t do it. Today you gotta sit back and just go step by step.”

  “That’s right,” Rossi and I say.

  “You got all the kids coming around today, you know, and they’re stronger than lions. And all these old guys, they got a brain of a seventy- or eighty-year-old person. A seventy-year-old brain can’t compare with mine, because where he’s got like twenty more years experience in his day, I got like fifty more years experience in my day. And we’re living in my day, not their day anymore. That’s what they fail to understand.”

  “That’s right,” we say.

  “Like, who thought jeans were gonna be good? A young kid thought of jeans and look at the fucking money jeans are making. These old-timers will never wear a pair of jeans in their life. Their brain stopped. I’ll show you men that will go through a fucking tank for you, and I gotta give them a hundred, two hundred a week, and they ain’t earning a dime. All these big puffers with their cigars and pinkie rings, they’re taking down all the money. It’s gotta change.”

  “Yeah,” Boobie says. He is looking around at some of the people passing through. �
��Those blondes is with somebody down here or what?”

  “They’re just around,” I say, “far as I know.”

  Rossi left the table for a few minutes. Sonny opened up more around me because Rossi was still considered an outsider.

  I told Sonny that “our friend, the cop” had introduced Tony to a guy who owned shrimp boats and used them to bring in cocaine and marijuana.

  “The deputy gave you this guy as a connection?” Sonny asks.

  “Yeah. The deputy was with this guy a while back, protecting him for hauling marijuana. This guy does everything. We just met him, you understand. I told Tony, ‘Let this guy do all the talking. We don’t want it to look like we’re too anxious to do business. We just let him keep telling us what he wants to do.’ He said he was gonna come and see us a couple of months ago, but he wanted to make sure we were okay.”

  “I don’t want to talk to Tony about it,” Sonny says. “If we do anything with this guy, you arrange it. We’ll take one piece and put it out on the street. Take us seven days. Whatever money we get, we’ll send up. Tell him the smoke is good because there ain’t that much involved. See, I got an army of cars to go back and forth from Orlando. Now, what we’re dealing with is a tremendous amount of trust in people. I only talk to you because you’re good, and you talk to me.”

  “Right.”

  “Down the line, these motherfuckers are weak. So don’t talk to nobody. I always talk alone, because the only way there is to get caught is talking with two other people. Because now there is a strict law. In other words, me and you are talking like now. They can’t pinch him over there for conspiracy with us because there’s just two of us. But there’s a lot of guys got five or ten years. We don’t trust nobody. We gotta get sneaky. Because the sneakier we are, the smarter we are.”

  A few days earlier, Donahue, the deputy sheriff, brought up the matter of dog-racing tracks with Rossi. He wanted to know if Rossi’s people might be interested. Some politicians would have to be bribed. I brought it up with Sonny. “The cop told Tony his people are gonna come up with the bread, and they got a lock in Tallahassee, which is the state capital, for the license. He wants to help him put it together and for protection, so nobody else is gonna muscle in on it.”

  “We could definitely protect this guy, down to the track. We gotta bring in another family, because that family controls over there.”

  “That’s what I think he’s looking for.”

  “Yeah, I’ll get that. Meanwhile I’ll come out with my top guns. Let’s hear what Tony’s got to say.” He waves for Tony to return to the table. “We’re talking about the dog track.”

  Rossi nods. “He guaranteed that he’s got two investors around here, and each will put up a million dollars. But what he wants is protection, all what it takes in order to put this thing together.”

  “What kind of help does he want? Protection from what?”

  “He came to me because, you know, you couldn’t run a track here in Florida without Trafficante’s permission. That never came up directly. That’s what I read into it. He thinks I could, you know, reach out.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s no problem. But who knows anything about putting a track together? That’s what we gotta find out. What is he actually looking for?”

  “Sonny, all I do is listen. I didn’t say yes, no, nothing. There’s three dog tracks now, each one is open four months, so they’re all working with each other. Now, you put in this other track, you’re gonna have problems with those other three tracks unless there’s somebody there that controls it. So what he’s really looking for is the permission.”

  “Or somebody,” I say, “that can go sit down with the guy in Tampa.”

  “All right. I’ll lay it down to him when I see this guy, see what he says. If the guy says, ‘All right, go ahead,’ then youse go ahead, nobody will ever bother us. But if he says, ‘Listen, I got three, what do I need four for?’ Then forget about it. Because you gotta show him respect. The deputy was happy with that four hundred we gave him?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Rossi says. “I give him money all along—two hundred, three hundred.”

  “I mean, for that one night.”

  “The Vegas Night? Oh, yeah.”

  “We should tell him that we’d like to get another one in a few weeks time. I’ll bring the crew down, two guys for the crap table. This way maybe this time we could take down some real money.”

  Phone calls home were not satisfying. “When are you coming home? Why aren’t you coming home?”

  I would talk to each of the girls, ask about school, whether they were keeping the horses fed—they had three horses now that they kept in a barn down the road. Mainly they wanted to know when I was coming home. My wife would say, “Joe, tell me some of the things you’re doing. Knowing where you are, picturing you doing something, that makes me feel more comfortable about it, helps keep my mind clear.”

  I would tell her a little bit. If the kids were afraid for me, I’d say, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. These guys are so stupid, they couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag.”

  Bills, household problems, teenager problems—I couldn’t do anything about any of it. So much had been going on, guys coming and going in Florida, that I hadn’t been home in seven weeks.

  I got home for my oldest daughter’s graduation, the first weekend in June. I was a stranger. A month earlier my wife had fallen while mowing the grass and sliced open her ankle, requiring six stitches. She hadn’t mentioned it. My daughters had gotten into a couple of bad habits—nothing disastrous, just frustrating because I wasn’t there to deal with it. At one point when I was by myself, I put my fist through the bedroom door.

  My wife produced a nice brunch party for my daughter’s graduation. My mother was there; her mother was there. I wasn’t in sync. I wasn’t conversational. I was missing a lot of years.

  Afterward my wife said, “It was your daughter’s graduation. You should have just forgotten for a while and been happy and put a different face on.”

  I had to get back to Florida because Sonny and Lefty were coming down. They had arranged a sitdown with Trafficante. I had been home for three days. “You’ve been in a horrible mood the whole time,” my wife said. She didn’t ask what was wrong. I wouldn’t have known what to answer.

  Tuesday morning, June 3, she drove me to the airport. It was our nineteenth wedding anniversary.

  When I got to Tampa, I called to apologize for my mood.

  Sonny came down with his girlfriend, Judy, and Lefty, and checked into the Tahitian Motor Lodge. Sonny had to wait for a call. Trafficante would say when and where they would meet. We hung around the pool.

  The next day he got the call. He was to meet Trafficante that night at eight. He wanted me to pick him up at six forty-five. “I like to get there early,” Sonny says, “and get the feel of the place, look it over to make sure it’s not a setup or there aren’t any cops.”

  A top Bonanno captain was meeting with the biggest boss in Florida. The FBI put a surveillance team on.

  I took Rossi’s car because it was wired with a Nagra in the trunk. I picked Sonny up. Lefty was not with him.

  “We’re going to Pappas,” he says, indicating the restaurant in Tarpon Springs. “He didn’t even say the name. He didn’t have to. He just said ‘I feel like eating Greek tonight.’ I said, ‘I know the place you mean.’ ”

  At about seven-fifteen we went into the restaurant. We sat at the bar and had a drink. Sonny scanned the place casually.

  “How’s this guy gonna know you?” I ask.

  “I met him up in New York last week. I been trying to set this up all along. He was up there. Stevie knew him from years ago. Stevie introduced me to him.”

  At about seven-thirty, Sonny says, “Okay, Donnie, you leave, go back to the club, and I’ll call you when it’s time to pick me up.”

  I walked out. Going through the parking lot, I passed right by Trafficante and another man heading toward the restaurant.
Trafficante was such a quiet-looking old gentleman, shoulders slightly hunched, calm old face. It was odd to think of him as what he really was.

  Sonny called at ten o‘clock. I met him in the lounge at the restaurant. We had a drink before we left. I didn’t say anything about having seen Trafficante.

  “He’s a dynamite guy,” Sonny says. “He likes me. We got whatever we want. All the doors are open to us in Florida now, just so we do things properly. A fifty-fifty split. If we fuck up, Donnie, the old man will shut every door on us. One of the things we should start looking at, he said, was bingo. He’s big in bingo, but he doesn’t have any in Pasco County. Big money in that.”

  In the car, Sonny unwound. “It was a feeling-out conversation,” he says. “I told him, ‘Listen, I’m no sophisticated person. I’m a street person all my life.’ I says, ‘I love the streets, you know. I don’t know nothing about nothing, about gambling or anything.’ I says, ‘Me, I just like to go in the street, rob who the fuck I gotta rob.’ ”

  “What did he say?”

  “He laughed.”

  “He probably likes you because you’re honest.”

  “I really respect the man. You show that when you talk.”

  “It was a stroke of luck that you met him in New York last week.”

  “You know what I told Stevie before? I went down to see him and I says, ‘Hey, Stevie, you gotta come to Florida. I’m telling you now. I never asked you for a motherfucking thing, I’m always alongside you. If you don’t come to fucking Florida with me, I ain’t even gonna fucking come around here no more-just leave me the fuck alone and I’ll do my own thing.’ And I got up and walked out. He called me the next day. He says, ‘Look how lucky we are—the guy is here. We reached right out,’ he says.”