“Because you did this thing!”
“Okay, I did it.”
“You ain’t going to dinner with me tonight!”
“Okay, I’ll eat by myself.”
Meanwhile Rossi is on his hands and knees. “Here it is,” he says, pulling the switch out from under the couch. He puts the switch back on and turns the air-conditioning off.
The room is filled with too much cigarette smoke and too much Lefty, and it’s making me crazy. I walk out. Rossi comes after me. I stop in the hall. “Tony, I’m going back in there and stab that motherfucker.”
“Hey, Don—”
“I can’t take him anymore. I’m gonna stab him. We’ll just go down to the pool, let them find him up here. Who’s gonna give a fuck if they find another dead wiseguy?”
“Hey, Donnie, take it easy.”
With everything else there was to worry about, I had to take this daily shit. Rossi thought I was serious. That’s how fed up I was with Lefty.
I talked to Lefty in the morning on May 5. It was a routine phone call. Nothing in his voice suggested anything unusual. Normal chitchat, good-bye.
I placed my usual call in the evening. Louise said Lefty wasn’t there, she didn’t know where he was.
I called the next morning. Louise said Lefty hadn’t come home, she still knew nothing.
I called Case Agent Jerry Loar in New York. I told him that Lefty was missing. He said they had received word from two informants that three Bonanno captains had gotten whacked the night before: Philly Lucky, Sonny Red, and Big Trin.
The three had apparently been summoned to Brooklyn to a “peace meeting,” to patch up differences, at a catering establishment. Our information was that’s where they were murdered. No bodies had been found.
The heart of the opposition to Rusty Rastelli and Sonny Black had been whacked out all at once. The other main rival, Caesar Bonventre, was in jail in Nassau County, New York, on a weapons charge. But the word was that he had decided to come over to Sonny’s side, anyway, and bring the zips.
Three days later Lefty called me in the afternoon. “I just got in.”
“Did you talk to Louise yet?”
“I called her this morning for two minutes, that’s all. You know why I come in, because she sent me all my clothes last night, whole box. She leaves the fucking pants out. She started crying at first. ‘What are you crying for?’ I says. ‘I got the clothes.’ ”
“I sent her a grand, you know, because I didn’t know how long you’d be gone.”
He had been holed up at Rabito’s apartment. “It’s gonna be a while yet, but let me throw a curve at you.”
“I’m listening, go ahead.”
“Everything is fine. We’re winners. A couple of punks ran away, but they’re coming back. They came back. We gave them sanctuary.”
“Is that right?”
“What we gotta do with you is, we gotta work out one more situation. I’m with that guy day and night. Have a little patience.”
“Yeah, well, I figured something was going on, so that’s why I just kept calling Louise. You don’t know how long you’re gonna be gone?”
“No. It’s just that I’m dead tired tonight, and I’ll be home the rest of the night.”
“You gonna stay in, then?”
“Ah, till I get a call. You know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah.”
“Everybody is satisfied. Them two guys out at the beach—don’t mention names.”
“Yeah.” That was Joe Puma and Steve Maruca.
“They belong to us now. Now, don’t talk to me, Donnie. But visualize what took place.”
“Yeah, all right.” I visualized the hits.
“You understand?”
“I understand what you’re talking about.”
“Now they’re ours. How’s the weather down there?”
“It’s nice. Everything gets cleared up, maybe you can come down.”
“Well, we’ll see what happens. Right now I can‘t, I’m stuck over here. What’s happening?”
“I’m looking at something, you know, might be worth maybe about ten grand or something.”
“Ah, that’d be perfect, buddy. We can use it. I wanna clear up all these goddamn bills.”
“That’s why I figured I’d send that grand.”
“She appreciated it.”
“I figured you might be gone another five, six days.”
“Well, now it’ll be longer than that. Being that tomorrow’s Mother’s Day, everybody went home, you know. Everybody’s laid up. I gotta go see him tomorrow morning.”
“You still got another situation.”
“Yeah. All right, buddy, so long.”
Six days after the hits, the wife of Philip “Philly Lucky” Giaccone filed a missing-person’s report on her husband with the Suffolk County, New York, Police Department.
On Tuesday, May 12, Lefty called and said that Sonny wanted to see me right away. I told him I needed a couple of days to clear up some business, then I would be up. “It’s very important,” he says, “so let me know as soon as you make arrangements.”
I didn’t have any business to clear up in Florida. But even in this instance I didn’t want to seem too anxious. I was being summoned by Sonny for one of two reasons. Either I was going to be whacked, or I was going to be told about the hits and maybe involved in the “other situation” that was still left to take care of.
Either mission was crucial enough for me to make one arrangement, which didn’t take long.
I flew into La Guardia on the afternoon of May 14, got off the plane, and immediately saw the agent I was to look for, Billy Flynn. I followed him silently into the men’s room. He slipped me a wallet containing a transmitter. I dropped it into my sports coat pocket and went out.
I rented a car and drove to Graham Avenue and Withers Street in Brooklyn, and parked up the street from the Motion Lounge, arriving at about three-thirty. I didn’t park right in front because I wanted to walk and case the block.
In recent weeks I had been in regular telephone contact with Jules Bonavolonta at Headquarters. Jules and I had been street agents together in New York. Working undercover, it was important to have one guy on the inside that you could trust totally to understand you and your situation, somebody that you could talk to as a close friend yet who at the same time had the skills to maneuver within the bureaucracy. Jules had become that guy for me. He could handle internal politics, get me authorizations and support. I called Jules all the time with frustrations: “You ain’t gonna believe this,” I would say when I had run up against some starch.
To the Bureau’s credit, they consistently came around to our way of thinking after things were explained.
Lately Jules had been testing my condition. “Are you getting tired? You getting home enough? You think you should come out soon?”
Now, with the hits, Headquarters was nervous. When they found out that I was going to a meeting with Sonny, a couple of people thought that maybe he was setting me up, that they were going to kill me. I said,
“What would they kill me for? I’m with Sonny. He’s the one that asked me to come up.” Jules agreed with me that Sonny wasn’t setting me up.
Still, there was a lot of nervousness. Sonny was now a target for retaliation. I was close to him—that made me a target too.
They wanted not only a surveillance team on me, which was reasonable, but they wanted SWAT guys hidden on the roofs. “Are you crazy?” I said. “In that neighborhood, Sonny’s neighborhood, you’re going to put guys on rooftops with rifles? Just put a good crew on the street, I’ll be all right.”
Jim Kallstrom was the coordinator of technical services, which includes surveillance teams. I specifically requested that I get a crew headed by Pat Colgan as street supervisor.
A surveillance crew is not just a passive monitoring outfit. If there’s trouble, they have to move in. Most of the agents didn’t know me except from pictures. They didn’t know my wa
y of talking, Sonny’s way of talking. That, along with the static and interference that made transmissions chancy, could lead to the crew misunderstanding the conversation, making a move too soon, busting in on us, and screwing up our whole operation.
A surveillance team that screwed up was more dangerous to me than no surveillance team at all. If they got made on the street in that neighborhood, where’s the first place a guy’s going to go to tip somebody off? He’s going straight to the Motion Lounge to tell Sonny Black, who is the main man in that neighborhood.
As I was walking up the block toward the Motion Lounge, I knew the surveillance team was there somewhere. I was looking for them to make sure they were in place. I am trained and experienced to spot such things on the street. I looked carefully. I knew they were there. I never made them. I never saw them at all. That’s how good they were.
Sonny was waiting at the bar. The scene looked placid. Boobie was playing the electronic pinball machine. Charlie was behind the bar. Jimmy Legs was there. And there was one other guy I hadn’t seen before. His name was Ray. He was, I later learned, Ray Wean, an informant for the FBI who did jobs with Joey Massino and with Sonny. In fact, it was Wean who had shot himself in the hand during the abortive burglary at the townhouse of the Shah of Iran’s sister in 1980. Neither of us knew who the other really was at the time.
I walked in, gave Sonny, Boobie, and Jimmy a kiss and a hug—normal greetings. “How you doing?” “How’s Florida?” Everything was normal. Sonny asked me to come into the back room. We sat at a card table.
“You know we took care of those three guys,” were his first words. “They’re finished. You got any reliable people in Miami?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because one guy got away, Bruno. You know Anthony Bruno?”
Anthony Bruno Indelicato was Sonny Red’s son. “I may have seen him, I don’t know.”
“I think he went to Miami because he’s got a $3,000-a-day coke habit and he’s got connections with the Colombians down there. I want you to find him. When you find him, hit him. Be careful, because when he’s coked up, he’s crazy. He’s not a tough guy with his hands, but if he has a gun, you know ...”
“Yeah, okay.”
“He might be down there with his uncle, J. B. If you come across them both, just kill them both and leave them there in the street. You want me to send Lefty down there with you?”
“You kidding? I’d rather be by myself. That makes it so much quicker.”
“Those two guys on the beach, Puma and that guy Steve, do you know them?”
“Yeah, I know them.” Joe Puma and Steve Maruca. The beach was a phrase they used to indicate the Miami area.
“What do you think of them?”
“Joe Puma, I met a few times. What can I say? He didn’t strike me as a stand-up guy.”
“Now they’re down there, they got the fear of God in them. Well, that’s too bad for them. Their time has been coming. I got to do a lot of work.”
“Sonny, you know me, I don’t ask questions, I don’t know nothing. There’s a couple places down there that these guys hang out. I’ll contact a couple of guys that I know. Once I get everything set up, then we can lay up for a few days down there and see what’s going on.”
“All right, any way you want to do it. Now, when I come down there, you got guns down there? I can’t be walking around with nothing. I need two. You got two?”
“Yeah, we got a couple. One thing, I gotta have a description of the kid.”
“I know him, but I can’t give you any good description. He’s like 140, 150 pounds. Smaller than you. Thin-faced kid. Italian-looking, dark. Always complaining about his bald head. In his late twenties. Bantam-weight, petite-looking. He’s a dangerous little kid. He’s a wild man when he’s coked up.”
“High roller, huh?”
“Likes his broads.”
“Suppose I come upon him, right? Then I get a chance to take him out, I don’t have to call you and ask if it’s okay?”
“No, no—go ahead, of course. You take him, leave him right in the street.”
“All right, don’t get excited. I’ll do it right.”
“I’m gonna come down maybe next week or so. Then I was gonna talk to the Old Man. Have you got a place to lay up over there now?”
“We can go to a lot of places down there. There’s the Deauville. Broads. A stockpile of broads.”
“All right. Now, we’re leaving it to you to get down there.”
“Joe and Steve are with you now, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, because their guy is one of the guys that went.” (Meaning Philly Lucky.) “It all comes in circles. We’re gonna lock everything up over there. It’s a tough situation. I got a lot of work to do. My game is a waiting game. Whatever happens, you get it when you can get it. It’s coming to you one way or the other.”
We went up on the roof to feed his pigeons. There was a guy up there hooking up a cable line for Sonny’s TV. “Getting the Home Box up today,” Sonny says. He was tapping into the system illegally, like all the wiseguys do. He had ninety-five pigeons. “Out of ninety-five” he says, “we lose about four. Soon as I got the heater in there this winter, we never lost a bird from the cold.”
He brought up the matter of Quaaludes. He wanted me to take some samples down to Florida and see if I could find a market. They were costing him eighty cents apiece, and he thought maybe we could get a dollar each for them.
We went downstairs. The guy named Ray had left. What none of us knew at the time was that he had left to call Pat Colgan, his contact at the FBI and coincidentally the guy who was running the surveillance team on me. He called Pat to tell him this guy named Donnie had just shown up from Florida, and he was apparently a good friend of Sonny Black’s because they kissed and hugged, and apparently he was a pretty big drug dealer.
Sonny and I went across the street to the Caffe Capri for demitasse and cannoli. We sat at a table in the rear.
Sonny said he was making a lot of changes. “I’m forming a good crew, people you can go to bed with and trust.”
I asked him about Mike Sabella.
“He thought I was gonna clip him,” Sonny says, “but we had a good talk. He said he had stayed with the other side because they intimidated him, but I told him, ‘You’re my man now.’ He was pleased. He’ll be loyal.”
He said that the day before the hits, Tony Mirra had said he was going with the opposition. On the day of the hits, Sonny called Mirra’s uncle, Al Walker, and told him to come to the Motion Lounge. They sat him down, put a guy at either side of him, and made him sweat until word came that the hits had gone down. “When he heard that,” Sonny says, “he turned ash-white. He thought we were gonna hit him too. But I just reamed him out about Tony, told him Tony was no good; and that he’d better recognize that and act right himself. He agreed, Donnie.”
I asked him how Joe Puma and Steve Maruca would feel with me sitting them down and telling them the terms, since they were wiseguys and I wasn’t.
“Don’t worry about it. Long as you’re my representative, they’ll listen to you. I also want you to meet a guy I’m gonna send down with you, in case you need some help. You going to see Lefty later?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell Lefty to call Sally Paintglass and have him meet me at the lounge at ten o‘clock, and you be here too.”
Sally “Paintglass” D‘Ottavio was a made member of the crew who got his name because he owned a couple of auto body shops.
I left Brooklyn and headed for Manhattan. As I went across the bridge I saw that I had picked up a tail. It was an unmarked van with a white guy and a black guy. I was curious, but I didn’t try to shake them. It didn’t matter. I figured they were cops. I was going into Knickerbocker Village. They weren’t going to do anything. I didn’t see them again.
I didn’t find out until two years later, when I was testifying, that these were N.Y.P.D. organized crime cops that had Sonny’s club under surveillance sin
ce the hits. They had no idea who I was at the time. So they and the FBI were both surveilling the Motion Lounge at the same time, and neither knew the other was there.
Lefty was home, sick with a cold. We sat on the couch and I started to tell him about my conversation with Sonny.
“I already know what Sonny asked you to do,” he says. “He’s in control of the family now. Donnie, I’m really happy that he’s having you clip Bruno, because it’ll look good in the eyes of the bosses that you did some work. It’s a good contract.”
“Yeah, I’m glad, too, Left.”
“The kid was supposed to be there. He didn’t show because he was all coked up, too high.”
He called Sally Paintglass and set up the meeting with Sonny. I said that before I went back to Brooklyn, I was going over to see my girl for a short while.
“All right,” he says. “I would go with you to Brooklyn, but I’m dying here.”
I did go to Jersey. I went across the George Washington Bridge to the Holiday Inn off Route 80, where I met with agents Jimmy Kosler, Jerry Loar, and Jim Kinne. I told them the whole story of the afternoon. Even though theoretically the conversation had been received from the transmitter and recorded, we couldn’t count on that, so I wanted to relay the information as soon as possible. I gave them the transmitter because the batteries were shot, anyway.
I felt good. I wasn’t a made guy, but I was given a contract to hit a made guy. And I was going to Miami to tell two other guys that they were now under Sonny. All the wiseguys could see how close I was to Sonny, who was becoming the main power in the family—aside from Rusty Rastelli, who was in the can.
The Motion Lounge was crowded at ten-fifteen. Sonny introduced me to Sally. “Donnie is with me, Sally. You can trust him as much as you trust me.”
Sally Paintglass was about 5’9”, sturdy, about five years older than me. He was a tough, greasy-looking guy with a weak chin. We agreed to meet three days later, on May 17, at Joe Puma’s restaurant, Little Italy, in Hallandale.
Sonny says, “This is the first time in over ten years that the family has control over itself instead of being controlled by the Commission. Donnie, watch out for the kid. I got to get him before he gets me, because I can’t rest at night and we can’t go places until we get this kid. That’s our only obstacle.”
Donnie Brasco Page 39