I went over to Manhattan to the Holiday Bar to see Lefty. We went out for a walk on Madison Street. He was aggravated with everybody, and a walk on the street was the only place he could really let his hair down. He wasn’t getting a proper split of profits, he was being ignored or unappreciated or mistreated. His longtime loyalty wasn’t counting for anything. Boobie was a phony; Joey Massino had all the men and money in the world and didn’t know how to do anything; Sonny was greedy.
“They got all the connections and I’m a jerk-off. Who’s gonna pay me? Sonny’s trying to hold me back. Push me for like two hundred a week here, two hundred a week there, to pacify me. Meanwhile he’s making like thirty thousand a week. Sooner or later he wants to get rid of me by making me a captain, but I gotta do it in Miami. He gives me a couple thousand, then I’m gonna go to Miami. Meanwhile they’re knocking it down. Boobie’s got fifteen hundred a week in salary. And they got all the junk. They took it all.”
“How come you’re not in on that?”
“Why? Because he’s a greedy cocksucker,” he says, meaning Sonny.
“You did all the work for him.”
He grunts. “Donnie, they gave me the contract now on the kid. Once I do that, the guy can go fuck himself.”
“They found that one body, huh?”
“Yeah. That was a mistake. Joey Massino, he’s the one fucked it up. Sonny’s really hot about it.”
Sonny Red’s body, like the others, was supposed to have been chopped up and gotten rid of properly, not buried quickly and whole.
“You have no idea,” Lefty says. “The guy choked.” He put a hand to his throat in the gesture used about athletes who don’t come through in the clutch.
“How’d you manage Big Trin?” I ask, “huge as he is?”
“I couldn’t move him. Boobie could. Trin was all cut open and bleeding. There was little pieces around from the shotgun. Boobie got blood all over him trying to pick him up. I couldn’t believe how strong Boobie is. He don’t look it. But I was amazed. Boobie could move him. Then they cut him up and put him in green plastic garbage bags.”
He said that the guys in on the hits were himself, Jimmy Legs, Nicky Santora, and a guy named Bobby Capazzio. When they came out of the building, Jerry Chilli told them that the kid was right around the corner.
“I said, ‘Bobby, let’s go over there.’ He says, ‘No, no, no, Lefty. Sonny Black told you to go to Brooklyn.’ The kid was around the corner, Donnie. We could have boxed the corner.”
So they went back to the Motion Lounge before going to Rabito’s to hole up.
Having done that “work,” Lefty was all the more disturbed with not getting a fair share of everything in the family.
“In fact, before the war started,” Lefty says, “he says, ‘Lefty, you come in on salary. We’re going to be millionaires in three months.’ I got shut out again. Who am I to speak up? And you wonder why I get aggravated. He knows I’d come at him. Because I’m gonna come at him. And what’s he gonna do, sit down with the bosses? He can’t sit down with the bosses, this man. He fucked up good. Now I got the contract for the kid. Uh-huh. Who the fuck you kidding? Only four guys can go. Me, Jimmy Legs, Nicky, and Bobby. What are you trying to do? I went there already. It’s a suicide thing.”
“To the house?” They had information that the kid was holed up in a house on a cul-de-sac in Riverhead, far out on Long Island.
“It’s a bad corner. You come on the fucking block, the kid spots us, we’re dead. Sonny wants us to hit pay dirt. Pay dirt? Sonny, who the fuck you kidding? There’s your fucking answer. He wants to be a rich man before Rusty comes out.”
He brought up the wedding. “Today he turns around in front of all the wiseguys and says, ‘How many tables we got?’ Four tables. ‘Well, how you gonna situate them, because everybody wants to sit with me.’ I says, ‘Not me. Oh, no, I’ll sit with my wife, with my friends. I wanna enjoy myself. I don’t wanna stand at attention.’ ”
“Where they having the reception?” None of us was going to the wedding itself.
“At Shalimar’s. Staten Island. Everybody’s gotta carry a pistol. Even you gotta carry a pistol. You got one? I’ll get you one. I know the right people. Two weeks ago he calls me. ‘Lefty, you gotta meet me Saturday night. Stay with me, you and Nicky.’ Boobie was there. So I went with them. I sit there with two pistols on me. They drank. I drank club soda. ‘Lefty,’ he says, ‘you’re beautiful, helluva guy,’ he says. ‘We’re gonna go far.’ He sits there playing with fucking birds. But when he’s in trouble, he opens his gut. I don’t stay with him no more. I used to spend day and night with him. This is my contract? Good. Now, sooner or later, if we whack this guy out, the bosses know I did it. I’ll go capture this kid. I’ll keep my mouth shut. I’ll tell you one thing, it fucking hurts inside. It really eats your guts.”
“Sure, you do everything you’re supposed to do.”
“How the fuck can he do this to me?”
“I don’t know. You’re fucking loyal.”
“If Rusty comes home, it’s all done. He’s dead. Rusty’ll kill him.”
I went back to the Motion Lounge, and that night I stayed with Sonny at his apartment.
I had a transmitter in the pocket of my slacks. When we went to bed, I hung up my slacks and other clothes in the closet. We were close enough now so that either of us would have felt comfortable going into the other’s pockets if we needed a couple bucks to go to the bakery or something. There was always that chance. But you don’t sleep with your pants on. So I just hung them up and went to sleep on the pull-out couch.
At six forty-five, Sonny woke me up with coffee and rolls. We sat in the dining room in our shorts. It was his birthday. I gave him $200 as a present. I gave him his driver’s license that I had retrieved from the Las Vegas Night bust, and the $1,000 bail money.
He gave me a pistol. He wanted everybody packing now because retaliation from the other side was a good possibility. The pistol was a blue-black German-made .25 automatic with the serial number scraped off the side of the barrel. It had a full clip of bullets.
“Carry this at all times, especially the wedding.”
We talked about King’s Court. He was anxious to get back together with Santo Trafficante.
“When you coming to Florida?” I ask.
“Maybe next week. There’s gonna be a big meeting of the bosses next week, and I can’t leave until after that.” He started writing in a small blue notebook, where he kept the tab on his loan-sharking business.
“I’m finally starting to make some money. I got thirty grand a week coming in. I got over seventy thousand on the street. If only I didn’t have to dish out and support so many people.”
We went upstairs to feed the pigeons. Sonny was in a quiet mood.
“You got any line on where Bruno is?” I ask.
“We have a line on him. We’re gonna give J.B. a pass, though.”
They weren’t going to kill the kid’s uncle. “How come?”
“You gotta give up something to lure the cat to you.” We were quiet for a while as he moved around the coops.
“Donnie, I’m gonna put you up for membership when the Old Man gets out.” He leaned over the railing. “I love you like a brother. I can’t trust anybody else in this crew. I know they’re telling stories. You I got faith in. I want you to make sure that if I get whacked or anything, my kids and my wife get what’s coming to them from my partners. You understand? I gotta trust you to take care of my kids. They’re supposed to get a G-note a week.”
“You can trust me, bro.”
“You know, these fucking pigeons, they can’t just go out and fly fifty miles fast. You got to train them, get them in shape. They go ten miles in ten minutes now.”
In the Motion Lounge, Lefty was talking with Jimmy Legs and Nicky Santora.
“Four guys got the contract,” Lefty says. “What? Are you kidding? Everyone else is fucking earning!”
“Who’s gotta go?” Nicky say
s.
“Me, you, Jimmy Legs, and Bobby—that’s it. Nobody else is supposed to. Are you kidding me? Because that’s the way he’s doing things. In other words, Boobie’s out. The other guys are making more money, out. Massino’s crew is out. What do you do? You run into fucking death. That kid’s sharp. He catches us coming in. Once you leave that parking lot, you’re gonna be open. Sonny wants to go at nighttime. How you gonna see in the dark at nighttime?”
“Let’s start Monday on it,” Jimmy Legs says.
“You figure this’ll be done in a week?” Nicky says. He was anxious to come down and hang out at King’s Court. He had never seen the place, and now Sonny had given him permission.
“Well, we gotta put time in. We get lucky. Where’s the credit card?”
They had some stolen credit cards they were using for various things.
“Why do you want a credit card?” Nicky asks.
“We can get a car from that.”
“How we gonna bring the car back?”
“Leave the fucking car in the street.”
“What about your guy with the cars? Can’t we get a couple of cars over there? I mean, where Mirra’s working.”
“Mirra? Don’t mention that fucking name in public. I can’t go near him, Sonny says, right now.”
“Why can’t you go near him?”
“I don’t know. When are you gonna get that car?”
“I ain’t getting nothing,” Nicky says. “You wanna do it properly, get two cars.”
“Hey, as tight as you are with Sonny Black, tell him what you want to do. You start running around in a fugazy car—hey, we’re going on a hit. If it’s not a hit, it’s a different story. You know what Philly Lucky sold only two weeks before he got hit—seven million cash? He had four trucking outfits over there. Young guy, fifty years old. He left seventy-five million. Handsome guy.”
Lefty and Boobie met at the Holiday Bar on Madison Street. Some former cop in the New York Police Department was offering a copy of an up-to-date police report detailing the investigation of the Bonanno family, including surveillance reports and names of people who were going to be subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. The guy wanted $5,000 for the report.
Lefty was urging its purchase. “The fucking thing is like a book. It goes back to May 4, the day before it happened on a Monday night, right? There was a meeting. They were observed. Just go to the family and let it come outa the kitty.”
I drove Lefty to Brooklyn.
“Sonny and Joey are feuding,” he says, “because Sonny’s got more power. So Joey got an unlisted telephone number now. He ain’t talking to anybody because of this feud with Sonny.”
Lefty and Boobie talked to Sonny about the offered police report. Lefty came out of the Motion Lounge, disappointed. “He doesn’t want it. He didn’t want to pay the five thousand.”
Lefty wanted to look at a new Cadillac he might buy. Nicky drove us to Queens to the dealer’s to look at it. It was burgundy. Rock-bottom price was $15,300. Lefty decided to buy it.
They talked about looking for the kid, casing the house.
“Should I take the shotgun?” Nicky asks.
Lefty laughs. “Yeah, like last time, you shot the guy that ain’t supposed to be shot.”
They all laughed. One of their own guys, Santo Giordano, had been shot accidently in the hip and left paralyzed. That was their best joke of the day.
In the beginning of my undercover role as Donnie Brasco, I had occasional fears about the dangers of being an agent. Now I also had fears about the dangers of being a badguy. As things had now developed into family warfare, I could get whacked for being either an agent or a badguy.
Some mornings when I stayed at Sonny’s I would get up and go into the bathroom and look in the mirror, and I would find myself thinking, Is today the day that I’m going to get whacked?
Lefty and I were having a lunchtime cappuccino at Caffe Capri.
“Tap Jerry Chilli’s phones,” he says. “He knows where the kid is. Tap Jerry Chilli’s phones and we’ll get the kid. I’ll put a bug in Jerry’s house. We’ll visit him. He’ll invite us, you know. Boobie goes there with a bullshit story. Puts a bug in there. And a bug outside, on a tree or something. Jerry was very close to the kid’s father. Sonny Red’s wife gave Jerry Chilli Sonny Red’s car to sell for her. So we put a bug in Chilli’s house on Staten Island.”
“I hope so,” I say.
“Now, you’re gonna get straightened out, Donnie. But please, let me tell you. First of all, you and I are gonna do a little talking while we’re away, where you come from and all that, because this is gonna come back on me.”
Sonny came in and joined us. He said that Sally Farrugia wanted to make some of the zips captains. “But that would be crazy,” Sonny says, “because those guys are looking to take over everything. That’s why those three guys were killed—they went against the zips, and the zips came over to our side. We were the ones slated to get hit, but because Sonny Red screwed the zips, they swung over to us. There’s no way we can make them captains. We’d lose all our strength.”
He said he urged Sally to take a firmer hand as acting boss until Rusty got out of jail.
“You’re gonna be in shit’s creek, Sonny,” Lefty says.
“Good. I been in shit’s creek eighteen years.”
“I advise you to be a little strong, because them fucking zips ain’t gonna back up to nobody. You give them the fucking power, if you don’t get hurt now, you get hurt three years from now. They’ll bury you. You cannot give them the power. They don’t give a fuck. They don’t care who’s boss. They got no respect. There’s no family.”
“Sally don’t want no problems with us,” Sonny says.
“Sure, I don’t blame him. Look at the position he got himself in.”
“I mean, what if the guy stays in another ten years?
You think they’re gonna let him out, especially with this RICO law? So what we gonna do now, stand on a corner? I’m starting from day one again.“
“Yeah, but don’t weaken,” Lefty says. “You weaken, you got a headache. You won’t get a headache now. You’ll get it three years from now. They’ll bury you. I’m telling you, they’ll bury you. Well, Sonny, you do what you gotta do. Your word counts with me.”
“I just can’t go along with it. Because there are some things I can’t do for certain people, and some things I did already.”
“You do what you gotta do. You gotta put fear in these guys.”
“I don’t put fear in there,” Sonny says. “I put friendship, you know? I almost didn’t win the battle.”
A bunch of us were sitting around the Motion Lounge with guns in our belts, swapping stories—Sonny, Lefty, Nicky, Jimmy Legs, and others. Sonny had ordered us to be armed at all times.
Jimmy Legs was packing a .45. Nobody used holsters. You carried your pistol in your sport-coat pocket or your belt. Jimmy Legs had a big belly, but the rest of him was skinny. He had no hips or butt. So when he’d walk around, the .45 kept falling down through his pants legs. He had this bright idea that he would sew a pocket on the inside of his pants at the small of his back and carry the gun in that pocket. So this evening he had just installed the pocket and was using it for the first time.
We were bullshitting about the world situation and how the United States should be tougher on other countries and not be pushed around. About how the liberals running our spy business should learn something from the methods of the KGB, which could do anything it wanted to in order to be effective.
Somebody brought up the different ways you could kill people in the spy business.
I told them a story about one of the methods. A KGB agent had an umbrella with a sharpened tip, and they put poison on it, and he’d walk by somebody and just prick him in the leg or arm with this umbrella.
They thought that was the greatest thing in the world. The CIA should be able to do that stuff and not be so answerable to Congress anymore, like it had been since
Watergate.
We got to laughing at some of the stories, and Jimmy Legs suddenly took off for the john.
A few moments later we heard a commotion. Jimmy Legs came out of john dangling his .45 from his thumb and forefinger. “I had to shit so bad that I forgot about my gun pocket, and when I took down my pants and began, the gun fell in the bowl so I had to fish it out. Hey, if we had to go to war and I had to kill somebody, I’d just leave a little shit on it that’d get on the bullet, and all I’d have to do is nick somebody and I’d kill them with that poison just like the fucking KGB!”
The wedding reception for Boobie’s daughter was scheduled for seven P.M. at Shalimar Caterers, 2380 Hylan Boulevard, on Staten Island. We started gathering at the Motion Lounge at about five P.M.—Lefty, Nicky Santora, Boots Tomasulo, Bobby Capazzio, Sonny, Charlie the bartender, and others.
The rules were that we would all stay around Sonny at all times, not leave his side, because this would be a good time for retaliation against him. Other families were going to be represented at the wedding, too, so we didn’t know who might do what.
Some guys brought their wives or girlfriends. We were going to travel in a caravan, so we discussed how to get there and who was going with who.
We had to make sure everybody was packing. Nicky had a .45 that was too big for his waistband, so he gave that to Boots, and Nicky carried a little .32. I, of course, had my .25 automatic.
I drove with Boots and Nicky. Everybody was at the reception. Lefty and Louise, Jimmy Legs, Jerry Chilli, Mr. Fish Rabito, Dennis the cop, Nicky Marangello, Mike Sabella.
One notable absence was Joey Massino, which really ticked off Sonny and Lefty.
“That jerk-off is afraid to get caught out in the open,” Lefty says, “that’s all.”
I sat at Sonny’s table with Nicky, Charlie, and Boots. Everybody had a girlfriend except Boots and me.
Donnie Brasco Page 41