It was a big, fancy reception with an open bar, a band, a prime-rib sitdown dinner. All kinds of wiseguys were there from different families, including Jerry Lang, the acting boss of the Colombo family. Boobie was proud, but quiet and controlled as always. We sat around Sonny and kept our eyes open.
There were photographers cruising around the room, but Sonny’s rule was no photographs at any tables where his crew sat.
At about eleven P.M., we all went back to the Motion Lounge to relax for a while.
Sonny gave me $4,000 to put on the street in Florida as shylock money.
I flew back to Tampa the following day. I couldn’t carry the gun Sonny had given me on the plane, so I took the handle apart, scratched my initials and the date on the metal underneath, put it back together, and handed it to another agent at the airport for him to take to Florida.
On July 12, Nicky Santora called. “You know that kid from up here? We got word he’s down there.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“So we just wondered, maybe you could get a line on him or something. I think Miami. We’re not positive, you know. It’s more logical that he would be down there.”
“I’ll make a couple phone calls. Some good people down there.”
“But, Donnie, you know, be careful, watch yourself.”
On July 23, Lefty called. “That guy’s coming out tomorrow. He’s got something in the back of his head.
I don’t know what the fuck’s happening.“
Lefty had been feuding with Sonny for the way the crew was being handled.
“Have I ever told you what the fuck he did? He took half of my guys away. Who do you think he gave them to?”
“Who?”
“You’ll never guess, Donnie. Who’s our enemy?”
“Don’t tell me he gave them to Al Walker.”
“Thank you. The whole neighborhood is blowing their tops. He gave him Mike. He gave him Joe Puma. They’re all disgusted. They’re all gonna quit.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“And the trouble he’s causing. He wants to know what they’re doing for a living. They’re all gonna rebel. So I went to see him. I said, ‘Are you blowing your fucking top?’ I start arguing with him. He said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ ”
“He’s making those guys stronger,” I say. “He’s giving Al Walker, who’s an enemy, other guys that are his enemies.”
“Thank you. Jimmy Legs don’t even want to come around, and he belongs to me. I’ve got Steve in Florida.”
“Instead of keeping them under control,” I say, goading him, “he’s giving them away.”
“Thank you. I’m glad you understand all these things. That’s what’s gonna make us much stronger when the shit hits the fan. Listen, Donnie, I want to be under the, uh, the guy that’s coming home. I’m allowed that request.”
“Is that right?”
“Now, if I got it, I don’t answer to nobody but him.”
“That means I can go with you over to him, huh, Left?”
“That’s it. You stay with me and we don’t answer to nobody. Follow me?”
“Well, what do you want me to do now with this guy when he comes down here?”
“Go along with him. Just play it cool.”
“All right.”
“He’s making all kinds of efforts. And so you know what the zips said? ‘We don’t like this guy, we don’t trust him.’ ”
“Is that right?”
“They don’t want him. He went over their heads. There’s a feud going on. I don’t care, Donnie. My guys are happy. I don’t bother them, you know?”
“What’s Joey M. doing?”
“Now they don’t bother each other. He’s buried himself. Joe Puma’s in the hospital, and he makes the guy check in every day from the hospital. Ever hear anything like this? ‘And don’t go back to Florida until you check out with me,’ Sonny tells him. Does not make sense. Well, that’s good in our favor.”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t bother our people.”
“That’s right.”
“But this guy, I don’t know what he’s doing to himself. I’ll tell you, Donnie, Sonny Black is in a fucking fog.”
So Lefty was going to put me with him directly under the boss, Rusty Rastelli, when he got out of prison in a few weeks. I could never relate as closely to Lefty as to Sonny. But one thing about Lefty I could rely on: Everything he ever told me about the Mafia turned out to be true.
I prepared for my final weekend in the Mafia, my last days as Donnie Brasco, as the host of Sonny Black.
20
COMING OUT
Sonny was anxious to get back in Santo Trafficante’s good graces, make sure everything was straightened out so we could move ahead and make all the money we could make through our hookup with Trafficante. He felt that a large part of his future was going to be in Florida.
Sonny and Nicky Santora came down on Friday, July 24, and had Rossi call Benny Husick to see if they couldn’t set up a meeting for Saturday—not in Tampa, because Sonny felt there was too much heat on the both of them there, but in Holiday. Rossi reached Husick at the Bayshore Country Club in Miami. Husick said they would try to be in Holiday by five P.M. Saturday.
This weekend we had planned to pump Sonny and Nicky for everything we could get. For the last several weeks there had been a million little things to do to tie up loose ends, and we still played our normal roles so we didn’t tip our hand. Now we were really coming to the end, and we could go for it, like a pitcher airing it out in the last couple of innings. We knew it would be the last time we would see them. We wanted them to talk about the murders, of course, but we would push conversations into any mob area we could bring up and grab anything that we could. It didn’t matter if we went too far, because everything was history after this weekend.
We wanted to loosen them up right away. Friday night we went to Pappas Restaurant to eat, then bounced around to a few places. We went to Clearwa ter Beach to a hotel where there was a comedian performing. We went back to the club and finished up at about six A.M. Saturday morning. They were having a good time. They didn’t talk business.
Trafficante and Husick arrived at the Tahitian Motor Lodge on the dot at five P.M. Saturday and went straight to Sonny’s room. A few minutes later the three of them left the room and went to the coffee shop. They talked there for about forty minutes, then Trafficante and Husick got up, shook hands with Sonny, and left in Trafficante’s Cadillac.
Sonny called Rossi and me into the coffee shop. He was ecstatic. The meeting had been terrific. He said that he had given Trafficante $2,000 and Husick $1,000 to split with the people who had worked that Las Vegas Night. Trafficante had said that the bust was “just one of those things.”
“So we’re back in his good graces,” Sonny says. “Now you guys got to get your asses moving and start producing because I got us back in with this guy.”
Bingo, gambling, numbers, dog tracks, drugs—everything was going to go big now, teaming up with Santo Trafficante. Florida was going to be ours.
They were in such a great mood that all they wanted to do was party. They wanted to celebrate and anticipate. It turned into a constant “go” weekend—they wanted to keep partying, we wanted to keep them up and talking as late as possible.
We partied all night at the club—Nicky Santora, Sonny Black, Eddie Shannon, Tony Rossi, and me. We had managed to get a little sleep Friday night. Saturday night, we didn’t go to bed at all. Neither Nicky nor Sonny was interested in talking business, no matter how we tried to maneuver conversations. In addition to our own cocktail waitresses and bartender, waitresses from other local joints and regular customers came in and joined the party. In the early-morning hours Sonny took one of the girls back to the hotel.
The sun was up on Sunday morning. These were the last hours for the club and the operation. I took Nicky on ahead to Denny’s for breakfast. Rossi and Shannon had to stay behind for a little while to check out the
cash register and help the staff clean up.
When Nicky and I had left, Rossi told the help that they were getting a surprise two-week vacation with pay because we were going to close the club for renovations.
I was alone with Nicky at Denny’s. There wasn’t much time. I decided to take a shot at learning something about the murders of the three captains. I came in from an angle, asked about a couple of Colombo guys who had disappeared.
“They got clipped,” Nicky said. “They were skimming drug money. They were mixed up in that with Sonny Red.”
“That must have been something,” I said, “that thing with him and Philly Lucky and Big Trin.”
“I never saw anything like it in my life, Donnie. Big Trin was so huge. When that shotgun blast hit him, about fifty pounds of his stomach just went flying.”
“What was it like with the other guys?”
“We’ll talk about it later, Donnie.”
Shannon and Rossi had walked in. I couldn’t signal for them to leave. Nicky had not met Shannon before this weekend. He clammed up.
We had breakfast and went back to the Tahitian. Nicky and Sonny packed up, and Rossi and I took them to the airport. On the way Sonny kept drilling into us how we had to keep things going now that he was back on the right track with Trafficante, how we had to hustle for drug connections and build up the shylocking and gambling, and get going on the bingo and the dog track. Everything was really going to roll now.
Nicky realized he had forgotten something. “Donnie, I left my blue suede jacket in the motel room. It’s got some important address books in it that I need. Do me a favor and pick it up right away and send it to me?”
“Sure thing, Nicky.”
We dropped them off at the airport. I felt relief and discomfort at the same time. I figured that I probably wouldn’t see Sonny again, not even in court. I believed he was history. I couldn’t make any big deal out of the good-bye.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I said.
I went back to the Tahitian and got Nicky’s jacket out of his room, along with two address books and a pocket-size folder with personal papers and cards. I turned the stuff in to agent Mike Lunsford.
We cleaned out our apartments. The furniture was rented, so it was just a matter of gathering up personal stuff.
King’s Court was locked up. The case agent would deal with it.
Later in the day Rossi flew to Washington, D.C., for his debriefing. I had to fly directly to Milwaukee to testify before the grand jury on the Balistrieri case. That case, like many others, had been held in abeyance until we wrapped up the whole operation. Eddie Shannon flew with me, just for double protection. After that I would go to Washington, D.C., for debriefing. For a couple of weeks I didn’t have a chance to go home. After I went home for a few days I went to New York to start working with the U.S. Attorneys on the indictments.
I am not inclined toward soul-searching, and during this period I didn’t have time to brood, anyway. I had some uncomfortable feelings because I felt close to Sonny Black. I felt a kind of kinship with him. But I didn’t feel any guilt of betrayal, because I’d always maintained in my own mind and heart the separation of our worlds. In a sense we were both just doing our jobs. If he had found out who I was, he’d have whacked me out. He would have done it in the traditional way. He wouldn’t have talked to me about it. He’d have set me up. Who kills you in that business is somebody you know. Maybe he would have had Lefty do it. Maybe he would have done it himself. It would have been cold-blooded.
Sonny was good at what he did. He wasn’t a phony. He didn’t throw his weight around. He was a stand-up guy. For reasons that are hard to explain, I liked him a lot. But I didn’t dwell on the fact that I was going to put him in the can, or that he was going to get killed because of me. That’s the business.
I knew that both Lefty and Sonny loved me in their own ways. Either would have killed me in a minute. It didn’t have to be because I was an agent. They could have thought I was an informant. I could have lost a decision to Mirra, and they could have been ordered to kill me. They would simply have done it.
The difference between our worlds was that I wouldn’t kill them. I would just put them in the can. I had a gut feeling that Sonny was going to be killed by his own people over this situation. I didn’t like being responsible for anybody getting killed. But it wasn’t my rules; it was their rules that would kill him. I didn’t write those rules. Those rules were written by their society, not mine.
So I felt bad, but I didn’t dwell on it. Nothing I did in my job was affected by any feelings I had for Sonny or anybody else. That was my discipline. Some guys have trouble dealing with that aspect. When one of my friends who had been working undercover was preparing to go to court, he said he couldn’t look the defendants in the eye because he felt guilty for having deceived them. You just did your job, I told him.
You can’t have those personal feelings in this business. I was not there to be buddy-buddy with these guys. I would not allow myself to become that emotionally attached. In my situation, my life was on the line every day.
On the first day after Sonny and Nicky went back to New York, Lefty tried to reach me in Holiday. On the second day, the agents visited Sonny Black.
Doug Fencl, Jim Kinne, and Jerry Loar went to the Motion Lounge.
Sonny knew Agent Fencl, and that was important. Agents working “straight up” will on occasion drop in on mob guys like Sonny just to let them know they are around watching them, available to them if they ever get jammed up and want to share information. Some months before, Sonny and Lefty and I had been talking about ways of insulating ourselves against the law, and it was their opinion that the ones you really had to worry about were the FBI agents. Sonny said that a couple of agents stopped in the Motion Lounge once in a while, and he mentioned Fencl. “He’s a nice guy, a gentleman. He doesn’t bullshit. He just tells me exactly what’s on his mind.”
So Fencl was one that Sonny would be likely to trust and believe. The agents showed Sonny a photograph taken especially for this occasion. It showed me together with these three agents. They asked Sonny:
“Do you know this guy? He’s an FBI agent. We just wanted to tell you.” They didn’t offer him a deal, because a deal is always implicit, and a direct offer to a guy like Sonny would have been insulting to him.
Sonny gave away nothing by his expression or tone of voice. “I don’t know him, but if I meet him, I’ll know he’s an FBI agent.”
We tracked what happened after that through wiretaps and informants.
Just as anticipated, Sonny’s first move after the visit was to call together the main men of his crew. Lefty, Boobie, and Nicky came to the Motion Lounge to meet with Sonny. Sonny told them there was no way I was an agent, that if the FBI had me, they must have kidnapped me and were maybe even brainwashing me.
For more than a week they kept the story to themselves while they looked for me. They reached out to the King’s Court area, even called some of our waitresses. Lefty went to Miami, and he and Maruca scoured the area, checked all the hotels and haunts. They sent two guys from New York to Chicago, Milwaukee, and California to see if they could come up with anything.
After ten days Sonny called Santo Trafficante and told him about the agents’ visit and what they had said. He didn’t offer interpretations or explanations. He sent word to Rusty Rastelli in prison. And then he called Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family, the boss of bosses.
The mob held several meetings in New York over this, making a damage assessment. They distributed pictures of me, snapshots taken over the years with Lefty or Sonny or others, all over the country, and all the mob families were put on alert to watch for me.
The bosses considered what to do. They decided to put an open-ended—open to anyone—$500,000 contract on me. There was a suggestion that they hit everybody in the mob that had anything to do with me. Obviously certain people were going to fall, but there was nothing we could do about it.
You can’t get a warrant to snatch anybody off the street, even for their own protection, without definite information that the person is going to get killed. Nobody’s name came to us as a definite target.
Except mine. The FBI dispatched teams of agents to visit all the top Mafia bosses they could find and tell them face-to-face, Hands off this agent, he beat you, it’s finished. If they hurt me, all the resources of the Justice Department would be focused on going after them—I and the FBI were not going to be intimidated.
On August 14, seventeen days after the agents had told Sonny about me, the bosses called a meeting in New Jersey. Sonny went to the meeting. I was not surprised. His options were either to turn informant, or to run, or to go to the meeting. He went to the meeting and disappeared.
Once we found out that Sonny was missing, I told Jerry Loar, “When you see them start taking his pigeon coops down, you can close your case on Sonny Black, because then he’s history.” About a week later a couple guys were on that roof taking the pigeon coops down.
A month later Sonny’s girlfriend, Judy, called the New York office of the FBI, wanting to talk to me. When I got in touch with her, she said she was scared for Sonny and for herself, and she wanted very much to get together and talk to me about things. I said okay, and that agents would be in touch with her to arrange it.
We had to be careful, even with Judy, because of a possible setup. We needed a controlled situation. So we decided to have the meeting in Washington, D.C. Two agents picked her up, flew down with her, and brought her to the Marriott right by National Airport.
We went to the dining room to have dinner. The other agents sat at a table across the room.
She said she was frightened and worried, and she missed Sonny.
I said, “Judy, the chances are that Sonny is not coming back. My recommendation is that you not associate with any of those people anymore. They’re not really your friends. Get on with your life.”
Donnie Brasco Page 42