Donnie Brasco (12 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
To become a made guy, to a street crook who is Italian, is a satisfaction beyond measure. A made guy has protection and respect. You have to be Italian, and be proposed for membership in the Mafia family, voted on unanimously by bosses and captains, and inducted in a secret ceremony. Then you are a made guy, “straightened out,” a wiseguy. No one, no organization, no other Mafia family can encroach on the turf of a made guy without permission. He can’t be touched. A Mafia family protects its members and its businesses. Your primary loyalty is to your Mafia family. You are elevated to a status above the outside world of “citizens.” You are like royalty. In ethnic neighborhoods like Jilly‘s, nobody has more respect than a made guy. A made guy may not be liked, may even be hated, but he is always respected. He has the full authority and power of his Mafia family behind him.
One Friday, Jilly was keyed up over a big score he was setting up for the weekend. He had a man inside a trucking company who was going to give him the keys to three trailers loaded with furs and leather jackets. That same inside guy was going to deactivate the Babco alarm systems in the trucks.
Monday morning, Jilly was pissed off with everybody. On Sunday night they had gone into the truck yard. They had opened two of the trailers. When they opened the third, the alarm went off. The whole crew panicked and took off from the scene without grabbing a single item.
It drives the guys crazy to miss a score like that when they were so close, just because somebody fucked up. It also makes them look bad. Jilly had had to get permission to take those loads. On a big score like that, when you’re a low-echelon made guy, a soldier, you have to get permission to make sure you’re not stepping on anybody else’s toes—and also to put the higher-ups on notice that some money will be coming in.
For permission Jilly had gone to his captain, Charlie Moose.
Your captain gets a piece of the action on whatever you do. So you go to him and tell him you’re going to pull a big job. If you don’t tell him ahead of time and he finds out about it, or you tell him after the fact, the captain might start thinking, They got more out of this job than they’re telling me, and that’s why they didn’t ask me up front.
Because that’s what happens all the time. It’s all a big bullshit game. You go to your captain and tell him you’re going to pull off a job worth a hundred grand. Usually the split is half with your captain. So right off the bat you have to give him fifty percent. The captain in turn has to kick in, say, ten percent upstairs, to the boss.
Captains are greedy, just like everybody else. And each captain sets the rules for his crews. He can set any rules he wants. So maybe a captain says, “I want sixty percent, instead of fifty.” Because what he will do is keep fifty and give the other ten percent to the boss. Instead of taking it out of his end, he’s taking it out of yours. Some captains demand that each one of their guys give them a certain amount of money per week, say $200, like a rent payment. That insures they get some money. Plus a percentage of the action.
And that’s because everybody’s playing this same bullshit game, trying to keep as much as they can, pass along as little as they can get away with, regardless of what the rules say. They always fudge. They figure they’re out doing the job, who wants to give up half of what they get to somebody that’s not even there?
So you never told anybody the whole story with money. If you made $100,000 on a score, you might tell your captain you came out with $80,000. That was the standard. It goes that way right up the line. That’s why nobody totally trusts anybody.
Later on, when my position became a connected guy, I had to split whatever I supposedly made on scores with the soldier I was under. He kicked in to his captain. That shows the captain two things: that the soldier is out earning; and that he’s loyal in kicking into the treasury. Same thing with the captains; they keep in good favor by throwing a piece of the action to the boss and the underboss.
Simply put: When you’re operating within the mob, for every score you do, you know that you’re going to split it with somebody at one point or another; you’re going to give some of your earnings up. Everybody plays the game of holding something back. Just so you don’t get caught.
Now, the thing is, it’s a dangerous game, because if you get caught, you’re liable to get whacked—killed. Holding out money from partners, captains, and bosses is, in a business strictly based on greed, a serious offense. If you did get caught, the questions are: How much did you skim and who did you keep it from? Some captains or bosses would have you whacked for withholding $5,000. The thing to remember is, no amount of money is insignificant to these guys. You might get whacked for $200—if it wasn’t your first time skimming, or if other guys needed to be shown a lesson, or if your captain or boss just felt like having you whacked.
So the practice of skimming, from your own family, was common, and so was the result of getting whacked. It would be nothing to have these guys whacked, the guys in Jilly’s crew. They weren’t even heavyweights, just underlings.
So in this case, Jilly and the failed score on the loads of leathers and furs, he had gotten permission from Charlie Moose to take the load, and then he had to go back to Charlie Moose and tell him that the score fell through. Nobody likes to be in a position of having to give his captain such news because, first of all, Charlie Moose would be very disappointed to hear that the money he counted on will not be forthcoming; and second, it would be obvious to Charlie Moose that this crew of Jilly’s fucked up like nitwits.
That was why Jilly was pissed off that particular morning.
Charlie Moose squeezed his crews. That was a subject of common complaint among Jilly’s crew. They’d bitch and moan about Charlie Moose. They’d complain that they couldn’t do anything without his say-so and that he was taking too big a cut of every score. They were all agreed that they’d short him every chance they got.
“What that lousy son of a bitch does,” Guido told me one day at the store, “is whenever anybody in the crew makes a score, you have to take all the money into him, and then he divides it up. He don’t trust us, then we don’t trust him. Fuck him. We pull in a hundred grand, we tell him we got seventy-five. How the fuck’s he gonna know the difference?”
Jilly said, “You better shut up with that stuff. You’ll get us all killed talking like that.”
One way Charlie might know the difference was if somebody there was a snitch, a rat. But that was unlikely. The mentality of these guys is: Once a snitch, always a snitch. So if a snitch rats out these guys to Charlie Moose, even though it might be to the captain’s benefit, Charlie is thinking, “These are the guys he’s with all the time, his own crew, and if he’s willing to rat them out, how do I know that if he gets caught in a box sometime, he’s not gonna snitch to the cops?”
So a snitch would be running at least as much risk as the guy he was ratting on. Nothing is hated more in the mob than a snitch.
While I was not getting to the big fences, I was getting a lot of information. Every few days, or when there was anything significant to report, I passed on the information to my contact agent. Occasionally, when they had pulled a particularly big job, we were tempted to have them busted from the outside. The contact agent and I talked it over. But we couldn’t do that. Since I was the new guy on the block with this Colombo crew, if any busts did go down, the finger would point at me. I’d be the guy that was the snitch. I was caught in the middle. Like everything else I was involved in at this stage, we couldn’t make any busts that might compromise me as a snitch. So a lot of my information just went into the files for later. And later—years later in some cases, because of my continued involvement—the Bureau busted people for some of these scores, or we turned the information over to local police departments for action.
Two guys from Jilly’s crew got out of prison, Frankie and Patsy. And naturally they came back and picked up right where they left off with the gang. They were a couple of tough guys, hard-nosed general-purpose thieves who were used to calling their own shots. And right away they were not too pleased with my presence, because I was new and had worked my way in while they were away in the can.
Frankie was about 5’ 10”, slim and stylish, in his late thirties. If you were casting for the movies, he would be perfect for the classic, shifty-eyed thief. Patsy was maybe ten years older, three inches taller, and ten pounds heavier.
They were big on daytime house burglaries. They would get information on a house where there was cash or jewels or guns. Their gimmick was to pose as detectives to gain entry, then handcuff anyone who was home and ransack the place. They had regular detective shields they could show, and they always had a guy in a getaway car outside.
They decided that a couple of houses in Hicksville, Long Island, were great prospects for burglaries. They went out there and posed as morning joggers to trot by and case the places. They would park their car down the road a ways and jog by the houses in their sweat suits.
The morning they were to hit this one house, they drove up and discovered there were a whole bunch of cars parked in the driveway. They canceled the job.
They jogged past the second house to case it. When they jogged back to their car, they saw a woman writing down their license-plate number. They canceled that job.
Jilly and Frankie and I went out in Jilly’s car to case a job in Hicksville. They had information that the owner of the house, supposedly the head of some retail dry-cleaners’ association, had a bed built over a safe in which there was a lot of cash. Apparently our car was noticed as being strange to the neighborhood and suspicious, because somebody called the cops. The cops came by, stopped, and talked to us. They asked us what we were doing. We said we were just looking for potential properties to buy. On the car seat was a black attaché case in which were two revolvers, one a .38 and one a .32; some loose bullets; and several sets of handcuffs. The cops were satisfied with our explanation. But that blew that job.
By now I was used to putting my two cents’ worth in on plans for scores, while still trying to avoid participating. It was part of my function to discourage them from pulling jobs, especially those where somebody might be in the house or somebody might get hurt. So when I had a chance, that’s what I did. Anyway, at the same time I was gathering a lot of information on criminal activity, which was also my job.
They had cased a job in Mountainside, New Jersey, and they wanted me to take a run over there and check out the alarm system, see if they could get by it. Since I was a burglar and a jewel thief, I had to know about alarm systems.
So I went over to this house. It was a mansion surrounded by a big fence. It looked like it would be a good house to hit. Of course, I didn’t check out the alarm system. I didn’t go anywhere near it.
But I went back to Jilly’s and told them it looked like the place had a very complicated alarm system that I didn’t know how to bypass, plus probably a secondary backup system that I couldn’t observe. Plus, it looked to me like there wasn’t a good escape route for getting out of the place in case the alarm was tripped. My recommendation was that they forget about that job.
Patsy really wanted to pull that job. He was pissed because I was trying to squelch it.
“It’s not worth a shot at getting caught,” I said.
“You just don’t want to come with us on this,” he said. “You’re fucking afraid.”
“You’re right, I don‘t,” he said. “If I can’t get by that alarm, what am I gonna do? Break a window and go in like some fucking two-bit junkie? But you guys can go ahead and do it, just count me out.”
Then the other guys decided they didn’t want to do it, either.
Their next house job they pulled off without telling me about it—some wealthy woman’s house over in Jersey someplace. When I came into the club the next morning. Patsy was parading around showing off this huge diamond he was so proud of. Everybody was oohing and aahing because of how much money it would bring. It was three carats, Patsy said.
He got around to me. I took the diamond and looked it over. “I wouldn’t get too excited about it,” I said, “because this is fake, a fugazy.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Patsy said, grabbing the stone.
“It’s a zircon, is what I’m saying.”
Patsy snapped his head back like I had shoved a stick up his nose. “You’re full of shit,” he said. “That broad wouldn’t have no fugazy diamonds in her house. We had information the broad didn’t have no fake jewelry. It’s three fucking carats!”
“It’s a fugazy,” I said. “Take it home for your kid to play with.”
“You’re such a smartass, like you know everything.”
“Hey, Patsy,” I said, “you just got out of the can, and I never been in jail, so I must be just a little smarter than you. You want to embarrass yourself, pal, take that stone to your fence, the jeweler you talk about.”
“That’s exactly what I’m gonna do,” he said. He stomped out with the gem. I could have been wrong, of course, and at least my credibility would have been hurt. But I had taken that gemology course, and I wanted to demonstrate that I knew something about gems. The stone was just too big—nobody would have this big a stone lying around in their house. And the color was a little off. I just had a gut feeling about it.
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