Donnie Brasco (15 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
I was introduced. Joe knew the other guys but not me. I watched his face. No reaction. I wasn’t going to excuse myself and leave, because something might click with this guy, and if it did, I wanted to see the reaction so I would know. If I left and something clicked with this guy, I could come back to an ambush. I watched his face, his eyes, his hands.
They talked about the watches, the prices. I decided to get the guy in conversation. Sometimes if a guy’s nervous about you, he can hide it in his expression, just avoid you. I figured if I talked to him, I could get a reaction—either he would talk easy or he would try to avoid conversation with me. I had to be sure, because there was a good chance I would run into this guy again.
“By the way,” I said, “you got any use for men’s digitals?” I had one and showed it to him.
“Looks like a good watch,” he said. “How much?”
“You buy enough, you can have them for twenty each.”
“Let me check it out, get back to you. Where can I reach you?”
“I’m right here every day,” I said.
The conversation was okay. There was no hitch in his reactions. They chatted a few more minutes and left. The whole thing took maybe twenty minutes. The guy simply hadn’t made me. Those situations occur from time to time, and there’s nothing you can do about them, except be on your toes.
A couple days later I asked Jilly, “Joe and that other guy, did they buy the watches?”
He said, “Yeah, they took some of mine, but they didn’t have any market for yours.”
From time to time somebody in Jilly’s crew would ask me if I had any good outlets for marijuana or coke. I was noncommittal. At that time I wasn’t trying to milk the drug side, other than to report back whatever I saw and heard. The FBI wasn’t so much into the drug business then. We didn’t want to get involved in any small drug transactions because we couldn’t get authority to buy drugs without making a bust. We were still operating on a buy-bust standard, meaning that if we made a buy, we had to make a bust, and that would have blown my whole operation. So in order not to complicate the long-range plans for my operation, I pretty much had to steer clear of drug deals.
Guido came up to me at the store. “You got plans for today?” he asked.
“No, I’m just gonna hang out. I got nothing to do,” I said.
“Take a ride with me. I gotta go to Jersey.”
We took Jilly’s car, a blue 1976 Coupe de Ville. We drove across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Staten Island. We drove around Staten Island for a while, then recrossed the bridge back to Brooklyn.
I said, “I thought you said you had to go to Jersey?”
“I do,” he said. “I gotta meet a guy.”
We drove up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, and headed north on the FDR Drive. Obviously Guido had just been cleaning himself, making sure nobody was following him, with the run to Staten Island. We crossed the George Washington Bridge into Jersey. We took the Palisades Parkway north.
A little after noon we got to Montvale, New Jersey. At the intersection of Summit Avenue and Spring Valley Road, Guido stopped to make a call at a phone booth. He got back in the car and we just sat there.
“We wait,” he said.
About a half hour later a black Oldsmobile pulled up beside us. The driver motioned for us to follow him. We followed him north for a few minutes, across the Jersey line into New York. We pulled into a busy shopping center in Pearl River. Guido and the other driver got out and talked. The other guy was about 6’, 180, with a black mustache. Guido signaled for me to get out of the car.
The guy opened his trunk. There were four plain brown cardboard boxes in there. We transferred the boxes to Guido’s trunk.
Guido asked, “How much is in there?”
“You got ninety-eight pounds,” the guy said. “That’s what you gotta pay me for.”
We got back in the car and headed for Brooklyn.
“Colombian,” Guido said, referring to the marijuana in the trunk. “We should get $275 a pound. On consignment. I got access to another 175 pounds. The guy said he could also supply us with coke, but not on consignment. Money up front for blow.”
I unloaded the boxes and put them in the back of Jilly’s store. The next day when I came in, the boxes were gone. They didn’t keep drugs in the store. Guido handed me a little sample bag. It was uncleaned—stalks, leaves, seeds. “Think you can move some of this?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never moved any of this stuff through my people. I’ll ask around.”
I held on to the sample for a couple of days, then gave it back. “Nobody I talked to could use it,” I said.
None of these guys used drugs themselves, so far as I could see. To them it was strictly a matter of business. If these guys had been dopers, it might have been a different story. They really might have tested me. But the fact was that the way you proved yourself with these guys was by making scores, making money.
According to the Mafia mythology, there was supposed to be a code against dealing drugs. In the old days there wasn’t a huge amount of money to be made in drugs, and they didn’t do it. Now that’s where the money is, forget any so-called code. Like anything else with the Mafia, if there’s money to be made, they’re going to do it.
One morning Jilly was sitting at the desk in the back room, scribbling on some papers.
“Gotta fill out these applications,” he said.
The application was for a loan from the Small Business Administration. He told me that they had a guy in the SBA who approved loans. So Jilly would fill out an application with all fake stuff, any kind of junk information: Joe Crap the Ragman, phony business, phony address. Then he’d send it in and this guy would approve it. At that time the SBA was going strong; there was all kinds of money. So if the application looked decent and the amount requested was not so exorbitant as to attract anybody’s attention, they wouldn’t do any big check on it. So Jilly would ask for like $20,000. The guy they owned on the inside would approve it, get the $20,000, take five off the top for himself, and pass on $15,000 to Jilly.
The great thing about it was you didn’t have to pay it back. Since everything on the application was bogus, how would they ever find you? Jilly pulled this off a couple of times.
Another day I got to the club and Jilly wasn’t there. I asked Vinnie, “Where is everybody?”
“Jilly and Guido got a contract,” he said, “and they’re out looking for the guy they gotta hit.”
You don’t ask questions about a hit. If they want you to know, they’ll tell you. But my job was to get information if possible. When Jilly came back, I asked him, “Where were you guys?”
“Me and Guido had to look for somebody,” he said.
“Anything going on?” I asked, as if it might be some kind of score.
He proceeded to talk about an upcoming hijacking. I tried to wrangle the conversation back to the guy they were looking for, but he wouldn’t talk about it. It wasn’t unusual that he wouldn’t tell me. Who was I? At the time I was just a guy who had been hanging around a few months, let alone an FBI agent. You don’t just tell anybody if you have a piece of work to do.
I don’t know if that particular hit came off or not. Whacking somebody is something that you don’t talk about. In my years with the Mafia guys sometimes they would would sit around and discuss how much work they’d done in the past—“work” meaning hits. But ordinarily they never discussed openly any particular individual they hit, or an upcoming one. If something went wrong, they might sit around later and laugh about it.
One time I was hanging out with Lefty Ruggiero at his social club in Little Italy, and he and a bunch of guys were laughing about a job. They had gotten a contract to hit a guy. They tailed this guy for a week, looking for the right opportunity. Then they were told the contract’s off, don’t hit the guy. And it turned out it was the wrong guy they were following. They would have hit the wrong guy. To them it was the funniest thing in the world. “What the fuck you think of that? We’re following the guy for a week and it’s not even the right guy—ha, ha, ha! We’re out every fucking night following this jerk-off. Piece a fucking luck for him, right? Ha, ha, ha!”
On the Fourth of July weekend Jilly had a cookout for everybody. He had a house down at the Jersey Shore, in Seaside Heights, a block from the beach, and he had all the guys down with their wives and girlfriends.
I went to Fretta‘s, the Italian meat market in Little Italy, and bought sausages and cold cuts and cheeses and took it down there for the cookout.
I wasn’t married, of course. Supposedly I had a couple of girlfriends here and there, but I never brought any of them around. The guys used to get on me sometimes about never bringing a girl around, but I told them there wasn’t anybody I cared enough about.
I always wear an Irish Claddagh ring that my wife gave me. It has hands holding a heart, and a crown on it, symbolizing love, friendship, and loyalty. Nobody had ever mentioned the ring.
We were sitting outside at this picnic table, and one of the guys’ girlfriends says, “That’s a nice ring you got on, Don. That’s an Irish Claddagh ring, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t those rings for love? Aren’t they used as wedding rings?”
“Yeah, sometimes,” I say. One of the guys asks about it, and I go into the history and so forth.
Then she says, “Well, what are you wearing it for? I didn’t think you were married or anything.”
“No, I’m not. But one of the few girls I was ever in love with gave it to me. Then a couple months later she jilted me. I keep wearing it because I don’t ever want to forget her.”
One of the guys looks puzzled. He says, “You sure you’re not married?”
“Why?”
“Because I just can’t figure it out. You mean, you loved that girl so much that you keep wearing that ring after she jilted you?”
“Sure, why not?”
“I just didn’t think you were the type of guy that could love anybody. You know, the way that you’re here, you’re there, you got no allegiance, no ties to anybody.”
“Well, there always comes a time in somebody’s life when there’s a girl that you love, somebody that’s special, so I’d rather remember it than forget about it. I just want to wear the ring, that’s all. What’s the difference to anybody else?”
The only time I take the ring off is when I work out lifting weights. I wore it during the whole operation. And that was the only time anybody ever mentioned it.
What with hanging out with Jilly’s Colombo crew and with Mirra and Ruggiero’s Bonanno crews and going to Florida to work with Joe Fitz on Sun Apple, I wasn’t getting home much at all. I missed the school sports seasons and watching my daughters cheerlead. I missed two of the girls’ birthdays. I wasn’t home for my birthday, either. I wasn’t home for our sixteenth wedding anniversary—to celebrate, my wife went out with a couple named Howard and Gail who had been close friends of hers for a year before I even met them. I was home maybe two or three nights a month.
And when I was home, I was a little harried, trying to make up for lost family time but unable to put mob business out of my mind completely.
I managed to make it to my younger brother’s wedding. It was a regular big Italian wedding, lots of cash and checks. After the wedding the bride and groom were leaving directly for their honeymoon. They didn’t want to take all this money with them. He asked me to take care of it until they got back. “Who could be safer to leave all this with,” he said, “than my brother the FBI agent?”
I put this big envelope of cash and checks under the front seat of my car and headed back to New York City.
A week later my brother asked me for the envelope. It wasn’t in my apartment. It wasn’t anywhere. It was still under the front seat of my car. I had been all over the place since then, to different neighborhoods in the city. My car had been parked on streets and in garages. I had totally forgotten about the money.
None of my family knew the depth of my involvement. My brother later told me that he began to suspect that I was into something heavy when I forgot about his money. The distractions of my job were causing friction in my family.
The situation was tolerable because it was temporary. A few months undercover. But now we had passed the six-month limit to the operation. I hadn’t reached the big fences. But unexpectedly I was getting deeper into the mob, with my association with Bonanno members Mirra and Ruggiero in Little Italy and their introduction of me to others. My undercover assignment was extended indefinitely.
Physically I was often feeling tired. But the daily challenge stimulated me. I felt good about how things were going.
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