Donnie Brasco (19 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
My personal rule was that under no circumstances would I have anything to do with any women hanging around the mob. Regardless of morality, that kind of thing will come back to haunt you when you testify in court against these guys. By saying I had a girlfriend someplace else, the heat was off me. Occasionally, just so I seemed normal, I would bring somebody around for dinner, a woman who I had maybe met in my neighborhood. I’d show her a nice evening with the mob guys, take her home and drop her off, and that was that.
At that feast in 1977, a bunch of us were sitting in a coffee shop on Mulberry Street at one A.M., Lefty and a couple other guys and a couple local girls. One girl was sitting next to me. Suddenly she’s rubbing my leg under the table. She says, “Where you going when you leave here?”
“Over to see my girl in Jersey.”
“Why don’t you stay in the city tonight?”
This girl is the daughter of a wiseguy, and her father is in the coffee shop. I have to be careful not to insult her because she might tell her old man that I’m grabbing her leg or something, and then I’m history—you don’t do that to a wiseguy’s daughter.
“I’m pretty true to my girl,” I say. “I promised I was coming over. I’d rather not lie to her.”
“How come you never bring her around?”
“No reason to.”
“Well, if you ever get the urge to go out, give me a call.”
“Okay, I will. Sometime when I don’t have to lie.” I squirmed out of that one.
One of Mirra’s operations was coin machines. He dealt in slots, peanut vending machines, game machines, pinball machines. He had them installed all over the city in stores, luncheonettes, clubs, after-hours places. Slot machines, since they were illegal, would be installed in back rooms. He would take me along on his route when he collected the money from the machines and when he got new business.
To collect, he just went in, opened the machines with a key, counted the money, and gave the store owner his cut—$25 or whatever it was. He would put the rest in a paper bag and out we would go. His route produced maybe $2,000 a week.
To get a new customer Mirra would walk into a place, tell the owner he was Tony and that the store needed one of his machines. Often the owner would recognize him or the name and say something like, “Oh, yeah, Tony, I was just thinking of calling you to get a machine in here.” If the guy didn’t think he was interested at first, Mirra would say, “In the next twenty-four hours, check around, ask about Tony down on Mulberry Street. Then I’ll come back and see if you’ve changed your mind.”
Invariably the owner had changed his mind when we came back.
He was trying to get his slot machines into Atlantic City. He said the family had five hundred slots in a warehouse, and he was just waiting for his lawyers to come up with a way to get access for them along the boardwalk.
Mirra says to me, “Drive me uptown.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I got to meet a guy that owes me money.”
He was collecting on one of his shylock loans.
We drive to a restaurant on First Avenue. We go in and stand at the bar. Pretty soon this guy walks in, tough-looking, about thirty. He comes over to Mirra and starts to open his mouth.
“Don‘t,” Mirra says, holding up his hand. “Don’t mention anybody’s name or I’m gonna smack you right here.”
Mob protocol is that if the guy says he talked to another wiseguy about the situation, mentions another wiseguy’s name, then Mirra would first have to talk to the other wiseguy. So he wasn’t giving this guy a chance to mention anybody’s name.
Mirra says, “Just answer the question I ask you. Where’s my fucking money?”
“Geez, Tony, you’re gonna get it, I’m just having a hard time, but I’ll have it for you, you know—”
“I heard this now a couple weeks,” Mirra says. “But it don’t happen. Let’s take a walk.”
Now I’m worried. If Mirra takes him out, this guy could end up in the alley next door. Mirra would beat him up or stab him. It was one of those situations where, as an agent, I had to intercede. But at the same time I had to maintain my role.
I say, “Hey, Tony, why don’t you let me talk to the guy, save you the aggravation. I’ll take him out for a walk.”
He nods to me and shoves the guy toward the door.
I take him outside. I figure at least I can buy some time, let Tony cool down. I say, “Look, I just saved you. I don’t want to see you get killed, but next time it ain’t gonna be that easy. When we go back in there, you say, ‘Tony, can I meet you tomorrow and give you the money?’ And you better have it for him tomorrow, because I might not be around tomorrow. And you act scared, like I gave you a couple smacks, because that’s what I’m supposed to do. You don’t act right, I’ll stab you myself, because I put my ass on the line with him.”
This tough guy is practically licking my hand because of his fear of Mirra.
We go back in, and the guy goes right up to Mirra and says, “Tony, I’ll give you the money tomorrow, meet you anywhere you want, okay? Okay?”
“The kid convinced you?” (Mirra sometimes called me “the kid.”) “Tomorrow. Right here.”
I was always on edge with Mirra. He was always in arguments with somebody. You never knew what might set him off, turn him into a cuckoo bird. He had no real allegiance to anybody. He was always in trouble with the law, which gave him a bad reputation on the street. I didn’t want to get tied up with Mirra, because you never knew when he would go back in the can. He was almost fifty years old, and he had spent more than half his life in jail.
He was valuable for introducing me to people. He introduced me to his captain, Mickey Zaffarano. Zaffarano handled porn theaters and national porn film distribution for the Bonanno family. He owned several pornography movie theaters in Times Square and around the country. His office was at Forty-eighth and Broadway—Times Square—upstairs from one of his theaters, the Pussycat. Mirra had me drive him up to Zaffarano’s office a couple of times. Zaffarano also came down to Madison Street once in a while. He was a big, good-looking guy, tall and heavyset.
Zaffarano eventually got caught up in the FBI sting operation called “Mi-Porn” out of Miami. When the agents went up to his office to arrest him, he started running away through the halls, and in the course of his run he dropped dead of a heart attack.
Lefty Ruggierro had a little storefront social club similar to dozens of others in Little Italy. Coffee, booze, card tables, TV. Downstairs was another room for more serious card games. Members only. Men only. Associates of Lefty and the Bonanno family only. It was a place to hang out.
In the back of the room was a phone and table, a place to take bets. Lefty was a bookie. Sometimes Mirra wasn’t there and I would bullshit with Lefty, chat about sports and what teams were hot to bet on. I began placing a few bets on baseball and horses, and on football when the pro exhibition season started—$50 to $100 just to help me be accepted. We started to develop a relationship. Lefty started calling me Donnie instead of Don, and that’s what everybody called me from then on.
The daily routine at Lefty’s was not much different from what it was at Jilly’s in Brooklyn, except that it was more of a real social club, not a store. Guys talked about the sports book, the numbers business, who owed what to whom, what scores were coming up. They groused about money. It didn’t matter how much anybody made or anybody had; they always groused about it. They were always talking about squeezing another nickel out of somebody.
After about two weeks Lefty asked me how I made money. By then I felt comfortable, not like I was rushing anything, so I told him I was a jewel thief and burglar.
“My son-in-law Marco is in that line,” he said. “Maybe you guys can get some things going together.”
“I usually work alone, Lefty,” I said. “But if there’s a good score and I like it, that’s always a possibility.”
For a while it was like a testing period. I just bided my time and didn’t push my nose into anything. Lefty started hitting me up for loans every now and then. He needed to pick up some clothes or some furniture, or whatever. I would lend him $300, $125. Sometimes he’d pay me back a fraction of it. I never thought he needed the money. I knew it was part of the hustle. You squeeze money out from whoever you can. Also, my lending him money was an indication that I was making money. So as not to seem like a patsy, I’d never give him all he asked for. He’d say he needed $500, I’d give him $200.
“Donnie, I need that thousand we talked about. You gonna be able to come up with that thousand for me?”
“A grand’s a lot for me right now, Lefty.”
“Yeah, but, see, I gotta pick up seventeen hundred bucks worth of clothes from this guy. What I’ll do, you give me the thousand, I’ll pay you back two hundred on that three-fifty I owe you.”
That kind of cycle went on with everybody. It didn’t necessarily mean guys were broke. It was just that everybody did everything possible to avoid using his own money.
In those days I was still moving around. I would stop down at Lefty’s at maybe ten o‘clock in the morning, hang around the club for an hour or two, have some coffee, read the papers, listen in on whatever conversations were going on, listen to some of the betting action going on over the telephone in the back. Then I’d go to Brooklyn and hang around Jilly’s for a couple of hours. Then in the evening I would hook up with Mirra, maybe meet him at Cecil’s, and hit the night spots.
Lefty suggested I come down to the club some nights. There were crap games or three-card monte games in the neighborhood. Some of them were heavy-duty. There would be regular games in a couple rooms upstairs from Fretta‘s, the meat market on Mulberry Street. Or they’d move around to different empty lofts. They’d move the games every week or two, just to keep on the safe side. They were pretty safe, anyway, in that neighborhood, as far as trouble from the cops was concerned, but you didn’t want to shove it in anybody’s face. Mainly I’d just watch. Guys could be winning or losing $100,000. Too steep for me on an FBI budget.
Lefty ran the bookmaking operation for Nicky Marangello, the underboss of the Bonanno family. One day he asked me to drive him uptown, to an address on lower Fifth Avenue. “I gotta see one of my biggest bettors,” Lefty said. “This guy makes men’s clothes, mostly shirts, up on the fourth floor. He put down $175,000 this weekend. I gotta collect.”
I gathered that in this instance Lefty collected between $5,000 and $10,000. “That’s a good week for me with him,” Lefty said. “One week last season I dropped sixteen grand in football bets to this guy.” He began regularly having me drive him around to make collections and payoffs on the betting operation. Sometimes he would meet somebody at the Biondi Coffee House on Mulberry Street to pick up money to pay off the bettors. His fortunes varied widely in the betting business.
“Couple weeks ago I got beat thirteen grand for the week,” he said. “Last week I booked fifty-two grand and my losses were only seventeen-fifty.”
One afternoon he had to run off somewhere, and he asked me, “You want to handle the phone while I’m gone?”
So I started taking bets over the phone for Lefty.
Lefty was very different from Mirra. He talked a lot and was excitable. He had a big reputation as a killer, but on a daily social basis he wasn’t as likely to inflict damage. Lefty and Mirra were both soldiers but under different captains. Mirra was under Zaffarano (until he died). Lefty was under Mike Sabella.
Sabella owned a prominent restaurant on Mulberry Street, CaSa Bella. Occasionally we went there for dinner. Lefty introduced me to Sabella, a short, paunchy man with baggy eyes. “Mike, this is Donnie, a friend of mine.”
One time during the Feast of San Gennaro, Lefty and I and Mike Sabella were sitting in a club across the street from CaSa Bella, which Mike usually closed during the feast because he hated tourists.
Jimmy Roselli, the Italian singer, had his car parked out on the street. He opened the trunk, and it was filled with his records. He started hawking his own records out of his car trunk right there at the feast.
Mike couldn’t believe it. He went outside and said to Roselli, “Put the fucking trunk down because you’re fucking embarrassing me by trying to sell your fucking records here on the street!”
Roselli closed the trunk immediately.
“He’ll act different from now on,” Lefty says.
Nicky Marangello, the underboss, stopped by Lefty’s club regularly. Called Nicky Glasses or Little Nicky or Nicky Cigars, Marangello was a small man with slicked-back hair, thick glasses, and a sharp nose. He never smiled. Because of his thick glasses, he seemed always to be staring. Lefty introduced me to him. “Nicky, this is Donnie, a friend of mine.” I wasn’t invited to join in conversation, so I would walk away while they talked.
Marangello had his own social club, called Toyland. It was Mirra who first took me to Toyland, at 94 Hester Street, on the outskirts of Little Italy and Chinatown. Toyland wasn’t the same kind of social club as Lefty’s.
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