Donnie Brasco (22 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
In September they decided to get married. Lefty asked me to be best man. The wedding was at City Hall. They were all dressed up. Lefty was so nervous that he forgot to pick up the license. The ceremony was at five P.M., and the license bureau was closed. The judge got his clerk to go down and get the license.
I gave them $200 as a wedding gift. We went to CaSa Bella to celebrate. Maybe ten people. Mike came over and sat down with us to have a drink. Then we went uptown to Château Madrid, Lefty’s favorite place, where we saw a floor show with flamenco dancing.
“You ever do a hit on anybody, Donnie?” Lefty asked.
“I never had a contract, if that’s what you mean. I killed a couple guys. One guy in a fight, another guy that fucked me out of a score and we got into a beef.”
“That ain’t a hit.”
“If you kill somebody, you kill somebody, what’s the difference?”
“No, Donnie, you don’t understand. It ain’t that simple. That’s why I gotta school you. Hitting a guy on a contract is a lot different than whacking a guy over a beef. On a beef, you got a rage about the guy. But on a contract you might have no feelings one way or another about the guy, it might not even concern you why the guy’s getting hit. You got to be able to do it just like a professional job, with no emotion at all. You think you could do that?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see. Lot of guys think it’s easy, then they freeze up and can’t do it. Next time I get a contract, I’ll take you with me, show you how to do it. Generally you use a .22. A .22 doesn’t make a clean hole like some bigger calibers. Just right behind the ear. A .22 ricochets around your skull, tears everything up. Next contract I get, I’ll take you along.”
What would I do if and when that situation came up? As an agent, I can’t allow a hit to go through, can’t condone it, certainly can’t participate in it, if I know it’s going to happen. But I could find myself in the situation all of a sudden. I didn’t always know where we were going or why, and it wasn’t appropriate to ask.
If a hit is going down and I’m on the scene, do I risk trying to stop it and maybe getting killed myself? My decision was that if it came to it, if the target was a wiseguy and it came down to whether it was him or me, it was going to be him that got whacked. If it was an ordinary citizen, then I would take the risk and try to stop it.
By midsummer of 1977, I was really becoming accepted and trusted and could move around easily. I knew most of the regular wiseguys down on Mulberry Street, not only Bonannos but guys from other crews. I was given the familiar hugs and kisses on the cheek that wiseguys exchange. I could come and go in any of the joints I wanted. I could move in and out. A lot of times we would hang out at 116 Madison Street, the Holiday Bar, a place so dingy that I would only drink beer or club soda out of a bottle, I wouldn’t touch a glass. Social clubs, coffee shops, CaSa Bella. We would hang around, play gin, and everybody would tell war stories to each other and bust balls.
I met guys like Al Walker, Tony Mirra’s uncle, whose real name was Al Embarrato. Mirra’s nephew, Joey D‘Amico, who went by the name of “Joe Moak.” Big Willie Ravielo who ran the numbers in Harlem for Nicky Marangello; Joey Massino, a beefy, broad-shouldered, potbellied man who was rising quickly through the ranks; Nicky Santora, who had served time for bookmaking and aspired to be a partner with Lefty; the Chilli brothers, Joe and Jerry.
And then there were Frankie Fish, Porkie, Bobby Smash, Louie Ha Ha, Bobby Badheart (because he wore a pacemaker), Joe Red, and so on.
Real names didn’t mean anything to these guys. They didn’t introduce by last names. I knew guys that had been hanging out together for five or ten years and didn’t know each other’s last names. Nobody cares. You were introduced by a first name or a nickname. If you don’t volunteer somebody’s last name, nobody’ll ask you. That’s just the code. The feeling is, if you wanted me to know a name, you would have told me.
The reason I knew guys’ last names was through our own FBI identification. I always tried to get some kind of ID on everybody that came through the scene, even if it was just a nickname. You never knew who might turn out to be important somewhere down the road, or in some other investigation.
I told Lefty I had a girlfriend in Jersey and that sometimes when he called my apartment and I wasn’t there, I was probably with her. Over a period of time the topic of my girlfriend came up a lot. I never volunteered a name. He never asked what her name was. Nobody did.
All through 1977, Lefty didn’t tell me his last name. I knew his name, of course, but he didn’t tell me. I didn’t tell him mine. I knew him as Lefty and Bennie. He knew me as Donnie. I used to go to his house on Sundays or at night and eat with him and Louise. I’d watch TV with them. I’d lie on the couch and fall asleep. He never told me his last name or asked me mine. The first time we traveled together and checked into a hotel, he said, “What name do you want me to put down for you?” That was how he found out my name was Brasco. And the first time I had to check him in someplace, that was when I asked him what his last name was.
All during this time I was passing on to the Bureau more intelligence about the structure of the Bonanno family and other families: how they operated, who was who and what rank, information on the Mafia nationwide, intelligence we’ve never had before from an agent on the inside. I was continuing to pick up information on the Sicilian mafiosi that were being brought over, how Galante and Carlo Gambino were collaborating on setting them up in pizza-parlor businesses in the East and the Midwest and leaving them there until the bosses needed them to do something. How these “zips” were being used as heroin couriers and hit men.
To ease the tension I used to try to run every day, and lift weights at the health club in my apartment building. I didn’t know any wiseguys at the time who were doing that. It was okay, I was just considered a health nut. On most Sundays I would try to go to Mass. Wiseguys didn’t do that, either.
Lefty was treating me like we were pretty close. He saw me as a good earner. I didn’t portray myself as somebody having a big bank account or big business because I didn’t want to get tagged as a mark. I wanted to get tagged as a working thief. I portrayed myself just like they were—you make a score, you live good for two or three weeks, then you’re back to scrounging again. He saw just enough money come out of me to suggest that I could make a lot. He needed that, because he was in trouble.
“I owe a lot of fucking money,” he told me. “I’m in hock a hundred and sixty thousand to Nicky. I can’t get no place with that debt hanging over my head. It’s like I’m spinning my wheels. We gotta make some money.”
Unlike most wiseguys, Lefty had not served time in prison. He had been arrested many times for extortion and theft but had always beaten the rap. Lefty’s real problem was that he was a degenerate gambler. If he made $2,000 one day, he would blow $3,000 at the track the next day. I knew him to lose as much as $10,000 in one day at the track or an OTB (Off-Track Betting) parlor. If he went through that and had $2 left, he’d bet that too. He preferred bookies because at OTB, if you win, you pay them a percentage right off the top; with bookies you don’t pay them anything if you win, and they pay better odds than the state does.
I’m the world’s worst gambler. I couldn’t win at craps, at cards, or at the track. I wouldn’t bet on anything ever if it weren’t for this job. But Lefty was worse. He had no more skill, his luck was just as bad, but he was the typical gambling addict. The big killing was just around the corner.
Sometimes we’d pop down to Florida for a little vacation. We’d hit the dog tracks and the horse tracks. He didn’t know much about the dogs. We might win or lose $100 or $200. Mostly we lost. He didn’t know much about the horses, either. We didn’t get inside tips. Lefty would just handicap by the program.
One time we were at Hialeah and we went for the “pick six.” For the first five races we invested a couple of thousand on long shots and won every time. The sixth race was worth about $30,000 if we picked right. So we figured that in this last race we’d bet the favorite, to be safer. The favorite lost. So we blew a shot at $30,000.
His reaction was: “Finally we bet the chalk horse, the fucking horse loses. That other horse hadda come from nowhere. Thirty fucking thousand we coulda won.”
“Well, we only lost a couple grand,” I said. “Ain’t the question, Donnie. The point is, we had it right in our fucking hands!”
His problem was so bad that it had delayed his becoming a made guy. He told me that when I first met him, he wasn’t made yet, and that was because he hadn’t paid off his gambling debts. He whittled them down some, and because of that he was able to get made shortly after I met him, in the summer of 1977.
But now he was in hock again for this huge amount, and that meant that everything he made from the bookmaking or anything else, Marangello was taking Lefty’s piece right off the top to apply to the debt, and Lefty never had anything, except what he could hide. The nature of the game was that everybody always pled poverty, anyway, so you could never be sure whether Lefty was broke or not.
I brought around just enough money to convince Lefty that I was a good earner, with potential that he could develop. Together we could make our fortune, as Lefty saw it.
He encouraged me about my future in the mob.
“The thing is, Donnie, you gotta keep your nose clean. You gotta be a good earner and don’t get into trouble, don’t offend, don’t insult anybody, and you’re gonna be a made guy someday. Now, the only thing is, they might give you a contract to go out and whack somebody. But don’t worry about it. Like I told you, I’ll show you how. You got the makings, Donnie. You handle yourself right, keep your nose clean, keep on the good side of people, I’ll propose you for membership.”
Lefty says, “Come on, we got to go up to Sabella’s.”
It’s a hot July night. We go to CaSa Bella but we don’t go in. There are five or six other guys standing outside on the sidewalk, guys I recognize as being under Mike Sabella. We stand on the sidewalk with these other guys.
I ask Lefty, “Why the hell are we standing here?”
“We’re out here to make sure nothing happens to the Old Man. He’s in there.”
The Old Man is Carmine Galante, the boss of the Bonanno family. He just recently got out of prison. I look in the restaurant window and I can see him sitting at the table reserved for big shots; he’s hawk-nosed, almost bald, has a big cigar in his mouth. Sabella and a few others are seated with him.
“What’s the big deal?” I say. “What’s gonna happen to him?”
“Things are going on,” he says. “There’s a lot of things you don’t know, Donnie. Things I can’t talk about.”
“Well, why can’t we go inside and make sure nothing happens to him in there, where at least we could sit down?”
“Donnie, Donnie, listen to me. You don’t understand nothing sometimes. In the first place, Lilo don’t sit down with anybody except captains or above—bosses. He don’t sit down with soldiers or below, like me and you. He doesn’t have anybody around him except people he wants. You can’t even talk to this guy. You got to go through somebody higher, somebody that can talk to him. He don’t want nobody in the restaurant except those people in there, and that’s it. ”
“Okay, if you say so.”
“You don’t know how mean this guy is, Donnie,” Lefty goes on quietly. “Lilo is a mean son of a bitch, a tyrant. That’s just me telling you, it don’t go no further. Lot of people hate him. They feel he’s only out for himself. He’s the only one making any money. There’s only a few people that he’s close to. And mainly that’s the zips, like Caesar and those that you see around Toyland. Those guys are always with him. He brought them over from Sicily, and he uses them for different pieces of work and for dealing all that junk. They’re as mean as he is. You can’t trust those bastard zips. Nobody can. Except the Old Man. He can trust them because he brought them over here and he can control them. Everybody else has to steer clear of him. Theresalot of people out there who would like to see him get whacked. That’s why we’re here.”
This happened a few times, Lefty and I going down to CaSa Bella to stand guard outside while Carmine Galante held meetings inside. Lefty was nervous, out there on the sidewalk. He and the other guards, except me, were carrying guns in their waistbands under their shirts. He watched people and cars going by. He watched windows across the street.
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