Donnie Brasco (23 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
I wasn’t comfortable, either. Here I was, an FBI agent, worried about getting whacked on this sidewalk on Mulberry Street because I was trusted enough by these mobsters to be standing guard over the feared boss of the Bonanno family.
Every few days I would call in to my contact agent. There was a special telephone line installed in the New York office for my calls only, and it would be answered by my contact agent. I would give him a rundown on what had been going on and what was coming up. Sometimes, for other operations, he would ask me to find out what’s going on at this or that club, who’s showing up or what’s being discussed. If I needed anything checked out—like a name or what a guy was into—he would take care of that for me. Any information I gave him that was noteworthy and that might be useful as evidence would be typed up as what we call “302s.” Once in a while the contact agent would bring along a handful of these reports for me to initial.
Once or twice a month, depending upon my circumstances, I met with a contact agent to get an envelope of cash for me to live and operate on. We would meet only briefly, usually just a couple of minutes. Often we met at museums—like the Guggenheim or the Metropolitan on Fifth Avenue. We would just be browsing, looking at the exhibits, he’d slip me the money. Sometimes we met on a bench in Central Park. Sometimes at a coffee shop.
We were approaching the end of 1977, and I had been undercover now for more than a year. The Bureau was about to close down the “Sun” part of Sun Apple in Florida, just settle for what Joe Fitz had been able to get so far without risking him down there any longer for minimal gains.
Once in a while my supervisor asked me how I felt, if I wanted to go a little longer. I felt fine. I wanted to keep right on going.
There were a couple of new considerations. I now had a good foothold with Lefty and the Bonannos. I was in pretty solid. The Bureau had started other undercover operations around the country. We could use my new mob credentials to establish credibility of other undercover agents in some of these other operations. I could be brought around to vouch for these other agents—attest that they were “good” badguys. Badguy targets of these other operations could check me out: I’m a friend of Lefty’s in New York.
It would be easier for me to do this if I wasn’t based in New York City, under Lefty’s thumb and eye on a day-to-day basis. If I moved someplace else while remaining Lefty’s partner, I could more easily slip around to these other undercover operations without having to ask permission to go out of town and without having Lefty knowing of my every move and questioning me about it. Also, conceivably I could bring Lefty out to these other operations, introduce him, hope that he might horn in, establish a link with the Bonannos that would form a conspiracy under the law.
I could still regularly come back to New York for two or three weeks at a time, continue to develop my association with Lefty, and maintain the partnership.
The other consideration was my family. Earlier I hadn’t been too concerned about protection of my family. I would get home to our house in New Jersey maybe one night every ten days or two weeks. I was always careful and covered my tracks. But by the fall of 1977, I was beginning to think that if I continued to get deeper into the mob, eventually my family was going to have to move away. There was always the chance of momentary carelessness that could be disastrous. I knew I was under surveillance by cops because I was being followed. Three or four times I was stopped and searched—for no apparent reason. Suppose I didn’t shake them off my tail sometime and they followed me right to my house? Or what if Lefty or some other wiseguy decided to follow me?
It was time to get my family out of there. That would eliminate that problem. And if I was going to be transferred out to another area, we might as well combine the two.
Through December and into January, I discussed this with my supervisor. He took the matter to headquarters. It was a pretty simple proposition. We decided to make the moves on February 1.
My family was used to moving. We had already moved four times for my job. But now my daughters were at an age where attachments to friends and boyfriends were more important. We had close relatives in New Jersey. When we moved back there for my earlier transfer to the New York office, we had supposed we would be staying. Nobody wanted to move again. My wife understood that it was necessary, without knowing the details. We didn’t have big discussions about it, because I didn’t present it as a choice. I was being transferred. They still didn’t know how deeply involved I was with the Mafia. They didn’t know the move had to do with their safety.
The FBI then had fifty-two offices throughout the country. They gave us the choice of five areas in which to relocate. As far as my work was concerned, where we lived didn’t matter because I would still be assigned to the New York case, and otherwise I would be roaming to different parts of the country. My wife and I picked an area.
I managed to get home late Christmas Eve and spend most of Christmas Day at home. In January, my wife and I took a trip to find a new house. We found one right away—smaller than our house in Jersey but in a pleasant neighborhood. The next week we put our New Jersey house up for sale. I had a friend who was a mover. I told him we needed to move and that he shouldn’t talk about it.
There were lots of family tears shed over the move. Nobody wanted to stand in the way of the work I was doing, but neither did anybody really know what I was doing. Had my family known more, they might have been more tolerant of my situation. But if that would have decreased the weight on me, it would have been at the cost of more fear to them.
For me and my colleagues in the Bureau, there had been no expectation that this job would go on so long. Now there was no guess at how long it would continue. What started with the idea of getting to fences had become penetrating the Mafia in Little Italy and now had evolved to me representing the mob in other places. It could have been mind-boggling except for the fact that we didn’t know where we were headed, and so we had no good perspective on where we were. The only certainty was that to continue at all I had to continue full-out. Donnie Brasco had the momentum.
The FBI had a couple of situations in San Diego and Los Angeles that they wanted me to look into. I told Lefty I had decided to go back to California—where I had supposedly spent a lot of my earlier jewel-thief life—for a while. “You know, Left,” I said, “I’m not making all that much money here right now. Why don’t I go out there and start making some good scores, you know, and come back and forth? You could even come out there, hang out for a couple weeks, see if we couldn’t get something going.”
He thought that was a good idea. So I took off for California.
In L.A., we had an agent going by the undercover name of Larry Keaton. Larry was a longtime friend of mine. He was trying to get in tight with some thieves who were engaged in all kinds of property crimes: thefts of stocks and bonds, checks, cars—the whole spectrum. These badguys were not necessarily Mafia, but some of them were ex-New Yorkers, and naturally they were respectful of wiseguys and connected guys.
They liked to hang out at a particular restaurant, and Larry would mix with them, trying to get in deeper. It happened that a bartender from a New York restaurant came out on vacation, and he hung out at this L.A. restaurant and was friendly with some of these badguys. Larry didn’t know anything about this bartender. He thought maybe he was a badguy too. Since the bartender was from New York, Larry thought it was just possible I might know him.
It so happened that I did. It was a coincidence that on occasion Lefty and I went to La Maganette, a restaurant on Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street—not a Bonanno hangout, just a place where he and I and a couple other guys would go have a couple drinks and eat. We got to know this bartender, Johnny. Johnny wasn’t himself a badguy, wasn’t into anything, but like a lot bartenders, he knew who was who. He knew who Lefty was, and that as Lefty’s partner I was a connected guy. So this was a chance for me to give Larry some credibility with these badguys.
I went to this L.A. restaurant where Larry was hanging out and saw Johnny there. “Hey, Johnny,” I said, “how you doing?”
“Donnie, how you been? What’re you doing out here?”
“Hanging out, looking around.” Larry was in the group, so obviously he had already met Johnny. “I see you know Larry here. Larry’s a friend of mine. We may be working on a deal together.”
We chatted a little while, and the job was done. I knew that Johnny would tell the badguys there that I was a connected guy back in New York, and that Larry was a friend of mine, so he was all right.
On and off I would hook up with Larry like that to help him gain credibility. Sometimes we’d go to the track with some badguys, things like that. I was just somebody to introduce. I never worked on his cases. He took it from there. He started making a bunch of cases. It was the type of operation where the government was continually arresting people as Larry brought in the evidence. Eventually he had to testify in court several times and got a load of convictions.
In the middle of this, Larry had occasion to come to New York to pursue yet another case of stolen stocks. I was also back in New York at that time, on one of my regular trips. Larry called Johnny the bartender to tell him he would be coming in. They set up a meet at P. J. Clarke‘s, on Third Avenue because that’s where Johnny liked to hang out in the afternoon.
So I hooked up with Larry and we went down to P. J. Clarke’s together. Johnny had a table in the back of the room with a bunch of people. We joined them.
Johnny introduced us around, and we were sitting there an hour or so.
Now, Larry is black. That means that in some badguy situations he was conspicuous. But he was smooth enough to make it work.
I see a guy headed for our table. Suddenly Larry whispers to me, “Let’s get outa here. Back door, quick.” He stands up and says to Johnny, “I just forgot, we got an appointment.”
I hustle Larry out the side door.
“Pretty close,” Larry says. “Did you see that guy coming toward our table, the guy in the suit? He was a defense attorney from L.A. He’s seen me testify in court.”
“I got us covered from this end,” I say, “with Lefty, just in case.”
“Good,” he says. “And I’m outa here tomorrow, anyway. ”
This kind of situation—a chance discovery or somebody reporting back on you—can happen at any minute of any day. You can’t wait for it to happen and then think of a way to protect yourself. You have to lay groundwork to cover yourself ahead of time—all the time. I knew Lefty would get a call on this.
From the time I began in California, I stayed in virtual daily touch with Lefty. He didn’t know how to reach me directly. I said I was always moving around. While Lefty was schooling me, I was also schooling him about me. I wanted him to get used to the fact that I was unpredictable. I would be vague about what I was doing, where I was. When I needed to cover myself, he would already be used to my style.
I had a couple of “hello” phones where he could leave messages, and I called him. In this case, after meeting Larry and Johnny out there, I had called Lefty and told him about running into Johnny in California. “Guess who I bumped into in L.A.,” I had told him. “Johnny. He was out there on vacation, seeing a bunch of guys. He was with this one guy named Larry who was into some kind of stocks-and-bonds deal. In fact, I think I’m going to look into that. I think we can make some money there.”
That’s what I had told Lefty. Because even without this surprise at P. J. Clarke‘s, I knew that sometime when I was with Lefty at La Maganette, the bartender Johnny was going to say something like, “How’s that guy Larry in L.A.?” And then Lefty was going to say, “Who’s Larry?”
So this way I had already introduced the name to Lefty. I had also suggested that Larry was hanging around with Johnny rather than with me—just enough of an offhand twist to protect Larry and me.
Sure enough, the next day Lefty grabbed me at the club.
“Hey, Donnie, that guy you were with in L.A., what’s the story on him?”
“Larry? That’s the guy I told you about that I met through Johnny the bartender. The wheeler-dealer I told you I was trying to do a stocks-and-bonds deal with. What are you upset about?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m upset about. I got a call from Johnny. I wanna know the whole story, what you were doing with that guy at P. J. Clarke’s.”
“Hey, Left, all I know is, I meet this guy Larry in L.A. He tells me he’s got some stolen stock deals going. He’s coming to New York, and we plan to hook up. So we’re at P. J.‘s, and he’s got this three o’clock appointment at the Sheraton, for us to meet this guy on the stock deal. So we leave P. J.’s and go to the Sheraton. The guy doesn’t show. So I say, ‘Well, too bad.’ And I leave. That’s it. What’s the matter?”
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter, you jerk-off. That guy’s a fucking federal agent! Johnny said a guy came in while you were there, some lawyer, and he seen you guys leaving the table, and he says to Johnny, ‘I seen that guy testifying in court, he’s a fucking agent.’ That’s what he told Johnny. Johnny tells me you’re hanging around with a fucking federal agent!”
“Hey, Left, that’s hard to believe. But, anyway, I don’t care what he is, he doesn’t know anything about me. I didn’t tell him anything about us or anything else. All he knows is I might be interested in a deal. He doesn’t even know where to find me. Nothing to worry about, Left.”
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