Donnie Brasco (33 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
Sonny Black summoned the top members of his crew to plan strategy regarding the stunning news about “Donnie Brasco.” From left: Boobie Cerasani, Nicky Santora, Lefty Ruggiero, Sonny Black.
Lefty Ruggiero, Agent Pistone’s Mafia “partner” for five years, stands in the doorway of the Motion Lounge as the “Donnie Brasco” revelation sinks in.
There was no way I could be away from home now for five solid months.
By not turning it down immediately, I thought maybe I could milk a little more information out of them.
After Lefty and Frank talked for a few minutes they came over. Frank said, “Okay, you get together with Steve next Tuesday. He’ll give you the whole rundown.”
We left the Peppercorn at about two A.M.
Lefty explained what he and Frank had talked about. “Frank says to me, ‘You know, if Donnie takes this, you gotta be responsible for him. You know the consequences.’ I says I definitely do. He says, ‘Once I put it on record, if this guy fucks up, you’re in trouble, not him. They don’t look for him. They look for you.’ So I says, ‘You don’t have to look far. I take the full responsibility.’ I told him you’re my blood, Donnie, nobody had to worry about you.”
Frank still had to call New York to get permission from our captain, Mike Sabella, to use me, and to go on record that Lefty was taking full responsibility if anything went wrong-such as if I was a snitch, or if I absconded with money from the book.
“I shook hands with him,” Lefty says, “but that don’t count. He’s still gonna put it on record in New York. ‘Go ahead and make your phone call,’ I says.
‘I’d stake my life on the man.’ Tony, the responsibility I gave Donnie just now ... if he fucks up, I’m a dead man. New York City, they only call bosses to bosses. This boss here, he calls New York, he talks to a boss. If I get sent for, I don’t know what I’m getting sent for. They just say to come in. And I’d be getting killed for something I didn’t even know. I’ll tell you one thing. You two guys, you couldn’t have any opportunity like this nowhere. You got the world at your feet. They’re all afraid of him over here. They’re all fucking Hoosiers.“
After Lefty went to bed I got hold of Conte right away. I said, “Tony, I just can’t do this.” He understood and said, “Donnie, you do what you’ve got to do. Don’t worry about it.”
I called the case agent, Mike Potkonjak, and told him. He got in touch with Ralph Hill, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge in Milwaukee. Hill wanted to meet and talk it over.
This all had to be handled immediately. I was going to have to tell Lefty the next morning, before Balistrieri called New York, or my credibility would be shot. I couldn’t meet with DiSalvo, get all the inside details, and then turn it down—I would look very much like a cop or a snitch.
Before dawn, Conte and I met with Hill and Potkonjak in a room at another hotel outside of town.
“I’d really like for you to go through with it,” Hill says, after we’d kicked it around. “You know what you’re throwing away.”
“There comes a point where I’ve got to start thinking about my family.”
Hill says, “What would it take for you to change your mind?”
They couldn’t make my job easier or safer. Half facetiously I say, “More money.”
He thought he could get me a raise. He called Headquarters in Washington. He explained the situation and asked that I be raised one grade, to supervisor, which would mean a couple thousand dollars more in salary.
Headquarters said no. They couldn’t advance me to supervisor because I wasn’t doing supervisory work, which meant either working in a Headquarters office in Washington or having a squad of men under you in the field. Hill pleaded that they not stick to technicalities, but they held firm.
That took me off the hook. I wasn’t going to take the job, anyway. But if Headquarters didn’t care enough to bend the rules for this opportunity when I was putting my ass on the line every day, at least I didn’t have to feel guilty.
Now I had to come up with a reason that Lefty would buy. Lefty would have to come up with yet another one to give Balistrieri.
Balistrieri wouldn’t be too upset because he had just that night made the offer and hadn’t yet contacted New York, and I hadn’t gotten involved in details. Lefty could just tell him that something came up with family business—the kind of dodge these guys use all the time because you can’t question that.
One thing that I had in my favor, seen through any mob guy’s eyes, was that no cop would ever turn that job down. So I would be above suspicion in that regard. Lefty would go cuckoo no matter what I said, but I could think of only one reason he would believe: simply that I would not stay cooped up in Milwaukee for twenty straight weeks, especially when it included the damn cold winter. He would scream, but he would believe it. He wouldn’t tell Sabella anything because it would be embarrassing. I had been his partner for more than a year, I had never embarrassed him, we still had prospects in Milwaukee, he would get over it.
Lefty came down to the coffee shop for breakfast, still bubbling over about how much money we were going to make.
I told him I had thought it over and changed my mind, and why.
He went bananas. “You wanna be a fucking playboy and lay around in California all the time! You worry too much about your girlfriend! You worry about getting pinched! Everything’s a joke to you! We’re blowing two hundred fucking grand!”
He was yelling in front of everybody in the coffee shop. When he calmed down, he said to Conte, “Tony, you get in touch with Frank. Go down there today and tell him that Donnie can’t take the gambling job because Mike just called this morning and he wants him free to be back and forth to New York for another job.”
He wouldn’t look at me. “Go to California and don’t bother me. I’m too mad to talk to you now. Go fuck with the broads on the beach and call me in a couple days when I cool down. Tony, take me to the airport.”
Lefty had been pushing Conte to rent him a car through Best Vending and have the business pay for it. It was a typical wiseguy way of thinking: Muscle into any business that you can, get a weekly cut, and squeeze out any extra perks you can.
Conte had been stalling. Now we reconsidered. Lefty had been good for the investigation. By cultivating him and keeping him happy, we had shortcut a lot of effort. He got us a sitdown with Balistrieri, got us the partnership. If he hadn’t come out to Milwaukee, Conte would be dead.
So we figured, what the hell, let’s rent him a car and let him keep it for a couple of months. Conte rented him a maroon Thunderbird and drove it to New York and presented it to him.
Mike Sabella wanted to talk to me. Lefty hadn’t told Mike that I had turned down the gambling job. “Don’t say nothing to upset him,” Lefty says. “He got enough in his mind. Work on his restaurant is gonna cost him six hundred grand now. Yesterday he smacked the contractor and almost killed him. And with the feast, there’s a new guy down there from the precinct, and he ain’t gonna allow no wheels down there, and Mike is blowing his top because of that.”
“Wheels” were roulette wheels, a major source of profit at the Feast of San Gennaro.
We went to CaSa Bella. Mike told me, “Don’t advertise what we got going in Milwaukee, because we don’t want everybody in New York to know about it. Permission came from Lilo and Nicky, and we want to keep it between bosses. Frank has Fort Lauderdale sewed up. We’d like to get into that action, through Frank. We don’t want any other crews fucking up our deal.”
He wanted to keep all the information among just Lefty, himself as our captain, boss Carmine Galante, and underboss Nicky Marangello.
Then suddenly everything changed. The Balistrieris started avoiding Conte. They weren’t giving him leads on routes to buy. They weren’t returning his calls. There was no explanation. Conte and I went to see John Balistrieri, Frank’s son and lawyer, to try to dope out what the hang-up was.
We met with John at his office. Conte did the talking because this involved his business. He didn’t bring up the problem directly, just tried to sense the situation. He reiterated Lefty’s invitations to all of them to come to the Feast of San Gennaro and be wined and dined by the New York crew. John was courteous. He said his father was tied up with some kind of grand jury matter lately, but he was sure his father wanted to come if he could get free, and they’d get back to us.
John seemed friendly, but he didn’t say what we wanted to hear, which was why they had retreated from business dealings with Conte. And they didn’t get back to us.
Lefty’s reaction was, “Maybe Frank’s just got his balls twisted over that grand jury. They were gonna bury him. Then twenty-three guys went in there and took the Fifth. Maybe that’s what’s been taking his mind up. But listen, you should’ve never gave up that goddamn bookmaking thing with him. And that would’ve only been a start, for chrissake. Then he starts sending you around to Vegas and Florida and Kansas collecting money. You messed the whole thing up. You should’ve listened to me. We would’ve been on easy street.”
The situation with Balistrieri didn’t improve. Nobody would return Lefty’s calls now, either. And finally Mike got involved, putting out inquiries through channels. Nothing. Even his calls were not returned.
Two weeks later, in early September, Conte got a letter from Balistrieri’s lawyer-sons dissolving the partnership with Conte.
Lefty called me back to New York. We met at Lynn‘s, a restaurant on East Seventy-first Street.
“It don’t make no sense to me,” Lefty says. “Maybe they think he’s a shady character. Maybe they’re afraid to put money in his hand because he’s a swindler. They won’t even pick up a phone for nobody over there, understand? This is an introduction through you. What is the story on this gentleman? I can’t explain this situation to anybody. You gotta tell me what the story is.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Left. I knew the guy ten years ago, he was okay.”
“Maybe he’s a ladies’ man. Listen, Donnie, last time he was in New York, he brought that car in, I took him to a joint, he bought drinks for three ladies in there. I lectured him about that. Now I hear that he made a play for one of Frank’s girlfriends out there, in one of his joints. Is that true, Donnie?”
“How the hell do I know, Left? I ain’t with him night and day. I never saw him do anything.”
“You know the way Mike feels about somebody that insults a wiseguy’s wife or girlfriend: That’s worse than being a rat or a pimp. Mike and I are embarrassed now because we introduced him to Frank. I’m in jeopardy over here. And you brought him in. You got to do something about this, Donnie.”
“What you want me to do?”
“You say you knew him in Baltimore. Go to Baltimore and check him out. Find people who knew him. Maybe he’s a snitch. We don’t know who the hell he is. If you check him out okay, maybe we can still salvage the situation out there.”
So I went to Baltimore. Of course, I didn’t do anything. I hung out for a few days, then went back to New York.
I told Lefty I had found a few guys who knew Conte in the old days, that he’d never done anything wrong as far as they knew, that he wasn’t a “wire”-which is a snitch or informant—he never got out of line with the ladies, didn’t insult people.
“All right,” Lefty says, “now we gotta get this guy in here and talk to him. Go out to Milwaukee. Bring him in.”
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