Donnie Brasco (37 page)
Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
“Forget about it,” Lefty says. “The guy was a mutt, that’s all. Donnie straightened him out.”
Chuck, the undercover agent who had the record business and put on concerts back in the beginning of my operation, was working on an operation in Miami on banks that were laundering drug money for Colombian and Cuban customers. The FBI code name was Bancoshares. The mob is always looking for ways to launder money. Chuck thought maybe I could lure the Bonannos in.
I told Lefty about it and suggested that maybe we could steer some customers down there and get a cut. He decided we should go down and meet with the brains behind the scheme. Chuck couldn’t meet with Lefty because he had met him years before when he was a “straight-up” agent-not undercover-in New York City. We brought in Nicholas J. Lore, an agent who had been working in California and has since retired from the F.B.I. to live there. He would pose as a big-shot free-lancer who was the brains behind everything—the guy who put the deals together with all the banks.
I told Lefty that coincidentally, Nick was the guy who owned the boat we went out on, the brother of the woman I knew. It was no more than putting a flesh-and-blood person into the story, instead of just a name, to add reality.
We came down for the meeting with Nick. Lefty was impressed with Nick’s access to big money. Nick wined and dined us at a joint on Key Biscayne. He introduced Lefty to “Tony Fernandez,” an agent who was supposedly his middleman in dealing with the banks. Tony was working with the president of a Miami bank—a Cuban who was deeply involved in laundering drug money through his bank.
Lefty wanted to get a piece of the banker’s action on money laundering by bringing in contacts from New York. He also wanted to get going on some cocaine smuggling. At that time you could buy a key— kilogram—of coke in Colombia for $5,000 to $6,000 and sell it in New York for maybe $45,000. But his attitude on drugs was: To hell with middlemen and cutting profits up with anybody, let’s do it ourselves and keep it to ourselves. Donnie himself can go to Colombia and get the loads. “I don’t need nobody in New York City,” Lefty says. “Donnie comes in with it, nobody knows his business.” Not splitting with the family could get you rich, killed, or both. But since we were dealing with people who weren’t wiseguys-not even Americans—Lefty figured it was worth a shot.
Fernandez put the proposition to this Cuban banker that he do business with Lefty and me, wiseguys from New York. The banker readily agreed and set up a meeting for us at his bank to work out details.
Lefty and I went with Fernandez to this banker’s office. The banker preferred to speak Spanish, so Fernandez was the translator. We sat down and began asking about details of prices and so forth, how the operation would proceed. Suddenly the banker became evasive. He didn’t know anything about the drug business. He didn’t know anything about money laundering. Clearly there would be no deal, and Lefty and I quickly lost patience with this guy’s tap dancing—I wanted the banker busted, Lefty wanted big cocaine bucks.
We left. We couldn’t figure out what spooked this guy. Maybe Lefty, who can be a very intimidating wiseguy, had made him nervous.
It wasn’t Lefty. It was me. Later Fernandez went back to ask him what went wrong. The banker said, “I look in those eyes of Donnie and they’re killer eyes. If something goes wrong in Colombia or anywhere, he’ll come back and kill me. I don’t want to have anything to do with that Donnie.”
Lefty laughed. “I’m the fucking mob killer, and he’s afraid of you.”
But it wasn’t funny to him that we had blown a drug connection in Colombia. Lefty told Nick, “Somebody should sit this banker down and explain to him how you can’t make promises and then back out on it and waste our time. That’s not the way Italians do things.”
An agent going by the name of Tony Rossi was in Florida trying to infiltrate the gambling business that might lead to a connection with the Santo Trafficante family. Trafficante, who had been operating out of Tampa for twenty-five years, was the biggest Mafia don in Florida. He ran gambling casinos in Havana until Castro came to power, and achieved a lot of public notoriety when he admitted participating in a CIA plot to assassinate Castro during the Kennedy administration.
Rossi got a job as an enforcer, a strong-arm guy protecting card games. After a few weeks of this Rossi and the supervisor, Tony Daniels, decided that this wasn’t moving fast enough.
Tony Conte joined Rossi, adding his experience from the Project Timber operation in Milwaukee. They came up with the idea of opening a nightclub. The operation using the nightclub as a way to get to Trafficante was code-named Project Coldwater.
Four case agents worked as contacts for the undercover agents: Jim Kinne, Jackie Case, Bill Garner, and Mike Lunsford. In the fall of 1979, they rented a club in Holiday, in Pasco County, forty miles northwest of Tampa, on busy U.S. Route 19. It was an octagonal building on five acres that had been a tennis club, with six tennis courts. They named it King’s Court.
Rossi was established as “owner.” So that King’s Court didn’t have to deal with the liquor authority, it was a private “bottle club” that you could join for a membership fee of $25. People brought their own bottles and left them in little lockers behind the bar. They paid for setups.
Rossie and Conte hired a manager for the tennis courts, and bartenders, waitresses, a piano player, and a club manager. Nobody knew it was an FBI operation. The club was all redecorated, new bar, new drapes, new oak tables, and padded oak chairs. The front door had a peephole, and signs saying: KING’S COURT PRIVATE LOUNGE; NO BLUE JEANS: MEMBERS AND GUESTS RING BELL TO ENTER.
They started running poker games out of a back room in the club, the house taking five percent. They paid off a member of the Pasco County Sheriffs Department for protection. They managed to entice in some local hoods who pulled small swag deals, drug deals. A couple of the guys that came in had garbage-collection businesses, so they came up with the idea of starting a Cartmen’s Association by which members would control that business in the area and keep newcomers out.
Some half-assed wiseguys began hanging out there—ex-Chicago guys, ex-New York guys. They indicated that they had big connections, maybe leading to Trafficante. But nothing happened.
Conte suggested that maybe I could bring the Bonannos in, like we had done in Milwaukee, and get something going with Trafficante. A liaison with the Florida boss, allowing them to operate in the area, would be just as interesting to the Bonannos as it was to us. We might facilitate a sitdown with Trafficante as we had with Milwaukee. Of course, Conte had to pull out of it. He was leaving, anyway. His past had caught up with him.
All of a sudden, on an October day, word came down from FBI Headquarters that I was to pull out, end the Donnie Brasco role. The Bureau had found out what had spooked Frank Balistrieri in Milwaukee: Balistrieri had learned that Tony Conte was an agent. By mob rules, Balistrieri’s next move should have been to tell the Bonannos in New York. It was just another quick step to them implicating me.
The decision had been made at the top without consulting me. I had to talk them out of it. I was certain that I had laid enough groundwork to continue.
I flew to Chicago to meet with Mike Potkonjak who had been the case agent for Project Timber. I presented my case.
Evidently Balistrieri had not yet passed on his information to New York. We had to assume that eventually he would. Then what would happen?
It was true that there wouldn’t necessarily be any warnings if New York got the word and they decided to ice me. But I didn’t think it would happen. It was true also that I had brought Conte in. But I had been very careful to vouch for him only to a certain extent. If Lefty questioned me, I would say, “Look, like I told you, he and I did some things ten years ago and I had no complaints. So maybe he was an agent ten years ago—so what? I didn’t know about it then, I don’t know anything more now.” Lefty would believe me. Plus, Lefty was in a box. In order to convince Balistrieri of Conte’s reliability, Lefty had told Balistrieri that he himself knew Conte, that Conte was a friend of his. And further, at the Icebreaker Banquet, Balistrieri had introduced Conte as his friend from Baltimore.
Potkonjak was on my side. So was the guy I trusted most in the whole outfit, an old friend, Jules Bonavolonta, coordinator of the Organized Crime Program in New York. But the matter was very intense. We had to work quickly, and all by telephone. We convinced Jimmy Nelson at Headquarters, who was the supervisor on Project Timber and with whom I had worked earlier in New York.
They went to work on the very top levels at Headquarters. Finally everybody came around. I was allowed to continue as Donnie Brasco. But there would remain a lot of concern in Washington. Every once in a while after that, people got nervous for my safety and thought I should come out. To their credit they were convinced, time after time, that I should stay under—that I could survive, that the stuff we were getting was better and better.
I was pretty sure I was right. But from then on this circumstance was always in the back of my mind. Every time I was called in for a meeting with anybody in the family, I wondered whether it might be because Balistrieri had finally passed on his information, and my number had come up.
My wife and daughters flew in to New Jersey to spend the Christmas holidays with relatives.
The day of Christmas Eve is when all the mob guys go around and pay their respects to other wiseguys at all the social clubs. You have a drink with everybody you know. Lefty and I hit all the spots, including CaSa Bella and other restaurants where guys hung out.
Christmas Eve I went to Lefty’s apartment and had dinner with him and Louise. They had a little Christmas tree on the table. Lefty and I exchanged presents-a couple of shirts for him, a couple of shirts for me.
At about eleven o‘clock I went back to Jersey “to see my girl.”
Christmas Day, I went back down to Little Italy to spend the day with Lefty. We cruised around again to the different spots and hung out. At about four P.M., he packed it in for the day, and I went back to Jersey to spend the rest of Christmas with my family.
The day after Christmas, we were all back on the job, hanging out and hustling.
Lefty had finally gotten his son Tommy cleaned up and off drugs. He had sent him to a rehabilitation center in Hawaii. Then he had gotten him a job at the Fulton Fish Market. Tommy was living with a girl and they had a child.
I walk into 116 one afternoon and Lefty is there, steaming. He tells me that Tommy’s girlfriend called him and said that Tommy hasn’t been coming home, hasn’t been giving her money to buy food and necessities for the child. It looked like maybe Tommy was back on junk.
Lefty was seething because Tommy wasn’t taking care of his baby.
“Donnie, he’s supposed to meet me here so I can talk to him. He ain’t showing up. I want you to go find him. I want you to throw him a fucking beating. Then bring him back here.”
I couldn’t beat up his kid, so I stalled for time. “What’s the problem?”
“I just told you the fucking problem.”
“Yeah, but, I mean, is it drugs or the broad or what?”
“Donnie, just find him, do a number, bring him here to me.”
Luckily Tommy walks into the bar and comes over. Lefty lights into him, reads him the riot act about taking care of the child. Tommy tries to explain something, but Lefty won’t hear it. He just wants to ream his son out.
From the fall of 1979 through February of 1980, I gradually cultivated Lefty about King’s Court. I told him a guy I had known from Pittsburgh had come into the Tampa area as a strong-arm, then had opened up a nightclub, and he wasn’t connected with anybody, and he was getting hassled by half-ass wiseguys. There was a possibility that we could move in. Lefty was interested. He wanted me to keep looking it over. Meanwhile Rossi was introducing me to people as his New York connection.
Finally I called Lefty and told him that I was convinced we could make a good score by becoming partners with this guy, and that now was the time to lay claim to the place before anybody else jumped in.
“How much money can we get from this guy, Donnie?” Lefty asks me. “We gotta get at least five grand on my first trip because first I gotta get permission from Sonny to come down, and if he gives me the okay, I gotta give him twenty-five hundred, then out of the other twenty-five hundred I give you your end.”
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