Donnie Brasco (47 page)

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Authors: Joseph D. Pistone

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime

BOOK: Donnie Brasco
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Sonny wanted me to come up to New York and bring $2,500 from our bookmaking “profits.” He said they got hit bad on their football book for three weeks in a row, and he needed the money to put back on the street.
“Remember when you came in the last time you came by John’s house?” he says. “Is that issue still available, the problem that you brought over?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the guy.”
“Well, see him.”
“All right. What about if I can’t get that stuff?”
“You don’t have to get it, just so long as it’s open, it’s still there. I’m interested in that one issue.”
Lefty called shortly afterward.
“Let me get a pencil and get these figures,” he says, “because I gotta go see the guy. What we win yesterday?”
“Yesterday, eleven-sixty.”
“And the other day?”
“The Thursday game? The Dallas game?”
“Yeah.”
“We won twenty-four-eighty.”
“So you’re still up by fifteen hundred for the week.”
“Yeah. Now don’t forget, tell him I’m gonna take a thousand out for that guy’s salary. I wanna give him some money.”
“I don’t know if he’s gonna accept that.”
“Well, I’ll hold off, and then when I see Sonny Wednesday I’ll explain it to him myself.”
Lefty was moaning and groaning. “I don’t feel good. Maybe flu. The doctor gave me a shot, ordered me home for a week. I made reservations for a chest X-ray. I ain’t got no money. Nobody will even take my bets. Listen, Donnie. When you come up here with that for him, you gotta bring me a hundred and five bucks for that rental car, you know? Because that hundred and five I give to my wife. She’s gotta pay the American Express card. I told him about it.”
 
I delivered the $2,500 to Sonny and told him that the marijuana was still available. He told me that John, the guy whose apartment I stayed at the time I delivered the sample, owed loan sharks more than $200,000. “And since he’s with me,” Sonny says, “I had to vouch for him. He owes sixty grand of that to Carmine. I made him put up a hundred and fifty grand in jewelry to Carmine. I tell you, if I don’t stick behind him, one of the guys is gonna fucking kill him. He runs up all these debts, and then he lies to everybody about them.”
Sonny had bought a hundred pounds of marijuana from a Cuban in Miami and made a deal with some people out on Long Island to sell it. He needed another hundred pounds as soon as possible. He had made a cocaine connection in Miami, and a sample tested out at eighty-one percent pure. He was buying it at $47,000 a kilo. He wanted us to push our heroin connections.
 
 
In the office at King’s Court, Pete and Tom Solmo, father and son, were trying to push their drug business to Rossi. Two cocky, bearded guys. Rossi sat behind the desk. Tom, the son, draped in gold necklaces and bracelets sat in an armchair in front of the desk. Pete stood with his arms folded, or paced and kept refilling their glasses with wine and Scotch.
“What we really need,” Rossi says, “is heroin.”
“Horse is tough,” Tom says. “How much marijuana do you need?”
“If you give me a sample, I’ve got people coming from New York on Wednesday and they’ll let me know.”
Pete explained how a marijuana transfer would work. “He comes down, checks into a motel. North Miami, Hollywood, Lauderdale’s fine. He gives me a call. We go to him. He’s got the bread, right? You give me the keys to your vehicle, I give them to my man. He goes, gets it loaded, brings it back. He comes up to the room and gives you the keys. And that’s it. Every bale will be numbered and have the weight right on it. Use us once, you’ll see.”
“My dad finances everything,” Tom says. “I go and work it all out. I know what stuff is good and what stuff is bad. I been down to Colombia many times.”
“He does all the dirty work,” his dad says. “He’s captained boats. He’s been a runner, bringing it in small ways, bringing it in by the ton.”
Rossi says, “The last I brought up to New York, he said, ‘What the fuck you bringing me all these seeds for?’ ”
“We got stuff got no seeds,” Tom says.
“You guys got a strong supply, huh?”
“Fantastic,” Tom says. “We’ll get you five thousand pounds every week. That’s no problem.”
Rossi says, “I gotta be totally up-front here. Up in New York he might say, ‘We’re totally overloaded here, let it go for a week, a month.’ I have no way of knowing. What I’m trying to say, I guess, is I can’t tell you how fast all this will be put together. You understand that I’m only like the fucking go-between.”
“On this other shit,” Tom says, casually taking a small plastic bag of white powder out of his jacket pocket, “it’s good stuff. You don’t know what you’re looking at.” He put the bag back in his pocket. “I don’t think you know that much about the product.”
“No, I don‘t,” Rossi says. “You don’t have to tell me that.”
“You don’t use it, you don’t know it,” Tom says.
“What’s the price on that?” Rossi asks.
“Right there?” Tom pulls out the sample again and lays it on the desk. “This is two-twenty-five.”
“What percentage is that?”
“I’d give it an eighty.”
“We’ve had a ninety-two,” Rossi says.
“How was it tested?”
“How the fuck do I know? All I’m telling you is that the guy gave it to another guy, had it tested, comes back and says, ‘Tony, it’s ninety-two percent.’ I said,
‘Is that good?’ He said, ‘That’s terrific.’ “
“You give me five minutes with your buyer, he’ll buy our shit, because I do have the best stuff in town.”
“You don’t need to have no time with my buyer,” Rossi says. “I just hand it to him. Your problem is when we tell you what we want and you get it, and then we come to you and it might not be the right thing.”
“If he likes
that
,” Tom says, waving the sample, “
that
will tell you what he’s gonna get.”
“What about ‘ludes?”
“It depends. If you want five hundred thousand, I got ‘ludes.”
“What they call those, ‘lemons’?”
“It depends. They’re all homemade now. Usually your lemon has Valium in it. You want quantity like that, we’re talking about thirty-five cents apiece. I can give your man anything he wants. Only positive request involved in this is C.O.D. I’m talking about for a start. Once it’s established, I don’t give a shit.”
“What I don’t want,” Rossi says, “is jacking around.”
I come into the office along with Eddie Shannon. Rossi says, “Donnie’s my partner from New York. Eddie’s the action guy around here. You meet Donnie before?”
“No,” say both Pete and Tom.
“Down at Joe Pete’s one night,” I say. “You guys were both drunk.”
They squirm around, embarrassed.
“They brought us a sample, Donnie,” Rossi says. “They said they could supply us with whatever we needed—everything with the exception of the horse, which is what we’re looking for.”
“No,” Tom says, “don’t say without it. We got it. But it’s ... we gotta find out ...”
“Fucking coke is nothing up there,” I say. “Forget about it. You can’t give coke away up there. Everybody is using the horse up there. When you gonna know about the H?”
“I don’t think I want to,” Tom says. “Down there, there’s too many deaths. I been in battles down there. It’s ridiculous. It’s a pain in the ass. Now, if you want, I can take you down there and let
you
jump on the bandwagon.”
“If we got an introduction,” I say, “we can make it worth your while to introduce one of our guys in New York to somebody down there.”
“Have to find that out,” Tom says.
“I’d have to think about that real hard,” says his dad.
“What about prices on the coke? Where’s it from?”
Tom takes out the sample again. “Fifty-five, sixty. Either Colombia or here.”
“Fifty-five grand?” Rossi says.
“To sixty,” Pete says.
“What we give you, the sample,” Tom says, putting the sample on the desk for Rossi, “that’s what you’re gonna get.”
“Sounds good to me,” I say.
They left the sample with us. The next day the cocaine sample was tested at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office lab. It was less than fifteen percent pure.
The day after that, we got the father and son back in the office. Jo-Jo knew these guys, so we had him in there with us. He was pretty uncomfortable.
I say, “I don’t know if you think you’re fucking with some jerk-offs or what. But that sample of coke ain’t even fucking fifteen percent. It’s bullshit. It’s been stepped on nineteen fucking times.”
Pete and Tom start stammering. “Y-you think we’d pull a shot like that, Don? You think we’d do that?”
“You told us it was eighty percent,” Rossi says.
“Just overnight the thought came to me,” Tom says. “It was something I grabbed that night. That’s why I kept it in my pocket. No way I’m gonna do that intentionally. What I’d love to do—really, I’d
love
to do this, because if what you’re saying is true ...”
“It’s not
if
what we’re saying is true,” Rossi says, “it
is
true. Why would we tell you different? We’re hoping it’s
ninety
percent.”
“Then somebody’s gonna fall,” Tom says. “This guy’s never done that. I been with the guy five years, and this is the first time, believe me. I’m serious.”
“It’s not a question of the money,” Rossi says. “It’s a question of the honorability.”
“Goddamn, man.” Tom shakes his head while his father paces around, shaking his head too.
“Whoever gave it to you is putting you in a fucking box,” Rossi says.
“Donnie, don’t get us wrong,” Pete says, “that we think you’re jacking us off or something like that.”
They are getting real edgy. Pete says, “What we wanna do is drop it. Just give the sample back.”
I get up and walk over to Pete. Jo-Jo is squirming in a chair right behind me.
“Just forget it,” Pete says. “I’ll buy you a drink. Now.” He jabs his finger at Rossi. “Now!”
“What’s ‘now’?” Rossi says.
“Give it back!” He throws up his hands. “All right, don’t give us the sample. Done. I’m really getting pissed off.”
“You can get pissed off all you want,” I say. “But don’t get the fucking attitude, pal, that we’re trying to fuck you with a bullshit sample. Understand what I’m saying?”
I hear Jo-Jo’s small voice behind me: “Donnie ... Donnie ...” He’s trying to tug my sleeve. He’s afraid somebody is going to get killed. I put my finger on Pete’s chest. “How can we be fucking you when we got the sample from you? Because if I take the sample from you and I want to move it, I want good stuff, right?”
Pete backs off fast. “You ain’t got good stuff there.”
“That’s what my man says.”
“Well, no deal, no money, no nothing. Hey, we’re friends.”
“That’s right. Because he’s with
me.
He’s not with anybody else.”
“Of course, he’s with you all the way. Your word is your man’s word.”
“So don’t come into this fucking joint saying that we’re trying to fuck you guys.”
“Can I come in the joint and have a drink?”
Tom is still shaking his head. “In my heart, I can tell you, this is the first time.”
“Hey, this business isn’t fucking in your heart,” I say. “This business is in your pocket. In your head. Not what’s in your heart.”
“What I mean by heart is my head. First of all, ain’t nobody gonna charge you for no sample.”
Rossi laughs. “Charge us for a sample? We get fucking samples of that shit every day.”
At that I walk out. Tom and Pete whine behind me, “Donnie! Donnie! Come back, Donnie!”
 
We planned our second Las Vegas Night for December 13. Trafficante was going to supply a crew to run the games. When the time came, his people weren’t available, so we postponed the gambling event to January.
Rossi and I went to New York to spend the few days before Christmas with Sonny and the crew. On December 17, he had the big Christmas party at the Motion Lounge. Each captain gives a Christmas party for his crew. Charley the bartender did all the cooking—pasta and sausage and peppers and meatballs. All the guys that belonged to Sonny’s crew came. We just ate and drank and told war stories and had a good time. Rossi and I each gave Sonny $200 as our presents.
Sonny was anxious to get back to Florida to meet with “the Old Man down there to really firm things up.” He said Carmine was going to put up money for an addition on the back of King’s Court, a dance floor and a swimming pool. The main thing now, he said, was to get the Las Vegas Night set up. “Now we’re going to start making money.”

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