Authors: Joseph D. Pistone

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

Donnie Brasco (51 page)

BOOK: Donnie Brasco

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One of the regular King’s Court members brought in a doctor friend from Tarpon Springs. The doctor talked to Rossi about having friends in the Mafia. Talk got around to drugs. The doctor said he’d done a lot of dealing and had even been busted for drugs. In fact, he had access right now to $1 million worth of heroin—sixteen kilos—in Wichita, Kansas. He had just come back from Wichita. He said it was confiscated heroin in the possession of an ex-FBI agent. He said he could put together a deal for us. If he had known we were interested, he said, he would have brought a sample back with him.

I told Lefty and Sonny about the approach, and they wanted us to push it, get a sample.

The doctor said he would have a sample brought to Florida. A date was set for delivery.

I joined Lefty in Miami. The plan was that Rossi would get the sample from the doctor and bring it to us in Miami where Lefty had a guy on hand to test it for quality. Sonny was standing by in New York with a potential buyer. Lefty and I took a room in the Deauville to wait for Rossi.

I kept calling Rossi to see if the doctor had shown up. Lefty kept calling Sonny to say the doctor hadn’t shown up yet. We didn’t dare leave the hotel room together for fear that we’d miss the call from Rossi, saying he was on his way. It was like waiting for a sitdown. We ordered up room service, or one of us went across the street to get sandwiches at a deli.

Every couple of hours we made our phone calls. Rossi kept saying he hadn’t heard from the doctor. After three days we gave up. I went back to Holiday, Lefty went back to New York.

We pursued the deal for weeks. The doctor said there was one delay after another in getting the sample to Florida.

“I’m embarrassed with this thing,” Lefty says. “Everybody’s disappointed up here. I’d like to shake him down for just the expense money. It hurted me. You gotta put your foot down. Grab him by the throat. I didn’t say smack him around. Just grab him by the throat.”

The three of us sat down to look at the situation—Rossi, Shannon, and me. Together we represented a lot of years of street experience. Rossi got it first. He says, “This guy’s setting us up. Somebody’s trying to do a number on us with this heroin. This guy ain’t got access to any more heroin than the man in the moon. This is a setup by somebody.”

We agreed. Rossi had it right on the nose. This doctor had been busted for drugs before. Somebody had him in a squeeze and was using him to trap us.

It could have been state or federal cops, or the DEA—the Drug Enforcement Administration. It could have been badguys, maybe amateurs who didn’t know how to finish off the deal. We couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. But somebody had this doctor in their clutches, and it looked like he was scared to go through with it.

Rossi decided to carry it out, lean on the doctor to bring us the sample. Nobody would ever see us touch it.

Rossi called the doctor and said he had twenty-four hours to produce the sample. That night the doctor showed up.

He came into the club at nine P.M. He was very nervous. He took Rossi aside and told him he had tossed the sample into the shrubbery just outside the door.

The doctor had a drink at the bar. After a while Shannon ambled outside. It was pitch dark, which was great, because nobody could see anything. He felt around and found the little bag. He brought it into the office.

The next day we had it tested. It was talcum powder. The doctor swore, in a panic, that he didn’t know, he had just accepted the sample. We believed him. Because if we had been legitimate badguys, for sticking us like this we might have killed him. At least we would have given him a bad beating.

Since we were agents, though, we couldn’t really do anything. “Next time you want to play around with somebody,” Rossi told him, “don’t play around with the big boys.”

We never found out who set him up to set us up. We had enough of a reputation that we were aware of the chances we could be set up. We could be set up by a law-enforcement agency to take a fall, which would have jeopardized the operation. Or we could be set up by badguys jealous of our success or their turf.

An undercover agent going by the name of Charlie Sacco—we called him “Charlie Chains” because he wore so much gold—was uncovering corruption and gambling involving the sheriff of a town near Charleston, South Carolina, and he set up a gambling hall. He brought Rossi into it because some of his clientele were Greeks that Rossi knew from the Greek community of Tarpon Springs and were frequent visitors to King’s Court. Rossi, Shannon, and I made a few trips to the Charleston area to play our roles on behalf of Charlie Chains.

Rossi met a Greek named Flamos, who claimed he was from Harlem and could get us any kind of drugs in any volume we wanted.

“Don’t bullshit me if you can’t produce,” Rossi says, “because the people I deal with in New York City won’t stand for it.”

The guy insisted he had great connections.

I came in as Rossi’s New York man. Charlie had rented a condominium right on the beach at the Beach and Racquet Club in Isle of Palms, where we stayed. He made an appointment for Flamos to come and see me.

Rossi and I are lying on the beach. Flamos comes walking across the sand in street clothes. Rossi introduces me as his friend Donnie from New York. “Tell Donnie what you can get for us.”

Flamos says he can get anything.

“Heroin,” I say.

“I got a direct contact in Katmandu,” he says. “But I need some front money to go to Katmandu, fifteen grand.”

“Do I look like a fucking goofball or what? Katmandu?”

Flamos gets indignant. “I don’t know you. How do I know you’re straight? I’m from New York too. I got some friends up there that are righteous people.”

“If you got the right friends up there, ask them to check out Donnie from Mulberry St. who’s a friend of Lefty’s. If your friends can’t check out Donnie and Lefty from Mulberry Street, then your friends ain’t worth shit.”

Flamos turns to Rossi. “I don’t want to get involved. Your friend’s coming on too strong.”

“Hey,” I say, “you’re coming on that you can come up with anything under the sun, so don’t bullshit me.”

“I’ll come back in two days,” he says.

The next day, Flamos comes back and comes right up to me. “Look, Donnie, I’m sorry if I offended you. I checked with my friends in Harlem, and when I mentioned Donnie and Lefty from Mulberry Street, these guys had nothing but the highest respect for Lefty, and they had heard of you being with him. Geez, Donnie, I didn’t realize you’re with the Bonannos.”

“Hey, let’s not have names here. We don’t mention families. The bottom line is, can you get us the dope?”

“I can get the heroin, Donnie, but I got to go to Katmandu. Forget the fifteen, but I need five grand for traveling expenses.”

“Forget the five and forget Katmandu. What could you bring here tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? I got hashish in my stash. What I got is worth seventy-five grand on the street. I got to get twenty-five for it.”

“All right, bring it over.”

“Wait a minute, we gotta set up a correct deal, you know.”

Rossi says, “What you do is, you deliver it to this warehouse we got, and when it’s in there, you let us know, we’ll have somebody check it. You come back, we’ll give you the money.”

“That’s your correct deal,” I say.

When he left, Rossi says to me, “We ain’t giving this guy twenty-five grand. Once that shit’s in the warehouse, it’s ours. We’ll give him five grand, and let him holler.”

Flamos makes the delivery to the warehouse. Charlie Chains goes over and checks it and calls us to say that it’s all there, good stuff. Rossi hands Flamos the money.

Flamos counts. “Ho, wait a minute, there’s only five grand here.”

“That’s what you get,” I say. “You don’t want it, give it back and you’re out everything. Because the hash stays with us.”

“Oh, man, this ain’t gonna go down with my people.”

“Go to your people in Harlem if you want to, go see whoever the fuck you gotta see. They’re gonna contact Lefty. Lefty’s gonna say we gave you twenty-five and you must have glommed the other twenty. Who they gonna believe?”

So we got $75,000 worth of hash off the street at a cost to the government of only $5,000, while actually enhancing our credibility as legitimate badguys.

Lefty called me to Miami because he wanted us to look at a lounge together. He said that the lounge at the Sahara Hotel, next to the Thunderbird, might be available for $15,000, and Sonny gave us the green light to go after it.

“All the wiseguys from New York hang out at the Thunderbird,” he says. “We can get all the overflow. Because all the guys will come, New Yorkers and ex-New Yorkers like Joe Puma, and people will follow them. Get a good piano player.”

We hung out at the bar in the lounge and looked the place over. We agreed that it looked good.

I was aware of the tension within the Bonanno family, because the infighting was causing tension with Lefty and Sonny. I couldn’t ask a lot of direct questions about it, but I strained to pick up what I could. Partly that was for intelligence. Partly it was to make sure I stayed alive.

Now, at the hotel, Lefty gave me some news.

“The Commission met in New York. They named Sally Farrugia acting boss for how long Rusty is in jail.”

Salvatore “Sally Fruits” Farrugia had been a captain.

“When Rusty gets out, Sally will step down,” Lefty says. “And Sonny is now the main captain. Every family has a main captain. When Rusty gets out, Sonny wants to become consiglieri.”

“Oh, yeah? I didn’t know that.”

“The consiglieri has to be voted by the whole family, you know, not appointed like the captains. Another thing, the Commission ordered the two sides in the family to keep the peace while Rusty’s in the can.”

“Is there gonna be peace or what?”

Lefty chuckles. “Let me tell you something. Sonny’s strength is that he’s close to Rusty.”

The ABSCAM scandal broke, arrests were made, the story was all over the news. I didn’t pay too much attention to it. I was too busy trying to dope out the power struggle within the Bonanno family.

I was in Miami with Lefty and a bunch of the guys. At three or four in the morning, after a night of bouncing around, one of the guys suggested that we go to Nathan’s for something to eat.

I started to sit down with them. Lefty grabs my arm. “Sit over here at this other table. I want to talk to you.”

We sat at a table over in the corner. “Donnie, what do you know about that boat we went out on?”

I started to answer when it hit me what he was driving at, and at the same time he whipped out a folded page from
Time
magazine, opened it up, and slapped it down in front of me.

“That’s
the boat, Donnie.”

I was stunned. There, as part of a story about ABSCAM, was a picture of the
Left Hand,
the boat we had partied on, and a description of how the FBI had used it in the sting. My life was on the line right here, with how I handled this.

“Gee, I don’t think that’s the boat we were on, Left.”

“Don’t give me bullshit, Donnie. One thing I know is boats. We went out on a fucking federal boat!”

“I’ll tell you this, Left, if that’s the boat, we were in good company, and we were better than they were.”

“Huh?”

“That fucking guy with the boat, he scammed congressmen and senators, and he tried to scam us. If he can scam those people, I ain’t no Phi Beta Kappa that he can’t scam me. But he didn’t get a fucking thing on us, right? We had a great party and we walked away from it.”

“You sure?”

“Hey, did they get us? We’re sitting here, Left. We beat those FBI guys!”

“I don’t know, Donnie,” he says. He keeps shaking his head and looking at the picture. “I hope you know who the fuck you’re messing around with. A fucking federal boat.”

Lefty called me at my apartment. Tony Mirra was causing trouble. He had gone to the boss and put in another claim on me. Mirra said that I had worked for him at Cecil’s disco when I first came around, and that entitled him to claim me.

“There’s gonna be a sitdown on this, at Prince Street. Sonny and I have to go to the table and straighten this whole thing out. That’s this afternoon. Last week Mirra won a decision that he gets $5,000 a week from Marco’s.”

Steve Cannone’s social club was at 20 Prince Street. Marco’s was a midtown restaurant that used to be Galante’s place.

“Left, no way I’m gonna be with Mirra.”

“You ain’t got nothing to say about it.”

THE SITDOWNS