Authors: Joseph D. Pistone
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
Donnie Brasco (8 page)
Anyway, by then I had accomplished what I had learned backgammon for. I had gotten to know some people, at least enough to be acknowledged when I came in: “Hey, Don, how’s it going?”
So I wasn’t a strange face any longer. I also got pretty friendly with the bartender, Marty. Marty wasn’t a mob guy, but he was a pretty good knock-around guy who knew what was going on. I got to bullshitting with Marty pretty good near the end of December 1976, and early January of 1977. Conversation rolled around gradually, and he asked me if I lived around there, since I was in there so much. I told him, yeah, I lived up at Ninety-first and Third.
“You from around here?” he asked me.
“I spent some years in this area,” I told him. “Lately I been spending a lot of time in Miami and out in California. I just came in from Miami a couple months ago.”
“What do you do?” he asked me.
That kind of question you don’t answer directly. “Oh, you know, not doing anything right now, you know, hanging out, looking around ...” You bob and weave a little with the guy. I said, “Basically I do anything where I can make a fast buck.”
He had a girlfriend that used to come in at closing, then they’d go out bouncing after work, around the city. A couple times he asked me if I wanted to go, and I backed off, said no thanks. I didn’t want him to think I was anxious to make friends.
Still, I didn’t want him or anybody else in there to think I didn’t have anything going for me. So once in a while I’d bring a female in—somebody that I’d met in another bar across the street from my apartment or something—just for a couple drinks or dinner. And sometimes my agent friend, Chuck, would come in with me for a drink. You can’t go in all the time by yourself, because they think you’re either a fag or a cop. And it’s good to vary your company so they don’t see you with the same people all the time and wonder what’s up. The idea is to blend in, not present yourself in any way at all that makes anybody around you uncomfortable.
Marty’s girlfriend had a girlfriend named Patricia, a good-looking blonde who was going out with one of the wiseguys that hung out there, a bookie named Nicky. A couple times she came in when I was in there and Nicky wasn‘t, and she’d sit down for some small talk with me. At first it was just casual conversation. Then I figured she was coming on to me a little, and I had to be very careful, as an outsider, not to overstep my bounds. The worst thing I could do is appear to be coming on to a wiseguy’s girlfriend, because there are real firm rules against that. If I made that kind of mistake I would have shot my whole couple months of work to get in there.
One night this Patricia asked me if I wanted to have dinner with her. “Nicky’s not gonna be around,” she said. “We could take off and find someplace nice.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I don’t think so. Not tonight.”
Then I grabbed Marty the bartender off to the side. “Hey, Marty,” I said, “I want you to know that I’m keeping my distance from Patricia because I know that she’s Nicky’s girlfriend. But I don’t want to insult anybody, either.”
Marty said, “I know, I’ve been watching how you handle yourself.”
So I established another small building block in my character: The bartender knew that I knew what the rules were with wiseguys. Most guys who hadn’t been around the streets or around wiseguys might have jumped at an invitation from a girl like that—figuring that, after all, if she makes the play, it must be all right. But with wiseguys there’s a strict code that you don’t mess. I mean, strict.
A week or so later Marty came over to me. “Hey, Don, I just want to tell you that Patricia and Nicky broke up, so if you want to ask her out for a drink or something, feel free.”
I said, “Thanks, but I’m not really out hawking it, you know?”
He said, “After work tonight we’re going to the Rainbow Room. Come on with us, and bring her.”
The four of us went to the Rainbow Room and had a good time. I went out bouncing with him a few times more after that, and that got me in pretty solid in that place.
He started introducing me to the other guys that hung out in Carmello‘s, including some of the half-ass wiseguys. I never did anything with them, didn’t get involved with them, but at least they acknowledged me when I came in, and I began to have a “home base” where people knew me, in case anybody started checking.
It was also a place where I could leave messages and where messages would be taken for me. I would tell Marty, If a guy calls here looking for me, tell him I’ll be in here at such-and-such a time. Sometimes I would call and ask for myself, and Marty would take the message and give it to me when I came in. So I established that I had some friends around, people I was involved with.
The important thing here in the beginning was not so much to get hooked up with anybody in particular and get action going right away. The important thing was to have a hangout, a good backup, for credibility. When I went other places, I could say, “I been hanging out at that place for four or five months.” And they could check it out. The guys that had been hanging around in this place would say, “Yeah, Don Brasco has been coming in here for quite a while, and he seems all right, never tried to pull anything on us.” That’s the way you build up who you are, little by little, never moving too fast, never taking too big a bite at one time. There are occasions where you suddenly have to take a big step or a big chance. Those come later.
Finally it was time for me to make my move with Marty the bartender. Typically, what an undercover cop will do, in a buy-bust situation, is try to buy something from you. Cops always buy, never sell. I was going to sell. So I brought in some pieces of jewelry. A couple of diamond rings, a couple of loose stones, and a couple of men’s and ladies’ wristwatches.
When there was nobody else at the bar, I opened the pouch and showed the stuff to him.
“If you’d like to hold on to these for a couple days,” I said, “you can try to get rid of them.”
“What’s the deal?” he asked.
“I need $2,500 total. Anything over that is yours.”
He didn’t ask if the stuff was stolen. He didn’t need to, because it was understood. During the course of recent conversations I had given him the impression that I wasn’t on the legit. So it was obvious. You say as little as possible in a situation like this. Actually, of course, the stuff was from the FBI, things that were confiscated during investigations and used strictly for this type of purpose.
He took the items and held on to them for three or four days. Then one night he said, “Don, some people want it, but I can’t get you the price tag that you want.”
Now, I don’t know if he’s testing me or what. You never take it for granted that somebody trusts you. I could have said, “Well, get me what you can for it, and I’ll give you a piece.” But that’s not the way you work. Things have a certain street value, and a street guys knows what that is. I knew what the going rate for swag was from dealing with my informants before I went undercover. So I could talk sense about price for diamonds, gold, jewelry with anybody, whether I was going to buy or sell. So if I have swag worth $2,500, I stick with that. If you say, “Okay, just give me $800,” then they might doubt that you know what you’re doing.
So I said, “Okay, just give it back, no big deal. I’ll be getting more stuff, so maybe we can do business another time.”
He said, “Anything you come across, Don, let me see it. If I can get rid of it, I will. I can move a lot of stuff. I come across a lot of swag.”
“The only things I’d be interested in,” I said, “are jewelry or good clothes for myself.” But I never bought anything from him.
I did place some bets through him. He talked about Nicky, the bookie, told me about his business. And I placed some bets on the horses.
All of this served the purpose of solidifying my place.
My agent friend, Chuck, had an undercover operation going in the music business: records and concerts. Sometimes we’d hang out together, back each other up—as when he would come with me to Carmello’s. Chuck was putting on a concert at the Beacon Theatre on Broadway, featuring the soul singer James Brown. He asked me if I’d give him a hand. That would help him and would also help me—it would show the mob guys downtown that I was doing something, that I was a mover.
He had sucked into his operation a couple of connected guys with the Colombo crime family. He introduced me to one of them, a guy named Albert. “Connected” means that you associate with Mafia members, do jobs with them, but do not share in all the rewards and responsibilities of an actual Mafia member. A true Mafia member is a “made guy” or “straightened out,” or a “wiseguy.” Albert’s uncle was a made guy in the Colombo family.
Albert was a half-ass wiseguy—just a connected guy, not a made guy. He was a big guy, maybe 6’ 2”, about thirty years old. He was a con artist dealing in paper—a stocks-and-bonds type guy. I didn’t think he ever did anything very heavy. He was a bullshit artist.
But he was not a bad guy to hang around. Chuck introduced me to Albert so that maybe I could get some introductions into the Colombo family. So I started running sometimes with Chuck and Albert, bopping around different night spots. Albert liked to hit all the in spots, discos, and restaurants.
When the James Brown concert was coming up, Albert and a couple of his buddies from Brooklyn came up with the great idea that they were going to stick up the box office. He came to Chuck and me and said, “Look, near the end of the concert, when the box office closes, let’s stick it up.”
He wanted to stick up our own box office. Chuck and I couldn’t allow guys with guns to come in and do that, but we couldn’t just veto it, either, without drawing suspicion. We really didn’t know how the hell the thing was going to go.
We told Albert, “Look, if these guys come in and knock off the box office, that’s less split for us, because we’re gonna cop this box office, anyway. We can split it three ways. If you bring in your two friends to stick it up, that’s a five-way split.”
He went back to his guys with that explanation, but they wanted to do it, anyway. They wanted it all.
It was the day before the concert. We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t tip off the cops, because the tip would have been traced right to Chuck or me.
“What should we do?” Chuck says to me.
“I don’t know,” I say, “this is your operation. I’ll go along with anything you want to do as long as we don’t jeopardize my operation.”
Chuck had an idea. “I think I’ll hire a couple of off-duty cops, just have them hang around the front of the lobby, like for crowd control, and maybe it’ll deter these guys.”
He hired the off-duty cops. They arrived in uniform and stood around. Albert and his friends showed up. “What the fuck’s with these cops?” Albert said.
I said, “I don’t know. Probably they’re on the job and figured they’d stick around and hear James Brown. I don’t know.”
“What the fuck,” Albert said to his friends. “How can we stick up the place with cops around?” They discussed it for a few minutes, standing outside, watching the cops in the lobby. They decided it was a no-go.
So we slipped that one. And it helped me out, because now I could tell guys that I had a piece of this guy, Chuck, who’s got this Ace Record Company in his pocket.
I was trying to get home to my wife and daughters at every opportunity, even if it was just for breakfast. I would often just end up the night and head across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey to spend a few hours at home. My wife and I socialized very little when I was home, and our few social friends were Bureau people. And while of course they knew I, too, was with the Bureau, they didn’t know what operation I was on.
I was very friendly with an agent named Al Genkinger in the New York office. All during the time I was undercover, Al and his wife stayed close to my wife, took care of anything that came up. Anything my wife needed, she would get in touch with them. That was a comfort.
We told neighbors and others that I was a salesman, on the road a lot.
My daughters were already developing the habit of evading conversations with others about what I did, or even of asking me questions about my work. They would say, “What do you do when you go to work?” And I would say, “I just do my work like anybody else.” After a while they stopped asking.
They were becoming cheerleaders at school. My oldest daughter had boyfriends. My wife and I became friendly with a lot of boys on the athletic teams. We went to high school wrestling matches on Wednesdays when I could make it home. She went without me if I couldn’t make it.
I set up a weight lifting program for some of the guys in our basement. I had been a weight lifter for a long time. They ate it up. They didn’t ask personal questions. They would come over regularly and follow the program I set up. My wife made pizzas.
It seemed I was home very little. My wife and daughters were not happy with the extended absences, especially when I didn’t give much explanation. We didn’t know it then, but that period gave me the best home time that I would have over the next five years.
I bopped around with Albert and got to know him pretty well. I took him up to Carmello’s a few times, so he could see that guys there knew me. It’s the kind of thing that feeds on itself: He sees that people know me and acknowledge me, so he feels he can introduce me to other people who know him. It enhances my credibility to be hanging out with a connected guy whose uncle is a wiseguy in the Colombo family. For his part, Albert sees that I’m accepted where I go, so it’s good for him to be seen with me.
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