by Joe Pistone
Warehouse burglaries, instead of house burglaries, would have been a big advancement for me in my gangster career.
The way that worked was fairly simple. The crew boss would get information that a warehouse had, for example, a shipment of Giorgio Armani men’s suits. The crew boss would tell me to go and case the warehouse. I’d be told to clock the comings and goings of the people who worked there. I’d have to see if there was a night-time guard, and if there was one, I’d have to clock his rounds and scope out his usual activities. Does he take a meal break? Is there a second guard on duty at the same time, which is rare, or one that replaces the main guard? How often do the cops cruise by to check? I’d have to look for the best time of night to break in and steal the load of suits. Maybe a weekend is the best.
I’d also need to check out how we’d break in. Usually, if there was a door with a key, the crew would just bang open the door and break the lock. Or they’d break a window, go through it and unlock the door from the inside. Typically, they’d be looking for an entrance in back of the place or for a loading dock. Most important, they’d be looking for the alarm to see where the box that controlled it was.
When the time came there’d be about five of us. We’d have a driver of our truck. We’d have a tail car like with a hijacking. We’d have a lookout who would stay outside on foot. The truck and the driver would be parked near the loading dock. The driver and the lookout would each have a walkie-talkie to alert any of us inside if there was trouble brewing on the outside. On the inside there’d be two or three of us, and at least one would have a walkie-talkie. We’d all have flashlights.
But before we went in, they would always tell me to bypass the alarm. As a jewel thief I was expected to know how to handle an alarm. I would have to go to the box and disconnect the live wire from the box after first using alligator clips to jump the live wire so there’s a continuous circuit going. The idea was to fool the live wire into thinking it was still connected, that the circuit was still going. Ironically, this is something I first learned in naval intelligence along with lock picking, both of which I learned again later in the FBI.
If there were a guard, the crew would know where he was, get the drop on him with guns drawn, and handcuff him to a pipe. The guards are not there to protect against professional thieves. They are there strictly to guard against kids—vandalism, petty thievery, whatever. They know their limitations and they act accordingly.
Adrenaline would be flowing. Warehouse burglaries were not as routine as hijackings because you have so many more things to do and you have a lot more exposure. Loading the truck would take less than fifteen minutes. We then would drive the load to a drop and it would proceed from there like a hijacking. My end would be $2,500 to $5,000, which I would turn over to my Agency handler.
Warehouse burglaries were a Sunday in Central Park compared to house burglaries. Don’t get me wrong; I still hated doing them. While I foolishly bought swag as a kid, justifying it by telling myself that everyone else in the neighborhood did it, and that I didn’t know for sure that it was swag, and that insurance, no doubt, covered the loss, I would never have directly stolen anything from anybody. Even as a private citizen I would have tried to stop a thief from stealing if I saw a theft occurring. And here I would be stealing some innocent person’s property, in the interest of combating the Mafia in a way that had never been done before. In my heart I hoped I was doing the right thing. Years later, as you’ll read later in this book, it turned out that I was.
The Mafia gangsters I lived with were not the intelligent, almost cultured people portrayed in certain books and movies, like The Godfather. Such fictional portrayals have often romanticized and inflated their stature. In fact, a lot of wiseguys studied the Godfather movies in an effort to imitate a certain style of wiseguy. But such imitation was form over substance. The bottom line is that the wiseguys I lived with had no regard for other people; they gave no thought to the bloodshed that spread to the innocent from the sale of drugs; they certainly gave no thought to the addicts their drug distributions had created, even when their own children became addicted.
Despite Mafia propaganda, drug distributions on a large scale (and sometimes on a small scale) were a part of many Mafia family’s bread and butter, practically from the start of the Mafia in America. But the Bonanno and Gambino families seemed to do more of it than the other New York families.
When I helped set up a sting operation in Florida to ensnare the Florida Mafia boss, Santo Trafficante, I had drugs practically thrown into my face.
Another undercover agent and I had set up a club called King’s Court in Holiday, Florida, about forty miles northwest of Tampa. It was to be an illegal gambling casino. A gambling casino controlled by the Bonanno family, or by anyone else for that matter, could not have been operated anywhere near Tampa without the approval of old-time Tampa boss Santo Trafficante. Trafficante was known the world over for his admitted participation on behalf of the CIA in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and in a CIA and Mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro. Trafficante was also alleged to have participated in the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. Trafficante had originally been a powerful casino owner in Havana before the Cuban revolution. After the revolution, Castro ousted him from Cuba. Trafficante ran Florida like a grandfather, and he had never been in an American jail.
To get Trafficante’s approval to open the King’s Court casino, Bonanno boss Rusty Rastelli, from his jail cell in Pennsylvania, had to reach out to Trafficante in Florida and vouch for Sonny Black. Sonny Black, in turn, had to vouch for me, and I had to vouch for the other undercover I had brought in. Trafficante, of course, would get half of the King’s Court earnings. In short time, all details were smoothed out and the casino opened.
This was a huge pigeon feather in the cap of Sonny Black. It was an operation that, no doubt, made Rusty Rastelli very happy in his dismal jailhouse surroundings. In hindsight I can see this King’s Court deal was one of the key factors that later led Rastelli to name Sonny Black acting street boss to replace Sally Fruits Farrugia. Sally Fruits had stepped down because he didn’t want the headaches that went with the power, and also because his thick Sicilian accent made communicating orders to Brooklyn Americans difficult.
With the King’s Court deal that I had brought to him, Sonny Black, to his great joy, was now branching out territorially. The Bonanno family territory, which had operations north of Miami on the east coast in Hallandale, Florida, was expanding into the west coast of Florida and was about to have a very powerful ally in Santo Trafficante. With a Bonanno crew of Sicilian imports (called “Zips”) already established in Montreal, Canada, dealing in heroin importation under their own Sicilian capo, Nick Rizzuto, this Trafficante alliance I had brokered would further establish the Bonannos’ power up and down the entire east coast. Although I never met Rusty Rastelli because he was in jail the whole time I was under, I can tell you that a boss loves the idea of expanding his territory with capable made men.
The illegal work involved in the operation required precision and thoroughness. Foremost it involved sit-downs in Florida between Sonny Black and Trafficante. Unknown to them, each sit-down was photographed and was evidence of the existence of a corrupt racketeering organization. The evidence of sit-downs was needed to bring federal RICO charges against the very structure of the two Mafia families involved. The gambling operation had to be run properly and actually function as a casino. Local law enforcement had to be paid off to protect the operation. They call a cop who will take a bribe “a meat eater.” We put a crooked captain, Joseph Donahue of the Pasco County Sheriff ’s Office, on our pad. Donahue could afford to buy a lot of steaks with the cash we handed him.
The politics inside Sonny’s crew had to be handled with a precision akin to diamond cutting. While the operation brought me closer to Sonny Black, I had to be careful not to make Lefty jealous enough to want to kill me. As a mere associate I should have been reporting to a sold
ier, not to a capo. In my case, that soldier was Lefty. Instead of dealing with Lefty—a soldier, a made man—Sonny had me deal directly with him. He confided in me, and not just about business but about personal matters as well. Lefty was especially miffed when Sonny gradually excluded him from much of the King’s Court planning and operation.
While all this intricate work was being performed in Florida in an FBI operation code-named Coldwater, the other undercover and I began to attract a lot of drug attention. I suspected that as soon as the DEA learned that a New York Bonanno gangster named Donnie Brasco had come down to operate in Florida—a hotbed of drug distribution from South America—the DEA wisely but incorrectly assumed I was in the drug business. After all, the Bonanno family seemed to be the family with the largest stake in drug trafficking of all the families.
Soon a medical doctor began to hang around King’s Court, claiming he had access to large shipments of cocaine that he could sell to me. I strung him along thinking I could work backwards through him to his suppliers. But he started making excuse after excuse. Because he never came up with anything more than promises, I became suspicious of him. Because of the strange way he acted around me, I began to think that he was a DEA snitch working off his charges, and that I was being set up by the government while I was setting up the Bonanno and Trafficante families on behalf of the government.
I certainly couldn’t go to the DEA with my suspicions. For security reasons only two or three people ever knew who I really was while in an operation. I had to let the DEA and this doctor continue to think I was a Bonanno gangster. So now I had to act as a gangster would act under the circumstances.
If I was right about him I also had to beat him to the punch, keep him from bringing drugs to me and avoid getting myself arrested in his sting. Along with the other undercover, I paid a visit to this doctor’s office. I asked him if he was fucking around with me. When he answered “No,” I knocked something off his desk. Then I asked him that same question again. When he answered “No” again, I knocked more items to the floor. After more of that I said, “Are you an agent?” He said, “No.” I knocked something else to the floor. Each time I asked and he answered, no matter what the answer, I trashed the place further. Needless to say he never called the police and I never heard from that doctor again.
I later learned that the reason the doctor had been stalling in hooking me up with the promised large shipments of cocaine was that my eyes had scared him. He thought I was a stone killer and he wanted no part of me.
There was another doctor I had a run-in with in Florida, though it wasn’t related to anything I was doing down there. There was a nearby hospital from which nurses used to come to the King’s Court after work to unwind, have a drink and relax a bit before going home. We would chat with them often, and one night they started talking about the head surgeon. This was the era before sexual harassment was made illegal. This head surgeon was very free with his hands. Every time he walked by a nurse he would pat her on the ass. He would make vulgar remarks and they felt they were powerless if they went to the administration because they were only nurses and he was very important to the hospital. Everybody knew the power plays he pulled and for years he simply got away with it.
One night I’d heard enough and decided to act; maybe it was because I have daughters. I asked one of the nurses to keep it to herself and to meet me in the parking lot at a time when the surgeon would be going to his car. She met me and pointed his car and him out to me. He didn’t know he was being watched.
I returned the next day and waited for him by his car. When he came out I said, “Excuse me, doctor so-and-so, do you like your fingers?”
“What?” he said.
“You need those precious fingers of yours to operate, don’t you?”
He didn’t answer.
I said, “You lay your hands on another nurse in that hospital, you won’t be operating anymore.”
About a week later I asked the nurses, “How’s that surgeon doing?”
“What a change!” one said. “We were just talking about him today. He hasn’t touched anybody all week.”
“He’s real nice to us,” another said.
“Somebody must have taught him a lesson,” the nurse who had met me in the parking lot said.
But believe me, the next time you hear a story like that about a Mafia gangster, you can bet he’s an undercover agent.
In the latter months of my deep cover I divided my time between Florida and New York. One evening after dinner in New York with Lefty, he and I decided to go to a card game in a walk-up apartment in Little Italy. As we were heading up the stairs, two young white guys were coming down. When they got a step past us they pulled out guns, put them in our backs and demanded our money. I thanked God that Lefty and I had no guns with us. I would have been afraid Lefty would pull his and start blasting away. This would put me in the position of having to blast away to defend myself from their guns and to satisfy Lefty that I was not a rat. Fortunately, we were not about to whack two drug addicts in a stairway. Yet.
Lefty said, “No problem, sport. Just give them your money, Donnie.”
Obviously, the robbers had sense enough not to rob the card game, because inside they would have been whacked. They figured it would be safer to get people on their way in with their gambling money. I had about $2,500 in gambling money and Lefty had about $1,500. We turned our money over and they ran out fast.
“So much for the card game,” Lefty said. “You got any money in your shoe?”
“Sorry, Left,” I said.
“Me neither,” he said. “You just saw two dead punks run down the stairs.”
Less than two days later Lefty called me to his apartment in Knickerbocker Village on Monroe Street near Little Italy. Lefty’s hobby was tropical fish and he had a few aquariums in his apartment. Lefty liked to just look at the fish and watch them swim around. A number of Bonanno wiseguys lived in Knickerbocker Village. They had some kind of in with the management. If they got behind in rent no one bothered them. Lefty had asked me if I wanted an apartment there, but I tactfully had said no. Anyway, Lefty had gotten the names and the hangout of the two robbers. I was relieved that he moved off of wanting them dead, as all he said was, “Go solo. Teach them fucks a lesson both. Get as much of the money you can back.”
The robbers hung out in an after-hours storefront on the outskirts of Little Italy. They were both Italian wiseguy-wannabes in their early twenties. They were stupid to think they could get away with it, practically in their own neighborhood, and made more stupid by the drugs they were on.
It was in the middle of the afternoon. I hoped for their sake I would find them because, if I couldn’t find them, Lefty might send somebody else who would find them and kill them. Plus, let’s face it: I was pissed off. First, they robbed me. Second, they put me in this position of having to cross the line into violence. What I was about to do was another one of those things that was very much unauthorized by the Bureau and that could cause me to need a criminal lawyer.
I considered the consequences of telling Lefty they weren’t there as I approached. But there they were. The two morons were out in broad daylight standing in front of their hangout. There was a strong grapevine in Little Italy. At that instant I could bank on that grapevine; Lefty would hear every detail of what happened even before I could report it to him.
They were my height; about six feet tall, but at 185 I had thirty pounds on each of them. They were junky skinny. I walked up to one and, boom, I let him have an overhand right. He hit the pavement as if I’d had a roll of dimes in my right fist (no comment). The other one’s eyes popped open when he recognized me.
“You stay put,” I said. “I’ll get to you next. Don’t even think about running. You’re in no shape to outrun me and it’ll only go worse for you.”
I looked down at the kid on the ground and realized he was out cold, and so I sprung suddenly and hauled off an overhand right on the other one and he went down
. I put the roll of dimes in my pocket and went through their pockets. I got a few hundred, but they had already shot up the lion’s share of the money they got from us. Getting the money back was not the point anyway. It was all about the satisfaction to know they didn’t get over on you and get away with it.
What I did next I did for each kid’s own good. I knew I had to throw them both a good beating or they could still get whacked. You don’t put a gun into the back of a made man like Lefty Guns Ruggiero and expect to live. Lefty’s son was a drug addict. His son’s problems might explain why Lefty only told me to “teach them fucks a lesson both.” During my time with Lefty before this incident, Lefty’s son pulled a gun and robbed a connected jeweler on Jewelers Row and Lefty had to square that beef with another family that the jeweler belonged to or Lefty’s son would have been whacked.
I know this much: the two junky armed robbers didn’t get up on their own and walk away from that sidewalk. From the kidney blows they bled piss for weeks. And until the breaks healed they had no use of their fingers for such things as shooting a gun. The whole thing took less than three minutes.
I can’t remember if I took any drugs from them. If I did I would have thrown it down the nearest sewer—another unauthorized act.
When I got to Lefty’s, he said, “Is it taken care of?”
I said, “It’s taken care of.”
I gave Lefty the few hundred I recovered and, like a boss, bless his soul, he put it in his pocket without throwing me a dime. Not another word ever was said on the subject.
