by Joe Pistone
“Florida is going to be ours, Donnie,” Sonny said to me, echoing what he’d said from the beginning. “Get going on the bingo and the dog track. Keep on top of the other guy regarding the numbers and the booking and moving shit. Florida is all about drugs. Everything’s got to be big down here. With the big man involved with us, I don’t want to be handing him thin envelopes. A big part of my future is going to be in Florida. I’m going to be spending a lot of time down here myself. You did a good job down here so far, Donnie. I see the future down here. Everything is really going to roll from here on out.”
Sonny talked about his future, but when he got out of my car and we parted, I believed I was looking at Sonny for the last time.
While I drove to my Florida apartment I had to remind myself that if Sonny had suspected I was an informant he would have killed me in a New York minute. The next day I packed up in a miserable mood. They could always close it down if things got hot for me. Why don’t they just pull some strings to let Rusty out of jail right now, claim the prison is overcrowded, so I could get made right now if they’re worried about waiting until December? Close it after I get my button. Maybe there was some ego in these thoughts. I had gone under in 1975 when Ford was president. I was under for the entire Carter administration. And now as I flew first to a grand jury in Milwaukee and then on to Washington, the Gipper was in the White House. I had to leave my resentment behind me in Florida. I wasn’t retiring to a farm. In a sense, my work was just beginning.
CHAPTER 5
FIRST BLOOD
AT THE LAST MEETING with my handler and the other agents involved before the end of the Donnie Brasco operation, we had to decide how we would handle my coming out. For sure we wouldn’t release my real name. That part was easy. In fact, we didn’t release my real name until a year later during my first day on the witness stand in my first trial.
There was a lot of scrambling for Jules and our electronics expert Jimmy Kallstrom to get court-ordered bugs and telephone wiretaps for certain Bonanno premises so that the fallout from my coming out could be monitored. Evidence from the field offices, which were handling all the other operations, had to be harvested and those operations closed down, whether productive or not.
At one time there were twenty-six wires and bugs up and running that were based on probable cause taken from intelligence reports of mine from the field. Not to mention all the physical surveillance operations that had been put in place and yielded fruit due to the intelligence I provided. Who would be where, doing what, and when. The flow of intelligence would now cease.
There were financial considerations, too. For example, Jules had an informant, a Mafia wannabe named Vinny DePenta, getting a salary of $1,000 a week in cash. Based on my intelligence about the way Toto Catalano’s Zips brought heroin into the country, DePenta was put on the FBI payroll to work a pasta import scam. He tried to lure Bonanno Zips into using his import business to smuggle in heroin from Sicily. That operation had to be wound down to save the Bureau DePenta’s salary. DePenta was earning more than I earned, and I had to pay taxes on my money.
Also there was the million-dollar question:Which one of the various wiseguys should we tell first? We knew that deaths were likely for all of those who were responsible for my rise in the ranks and for all those who had made introductions of me to the top bosses.
There’s a line in the movie where Johnny Depp says, “If I come out alive, this guy, Lefty, ends up dead. That’s the same thing as me putting the bullet in his head myself.”While I never expressed that sense of regret, I certainly knew that that was the likely consequence for some of those who had vouched for me, especially Lefty. I had been ready to go to a house in Staten Island to kill Bruno Indelicato and whoever was protecting him. How much different was that from causing deaths by coming out?
Tony Mirra had been the first Bonanno to vouch for me. Mirra was the first one to bring me around Little Italy and introduce me around as an associate of his. You have to remember that Little Italy twenty-five to thirty years ago was not the tourist attraction it is today. Back then it was lined with social clubs and Mafia hangouts. Wiseguys would sit outside in front of these clubs and sip coffee and watch everybody that walked by. This was the Mafia’s turf. A good look at how it was then can be gotten from the Martin Scorcese film Mean Streets, filmed on location in Little Italy in the early seventies. Through Mirra I was introduced to capo Mickey Zafferano, in charge of porn, and capo Fort Lee Jimmy Capasso. Either one of those two introductions could get Mirra killed when I surfaced.
I had met Mirra through my early work with Jilly Greca’s crew in the Colombo family in Brooklyn. I was with Jilly’s crew around 1976 or so when Jilly got made. In 1980, a year before I came out, Jilly Greca got whacked. High among the host of risk factors for getting whacked was getting indicted. A man under indictment is a man under pressure. The fear is that the man may fold under pressure. When a wiseguy rolls over he is said to have gone bad. The idea is to get rid of him before he goes bad.
If the man is only a so-so earner to begin with, his loss is no great loss. Jilly Greca’s scores were never very big ones when I was with him. Jilly got indicted and Jilly got whacked. The evidence for the indictment against him was based on intelligence I had gathered and supplied to my handlers. Looking back I can see that Jilly Greca’s death was the first one the Donnie Brasco operation had caused.
As I said, I wanted to get away from Jilly’s crew because of its cowboy mentality. To make that happen I hung out for six months at Carmella’s restaurant where Tony Mirra would come in regularly. Tony was the first Bonanno family member I hung out with and it was through Tony that I met Lefty. When I met Tony he had just gotten out of prison on an eighteen-year drug distribution sentence and he was picking up where he had left off.
Tony was loathsome and vicious as the devil. But he was a money machine for the Bonanno family. Tony and I might go to a bar, pick a fight in the bar with some citizens, break a mirror and after the commotion was over move in on the bar owner, demanding a weekly salary not to do that again, convincing him that he needed protection. The next night we might go around collecting from the slot machines Tony had installed in bars by similar strong-arm tactics. Meanwhile, Tony distributed drugs, mostly wholesale quantities. Among his clients in the discos and nightclubs we bounced around in were movie stars, politicians, and prominent lawyers.
Tony was a top soldier, but Tony was such an individualist that I didn’t see that he would take me to places I wanted to go, places where I would be able to infiltrate at the next level above soldier. It didn’t take me long to realize that life with Tony was not for me and that it would be wise to divide my time and cultivate Lefty.
I couldn’t walk out on my new best friend Tony or he’d make me pay for the snub. I had to gauge how much time I could spend away from him. Meanwhile, my new friend Lefty was counseling me to stay completely away from Mirra because, while Mirra was a made man and entitled to respect, he could be a dangerous enemy and a more dangerous friend. Lefty said, “Don’t mess with that guy. He killed more people than cancer.” Mirra’s weapon was a knife. If you saw him pull a knife you knew he would use it and kill with it. The only person Mirra had any kind of close relationship with was his mother, but sometimes if you asked him how she was doing he’d tell you to mind your own business. Like Anthony Perkins said to his knifing victim Janet Leigh in the movie Psycho, “A boy’s best friend is his mother.” Tony Mirra would definitely qualify as a psycho.
One night Mirra asked me to take a ride with him to Brooklyn. He didn’t say a word the whole way. With a whacko like Mirra you never knew what he had in mind. I considered that maybe in his warped mind he had some secret grievance against me and he was taking me to Brooklyn to kill me. Fortunately, when we got to his destination there was a Rolls Royce waiting. The boss of the Colombo family, Carmine Persico, and his son Little Allie Boy Persico were there for some kind of meeting with Mirra. Tony introduced me to them. Looking back, t
hat one introduction more than any other no doubt sealed Mirra’s fate when I surfaced.
The problem of disassociating myself from Mirra was solved when he went back to jail on an eight-and-a-half-year sentence for another narcotics conviction, having already spent nearly half his life in jail.
With Mirra out of the picture I was free to spend every day with Lefty, who then was a soldier in capo Mike Sabella’s crew. Lefty called Jilly Greca to vouch for me. Lefty said to me, “Jilly says you ain’t no leech. He says you keep busy and earn good, and nobody over there had to carry you.”
There’s a restaurant that’s still there on Mulberry Street, called CaSa Bella’s. CaSa Bella’s was named after its first owner and founder, Lefty’s capo Mike Sabella. The only time I ever saw Carmine Galante in the flesh before he was whacked in 1979 was on the sidewalk in front of CaSa Bella’s. Lefty had taken me there to help guard Galante, who was there to have a meeting with Mike Sabella and other capos.
Carmine Galante arrived with his two bodyguards, Baldo Amato and Cesare Bonventre, a couple of Zips imported from Sicily to Knickerbocker Avenue by the baker, Toto Catalano. I had met Toto, Baldo, and Cesare and some of the other Zips when I was running with Mirra and then later with Lefty. The Zips gave Galante a lot of power. The power came from the Zips’ willingness to do anything for him, and the fact that other families had little contact with them so they could be fairly anonymous on a hit inside another family. Baldo Amato and Cesare Bonventre specifically covered Galante’s back pretty much all the time, and under Toto Catalano they helped Galante run the heroin import business ever since he got out of jail in 1974.
After they went inside, Lefty, in a hushed tone of voice, said, “You don’t know how mean this guy is, Donnie . . . a tyrant. That’s just me telling you, it don’t go no further. Lot of people hate him. They feel he’s only out for himself. He’s the only one making any money. . . .There’s a lot of people out there who would like to see him get whacked. That’s why we’re here.”
Lefty told me that when Mike Sabella had the marble done in CaSa Bella’s it was imported from Sicily and heroin was smuggled in with the marble. Although Mike Sabella went back down to soldier when Galante got whacked, Sabella retained CaSa Bella’s, Italian marble and all, for years.
Lefty was a 24-hour-a-day gangster. He was a degenerate gambler. He had the ability to generate money, but he never had any. Ironically, while he was doing his own gambling and losing at it, he was handling the family’s bookmaking operation for the underboss Nicky Glasses Marangello. The first important introduction Lefty made for me was with Nicky Glasses. On Lefty’s behalf I would often deliver gambling receipts to Nicky Glasses at his social club, Toyland. Lefty was always educating me on the ways of the Mafia and the ways of the wiseguy. He taught me how dangerous an introduction can be for the man who makes a bad one and vouches for a rat. The assumption is that if you introduce a rat or otherwise vouch for a rat, there’s a good chance you yourself are a rat making introductions for the feds in order to get out from whatever trouble you might be in.
Lefty never talked to me about the hits he did, but he did tell me the best way to do a hit—two shots from a .22 in the back of the head. “The bullets rattle around in the skull,” Lefty said.
I got the impression from all these guys that killing was something instilled in them when they were small. You kill a guy. He’s gone. He’s dead. Where are we going to eat tonight?
During the time I spent with Lefty under Mike Sabella I proposed to Lefty the idea of a vending machine business in Milwaukee. That meant that boss Carmine Galante had to arrange for capo Mike Sabella and underboss Nicky Glasses to meet with capos in Chicago to arrange for a meeting between Milwaukee’s top boss Frank Balistrieri and Lefty and me. Also on our side of the table was another undercover, Tony Conte, I had brought in on what the Bureau called Operation Timber.
Although Milwaukee was its own Mafia family, Chicago still oversaw everything out that way. So here was Lefty introducing me to his capo Mike Sabella and the underboss Nicky Marangello, and causing these two heavyweights to meet with Chicago bosses. And, to cap it all off, when everything was finally arranged, here was Lefty introducing me to the top boss of the Balistrieri family. Besides having meetings with Frank Balistrieri himself, we had meetings with his underboss Steve DeSalvo and Balistrieri’s brother and both of Balistrieri’s sons, who were lawyers and made men at the same time.
During one of those meetings, because the Mafia is always in search of a few good men, Balistrieri offered me the job of picking up the skim in Vegas for his family and delivering it to Kansas City. I gave Balistrieri the impression that I was considering his job offer. But it was not a job offer that would lead to prospects for my operation. In front of me Balistrieri warned Lefty, “. . . if Donnie takes this, you gotta be responsible for him. You know the consequences once I put it on record. If this guy fucks up, you’re in trouble, not him. They don’t look for him. They look for you.”
As a side note, it was disconcerting the way Frank Balistrieri treated his brother and his sons during these meetings. They bowed down to him like the Don that he thought he was. There was no feeling of a fatherly or brotherly relationship. He barked at his brother in front of us like his brother was Fredo in The Godfather, and his brother took it. In the brief meeting I had witnessed with Carmine Persico and his son Allie Boy there was none of that. You could tell there was a relaxed father-son relationship that went above the relationship of a tough guy boss to a made soldier. I had seen Lefty with his troubled son and there was always that spark that a father has for his son, no matter how disappointed he might be in the son’s drug use or whatever.
To make matters worse for Lefty, when Mirra went to jail, Lefty “went on record” with me. That is, Lefty put in a claim to Mike Sabella that I was now part of Lefty’s crew. Putting in a claim is another of those territorial things they believe in. I was now the property of Lefty. I belonged to him. I could now only do scores after first getting Lefty’s approval and splitting the take with him. I didn’t necessarily have to tell Lefty exactly what crime I was planning, just that I was going away on a score, and I had to return with money for him. Mirra might have once owned me, but as with the recording of a deed to a house, Mirra had failed to file the proper paperwork.
When Mirra got out of jail and saw how enterprising I had been while he was away, he went to the ruling Commission of the bosses of the five families and formally disputed Lefty’s claim on me. Looking back, I think that of all the partnerships I brokered, the alliance in the mid-west with Balistrieri, even though it had fallen through for no known reason, was the most impressive one to a guy like Mirra. It’s one thing to branch out into New Jersey or even Florida, but to expand a family’s territory into the domain of Chicago was quite large.
As a result of Mirra’s challenge to Lefty’s long-ago claim on me, there had to be several sit-downs with the Bonanno capos to settle it. Sonny represented Lefty at these sit-downs. In the end, Lefty and Sonny won when capo Big Joey Massino, an oversized swing vote, enlisted Rusty’s influence in favor of Lefty’s claim. Lefty told me Big Joey had said to him, “Lefty, stick to your guns. I’ll go back and tell that guy in the can.”
After Lefty and Sonny won me, Mirra made another formal claim. This time he claimed that I had stolen $250,000 in a drug deal a few years back. The obvious question was why didn’t he bring it up at the time. It was not like Mirra to let 250 pennies slip through his fingers without pulling his knife. Still, the punishment for stealing anything, much less $250,000, is death. We had to go through another round of sit-downs to expose it as a trumped-up charge. All the while, Lefty and Sonny, without realizing it, were exposing themselves to death as my champions.
As a side note, I had the added indignity of one of the old Hooverite supervisors in the Bureau Headquarters opening up an internal investigation on me based on Mirra’s wild charge that I stole drug money. I guess I should laugh now, but a part of me can�
�t. Here I was just trying to do the best job I could, to stay focused. I loved being an FBI agent and I was working at what I was good at—and I was good at undercover work. Yet while trying to do that job I had to handle the stresses of my own Bureau while handling the stresses of the Mafia and of my own neglected family.
After Carmine Galante got whacked in 1979 and Lefty and I were assigned to Sonny Black, it wasn’t long before Lefty’s new capo Sonny Black had made me his own. Lefty was kept out of things that I was put into. Lefty complained to me about that and I had to make sure Lefty’s nose didn’t get too far out of joint while I harvested the fruits of my close association with Sonny Black.
Sonny had charisma. Sonny was old school. He was, in their terms and mine, a stand-up guy. If I could forget what he did to earn his money, there was something very likeable about Sonny, and we clearly connected as men. Sonny was intelligent. We talked about current events, sports, life in general, not just the boring talk of Mafia life.
Sonny spent most of his time at the Motion Lounge, living a double life. His wife and kids lived a few blocks away. His son suffered from a chronic illness that needed medical care. At one point in our relationship Sonny asked me to make sure that if he ever got whacked his wife still got a thousand a week for her and his kids. Sonny said, “I want you to promise me that you’ll look out for my kids if anything happens to me.” That was a promise I knew I could not keep as I made it. Sonny then said, “In this life, if you get power, somebody will want to take it from you.”
Sonny Black made the deadliest of all the introductions when he introduced me to Santo Trafficante in Florida and I shook Trafficante’s hand. It didn’t matter that I had set the whole deal in motion with Trafficante regarding the gambling operation at King’s Court. I could never have met a boss as powerful as Trafficante without a direct introduction from at least a capo, if not from an acting street boss. Sonny himself could not have sat down to forge an alliance with Trafficante unless it came from Rusty in jail. In fact, a mere capo sitting down with any boss from another family, much less a boss with the stature of Santo Trafficante, was an unusual occurrence and a tribute to the rising power of Sonny as well as to the merit of the King’s Court schemes I had brought to Sonny and Rusty.
