Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business

by Joe Pistone

  Anyway, this guy who asked me if I was a dumb lox started reading from one of my 302s—blah, blah, blah. Finally, I said, “Can I see that?”

  He started walking up to the witness stand, and as he got closer, I slowly leaned far back away from him so that he had to come real close to hand it to me. He reached out to give me the 302. I leaned further back, and he leaned in even closer. I grabbed his hand, and brought his ear close to my mouth. “If you ever call me a dumb lox again,” I whispered, barely moving my lips, “I’ll rip your heart out.”

  He asked for a sidebar with the prosecutor, Louis Freeh, and said to the judge, “Did you hear what he just said to me?”

  The judge said, “I thought he was saying something to you, but I couldn’t make it out and I’m certain the jury didn’t hear it.”

  The defense lawyer told the judge and the prosecutor what I had said, and then he turned to the prosecutor and asked, “What are you going to do about it?”

  Louis Freeh said, “I’m not going to do anything about it. But I advise you not to call him a dumb lox again. Because I know this guy, and he will rip your heart out.”

  Before the trials began, there were endless days of preparation for the first batch of indictments against over fifty Mafia gangsters; of testifying at grand juries in Florida, Wisconsin, Brooklyn, and Manhattan; of reading and rereading reports and transcripts; of listening to endless tape recordings; and of interpreting the enigmatic language spoken by the wiseguys and gangsters who had been recorded.

  Even for cases in which I didn’t testify, I had to fly from New York to L.A. and many cities in between to meet with prosecutors and explain to them the structure of the Mafia and the mindset of the associate, the soldier, the capo, and the bosses. Remember, this was all new information back then. Except for The Godfather (in which the word Mafia never was uttered), our culture had no reference point at that time from which to understand the Mafia. My immersion into the Mafia gave us a perspective we’d never had, and my detailed explanation of that world helped many prosecutors understand the information they had on tape from bugs and wiretaps.

  Also, there were pretrial proceedings that I had to attend for the cases in which I would be testifying. At one such proceeding in Tampa, Lefty suddenly jumped up from his seat, pointed at me, and said to the judge, “Why don’t you lock him up?”

  The judge’s eyes popped. Lefty’s own attorney backed away from him a little bit and marshals headed toward him.

  Lefty started to take his seat, turned back to the judge and said, “He should be in jail! He’s the gangster, not me!”

  Then as the trials were scheduled I had to do the preparing all over again, this time working closely with the prosecutors that were going to present each particular case. As one case led to the next, I had to read and reread all my prior testimony. Every sentence was a potentially devastating pitfall to the prosecution’s case if my memory failed me. You don’t realize how boring you can be until you read your own testimony twice.

  The first of the trials began almost a year to the day after I came back out to civilization. It was United States v. Napolitano, et al. Members of the press appropriately dubbed it the “Bonanno Family Trial.” The “et al” were Lefty, some of the more prominent members of Sonny Black’s crew, and capo Big Joey Massino. Napolitano was Sonny Black, of course, but he had disappeared a year earlier.

  Big Joey Massino disappeared, too. Ever the cautious “jerk-off,” Big Joey went on the lam around the time Tony Mirra got hit in 1982, hiding in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania for over two years until he surrendered in July 1984, two years after the Bonanno family trial had ended.

  Big Joey was hiding in a home owned by the parents of his good friend, an associate in his crew, Goldie Leisenheimer. The only soldier in his crew that Big Joey trusted to visit him was his brother-in-law and childhood friend—the S in the J & S Cake Social Club—Good-looking Sal Vitale. Good-looking Sal was the only one permitted to visit Big Joey in the Poconos; he went once a month to report on crew business and to get orders.

  In hindsight, you have to wonder if the prudent Big Joey Massino wasn’t being doubly prudent by going on the lam. It put him in a win-win position. He avoided both the trial and the Mafia.

  Although Big Joey and I had minimal contact while I was with Sonny’s crew, we did have contact. More importantly, Big Joey and Sonny were very close, and at times they were a working partnership. Together they orchestrated the hit on the three capos. And now Big Joey was indicted in a RICO conspiracy with Sonny, and with crewmembers of Sonny’s. But why did he stay on the lam for over two years after the trial ended?

  To begin with, just getting indicted for a conspiracy that involves a boss is a definite risk factor for a hit. The crewmembers would have no evidence to offer against Rusty, but Big Joey was the one who visited Rusty in jail and got approval for the work he and Sonny did. He also got the orders from Rusty for the three capos’ hit.

  Big Joey said a lot of things to a lot of wiseguys to distance himself from me after I came out, reminding people he didn’t want me on the hit of the three capos—in fact, he vetoed Sonny’s plan to have me on the hit—because he didn’t trust me. He also claimed, untruthfully, that the reason he didn’t attend Boobie’s daughter’s wedding, and the reason he got an unlisted phone number that he didn’t give out, was because he didn’t trust Sonny Black’s rising star—yours truly. But those defenses work both ways. If he didn’t trust me, then why didn’t he investigate me? His failure to act and ignoring his hunch about me is a pretty big sin in a boss’s eyes. And if he didn’t trust me, why did he side with Sonny and Lefty in the sit-downs involving Tony Mirra’s claim on me? Why did he go to Rusty in the can to influence Rusty favorably in Lefty’s claim of me against Mirra?

  Another black mark against him that Big Joey had to consider was that the FBI had revealed an informant in his crew who would testify in the case. In the eyes of the Commission, when it came time to dish out punishment, it was a lesser offense to have a criminal informant in your crew’s midst than it was to have an undercover agent infiltrate your crew. Sonny Black’s offense was such a huge offense that it had never been done before to such an extent. Still, when it comes time to mete out punishment for both greater and lesser offenses, the Mafia does not employ a wide range of punishments. The range includes two behind the ear, four in the face, a shotgun blast in the gut, an occasional car bomb—not a whole lot to choose from.

  To get out from under some other charges the government had on him, the informant wore a wire and gathered RICO evidence against Big Joey. The informant was an associate named Ray Wean, a hijacker. As I said earlier, we always had paid informants in the hijacking crews who tipped us off on loads, but now Ray Wean was part of much bigger government plans.

  I had a rule when I was under that I did not want to know whether there was surveillance because I didn’t want the distraction of wondering where they were or who they were. I also didn’t want to know who any informants might be because I might have a tendency to try to protect them, which could blow everything. I knew Ray Wean as Ray Wean the hijacker, and he knew me as Donnie Brasco the jewel thief, Sonny Black’s new guy, without knowing I was an agent. During his time as an informant, he reported back to the agent handling him that there was a stone killer in Sonny Black’s crew named Donnie Brasco, and that the FBI should keep a watchful eye on this Brasco. Like the doctor in Florida, Wean said Brasco had the eyes of a killer.

  I often wondered after I came out whether Big Joey Massino finally woke up and recognized me from the hijacking bust years before. If any other wiseguy found out that Big Joey had actually been arrested by me in 1973 and had a clear opportunity to nip my operation in the bud—but blew it—he’d pay for that mistake with his life.

  Big Joey Massino, at the end of the day, had more than one reason to hide in the Pocono Mountains. He certainly wasn’t a ski bum.

  So the trial went on without Big Joey Massino.

&nb
sp; It was the Donnie Brasco operation’s first trial, and for many reasons it was crucial that we get convictions. We had a RICO allegation and we had a mountain of evidence—including physical surveillance, electronic surveillance in the form of tapes made from planted bugs and telephone taps—and we had Ray Wean the informant. But lead prosecutor Barbara Jones and the second chair, Louis Freeh, repeatedly told me that the whole case depended on my credibility. I could not goof or we’d lose, as the feds too often had in the past in Mafia trials. In blunt terms, I was told that the man who lied every day for six years and lived a web of lies, now had to convince a jury that he could be believed. Innocent mistakes of memory were unacceptable.

  “Joe,” Barbara told me with Louis sitting beside her, “no matter how much evidence we put on, the jury has to believe you. Without your credibility, we have nothing.”

  Remember, while I was under I took no notes because it was too risky to keep notes on me or in my apartment. And only a few times did I wear a wire to record a conversation. I had to make mental notes. So by the time I got a chance to call my handler, there were often 500 conversations I’d had to commit to memory. Because I didn’t know which conversations were more important and which one’s were less important, I had to recall each one for my handler, who would then put my words into a report. Because I possessed no notes of my own made around the time of the conversations, I was fair game to be accused by defense attorneys of making things up to fit the prosecution’s RICO theory.

  Nothing for nothing, but if Lefty or Mr. Fish Rabito or Nicky Santora or Boobie Cerasani or Boots Tomasulo detected any exaggeration in my retelling of events and my recollection of things they had said to me, the Commission would have doubled the price on my head. I would have crossed another line in their eyes.

  The reputation of the FBI as a successful fighter of organized crime was also on the line in this first trial. We weren’t the first Mafia trial to go forward under the 1970 RICO law, but we were among the first few. We were in fact the first RICO trial with an FBI undercover agent as the principal witness. A year before I came out, there was a RICO trial in Philadelphia against Frank Sheeran and Lou Bottone. Sheeran was a Bufalino family hitman, a suspect in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, and a Teamsters officer. Bottone was a Philly wiseguy. The FBI had relied on wire recordings made by an informant—Bufalino associate and Sheeran’s driver, Charlie Allen Palermo—to prove the RICO conspiracy and the two murders that were part of a pattern of racketeering. When the federal jury in Philadelphia returned with its verdict, the government had lost every count of each man’s indictment. Charlie Allen Palermo, even with tape to back him up, had no credibility with the jury. Having an FBI undercover agent testify and lose would have been much more of a black eye and disappointment for the Bureau than that loss.

  You try not to take any of this personally. But considering the sacrifices my family and I had made, a loss for me would have been a blow that would have taken a long time to heal.

  More importantly, the FBI had invested a lot of time and money in Donnie Brasco. If we lost our first trial in Manhattan, it could spell disaster for the rest of our courtroom plans in Manhattan, Tampa, Milwaukee, and Brooklyn. It could also spell disaster for the whole new concept of FBI agents working deep cover.

  Because of my unique role and all the legal ramifications it carried—such as whether, as a law enforcement officer, I enticed and entrapped anyone into committing a crime—we were breaking crucial new ground, and we couldn’t fail. Our RICO theory, with an undercover agent as the one who gathered the most incriminating evidence, was as uncharted a stretch of water to navigate as the waters I had been in while working undercover. We were all Christopher Columbus when the trial began on July 19, 1982.

  All my undercover work during my years with the Bonanno family eloquently got put into the Reader’s Digest condensed version by Louis Freeh in his opening statement to the jury on a hot New York City day in the middle of the summer.

  Louie told the jury, “The bread and butter for these defendants came from truck hijackings, armed robbery, narcotics trafficking, and gambling operations. When taken together with the acts of murder charged in this case, they constitute a pattern of racketeering—a pattern which was committed between 1974 and 1981 in New York, New Jersey, and Florida. This pattern of racketeering forms the basis for the charges in this indictment. . . . The proof will come to you in installments, one witness at a time, one piece of evidence at a time. Be assured, however, that as the trial progresses, these pieces will fall into place, and they will paint for you a clear, simple picture of a criminal enterprise known as the Bonanno family of La Cosa Nostra—an enterprise motivated by greed and power.”

  “One piece of evidence at a time,” gathered up like stray pieces of coal along the railroad tracks and put into my coal bucket, was about to light a fire under the entire American Mafia.

  The RICO theory of the case required proof of what they called “predicate acts of racketeering.” We charged and had to prove, mostly from my memory of things that I had seen and things that had been said to me by the RICO conspirators, that the May 5, 1981 murders of the three capos was a Bonanno family crime.

  The corpse of Sonny Red Indelicato was found nineteen days after the hit in an empty lot on Ruby Street on the Brooklyn-Queens border. The grave that was dug for Sonny Red’s corpse was too shallow, and when rigor mortis set in, the left arm of Sonny Red, with his wristwatch still on his wrist, stiffened and shot up through the ground. Sonny Red had been wearing a self-winding Cartier watch. The watch had stopped on May 7th. An expert from Cartier testified that the watch can continue to run “after wrist action ceases” for 40 to 45 hours. This put the date of death at May 5th.

  My testimony provided the backstory.

  Lefty had told me that the job of disposing of Sonny Red’s body had fallen to Big Joey Massino. Over a year before the trial, when boys playing in the empty lot found the body, Lefty told me that Big Joey had “screwed it up.” Obviously a capo, especially a 300-pound capo, didn’t go around digging graves. But Big Joey was responsible for getting the job done, and the crew he had given the job to had screwed it up, so Big Joey Massino had given a bad order.

  Lefty had told me that 5’ 5” roly-poly Mr. Fish Rabito’s apartment in the exclusive Manhattan neighborhood of Sutton Place had been used as a base of operations for the hit. After the hit, Lefty, Sonny Black, Jimmy Legs, Boobie, Nicky Santora, and some others spent a few days there. About the time Sonny Red’s watch had stopped, Lefty returned to his Knickerbocker Village apartment on a mission to get a pair of pants. His wife, Louise, had forgotten to include the pants in his suitcase when she packed for him. It was important to have a complete change of clothes in case any blood spattered on you during a hit or during the disposal and cleanup.

  Lefty and I spoke on the phone during this visit to his apartment to get his pants. Lefty told me that he would be “gone a while yet . . . everything is fine . . . we’re winners . . . a lot of punks ran away but . . . they came back . . . and we gave them sanctuary. . . .”

  Lefty had told me that Big Trin was so big that even though he was “all cut up” in pieces, Lefty couldn’t budge the body. Lefty had to get help from Boobie, Jimmy Legs, and Nicky Santora.

  “I couldn’t move him,” Lefty had said about Big Trin. “Boobie could. Trin was all cut open and bleeding. There was little pieces lying around from the shotgun. Boobie got blood all over him trying to pick him up. I couldn’t believe how strong Boobie is. He don’t look it. But I was amazed. Boobie could move him. They cut him up and put him in green plastic garbage bags.”

  Boobie was tall and lean, pretty smart, a chess player, and to our frustration he ended up getting a fluke acquittal in this case. But despite his later Donnie Brasco operation conviction in Tampa that got him five years, and his other convictions for drug dealing and bank robbery, when the movie Donnie Brasco came out Boobie sued us for libel claiming the movie defamed his reputation. The j
udge reminded Boobie that he had no reputation to damage and threw the case out in a pretrial decision, stating, “I hold that Cerasani’s reputation is so badly tarnished that . . . no reasonable jury could award him anything. . . .”

  Lefty also said during that conversation that there was “one more situation . . . we gotta work out.” Both Lefty and Sonny later explained to me that that “one more situation” was the hit on Bruno Indelicato. Sonny Black gave me the contract on that hit, and Lefty explained that the Bruno hit would “go on record” with the “family” and would be good in the eyes of the “bosses.” Bingo, bingo, bingo—a “family” with “bosses” who ordered and sanctioned hits—evidence against the very structure of the Mafia, evidence that had eluded law enforcement throughout history before this trial.

  That conspiracy to murder Bruno, like the May 5th massacre of three capos, was a predicate act of racketeering in our RICO indictment that we had to prove. Nicky Santora had solidified this predicate act in a conversation we had after I returned to New York claiming that I’d been unable to find and kill Bruno in Florida. In that conversation, Nicky said, “We’ll find the kid. . . . If he comes out of it, we’ll get him. . . .We got feelers out now. We’ll know this week.”

  Thanks to one of the rare times I risked wearing a wallet transmitter, we had Sonny Black’s own voice telling me, “We took care of those three guys, they’re gone. . . . Bruno got away.” Later Sonny Black said, “This is the first time in over ten years the Bonanno family agreed on exactly what to do.”