Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business

by Joe Pistone

  On cross-examination, one of the other defense attorneys started to ask me a question and prefaced it by exaggeratedly referring to “this dangerous task” of infiltrating the Mafia. I jumped in and said, “Yes, it was very dangerous,” and he steered away from trying to minimize the danger. Then he tried to make Lefty look like an idiot and an exaggerator by asking me, “Do you recall him ever telling you that he had a personal friend whose name was Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas?”

  “I don’t know if [Lefty] Ruggiero said that or not,” I said. “But someone mentioned it one night. There was a group of us in a night club.”

  Nothing for nothing, but this was 1986. This was fourteen years after The Godfather had won the Academy Award for best picture. Somebody on that jury must have remembered how the Corleone family owned Congressmen and had a United States Senator from Nevada in their pocket. If any of the jurors remembered Justice William O. Douglas, they would have remembered that he had a reputation for always siding with the criminal in every Supreme Court case. He was controversial, and he got headlines for creating more and more rights for criminals in the 1960s. In the last years of his life as a Justice, in the 1970s, he married a 23-year-old girl when he was 65. When that marriage quickly went on the rocks, he married a 22-year-old waitress when he was 68. Then he lied about having served in World War One so he could be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, which was supposed to be reserved for war veterans. He had been in an informal student corps in college, but even that was after the war was already over. Douglas had never served a day in the Army.

  The squawking coming from the defense attorney’s conference room escalated after that brilliant so-called cross-examination.

  On a piece of paper used in connection with the transfer of $1.54 million in cash from “some pizzerias in New York and New Jersey” to Swiss bank accounts, the FBI lifted a latent fingerprint that belonged to the right thumb of Toto Catalano. This evidence came in near the six-month mark, and there was still nearly a year to go.

  Wiretaps of long-distance calls were played of Badalamenti and one of the New York Zips. They spoke in an easily penetrated code. They referred to “pure cotton,” meaning pure heroin from Sicily; “ten percent acrylic,” meaning 90 percent pure heroin; “shirts,” meaning cocaine from South America; and “22 parcels,” meaning 22 kilograms. Duh.

  After the government rested its case at the one-year mark, Badalamenti’s lawyer moved for a mistrial on the grounds that the jury had become “irreparably benumbed.”

  Failing with that attempt, he called Badalamenti to the stand. Looking like a kindly old uncle, Badalamenti denied dealing drugs and assured the jury that he was a man of honor and dignity whose only interest was to help the downtrodden masses. He said he was the baby among nine children, raised on a family dairy farm. He had a fourth-grade education and had fought in the Italian Army before deserting in 1943 when the Americans invaded Sicily. He came to America illegally after the war and worked in his brother’s grocery store in Michigan until he was deported. He claimed that his only crime was to smuggle tobacco into Sicily.

  On cross-examination he defied the judge and the jury and refused to answer a single question regarding the Mafia or his membership in the Mafia. Judge Pierre Leval threatened Badalamenti with contempt of court, but he remained silent. He was taking a shot. If the jury bought his man-of-dignity nonsense, he might win the case. If he lost the case, another six months for contempt of court would be meaningless.

  Badalamenti believed he was in a win-win situation when he testified and stonewalled on cross-examination. But when the jury came back on March 2, 1987 after a mere six days of deliberation, Badalamenti had lost-lost.

  Of all the defendants that were left, the only one to get a complete acquittal was Badalamenti’s son,Vito, a minor figure. But Vito stayed in jail pending his deportation. Two other equally minor defendants had copped pleas during the trial.

  Badalamenti and Catalano got 45 years each. Under the terms of his extradition agreement, Badalamenti would serve no more than 30. Ringleaders a notch below kingpin got either 30, 25, 20, or 15 years each. Alfano, in his wheelchair, got 15 years. Lesser Zips got sentences between one and 12 years. The Zip that got one year did less time than the jury.

  Judge Leval applied the federal restitution law in a unique way. The judge ruled that the kingpins were responsible for injuring countless drug addicts during the years of the narcotics conspiracy, from 1975 to 1984. Following this logic, he ordered restitution in the millions to be paid to a fund for the rehabilitation of drug addicts. A total of $3.3 million in restitution was to be paid by eight of the bigger and more prosperous players in the Pizza Connection Case. Toto Catalano alone was ordered to pay a million in restitution, on top of a $1.5 million fine.

  The sentencings were in June 1987.Twenty-one months had passed since jury selection began in September 1985.

  Rudy Giuliani said, “No one case can result in a massive destruction of the Mafia. However, the momentum is building.”

  On September 28, 1987, two days shy of the two-year anniversary of the start of jury selection, a long article appeared in the New York Times that cast doubt on whether Toto Catalano would ever be required to pay his restitution and his fine, and whether he would remain imprisoned in Leavenworth.

  Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal wrote that Toto Catalano’s lawyer, Ivan Fisher, had contacted him and asked him to attend a meeting in a Holiday Inn near Cincinnati, Ohio with Luigi Ronsisvalle. Luigi had dropped out of the Witness Protection Program and wanted to talk to Ivan Fisher, and Ivan Fisher wanted an unimpeachable witness at any such meeting. Blumenthal attended and tape-recorded the entire meeting. A few days later, on September 22nd, a second meeting was held in the motel.

  Luigi recanted his trial testimony that implicated Toto Catalano in the receiving of 220 pounds of heroin in the trunk of a red Porsche on Knickerbocker Avenue. Luigi recanted his testimony that Catalano was present for the conversation about the pipeline “from Sicily, with heroina.”

  Luigi, as if singing an aria, said to Toto Catalano’s lawyer, “Mr. Fisher, I want you, please, from the bottom of my heart, I want you to accept my apology for what I done to Toto Catalano. I swear to God, I feel so bad, I feel like crying.”

  Luigi continued, “I got three daughters. God is my witness. If I lie to you now, may my daughters drop dead with the worst things God can give to human beings. I’m swearing to you on my three daughters.”

  As for Catalano, Luigi said, “Somehow I put him in the middle, I don’t know how. I’m trying to give it to you straight, but he’s not there. I don’t know what happened. Somehow the guy pops out on the corner.”

  Luigi explained how it happened. “It sound like they washing my brain. They not telling me this is what you got to say, but the way they were talking, it sounds like that is what they would like.”

  “And while they were talking I put two and two together,” Luigi added. “I live like a dog because I can’t take what I did in this court—a liar.” Luigi said he was so upset by the lies he told that he had to drink a bottle of scotch every night to get to sleep.

  When Ivan Fisher announced he would seek a new trial based on Luigi’s changed testimony, Rudy Giuliani, who had supervised the trial, said his office would oppose the motion. Rudy said, “There was an overwhelming amount of testimony against him.”

  Louis Freeh said, “Had Ronsisvalle not testified, it would have made absolutely no difference. There were numerous other witnesses who convicted him.” In the law, this is called “harmless error”—it wouldn’t have mattered. It may not be the strongest position to take, but it was the only position available under the circumstances. The prosecutors, however, had to worry that they were already saddled with the harmless error from all the prosecution talk about Catalano’s involvement in the Galante hit in the two months before Judge Pierre Leval had ruled the Galante hit out of the case. You can only pile on so much harmless error before you get a re
versal.

  Blumenthal was objective and candid in his article, reporting that he had no way of knowing if any conversations had taken place between Luigi and Fisher prior to the first meeting he attended. Blumenthal also reported the many references Luigi made to wanting Ivan Fisher to supply him money.

  Luigi rubbed his fingertips together and said, “You still not talking about them goddamn things.”

  To pay for the motel room and expenses for Luigi to visit his daughters, Ivan Fisher gave Luigi $2,620. “Okay,” Luigi said. “This is not buying me. Like I told you, I have to see my daughters.” And then, squeezing the last nickel, Luigi said, “You no think Mr. Toto Catalano after say thank you, send me a few dollars someplace, buy a pack of cigarettes?”

  Luigi switched subjects to another demand. “You got to guarantee for my life. . . . Because once we are having some kind of business, your client don’t want me to drop dead now.”

  “I no gonna have no six months life. I tell you that.”

  When Ivan Fisher asked Luigi why he was willing to expose himself to a perjury indictment, Luigi said, “How I got to speak? In Chinese? In Japanese? What kind-a language? You understand a man who can’t swallow some things? You forget one point: in 1979 I give up myself because I can’t take no more of that goddamn life.”

  Five days later, on October 3, 1987, Ralph Blumenthal wrote another article in the New York Times under the headline: WITNESS IN MOB “PIZZA” TRIAL SAYS HE LIED IN RECANTING.

  Ah, life with Luigi. In court, when pleading guilty to his feeble attempt at obstructing justice, Luigi explained, “About three weeks ago some people approached me saying where my family are, my daughters are, the names, the town. In my own language, in Sicilian. And they ask me after 30, 35 minutes of speaking to me, to call a Mr. Ivan Fisher and tell him I was wrong in two points of my witness, and I said okay because I know my kids, now they are under shotgun or whatever. . . . I know at the moment I was doing something wrong, but I have pressure because my family was in danger. People were watching.”

  On October 15, 1989, four years after the first day of the trial, the federal appeals court in Manhattan upheld the heroin smuggling RICO verdicts, with the exception of one count regarding one of the Zips. This reduced his sentence from twenty-five years to twenty years. The conviction of the Zip who had received a one-year sentence was completely overturned, but he had long ago served his full sentence. Sadly, the appellate judges knocked out the $3.3 million in restitution Judge Pierre Leval had ordered to be paid by eight defendants to a fund for the treatment of drug addicts. While it was a great idea that the public liked, it was an idea that could never be used again based on this precedent.

  At the same time the Pizza Connection Case was in trial, the fearless Italian anti-Mafia crusader Giovanni Falcone was conducting the “Maxi Trial” of Mafiosi in Palermo, Sicily, from 1986 to 1987. Falcone and Rudy Giuliani praised and encouraged each other. Falcone’s efforts led to the conviction of 338 Mafiosi, including the Sicilian Boss of Bosses, Salvatore Riina. Tragically, Riina went into hiding and from his underground quarters plotted revenge. Five years later, on May 23, 1992, Falcone, his wife, and three police bodyguards were blown up and killed by a powerful bomb hidden under a bridge over which their car was traveling.

  Two months after that, in July 1992, a bomb in Palermo killed Falcone’s protégé and replacement, the new chief anti-Mafia prosecutor in Italy, the brave Paolo Borsellino, along with five others. Borsellino had just driven up to his mother’s house when the explosives were ignited. Borsellino was literally blown to bits and his body was never found.

  In a very short period of time, many more were added to the list of “the honest dead” in Italy and Sicily, including the two chief investigators who handled the Italian end of the Pizza Connection Case investigation, Cesare Terranova and Boris Giuliano.

  Twenty years after his arrest and extradition in the Pizza Connection Case, Gaetano Badalamenti, who had spent most of his 30-year sentence in the worst of the Federal prisons—the underground tomblike pen in Marion, Illinois—died on May 3, 2004 at the age of 80 in an American prison hospital.

  Over the years, Luigi called me from time to time. He was a severe alcoholic and very depressed. I was a sounding board. They had him in the Witness Protection Program in someplace like South Carolina. He was out of his element. Every so often during one of these calls he would ask for a “loan of $500.” I was doing well with the book and the movie, so I’d send him some of “them goddamn things.” Alcohol is a depressant, and as his disease progressed Luigi got more depressed. A few years ago, Luigi committed suicide.

  CHAPTER 11

  SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

  IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES the work itself was spectacular. I loved being an FBI agent and I loved doing the particular work I was doing in the FBI. We had set lofty goals for ourselves and we were pursuing those goals as a team. But at least one important person I had to deal with in the Bureau’s hierarchy was not cheering us on.

  We had so many things going on at once that it was often hard to keep track. During the time that members of Rudy Giuliani’s crew were working with the FBI and the Italian government on putting together the Pizza Connection Case, another part of Rudy’s office was working with supervisory special agent Lin DeVecchio of the FBI, case agent Pat Marshall, the NYPD, and the New York State Organized Crime Task Force to put together the dream case—the Mafia Commission Case—that Jules and I had nurtured a couple of years before I came out in 1981. The goal behind the Mafia Commission Case was to indict and convict the bosses of all five New York City families in one trial and send them away to die in prison.

  Over the years there has been some discussion about whose idea it was and when it was hatched. I know that Jules and I talked about it early on, and he and Jimmy Kossler talked about it with the man they called their consigliere, the author of the RICO statute, Bob Blakey. Blakey’s law was invented for the sole purpose of destroying the Mafia. The 1970 passage by Congress of the Witness Protection Program and RICO created a one-two combination punch. The Witness Protection Program was designed to trap as many rats as possible and then use them, like Luigi, with all their baggage, in RICO prosecutions. If Witness Protection was the setup, RICO was the knockout punch.

  I like to think that the Mafia Commission Case was such a logical strategy that many minds could have “originated” the idea. In fact, Big Paul Castellano came up with the idea on his own in 1983. Big Paul was picked up on a bug in the White House, two years before the indictment, predicting that all the bosses soon would be charged “in one tremendous conspiracy.”

  Whoever thought of it first, it was Rudy Giuliani who understood the strategy instantly and got the necessary approvals from FBI Headquarters to mobilize manpower and make it a reality.

  The strategy to convict all the bosses and send them away forever was intended to have far-reaching consequences, more consequences even than adding to the momentum that was starting to swing our way, as Rudy had publicly stated. The strategy was to kill the snake by cutting off its head. The strategy was intended to, in time, kill off the entire Mafia.

  From my experience with how these people think, I came to believe that the primary purpose of the organized crime syndicate’s Commission that Lucky Luciano and his pals created in 1931 was to insulate and perpetuate the bosses at the top. Without a Commission to protect themselves, bosses would be forever walking around with little bull’s-eyes pinned to the backs of their heads. On their backs like “Kick Me” signs would be “Shoot Me and Take Over” signs. Who would want to assume such a vulnerable position?

  It was our strategy to pin targets back on the bosses, not on the backs of their heads for two shots behind the ear, but rather on their faces for the taking of mug shots. Get the bosses. Without bosses there would be no leadership, and without leadership there would be no organization to organized crime.

  It was our strategy to send a message downstream. As Lefty said after the Commission
sanctioned the hit on Galante, “If they can hit a boss, nobody’s immune.” Get the bosses, and destroy the illusion of an umbrella of protection for everyone under the bosses.

  It was our strategy to create a vacuum at the top. While not rocket scientists, the bosses still were usually the brainiest and the most cunning. Get the bosses and start the brain drain.

  While the various pieces that would become the Commission Case were being assembled, the prosecutors and people in the Bureau like Jules and Lin DeVecchio, who was in charge of the investigation, kept me in the loop. The Commission Case began as five separate FBI RICO investigations against each one of the five families. It was called Operation Genus, and I was consulted from time to time to provide intelligence that went into the affidavits of probable cause for wiretaps and bugs, like the one on Big Paul’s White House.

  When I came out and I wasn’t traveling to consult or testify, I did most of my work in a city in the South which will remain confidential.

  Because New York was the Grand Central Station of the Mafia, it was decided early on in the Donnie Brasco operation that my family should not live in New York City or in the New York Metropolitan Area, which includes New Jersey, Long Island, Upstate New York, and Connecticut.

  About a year and a half after I had gone under, the Bureau gave my wife and me two choices for my family’s safe relocation: San Diego or this city in the South. They would move my family, under an assumed name, to either city. They would assign me to the field office in that city, but they would keep me in an apartment in New York City out of which I would continue to do my work as Donnie Brasco in New York, Tampa, Miami, Chicago, Milwaukee, L.A., or wherever events took me. Because the southern city was closer to New York, we chose it. With less travel time my wife and kids could more easily visit our families in New Jersey. And I could come home more frequently, or so we thought.