Donnie Brasco

by Joseph Pistone

  Two guys from Jilly’s crew got out of prison, Frankie and Patsy. And naturally they came back and picked up right where they left off with the gang. They were a couple of tough guys, hard-nosed general-purpose thieves who were used to calling their own shots. And right away they were not too pleased with my presence, because I was new and had worked my way in while they were away in the can.

  Frankie was about 5’ 10”, slim and stylish, in his late thirties. If you were casting for the movies, he would be perfect for the classic, shifty-eyed thief. Patsy was maybe ten years older, three inches taller, and ten pounds heavier.

  They were big on daytime house burglaries. They would get information on a house where there was cash or jewels or guns. Their gimmick was to pose as detectives to gain entry, then handcuff anyone who was home and ransack the place. They had regular detective shields they could show, and they always had a guy in a getaway car outside.

  They decided that a couple of houses in Hicksville, Long Island, were great prospects for burglaries. They went out there and posed as morning joggers to trot by and case the places. They would park their car down the road a ways and jog by the houses in their sweat suits.

  The morning they were to hit this one house, they drove up and discovered there were a whole bunch of cars parked in the driveway. They canceled the job.

  They jogged past the second house to case it. When they jogged back to their car, they saw a woman writing down their license-plate number. They canceled that job.

  Jilly and Frankie and I went out in Jilly’s car to case a job in Hicksville. They had information that the owner of the house, supposedly the head of some retail dry-cleaners’ association, had a bed built over a safe in which there was a lot of cash. Apparently our car was noticed as being strange to the neighborhood and suspicious, because somebody called the cops. The cops came by, stopped, and talked to us. They asked us what we were doing. We said we were just looking for potential properties to buy. On the car seat was a black attaché case in which were two revolvers, one a .38 and one a .32; some loose bullets; and several sets of handcuffs. The cops were satisfied with our explanation. But that blew that job.

  By now I was used to putting my two cents’ worth in on plans for scores, while still trying to avoid participating. It was part of my function to discourage them from pulling jobs, especially those where somebody might be in the house or somebody might get hurt. So when I had a chance, that’s what I did. Anyway, at the same time I was gathering a lot of information on criminal activity, which was also my job.

  They had cased a job in Mountainside, New Jersey, and they wanted me to take a run over there and check out the alarm system, see if they could get by it. Since I was a burglar and a jewel thief, I had to know about alarm systems.

  So I went over to this house. It was a mansion surrounded by a big fence. It looked like it would be a good house to hit. Of course, I didn’t check out the alarm system. I didn’t go anywhere near it.

  But I went back to Jilly’s and told them it looked like the place had a very complicated alarm system that I didn’t know how to bypass, plus probably a secondary backup system that I couldn’t observe. Plus, it looked to me like there wasn’t a good escape route for getting out of the place in case the alarm was tripped. My recommendation was that they forget about that job.

  Patsy really wanted to pull that job. He was pissed because I was trying to squelch it.

  “It’s not worth a shot at getting caught,” I said.

  “You just don’t want to come with us on this,” he said. “You’re fucking afraid.”

  “You’re right, I don‘t,” he said. “If I can’t get by that alarm, what am I gonna do? Break a window and go in like some fucking two-bit junkie? But you guys can go ahead and do it, just count me out.”

  Then the other guys decided they didn’t want to do it, either.

  Their next house job they pulled off without telling me about it—some wealthy woman’s house over in Jersey someplace. When I came into the club the next morning. Patsy was parading around showing off this huge diamond he was so proud of. Everybody was oohing and aahing because of how much money it would bring. It was three carats, Patsy said.

  He got around to me. I took the diamond and looked it over. “I wouldn’t get too excited about it,” I said, “because this is fake, a fugazy.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Patsy said, grabbing the stone.

  “It’s a zircon, is what I’m saying.”

  Patsy snapped his head back like I had shoved a stick up his nose. “You’re full of shit,” he said. “That broad wouldn’t have no fugazy diamonds in her house. We had information the broad didn’t have no fake jewelry. It’s three fucking carats!”

  “It’s a fugazy,” I said. “Take it home for your kid to play with.”

  “You’re such a smartass, like you know everything.”

  “Hey, Patsy,” I said, “you just got out of the can, and I never been in jail, so I must be just a little smarter than you. You want to embarrass yourself, pal, take that stone to your fence, the jeweler you talk about.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m gonna do,” he said. He stomped out with the gem. I could have been wrong, of course, and at least my credibility would have been hurt. But I had taken that gemology course, and I wanted to demonstrate that I knew something about gems. The stone was just too big—nobody would have this big a stone lying around in their house. And the color was a little off. I just had a gut feeling about it.

  Half an hour later Patsy was back, his tail between his legs. He wouldn’t look at me. “How’d you know?” he said.

  “I’m a jewel thief all my life, so I shouldn’t know about diamonds? You oughta stick to hijacking coffee and sugar, because that’s what you know.”

  “Gettin’ on my nerves,” he muttered.

  “Hey, I was trying to do you a favor. You’re supposed to know this shit. You take it to the guy and he tells you it’s a fugazy, what’s he gonna think of you next time you come in with a stone?”

  “Your fucking time will come when you won’t be such a smartass,” he said.

  A couple days later I came in and they were planning a burglary of a clothing factory nearby in Brooklyn. The job was to involve me and six other guys, including Frankie and Patsy.

  This was a small place that made sport clothes, jeans, blouses. They had been discussing this idea for days, and I had stayed out of it. Now they had it finalized.

  I sat down at the table and said, “How we going about doing it?”

  It was a beaut. Supposedly there were about twenty or twenty-five people working at this place, most of them women, most of them Italian. Quitting time was five P.M., so at around four-thirty, when most of the salesmen would be gone and just employees left in the place, they’d back a forty-foot trailer truck up to the loading dock. The crew would go in, announce a stickup, handcuff everybody, and load up the trailer.

  I had to try to talk them out of it. First, with all this handcuffing and so on, somebody was going to get hurt. Second, because of that first reason, there was no way I could go along on the job, and when the shit hit the fan and the operation got busted up—which in all likelihood would happen—I didn’t want the fingers pointing at me as the snitch.

  “Well, it sounds good,” I said. “But how long is it going to take to load up the trailer and get out of there?”

  Two hours, was the answer.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Quitting time is five o‘clock. What happens when the husbands and boyfriends of the women who work there come to pick them up? They just gonna sit and wait in the car for a couple hours without checking inside, while their wives are inside handcuffed and you load your truck? Or if a husband is home at five-fifteen and his dinner isn’t on the table by five-thirty-his wife isn’t even home—what’s the first thing he’s gonna think? That she’s out screwing somebody. What’s the first thing he’s gonna do? He’s coming to this factory and backtrack to find his
wife. They’re all gonna come right down to the factory. It’s gonna be like a zoo. You’re gonna have a hundred fucking people coming down there while you’re loading the trailer. What are you gonna do, barricade the fucking doors while you load the trailer and everybody’s handcuffed inside? I think it’s a pretty stupid idea.” “

  Patsy started fuming. “Every time we plan to pull a fucking score, you got something to say, throw a monkey wrench in. We think this is a pretty good fucking idea.”

  “You’ll be back in the can,” I said, “thinking up such good ideas. But you do whatever you want. I don’t have to be in on it. I’m just trying to save your ass. But I ain’t the boss.”

  Jilly said, “I don’t think it’s good. That joint is only half a mile from here. Too close. Not good.”

  Jilly was the boss. So that blew off that plan. But there was a lot of heat in that room.

  6

  THE BONANNOS

  One morning not long afterward, I walked into the store. Everybody was there, but nobody was saying much. Jilly took my elbow and said, “Don, let’s take a walk.”

  We went outside. He said, “Look, Don, nothing for nothing, but Patsy and Frankie, they don’t feel comfortable around you. They got a beef.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “They feel like they don’t know you well enough. They don’t want you involved in any more jobs until they know more about you. They want the name of somebody that can vouch for you down in Miami where you said you did a lot of work, so they can feel more comfortable with you.”

  “Well, how do you feel, Jilly?” I said. “We’ve done stuff together, right? You know who I am. You got any problems with me?”

  “No, I got no problems with you.” Jilly was uncomfortable. “But I grew up with these guys, you know? They been my partners for years, since before they went to the can. So they got this little beef, and I gotta go along with them. Okay?”

  “Fuck them, Jilly. I’m not giving them the name of anybody.”

  “Let’s just take it easy, okay, Don? Let’s go in and talk it over, try to work it out.”

  Jilly was the made guy, the boss of this crew. I had rubbed these other guys the wrong way, and they had gone first to Jilly and put the beef in with him, which was the right way to do it. He had to respect their wishes because of the proper order—he had known them longer than he knew me, even though he had faith and trust in me. It was their beef, but it was his responsibility to get it resolved one way or the other. He was handling it the proper way. He came to me and talked to me first.

  Then, when I hard-nosed it, said no right up front (I couldn’t give in right away, I had to string it out and play the game), he said we had to sit down and talk about it. When you sit down, everybody puts their cards on the table and airs their beefs out. And Jilly had to lean toward them in granting their request about getting somebody to vouch for me in Florida. At that point I wasn’t worried; because things were being handled in the right way, according to the rules.

  We went back in the store. I went over to Patsy and said, “You got a beef?”

  “You say you pulled off all those scores down in Miami before you came here,” Patsy said. “But we don’t know nothing about that. And you seem to want to say a lot around here. So Frankie and me wanna know somebody you did those jobs with, so we can check you out.”

  “You don’t need to check me out,” I said. “I been around here five-six months. Jilly and the other guys are satisfied. I don’t have to satisfy you just because you were in the can.”

  “Yeah, you do,” he said. “Let’s go in the back and sit down.”

  Everybody walked into the back room. Patsy sat down behind the desk. “You could be anybody or anything,” he said. “Maybe you’re a stoolie. So we want to check you out, and we need the name of somebody to vouch for you.”

  “I’m not giving you any name.”

  Patsy opened a desk drawer and took out a .32 automatic and laid it on the desk in front of him. “You don’t leave here until you give me a name.”

  “I’m not giving up the name of somebody just to satisfy your curiosity,” I said. “You don’t know me? I don’t know you. How do I know you’re not a stoolie?”

  “You got a fucking smart mouth. You don’t give me a name, the only way you leave here is rolled up in a rug,” he said.

  “You do what you gotta do, because I ain’t giving you a name.”

  It was getting pretty tense in there. Jilly tried to be a mediator. “Don, it’s no big deal. Just let him contact somebody. Then everybody feels better and we forget about it.”

  I knew all along, from the time he pushed it to the gun, that I would give him a name. Because once he went that far in front of everybody, he wouldn’t back off. But even among fellow crooks you don’t ever give up a source or contact easily. You have to show them that you’re a stand-up guy, that you’re careful and tough in protecting people you’ve done jobs with. So I was making it difficult for them. I acted as if I were really torn, mulling it over.

  Then I said, “Okay, as a favor to Jilly, I’m gonna give you a name. You can check with this guy. But if anything happens to this guy, I’m gonna hold you responsible. I’ll come after you.”

  I gave him the name of a guy in Miami.

  He said, “Everybody sit tight. I’m gonna go and see if we can contact somebody down there that knows this guy of yours.” He left the room and shut the door.

  I was nervous about the name I gave him. It was the name of an informant, a thief in Miami who was an informant for another agent down there. It had been part of my setup when I was going undercover. I had told this other agent to tell his informant than if anybody ever asked about Don Brasco, the informant should say that he and Brasco had done some scores together, and that Brasco was a good guy. The informant didn’t even know who Don Brasco was, just that he should vouch for him if the circumstance came up.

  So now I had a couple of worries. That had been seven months before. I wasn’t absolutely sure that the informant got the message, and if he had been told, would he remember now, seven months later? If the informant blew it now, I was going to get whacked, no doubt about it. The other guys in the crew here didn’t care; they were on the fence. But Patsy or his pal Frankie would kill me, both because of the animosity between us and because they had taken it too far to back down.

  While Patsy was gone, I just sat around with the other guys playing gin and bullshitting as if everything were normal. Nobody mentioned the problem. But I was thinking hard about how the hell I was going to get out of there at least to make a phone call.

  After a couple of hours I figured everybody had relaxed, so I said, “I’m gonna go out and get some coffee and rolls. I’ll take orders for anybody.”

  “You ain’t going anywhere,” Frankie says, “until Patsy comes back.”

  “What are we here, children?” I say. “I got no reason to take off. But it’s lunchtime.”

  “Sit down,” Frankie says.

  If it came to it, I would have to bust out of there somehow, because I was not just going to sit there and take a bullet behind my ear. There was a door out to the front, which I figured Patsy had locked when he went out. There was a back door, which was nailed shut, never used. And there were four windows, all barred. I didn’t have many options. I could make a move for the gun on the desk; that was about it. But I wouldn’t do anything until Patsy came back with whatever the word was, because I might luck out. And if I could stick with it and be lucky, I would be in that much more solid with the Colombo crew.

  We sat there for hours. Everybody but me was smoking. We all sat and breathed that crap, played cards, and bullshitted.

  It was maybe four-thirty when Patsy came back. Instantly I could see I was okay—he had a look on his face that said I had beaten him again.

  He said, “Okay, we got an answer, and your guy okayed you.”

  Everybody relaxed. Everybody but me. With what had gone down, I couldn’t let that b
e the end of it. You can’t go through all that and then just say, “I’m glad you found out I’m okay, and thank you very much.” The language of the street is strength; that’s all they understand. I had been called. I had to save some face, show everybody they couldn’t mess with me. I had to clear the air. I had to smack somebody.

  The gun was still lying there. But now we were all standing up, starting to move around and relax. I wanted to take Patsy first. But Frankie was the one between me and the gun. I circled around, casually edging over to him. I slugged him and he went down. Patsy jumped on me and I belted him a few times. Then the rest of the crew jumped in and wrestled us apart. I had counted on the crew breaking it up before it got out of hand, so I could make my point before the two of them got at me at once.

  Patsy was sitting on the floor, staring up at me.

  “You fucking punks,” I said. “Next time you see me, you better walk the other way.”

  Guido, the toughest of all of them, stepped in front of me and looked at everybody else. “That’s the end of it about Don,” he said. “I don’t want to hear nothing else from nobody about Don not being okay.”

  Sally’s club was a place where everybody tended to let their hair down during the long Tuesday lunches. They would bullshit about scores, about guys they had beefs with, about things that got fucked up. They would like to laugh and break each other’s chops.