Donnie Brasco

by Joseph Pistone

  The next lunch at Sally‘s, the matter of the fugazy diamonds was good for ball busting. They called me “Don the jeweler” and said I probably thought all diamonds were fake. They got on Patsy for getting so high on a fake diamond. “Patsy’s gonna get some real diamonds someday,” somebody said. “But he can’t show them to Don, because Don’ll say they’re fake and Patsy won’t know the difference.” Everybody laughed.

  Patsy and Frankie didn’t mess with me after that, even though we continued to be involved with each other. They treated me with some respect. Later on, ironically, Patsy turned informant and was put in the federal Witness Protection Program.

  I had met Anthony Mirra in March of 1977. He invited me downtown to Little Italy. He had a little food joint called the Bus Stop Luncheonette at 115 Madison Street. We used to hang out there, or across the street at a dive called the Holiday Bar.

  Mirra also introduced me to Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, like himself a soldier in the Bonnano family. Like Mirra, Lefty was known as a hit man. He had a social club at 43 Madison Street, just up the street from Mirra’s Bus Stop Luncheonette. Mirra used to hang out there. He introduced me to Lefty on the sidewalk outside the club. “Don, this is Lefty, a friend of mine. Lefty, Don.”

  Lefty was in his early fifties, about my height—six feet—lean, and slightly stoop-shouldered. He had a narrow face and intense eyes.

  Mirra turned away to talk to somebody else. Lefty eyed me. “Where you from?”

  He had a cigarette-raspy voice, hyper. “California,” I said. “Spent a lot of time between there and Miami. Now I’m living up at Ninety-first and Third.”

  “How long you known Tony?”

  “Couple months. Mainly the last few months I’ve been hanging out in Brooklyn, 15th Avenue. With a guy named Jilly.”

  “I know Jilly,” Lefty said.

  Prior to that introduction, I was never invited into Lefty’s club, and you can’t go in without permission when you’re not connected. From that time on, I would go down to Lefty’s almost every day to meet Mirra. So I got to know Lefty.

  I then began dividing my time between Mirra, Lefty, and the Bonanno guys in Little Italy, and Jilly and the Colombos in Brooklyn. Since I wasn’t officially connected to anybody, it was permissible, if not encouraged, to move between two groups. But it was also a lot to handle when you’re trying to stay sharp on every detail.

  My time became triply divided with Sun Apple. The “Sun” part of Sun Apple was not proceeding as well as the “Apple” part. Agent Joe Fitzgerald had set himself up with an identity, an apartment, and the rest, just as I had, and we did basically the same thing. Fitz was doing a good job working the street in the Miami area, and he fingered a lot of fugitives for arrest. But for whatever reasons, the operation there didn’t catch on as readily. Most of the guys Fitz was able to get involved with were guys that were chased out of New York, small-time dopers, credit-card scammers, and the like. No real heavyweights.

  Now that I had some credentials with both the Colombo and Bonanno people, we thought that maybe I could help stimulate some contacts in Miami. So from time to time I would go down there and hang out with Fitz, letting people know that I was “connected around Madison Street” and in Brooklyn.

  I had a dual role, hanging out with Fitz. First was to help him if I could, by being a connected guy from New York who he could point to for credibility. Second was to build up my own credentials. I would tell people in New York that I was going down to Miami to pull some sort of job. I would be seen down there hanging out in the right places. Word always gets back. So you always had to stay in character.

  One time we were at an after-hours joint named Sammy‘s, where a lot of wiseguys hung out. We were at the bar. Fitz was talking to a couple of women to his right. I was sitting on his left, at the L of the bar, and around the corner of the L were three guys talking together. One of them was drunk, and I recognized him as a half-ass wiseguy from New York.

  This drunk starts hollering at me. “Hey, you! Hey, you, I know you.”

  I ignore him, and he reaches over and grabs my arm. “Hey, I’m talking to you!” he says. “I know you from somewhere. Who you with?”

  “I’m with him,” I say, pointing to Fitz.

  Not only is he drunk, but he is also saying things he shouldn’t be saying around wiseguys, asking things he shouldn’t be asking—such as about what family I was with. I signal to the two guys with him. “Your friend is letting the booze talk,” I say. “He’s out of line, so I suggest you quiet him down.” They shrug.

  I call the bartender over. “I want you to know that this guy is out of line here,” I say. “And you’re a witness to what he’s saying, if anything happens.”

  The drunk keeps it up. “I know you from New York. Don’t turn away from me. Who you with?”

  I lean over to Fitz. “He grabs me again, I’m gonna have to clock him,” I say.

  “No problem,” Fitz says. He is standing there, all 6’5” of him. “When you’re ready, let me know, I’ll take care of those other two guys.”

  The drunk grabs me by the shoulder. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

  “Okay, Fitz,” I say. I reach over and belt the drunk, and he slides off the stool. At the same time Fitz clocks the second guy, and then the third guy, one right after the other. All three of them sink to the floor.

  Everybody in the joint turns away. Where wiseguys are concerned, nobody wants to know anything.

  I say to the bartender, “You saw and you heard, right?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “So if anything comes down regarding this, just say how this guy was out of line. Fitz knows how to reach me and my people in New York.”

  It turned out the guy was a member of the Lucchese family. Word did get right back to New York. Everything was smoothed over. It helped my image.

  Fitz and I cruised the Miami-area hangouts that had been identified as likely places for contacts: Sneaky Pete‘s, Charley Brown’s Steak Joint, the Executive Club, Tony Roma’s, Gold Coast up in Fort Lauderdale.

  But we weren’t able to lure the big-timers into conversation. For several months I went back and forth between the Colombos and the Bonannos, between New York and Florida.

  Fitz and I were out one night in a nightclub near Fort Lauderdale. We were sitting at the bar. Fitz introduced me to a lot of people he knew in there. “This is Don from New York.” Guys were going into the john to snort coke. I was just sitting at the bar bullshitting with a couple of half-ass wiseguys and their girlfriends.

  Then this one guy comes out of the john and comes over to me holding this little open vial. He holds it out to me and says, “Here, Don, have a snort.”

  I smack his arm, sending the bottle flying and the cocaine spraying all over the place. I grab him by the lapels and hoist him. “I don’t do that stuff,” I say, “and you had no business offering it to me. Don’t ever offer it to me again. I make money off it, but I don’t use it. I keep my head clear at all times.”

  “But look what you did,” he whines, “all my stuff!”

  “Write it off to experience,” I say. “You wanna fuck up your head, that’s up to you. Don’t bring it around me.”

  I didn’t do these things to be a tough guy. But with things like drinking and drugs, you can’t be a fence-sitter around these guys. If you smoke a joint or take a snort the first time—maybe just to show that you’re a regular guy—or if you say, “Maybe later,” it gives the impression that you do drugs. If you’re a fence-sitter, then you’re in a bind. You just invite people to keep offering it to you. And if you say, “Not now,” and then keep refusing and refusing and putting it off, they begin to wonder: What’s up with this guy? But if you draw the line right in the beginning—I don’t do it; I ain’t ever gonna do it—then that’s it, nobody cares anymore.

  A lot of people have the misconception that mob guys are all big drinkers or dopers. Some of them are—a greater proportion of young guys do drugs than olde
r guys. But so many guys don’t do anything that you don’t stand out by saying no—it’s no big deal. Tony Mirra killed twenty or thirty people, and he drank only club soda.

  The thing is, even though it’s a fake world for you as an undercover agent, it’s a real world for the people that you’re dealing with. And you have to abide by the rules in that world. And those rules include how you establish your own standards, credibility, and individuality. I know one or two guys that drank or did drugs while they were undercover just because they thought they had to do that to blend in or show they were tough guys. It was an enormous mistake. You can’t compromise your own standards and personality. Smart wiseguys will see right through your act. You look like somebody that has no mind of his own, hence no strength.

  I don’t use drugs, and I wasn’t going to start using them then just for an undercover role. How could I tell my kids not to use dope if I was out there sniffing coke just for the job?

  And there’s another reason, very practical. As an FBI agent, someday down the line I was going to be in court testifying on all these cases we were making. I was not going to lie. And I was not going to tarnish my credibility and risk failing on convictions by taking drugs or getting drunk or doing anything that would suggest I lacked commitment or character.

  This line of thinking is not arrived at on the spur of the moment. I didn’t think it over when the guy offered me the coke. I acted spontaneously, because I had sorted all this out in my head and established my priorities and standards before I ever went out on the job.

  In any event, I accomplished what I wanted to. While later on I would get involved in drug transactions, nobody ever again offered me drugs for my personal use.

  I was down in Miami one time working with Fitz for a week. I had told Jilly and his guys that I would be down there. But I didn’t call them back with a telephone number where I could be reached.

  As it turned out, they had tried to find me because they wanted me in on a big job they were going to pull down there.

  They had connections in Florida. Guido told me that he had been dealing drugs in Florida for nine years, especially in the Key West area, where he had the fix in with the police department and the district attorney’s office. Vinnie told me that he had a friend who owned a nursery on Staten Island where he was growing a big marijuana crop, and that when it was harvested in August, Guido would take it to Florida for sale.

  In this instance they had information about a house in Fort Lauderdale where they could pull off an easy $250,000 cash score. It was a four-man job. When they couldn’t locate me, Jilly joined Guido and Patsy and Frankie. When I got back to New York, they filled me in on what had happened. They had pulled off the job, and it had been a disaster.

  The information their Florida tipster gave them was that an elderly lady kept the cash and diamonds in a safe. Guido bought safecracking tools for the job in Miami. They went to the house, flashed their detective shields to the lady, and said they were on an investigation and needed to come in. They handcuffed the lady. But there was no safe. And there was no quarter of a million in cash.

  What they found were bullet holes in the ceiling, bank books showing that a huge deposit was made the day before in a safe-deposit box, and a little cash lying around. By the time they accounted for plane fare and tools and other expenses, they came out of the job with about $600 apiece.

  Their information had been good, but late. Later their tipster filled in the story. The lady’s husband had died and left the quarter mill. He had promised a large chunk of that to his nephew. But the widow didn’t like the nephew and didn’t want to give him the money. The nephew came to collect. He tried to frighten the lady. He pulled out a gun and fired two bullets into the ceiling. But she didn’t give up the money. The next day she put it all in a safe-deposit box. That was the day before Guido and Jilly went there to steal it.

  “If I‘d’ve known all this ahead of time,” Guido told me, “I never would have pulled the job.”

  Jilly got 1,200 ladies’ and children’s watches from a job at the airport. He brought samples into the store. As usual, he offered me a piece or all of the load if I could find a market. He gave me a sample to show, a Diantvs.

  Meanwhile he had located a potential buyer. A couple of guys were interested in part of the load. The next afternoon, we were in the back room when these two guys walked in.

  I recognized one of them as a guy I had arrested two years earlier on a hijacking charge, back before I went undercover and I was on the Truck and Hijack Squad.

  I had worked on the street only a couple of months up in New York. So it wasn’t as if I had arrested thousands of people. When you arrest somebody like that, you usually remember him. I remembered the face; I remembered the name: Joe. Just like the crook, he usually remembers the cop that arrests him. It’s just something that stays with you. There we were.

  I was introduced. Joe knew the other guys but not me. I watched his face. No reaction. I wasn’t going to excuse myself and leave, because something might click with this guy, and if it did, I wanted to see the reaction so I would know. If I left and something clicked with this guy, I could come back to an ambush. I watched his face, his eyes, his hands.

  They talked about the watches, the prices. I decided to get the guy in conversation. Sometimes if a guy’s nervous about you, he can hide it in his expression, just avoid you. I figured if I talked to him, I could get a reaction—either he would talk easy or he would try to avoid conversation with me. I had to be sure, because there was a good chance I would run into this guy again.

  “By the way,” I said, “you got any use for men’s digitals?” I had one and showed it to him.

  “Looks like a good watch,” he said. “How much?”

  “You buy enough, you can have them for twenty each.”

  “Let me check it out, get back to you. Where can I reach you?”

  “I’m right here every day,” I said.

  The conversation was okay. There was no hitch in his reactions. They chatted a few more minutes and left. The whole thing took maybe twenty minutes. The guy simply hadn’t made me. Those situations occur from time to time, and there’s nothing you can do about them, except be on your toes.

  A couple days later I asked Jilly, “Joe and that other guy, did they buy the watches?”

  He said, “Yeah, they took some of mine, but they didn’t have any market for yours.”

  From time to time somebody in Jilly’s crew would ask me if I had any good outlets for marijuana or coke. I was noncommittal. At that time I wasn’t trying to milk the drug side, other than to report back whatever I saw and heard. The FBI wasn’t so much into the drug business then. We didn’t want to get involved in any small drug transactions because we couldn’t get authority to buy drugs without making a bust. We were still operating on a buy-bust standard, meaning that if we made a buy, we had to make a bust, and that would have blown my whole operation. So in order not to complicate the long-range plans for my operation, I pretty much had to steer clear of drug deals.

  Guido came up to me at the store. “You got plans for today?” he asked.

  “No, I’m just gonna hang out. I got nothing to do,” I said.

  “Take a ride with me. I gotta go to Jersey.”

  We took Jilly’s car, a blue 1976 Coupe de Ville. We drove across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Staten Island. We drove around Staten Island for a while, then recrossed the bridge back to Brooklyn.

  I said, “I thought you said you had to go to Jersey?”

  “I do,” he said. “I gotta meet a guy.”

  We drove up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, and headed north on the FDR Drive. Obviously Guido had just been cleaning himself, making sure nobody was following him, with the run to Staten Island. We crossed the George Washington Bridge into Jersey. We took the Palisades Parkway north.

  A little after noon we got to Montvale, New Jersey. At the intersection of Summit Avenue and
Spring Valley Road, Guido stopped to make a call at a phone booth. He got back in the car and we just sat there.

  “We wait,” he said.

  About a half hour later a black Oldsmobile pulled up beside us. The driver motioned for us to follow him. We followed him north for a few minutes, across the Jersey line into New York. We pulled into a busy shopping center in Pearl River. Guido and the other driver got out and talked. The other guy was about 6’, 180, with a black mustache. Guido signaled for me to get out of the car.

  The guy opened his trunk. There were four plain brown cardboard boxes in there. We transferred the boxes to Guido’s trunk.

  Guido asked, “How much is in there?”

  “You got ninety-eight pounds,” the guy said. “That’s what you gotta pay me for.”

  We got back in the car and headed for Brooklyn.

  “Colombian,” Guido said, referring to the marijuana in the trunk. “We should get $275 a pound. On consignment. I got access to another 175 pounds. The guy said he could also supply us with coke, but not on consignment. Money up front for blow.”

  I unloaded the boxes and put them in the back of Jilly’s store. The next day when I came in, the boxes were gone. They didn’t keep drugs in the store. Guido handed me a little sample bag. It was uncleaned—stalks, leaves, seeds. “Think you can move some of this?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I never moved any of this stuff through my people. I’ll ask around.”

  I held on to the sample for a couple of days, then gave it back. “Nobody I talked to could use it,” I said.

  None of these guys used drugs themselves, so far as I could see. To them it was strictly a matter of business. If these guys had been dopers, it might have been a different story. They really might have tested me. But the fact was that the way you proved yourself with these guys was by making scores, making money.

  According to the Mafia mythology, there was supposed to be a code against dealing drugs. In the old days there wasn’t a huge amount of money to be made in drugs, and they didn’t do it. Now that’s where the money is, forget any so-called code. Like anything else with the Mafia, if there’s money to be made, they’re going to do it.