Donnie Brasco

by Joseph Pistone

  “Okay, Tony,” I said, and I pocketed the bills. I wanted to avoid a big argument with him, and possible consequences. But it was not easy, letting somebody like that talk to you like that.

  Mirra told me that Hippopotamus was owned by Aniello Dellacroce, the underboss of the Gambino family. Mirra introduced me to Aniello’s son, Armond, who he said ran the place.

  Armond had an illegal “after-hours” place at 11 West Fifty-sixth Street, with blackjack and dice tables and a roulette wheel. I went there with Mirra a few times. It was a comfortable, carpeted place, free food and booze, all kinds of girls waiting on you while you gambled. It opened at two or three in the morning and ran until maybe eight or nine.

  Aniello Dellacroce died of cancer in 1985, while under indictment on RICO charges; soon after that, Armond pled guilty to federal racketeering charges, but he disappeared before sentencing and at this writing is still a fugitive.

  We were at a bar in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Tony was talking to some guy on the other side of him and I was listening. I moved my elbow and knocked over my drink, spilling it on the guy on my other side. “Sorry,” I say.

  “ ‘Sorry’ don’t clean my coat,” the guy says. “Why don’t you assholes go back to New York where you belong.”

  “Hey, I said I’m sorry.” I get a bar rag from the bartender and wipe it up.

  Now this guy gets a drink, puts it on the bar, and knocks it over on me. “Take your dumb ass back across the river,” he says.

  Nothing’s going to appease this guy. I see Tony listening to this, getting that cuckoo look in his eye, his hand in his jacket pocket.

  My theory is, you don’t get into an argument because you don’t know what will develop—some guy pulls a gun or goes outside and brings back twenty guys. Plus Mirra may be on the verge of pulling out his knife to stick this guy. I have to end it quick.

  I say, “You wanna step outside?”

  “Yeah.” He gets up off his stool, and I give him a shot right there, because I’m not going outside. Another guy jumps in, Mirra smacks him. The first guy comes at me again, I clock him with a bottle.

  I say to Mirra, “Let’s get the fuck outa here.”

  “Yeah, let’s go,” he says.

  We scram before the cops come.

  “Why didn’t you just stick the cocksucker?” Tony says. “I was gonna do it for you.”

  Embarrassed? Yeah, I was. Here I am an FBI agent, a thirty-eight-year-old man, getting into a bar fight. I didn’t even want to be in that joint with Anthony Mirra. But because I was, that’s the kind of thing that can happen. And when it does, the best thing you can do is handle it quick so it doesn’t get out of control. I don’t believe in arguing.

  Often on Friday and Saturday nights we hung out at Cecil’s. I learned that Cecil’s was one of the joints Mirra had muscled in on. The owners paid him a weekly cut, a salary for the privilege of having him around. Sometimes he’d tell me to watch the bartenders and manager to make sure they weren’t clipping the joint.

  If he didn’t make $5,000 there on a weekend, he went cuckoo. One Friday night, out of the blue he decided he wasn’t making enough money out of the joint, so everybody would be charged five dollars at the door. The manager and I tried to talk him out of it, because you couldn’t just suddenly change the policy on the regular clientele, but Mirra wanted the money.

  “Tonight everybody gets charged a fin,” he said. “Everybody.”

  He told the kid at the door to collect, and sent me over there to make sure everybody paid.

  Customers complained, but they paid. Then three guys came to the door with three girls. “We don’t pay no charges,” one of them said. They started to elbow their way past the kid at the door.

  I recognized the guys as wiseguys, friends of Mirra’s. But I felt like busting some balls. I stepped in front of them. “Everybody that comes in tonight pays five bucks,” I said.

  “We don’t pay.”

  “Then you don’t come in.”

  “Who the fuck are you? Who you with?”

  The question meant, What mob crew was I with? I played dumb. “I’m here by myself.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “I don’t wanna know. But if you’re some kind of big-time operator, you ought to be able to come up with thirty bucks for you and your girlfriends.”

  “I wanna see Tony Mirra!”

  “You wanna see Tony, give me five bucks, you can go right in and see him.”

  Now the guys are very embarrassed in front of their girlfriends, and they start a ruckus, shouting and shoving. Mirra comes over.

  “These guys don’t wanna pay the five bucks, Tony,” I say.

  “Not these guys, you fucking idiot,” he says.

  “Tony, I’m just doing what you told me to do. You didn’t say wiseguys come in free.”

  “These guys get in.”

  “You guys get in,” I say to the bunch, giving them a big smile.

  “You’re a crazy bastard,” Mirra says to me.

  With a guy like Mirra, you had to allow yourself a little fun every once in a while, otherwise you would go wacko.

  I was sitting at the bar at Cecil’s. A friend of Mirra‘s, a guy I didn’t know well, came up behind me to pat me on the back and say hello. He ran his hand down my back.

  “What the fuck you doing?” I said as softly as I could manage. He grunted and walked away. I knew what he was doing. He was checking me for a wire. I saw him talking to Mirra.

  Later I was in the men’s room washing my hands. When I turned around, I bumped into this same guy. He quickly slid his hands down the sides of my jacket. I pushed him away. “I think you got the wrong guy, pal,” I said. I just left him standing there.

  Nobody could get close to Mirra. The only family he was close to was his mother. You could never get him to talk about anything personal. One day you might ask him, “How’s your mother, Tony?” He might say, “Okay.” Another day you ask him, and he might answer, “What the fuck you so nosy about?”

  He was always hustling broads. Women were attracted to him, even though he treated them like dirt. He was never married, but he had a load of girlfriends, everything from bimbos to movie stars. When he wasn’t hustling them, he was abusing them. He was just totally obnoxious. When a woman at Cecil’s complained that her umbrella had been stolen out of the coatroom, he said to her, “You think I care about a fucking umbrella? The thing for you to do about it is to get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”

  Then there was a time down at the South Street Seaport restoration project when one of the many street vendors, an old woman selling jewelry, was waiting to use the pay phone Mirra was tying up. Wiseguys spend their lives on the telephone. Mirra had been tying up the phone for about a half hour, making one call after another. When this old woman asked him politely if she could please use the phone, because that was the only phone in the area for the vendors to use, and they used it for business, Mirra said, “Listen, you fucking cunt, I’m using this phone. When I’m finished, I’m finished. Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll cut you.”

  He was telling a bunch of guys about this very big movie actress he was seeing. “I got her to give me a blow job while another guy was fucking her and she was jerking off another guy,” he said. I must have winced or groaned or something, because he said to me, “Aw, what’s the difference? She was so strung out on dope, she didn’t know what she was doing. Don’t act like a fucking fruitcake.”

  The Feast of San Gennaro is the biggest annual street festival in Little Italy, taking over Mulberry Street for two weeks in September. It’s a big tourist thing; people come from all over the country. It’s a religious festival, but on the street it’s all controlled by the mob. All five families are involved. Different captains each have a certain portion of a block that is his, where there may be five or six booths. You can’t just go to the church and say you want a booth at such-and-such a place. That is controlled by the mob captains. Anybody that puts a booth
in your section has to kick back to you. The more powerful captains control the sections closer to the center of the feast. And captains control the supplies. One captain might have control of all the sausage that comes in, another controls the beer. In other words, if you have a booth and want to sell beer, you go to the captain or his representative and say you want beer at your booth. He’ll send a guy to you that will provide beer. So they get a cut of everything. You have to pay for the space the booth occupies, and you have to pay a certain amount off the top as a nightly fee.

  During the Feast of San Gennaro everybody goes down and hangs around on the street, all the wiseguys. That’s the big thing to do. Eat food from the various carts. Some of the people with the carts and booths were itinerant carnival types, but a lot of them were neighborhood people that had had booths there for years.

  The day before the feast began in 1977, Mirra had met this girl who had a merchandise stand at South Street Seaport adjacent to the Fulton Fish Market, and he was hustling her.

  “I got her a slot at the feast,” he told me. “Drive me down there. I told her I’d help carry her stuff over to the feast this afternoon so she could set up.”

  I drove him down to South Street. She was nice-looking and pleasant. But there was something about her. We helped her pack up and drove her to Mulberry Street.

  Mirra says, “I’ll see you tonight, hon,” and we left.

  I say, “How well you know that lady, Tony?”

  “I just met her. I figure I’ll grab her tonight after the feast, spend a hot night.”

  “You sure?”

  “Who the fuck you talking to?” he says.

  Later that night Tony took off for his date. I was in a coffee shop when he came stomping in.

  “You knew she was a fucking lezzie!” he hollers. “And you didn’t tell me, you cocksucker! Son of a bitch. I went through all the trouble of getting her a booth at the feast. Know what I told her? I told her,

  ‘Don’t come back to that fucking booth tomorrow!’ “

  Psychologists could probably have had a field day with Mirra. For my part, he was a dangerous and necessary pain in the ass. He got on me for not hustling broads myself, or bringing any around. I just said I had a girlfriend in Jersey and one in California, but I kept that part of my life separate.

  Married mob guys typically have girlfriends. They’re not discreet about it. Other than that, there was much less skirt chasing than I expected. Women were always around and available, because they gravitated to these guys. Maybe they’d hook up with them later. But most evenings they just wanted to go out and have some drinks and talk over schemes with the other guys.

  My personal rule was that under no circumstances would I have anything to do with any women hanging around the mob. Regardless of morality, that kind of thing will come back to haunt you when you testify in court against these guys. By saying I had a girlfriend someplace else, the heat was off me. Occasionally, just so I seemed normal, I would bring somebody around for dinner, a woman who I had maybe met in my neighborhood. I’d show her a nice evening with the mob guys, take her home and drop her off, and that was that.

  At that feast in 1977, a bunch of us were sitting in a coffee shop on Mulberry Street at one A.M., Lefty and a couple other guys and a couple local girls. One girl was sitting next to me. Suddenly she’s rubbing my leg under the table. She says, “Where you going when you leave here?”

  “Over to see my girl in Jersey.”

  “Why don’t you stay in the city tonight?”

  This girl is the daughter of a wiseguy, and her father is in the coffee shop. I have to be careful not to insult her because she might tell her old man that I’m grabbing her leg or something, and then I’m history—you don’t do that to a wiseguy’s daughter.

  “I’m pretty true to my girl,” I say. “I promised I was coming over. I’d rather not lie to her.”

  “How come you never bring her around?”

  “No reason to.”

  “Well, if you ever get the urge to go out, give me a call.”

  “Okay, I will. Sometime when I don’t have to lie.” I squirmed out of that one.

  One of Mirra’s operations was coin machines. He dealt in slots, peanut vending machines, game machines, pinball machines. He had them installed all over the city in stores, luncheonettes, clubs, after-hours places. Slot machines, since they were illegal, would be installed in back rooms. He would take me along on his route when he collected the money from the machines and when he got new business.

  To collect, he just went in, opened the machines with a key, counted the money, and gave the store owner his cut—$25 or whatever it was. He would put the rest in a paper bag and out we would go. His route produced maybe $2,000 a week.

  To get a new customer Mirra would walk into a place, tell the owner he was Tony and that the store needed one of his machines. Often the owner would recognize him or the name and say something like, “Oh, yeah, Tony, I was just thinking of calling you to get a machine in here.” If the guy didn’t think he was interested at first, Mirra would say, “In the next twenty-four hours, check around, ask about Tony down on Mulberry Street. Then I’ll come back and see if you’ve changed your mind.”

  Invariably the owner had changed his mind when we came back.

  He was trying to get his slot machines into Atlantic City. He said the family had five hundred slots in a warehouse, and he was just waiting for his lawyers to come up with a way to get access for them along the boardwalk.

  Mirra says to me, “Drive me uptown.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I got to meet a guy that owes me money.”

  He was collecting on one of his shylock loans.

  We drive to a restaurant on First Avenue. We go in and stand at the bar. Pretty soon this guy walks in, tough-looking, about thirty. He comes over to Mirra and starts to open his mouth.

  “Don‘t,” Mirra says, holding up his hand. “Don’t mention anybody’s name or I’m gonna smack you right here.”

  Mob protocol is that if the guy says he talked to another wiseguy about the situation, mentions another wiseguy’s name, then Mirra would first have to talk to the other wiseguy. So he wasn’t giving this guy a chance to mention anybody’s name.

  Mirra says, “Just answer the question I ask you. Where’s my fucking money?”

  “Geez, Tony, you’re gonna get it, I’m just having a hard time, but I’ll have it for you, you know—”

  “I heard this now a couple weeks,” Mirra says. “But it don’t happen. Let’s take a walk.”

  Now I’m worried. If Mirra takes him out, this guy could end up in the alley next door. Mirra would beat him up or stab him. It was one of those situations where, as an agent, I had to intercede. But at the same time I had to maintain my role.

  I say, “Hey, Tony, why don’t you let me talk to the guy, save you the aggravation. I’ll take him out for a walk.”

  He nods to me and shoves the guy toward the door.

  I take him outside. I figure at least I can buy some time, let Tony cool down. I say, “Look, I just saved you. I don’t want to see you get killed, but next time it ain’t gonna be that easy. When we go back in there, you say, ‘Tony, can I meet you tomorrow and give you the money?’ And you better have it for him tomorrow, because I might not be around tomorrow. And you act scared, like I gave you a couple smacks, because that’s what I’m supposed to do. You don’t act right, I’ll stab you myself, because I put my ass on the line with him.”

  This tough guy is practically licking my hand because of his fear of Mirra.

  We go back in, and the guy goes right up to Mirra and says, “Tony, I’ll give you the money tomorrow, meet you anywhere you want, okay? Okay?”

  “The kid convinced you?” (Mirra sometimes called me “the kid.”) “Tomorrow. Right here.”

  I was always on edge with Mirra. He was always in arguments with somebody. You never knew what might set him off, turn him into a cuckoo bird. He had
no real allegiance to anybody. He was always in trouble with the law, which gave him a bad reputation on the street. I didn’t want to get tied up with Mirra, because you never knew when he would go back in the can. He was almost fifty years old, and he had spent more than half his life in jail.

  He was valuable for introducing me to people. He introduced me to his captain, Mickey Zaffarano. Zaffarano handled porn theaters and national porn film distribution for the Bonanno family. He owned several pornography movie theaters in Times Square and around the country. His office was at Forty-eighth and Broadway—Times Square—upstairs from one of his theaters, the Pussycat. Mirra had me drive him up to Zaffarano’s office a couple of times. Zaffarano also came down to Madison Street once in a while. He was a big, good-looking guy, tall and heavyset.

  Zaffarano eventually got caught up in the FBI sting operation called “Mi-Porn” out of Miami. When the agents went up to his office to arrest him, he started running away through the halls, and in the course of his run he dropped dead of a heart attack.

  Lefty Ruggierro had a little storefront social club similar to dozens of others in Little Italy. Coffee, booze, card tables, TV. Downstairs was another room for more serious card games. Members only. Men only. Associates of Lefty and the Bonanno family only. It was a place to hang out.

  In the back of the room was a phone and table, a place to take bets. Lefty was a bookie. Sometimes Mirra wasn’t there and I would bullshit with Lefty, chat about sports and what teams were hot to bet on. I began placing a few bets on baseball and horses, and on football when the pro exhibition season started—$50 to $100 just to help me be accepted. We started to develop a relationship. Lefty started calling me Donnie instead of Don, and that’s what everybody called me from then on.

  The daily routine at Lefty’s was not much different from what it was at Jilly’s in Brooklyn, except that it was more of a real social club, not a store. Guys talked about the sports book, the numbers business, who owed what to whom, what scores were coming up. They groused about money. It didn’t matter how much anybody made or anybody had; they always groused about it. They were always talking about squeezing another nickel out of somebody.