“Ah, you’re okay with me,” he says at last. “I like you.”
“Then don’t embarrass me. As far as I’m concerned, right now everything’s forgotten, nothing ever happened, we have a new start.”
That was the end of the conversation. He peeled off and went back to his luncheonette. He never mentioned anything about it, but there was an edge between us after that. He never forgot.
He offered me a job. Mirra wanted me to handle his slot-machine route, make the collections. “I’ll give you three hundred bucks a week,” he said.
That was strange. I knew he respected my abilities, but I couldn’t be sure what was cooking in that off-the-wall mind of his. There was no way I could take the job, because if I did, I’d be married to the guy, under his thumb, like an errand boy—which is what everybody was to Mirra. I’d be looking over my shoulder all the time.
I said, “Look, Tony, I’d be happy to help you now and then, you know. But I got some things going, and three hundred a week just wouldn’t be worth my while to get tied up.”
“Fine,” he said.
I told Lefty about the job offer. “You did the right thing, Donnie,” he said. “Anybody that gets hooked up with that cocksucker ends up getting fucked over or whacked.”
Not long after that, Mirra went on the lam. He snuck out of town in a Volkswagen. He was wanted by the state on another narcotics rap. They caught up with him after about three months, and Mirra was back in the can.
He was sentenced to eight and a half years in New York’s Riker’s Island Prison. Lefty said, “See how tough he is with those niggers out there.”
I was through with Mirra—for a while.
Besides the bookmaking operation, there were all kinds of scams and schemes around. Little ones and big ones. These guys might pull off a $100,000 score one day, rob a parking meter the day after. Anything where there’s a dime to be ripped off.
The key was in the number of scams. Two hundred dollars isn’t a lot, but if you’re hitting up fifty scams for $200 apiece, you’re making some money. We had counterfeit credit cards and stolen credit cards. You could always beat those once or twice before it got hot. They would go in with these cards and buy a lot of electronic equipment that they could sell.
A guy named Nick the Greek regularly supplied Lefty with manifests of cargo ships docked over in Jersey. Lefty would have stuff stolen to order. He showed me the manifests so I could check through them and see if I wanted to buy anything—radios, luggage, clothes. He and his crew could provide all kinds of phony documents. He had a guy in the Department of Motor Vehicles who supplied him with blank drivers’ licenses. You just had to type in the information. One guy paid Lefty $350 for six phony New York State drivers’ licenses and six phony Social Security cards.
For settling a beef between owners of a company at the Fulton Fish Market, Lefty and two of his associates were given twenty percent of the ownership, plus a salary of $5,000 a month. “It’s a shame,” he told me after meeting with the other owners at his club, “that my shares couldn’t be put in my name.” Wiseguys didn’t like to show income or ownership of anything. The cars they drive are almost always registered to somebody else. Lefty didn’t file tax returns.
A typical scam was how we worked cashier’s checks. Lefty told me he had access to cashier’s checks from a bank in upstate New York. “We got a vice-president up there that will authorize cashing the checks when anybody calls him up,” he said. The checks would be used to “buy” merchandise, which we could then resell.
He introduced me to a guy named Larry, who used to own a bar on Seventy-first Street. Larry was the contact on the deal. Larry said he had sat down with some friends of his in the banking business and figured out the best way to work the scam.
He had the stamp machine to certify the checks. He had several guys besides me to pass them. He had eight checks and provided us with a list of eight names, which were the names to be used on the checks. He provided New York State drivers’ licenses and Social Security cards for IDs on the eight names. Bank accounts had been opened in these names. There just wasn’t money in them to cover these bogus checks. When a business would call the bank for verification, giving the name on the check, this vice-president would okay the check. In order to pull this off before the bank caught up with the scheme, all the checks had to be cashed within one week. If we worked it at maximum efficiency, the checks could be worth $500,000.
Larry had a list of stores where we could buy merchandise with the checks, stores innocent of the scheme but places Larry knew could accept cashier’s checks. I was supposed to use the name and ID papers of “John Martin,” and be working for a company named Outlet Stores. In case the merchant wanted to verify that Outlet Stores existed, Larry gave me a number for him to call, where someone would answer “Show-room, Outlet Stores.”
I was to go into a store and select the merchandise I wanted to buy, then tell the merchant I would be back with a cashier’s check in the proper amount. Then I would call a number to reach a guy named Nick. I would give Nick the name of the store and the amount, and Nick would fill in the check and stamp it “certified.”
The guys passing the checks would be spread out in the New York-New Jersey area. I was directed to go to a certain store on Orchard Street, in New York’s lower east side, and buy around $4,000 worth of clothes.
I went to the store, picked out $2,660 worth of men’s clothes, and told the salesman I would be back shortly with a certified check. I left the store and called Nick.
Nick said to meet him at Lefty’s club in an hour. Nick handed me the check, marked with a blue “certified” stamp.
We went back to the store, picked up the clothes, and loaded them in the trunk of his car. Other of his guys would take care of selling the stuff from all the purchases of all the guys.
A week later Larry met me at Lefty’s. He said that he had had trouble getting rid of the clothes I had bought and that he had finally gotten $1,100 for them. After expenses he had $600 left. “I had to give the banker his cut, see,” Larry said. “And then the other two main guys, they hammered me for a bigger cut. You know.”
Lefty was disgusted. “Forget about it,” he said. “Just give us what you got for us, and don’t come back around here no more.”
Half of the $600 was Larry‘s, so he gave me $300. I had to split my end, as always, with Lefty.
I came out of this whole big deal with $150, which I passed on to my contact agent.
After the operation the FBI reimbursed the stores.
Lefty introduced me to a guy named “Fort Lee Jimmy” Capasso (because he was from Fort Lee, New Jersey), a capo in the Bonanno family and a partner of Nicky Marangello. One day I was waiting around in front of Toyland when Fort Lee Jimmy came over and said, “Donnie, like to talk to you.”
He was in his fifties, always seemed like a decent guy.
He took me aside. He says, “Donnie, you seem like a pretty sharp guy. I just want to give you a piece of advice. This business we’re in, you get old fast, and a lot of things you do now you can’t do when you get older. Lot of these guys you see around make a lot of money, then they get older, fifty or sixty, and they’re broke because they didn’t save anything. And now they can’t make so many good moves anymore. So my advice is, Donnie, find somebody you can really trust. Every time you pull a score, take some of that money and give it to that friend and have them keep it for you. And make the rule with that friend that he won’t give you any of that money until you like retire. You can’t go to this guy tomorrow and ask for a grand or two, because he won’t give it to you—that’s the rule you’ve set up. Just keep doing that over the years, so when you get older and can’t be out stealing every day, you got yourself a nice little stash. You don’t have to worry about being old and broke, like a lot of these guys.”
He was recommending a little Mafia IRA, back in 1977.
8
LEFTY
Like most wiseguys, Lefty Guns Ruggier
o still lived in the same neighborhood where he was born and raised.
He lived in a big old apartment complex called Knickerbocker Village on Monroe Street, a few blocks south of Little Italy. A lot of wiseguys lived in there, including Tony Mirra. Lefty invited me up there often.
Lefty’s apartment was a small one-bedroom on the eighth floor, overlooking the interior courtyard of the complex. He loved tropical fish and had several tanks of them. He had a big color TV and a VCR, and a cable connection into which he had tapped illegally, like all the wiseguys, so it was free.
He didn’t have air-conditioning. Lefty hated air-conditioning. On the hottest, most humid days, he wouldn’t let me turn it on even in the car. He chain-smoked English Ovals, which made the air everywhere he was worse—especially for a nonsmoker like me.
He was a great cook, any kind of food. I would go over there to eat a couple of times a week.
Lefty had been divorced for a long time. His girlfriend, Louise, was a nice girl from the neighborhood. I got along good with Louise. She put up with a lot. Lefty had no sensitivity and sometimes treated her badly, just like he treated everybody else. But at the same time he was protective of her and quite faithful. She had a full-time job as a secretary.
When Louise’s mother died, she asked me to come to the wake. I didn’t know her mother, but I was complimented to think that Louise liked me well enough to include me. I remember it was raining like hell when I went to the wake. It was dreary and sad, and put me in a strange mood, sharing this kind of time with somebody who thinks you’re somebody else.
You develop feelings for people, even in this job. It’s easy to accept deceiving the badguys, because that’s the game. Knowing that for five or six years you’re deceiving others in their world who are not badguys, who don’t know what’s going on, who just happened to be born to or married to badguys, that’s tougher on your mind. Some of those people develop feelings for you too. While you are allowing this to happen, you know that in the end, they are going to be hurt by what you are doing. And they don’t even know who you really are.
Lefty had had four grown kids. I got quite close to Lefty’s kids, really became a friend to them. They would come to me with their problems. His youngest daughter, in her mid-twenties, lived with his ex-wife in the building and worked at a hospital. She was a hard worker. Every year she had a booth at the Feast of San Gennaro, where she sold soft drinks and fruits. His son, Tommy, who was about twenty-eight, also lived in the building. He was a thief and had done some work for the family. Basically he was a free-lancer. But he also had problems with heroin. He was an on-and-off junkie.
Lefty was continually asking me to talk to Tommy, get him straightened out. He wanted me to help keep him off drugs and to get him to settle down to work. Sometimes Tommy and I would be in Lefty’s club in the early afternoon watching our favorite soap operas, like All My Children. Lefty would come in and see that and throw a fit. “Turn off them fucking soap boxes!” he would bark. “You should be out stealing and looking for business. Come on, Donnie, get Tommy busy out on the street.”
Two of Lefty’s daughters were married to wiseguys. One had the misfortune to be married to Marco.
I met Marco at the Bus Stop Luncheonette, Mirra’s place. Besides being a jewel thief, Marco was supposed to be an expert safe-and-lock man. He was also a drug dealer and a loudmouth. Other than a few conversations about jewels, I never had much to do with Marco. He lived a flashy life, vacationed in Florida where he had a big boat. He boasted that he could move all the dope that anybody could provide him with.
When I met Marco, he was worried about his partner, Billy Paradise. “Billy has turned stoolie,” Marco said. “Billy could put me away twenty-two times if he ratted me out about the jobs we pulled.”
Lefty was also worried about Billy Paradise. “We gotta think about having that guy whacked,” he said.
“I’d like to take him on my boat and throw him to the fishes. I ever tell you that story, Donnie, about the guy that thought I was gonna whack him on my boat?”
“No.”
“One day I asked this guy to come out with me in my boat, you know, in the East River, my speedboat. He came along, but he kept watching me, wouldn’t turn his back to me. Finally I asked him what the hell was the matter. He said he was afraid that I thought maybe he had turned stoolie and I was gonna shoot him and throw him overboard. I said, ‘You dumb bastard. If I wanted you whacked, I wouldn’t have bothered bringing you out in my boat. I would have hit you downstairs at the club while you were playing cards and rolled you up in a rug and dumped you in the river right at South Street. That’s what we do with stoolies,’ I told him.”
He was looking at me. I didn’t know if he was just telling me a story, or if he was giving me a message about what happens to informants.
“Well, I hope this guy Paradise don’t rat anybody out,” I said.
One day Marco just disappeared. The word was he got into skimming drug profits that were supposed to go to the organization. He was never found. Word on the street was that the contract had gone to Lefty, to whack his own son-in-law. But Lefty never said anything about it.
Louise knew what kind of business Lefty was in, that he came and went when he wanted to, like all the wiseguys do. They seemed to have a comfortable relationship. Lefty talked openly in front of her, but without swearing. That’s a thing about wiseguys. You can go out and kill somebody, but don’t swear in front of a female. And if a female swears, she’s a puttana—a whore. “If Louise said ‘fuck,’ I’d throw her out the window,” he said.
In September they decided to get married. Lefty asked me to be best man. The wedding was at City Hall. They were all dressed up. Lefty was so nervous that he forgot to pick up the license. The ceremony was at five P.M., and the license bureau was closed. The judge got his clerk to go down and get the license.
I gave them $200 as a wedding gift. We went to CaSa Bella to celebrate. Maybe ten people. Mike came over and sat down with us to have a drink. Then we went uptown to Château Madrid, Lefty’s favorite place, where we saw a floor show with flamenco dancing.
“You ever do a hit on anybody, Donnie?” Lefty asked.
“I never had a contract, if that’s what you mean. I killed a couple guys. One guy in a fight, another guy that fucked me out of a score and we got into a beef.”
“That ain’t a hit.”
“If you kill somebody, you kill somebody, what’s the difference?”
“No, Donnie, you don’t understand. It ain’t that simple. That’s why I gotta school you. Hitting a guy on a contract is a lot different than whacking a guy over a beef. On a beef, you got a rage about the guy. But on a contract you might have no feelings one way or another about the guy, it might not even concern you why the guy’s getting hit. You got to be able to do it just like a professional job, with no emotion at all. You think you could do that?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see. Lot of guys think it’s easy, then they freeze up and can’t do it. Next time I get a contract, I’ll take you with me, show you how to do it. Generally you use a .22. A .22 doesn’t make a clean hole like some bigger calibers. Just right behind the ear. A .22 ricochets around your skull, tears everything up. Next contract I get, I’ll take you along.”
What would I do if and when that situation came up? As an agent, I can’t allow a hit to go through, can’t condone it, certainly can’t participate in it, if I know it’s going to happen. But I could find myself in the situation all of a sudden. I didn’t always know where we were going or why, and it wasn’t appropriate to ask.
If a hit is going down and I’m on the scene, do I risk trying to stop it and maybe getting killed myself? My decision was that if it came to it, if the target was a wiseguy and it came down to whether it was him or me, it was going to be him that got whacked. If it was an ordinary citizen, then I would take the risk and try to stop it.
By midsummer of 1977, I was really b
ecoming accepted and trusted and could move around easily. I knew most of the regular wiseguys down on Mulberry Street, not only Bonannos but guys from other crews. I was given the familiar hugs and kisses on the cheek that wiseguys exchange. I could come and go in any of the joints I wanted. I could move in and out. A lot of times we would hang out at 116 Madison Street, the Holiday Bar, a place so dingy that I would only drink beer or club soda out of a bottle, I wouldn’t touch a glass. Social clubs, coffee shops, CaSa Bella. We would hang around, play gin, and everybody would tell war stories to each other and bust balls.
I met guys like Al Walker, Tony Mirra’s uncle, whose real name was Al Embarrato. Mirra’s nephew, Joey D‘Amico, who went by the name of “Joe Moak.” Big Willie Ravielo who ran the numbers in Harlem for Nicky Marangello; Joey Massino, a beefy, broad-shouldered, potbellied man who was rising quickly through the ranks; Nicky Santora, who had served time for bookmaking and aspired to be a partner with Lefty; the Chilli brothers, Joe and Jerry.
And then there were Frankie Fish, Porkie, Bobby Smash, Louie Ha Ha, Bobby Badheart (because he wore a pacemaker), Joe Red, and so on.
Real names didn’t mean anything to these guys. They didn’t introduce by last names. I knew guys that had been hanging out together for five or ten years and didn’t know each other’s last names. Nobody cares. You were introduced by a first name or a nickname. If you don’t volunteer somebody’s last name, nobody’ll ask you. That’s just the code. The feeling is, if you wanted me to know a name, you would have told me.
The reason I knew guys’ last names was through our own FBI identification. I always tried to get some kind of ID on everybody that came through the scene, even if it was just a nickname. You never knew who might turn out to be important somewhere down the road, or in some other investigation.
I told Lefty I had a girlfriend in Jersey and that sometimes when he called my apartment and I wasn’t there, I was probably with her. Over a period of time the topic of my girlfriend came up a lot. I never volunteered a name. He never asked what her name was. Nobody did.
Donnie Brasco Page 15
