I hustle Larry out the side door.
“Pretty close,” Larry says. “Did you see that guy coming toward our table, the guy in the suit? He was a defense attorney from L.A. He’s seen me testify in court.”
“I got us covered from this end,” I say, “with Lefty, just in case.”
“Good,” he says. “And I’m outa here tomorrow, anyway. ”
This kind of situation—a chance discovery or somebody reporting back on you—can happen at any minute of any day. You can’t wait for it to happen and then think of a way to protect yourself. You have to lay groundwork to cover yourself ahead of time—all the time. I knew Lefty would get a call on this.
From the time I began in California, I stayed in virtual daily touch with Lefty. He didn’t know how to reach me directly. I said I was always moving around. While Lefty was schooling me, I was also schooling him about me. I wanted him to get used to the fact that I was unpredictable. I would be vague about what I was doing, where I was. When I needed to cover myself, he would already be used to my style.
I had a couple of “hello” phones where he could leave messages, and I called him. In this case, after meeting Larry and Johnny out there, I had called Lefty and told him about running into Johnny in California. “Guess who I bumped into in L.A.,” I had told him. “Johnny. He was out there on vacation, seeing a bunch of guys. He was with this one guy named Larry who was into some kind of stocks-and-bonds deal. In fact, I think I’m going to look into that. I think we can make some money there.”
That’s what I had told Lefty. Because even without this surprise at P. J. Clarke‘s, I knew that sometime when I was with Lefty at La Maganette, the bartender Johnny was going to say something like, “How’s that guy Larry in L.A.?” And then Lefty was going to say, “Who’s Larry?”
So this way I had already introduced the name to Lefty. I had also suggested that Larry was hanging around with Johnny rather than with me—just enough of an offhand twist to protect Larry and me.
Sure enough, the next day Lefty grabbed me at the club.
“Hey, Donnie, that guy you were with in L.A., what’s the story on him?”
“Larry? That’s the guy I told you about that I met through Johnny the bartender. The wheeler-dealer I told you I was trying to do a stocks-and-bonds deal with. What are you upset about?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m upset about. I got a call from Johnny. I wanna know the whole story, what you were doing with that guy at P. J. Clarke’s.”
“Hey, Left, all I know is, I meet this guy Larry in L.A. He tells me he’s got some stolen stock deals going. He’s coming to New York, and we plan to hook up. So we’re at P. J.‘s, and he’s got this three o’clock appointment at the Sheraton, for us to meet this guy on the stock deal. So we leave P. J.’s and go to the Sheraton. The guy doesn’t show. So I say, ‘Well, too bad.’ And I leave. That’s it. What’s the matter?”
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter, you jerk-off. That guy’s a fucking federal agent! Johnny said a guy came in while you were there, some lawyer, and he seen you guys leaving the table, and he says to Johnny, ‘I seen that guy testifying in court, he’s a fucking agent.’ That’s what he told Johnny. Johnny tells me you’re hanging around with a fucking federal agent!”
“Hey, Left, that’s hard to believe. But, anyway, I don’t care what he is, he doesn’t know anything about me. I didn’t tell him anything about us or anything else. All he knows is I might be interested in a deal. He doesn’t even know where to find me. Nothing to worry about, Left.”
“Maybe Johnny’s full of shit, Donnie. I don’t know. But stay away from this guy, Larry. Understand? Just in case. Don’t have nothing to do with him. Donnie, sometimes I think you’re not too careful.”
“Don’t worry about it, Left.”
So I couldn’t do anything more with Larry in the Los Angeles area. But he had his operation well under control. His cases eventually brought in some two hundred thieves, and the government recovered $42 million in stolen property.
If Larry hadn’t spotted that lawyer coming into P. J. Clarke‘s, my whole Mafia project might have ended right there.
Anyplace I traveled, I tried to touch base or make contact with any wiseguys that I knew of in the area—Bonanno guys or any others that I had met. That established me as a guy with connections, a guy good at freewheeling around the country, a guy with things going on. The more places I was seen, the more times I was recognized by wiseguys, the better my credentials.
Back in California, the Bureau had their eye on some restaurants and nightclubs in the San Diego and La Jolla area and wanted to know if they were mobbed up. I went to these places just to size them up first so I could talk intelligently about them.
Then I called Lefty. I told him I was hitting a few joints out there, trying to line some things up, and that it looked like I had found a couple of places where some wiseguys hung out or had a piece of.
“Why don’t you come out here, Left? Maybe we can get something going. If these joints aren’t already wiseguy joints, maybe we could do something to move in on one of them. And also, it’s nice out here—nice weather, the ocean.”
“I never been to San Diego. Is it like Miami?”
I booked us a room at the Sheraton, right on the water. I picked him up at the airport and carried his bags—catered to him the way anybody in the organization is supposed to treat their superior. I told him I had made a score recently and gave him his end.
During the day we toured San Diego, just the two of us, because neither one of us knew anybody in San Diego. Lefty was impressed. “Nice ocean,” he said. “Nice city. Clean. Not like New York. The people dress different.”
I took him to the San Diego Zoo. “This place is amazing,” Lefty said. “Think of the Bronx Zoo. Look how they really take care of this place. Donnie, San Diego is the kind of place where you can walk around and not be afraid of getting mugged.”
Everything he saw, he evaluated in terms of how it would go in New York, how much money you could make. “Can you imagine if we had this in New York, Donnie?” he’d say about some kind of store or vending operation or location. “We’d make a fortune.” Everything was a scheme or a scam.
Evenings we went to the joints the Bureau had targeted. I watched Lefty operate.
He would get into innocuous conversations with the managers or maître d’s: Nice place. How long you been in business? How’d you find dependable suppliers? Looks like you keep everything running real smooth. Anybody give you troubles with a place like this—the city or unions or anybody?
He’d size the place up, look for little things. He pointed out to me things he was seeing. Maybe there’s a guy hanging around the cash register not doing anything. See who talks to him. See if there’s a guy sitting at a certain table all the time, no meal in front of him, like he’s just waiting to talk to people. And people go over one at a time and sit down and have conversation with him and then leave. Watch how people treat him. See how the waitresses treat the guy. An ordinary citizen could look at this and not see anything. A wiseguy sees things if there are wiseguy things to see: how a person acts, carries himself, talks; what deference is paid to him.
We confirmed the Bureau’s suspicions. In one place Lefty knew a couple of the guys involved. Each of the others, he said, looked like they were either mob operations or mob-connected.
“We can’t fuck around with these places, Donnie,” Lefty said, “because they’re already mobbed up.”
To do my job better and to stay alive, I was working at picking these things up. I was adjusting my demeanor and the way I looked at things. So that I could ask the right questions and see the right things, I was learning not only how to act like a wiseguy, but also how to think like a wiseguy. When Lefty and I bounced around to different spots, I began to see the same things he did, pick up things the way he did. Like wiseguys, I was learning not to volunteer that I didn’t know things. Keep your mouth shut and absorb as fast as possible. T
he key is, you act like you know, so that by the time they find out you didn‘t, you do.
Lefty was the epitome of the wiseguy. He was at it twenty-four hours a day, scheming. On the street, in wiseguy situations, he was savvy and sharp and tough. That’s why he got a lot of respect from wiseguys. But you take him off his turf and you find out he’s just a small-town guy in some ways, unsophisticated about the rest of the world.
One afternoon we’re sitting in the lounge of a hotel, and there is this really nice-looking woman across the room who keeps looking at me.
“That lady can’t take her eyes off you, Donnie,” Lefty says. “Why don’t you invite her over to the table?”
I smile, she smiles. “Lefty, she’s probably a hooker.”
“Naw, Donnie, you’re nuts. She’s too nice. Good clothes. Hookers don’t dress like that.”
“Left, this is California. People dress different.”
“Not hookers. She’s probably a regular business lady. Come on, Donnie, she thinks you’re a good-looking guy, and she’d like to get to know you. Invite her over.”
The only way to stop Lefty when he got onto something was to do what he said. So I ask the waitress to invite the woman to our table. She comes over and sits down. Lefty doesn’t want to be in the way of this sweet flirtation, so right away he says, “Well, I think I’ll go up and take a little nap,” and he leaves.
I chat with the lady, and it doesn’t take five minutes to find out that she is a hooker. I go up to the room and tell Lefty. “I can’t believe it!” he says. “She didn’t have all the makeup or the short skirt or anything. How you supposed to tell?” He laughs. “Hey, Donnie, you got to watch yourself out here. You’ll lose all your New York instincts.”
Although he traveled a lot on mob business, he was used to somebody booking his flights. When he had to join me someplace, he wanted me to book his flights. I found out why one time when he had to book his own flight. He got intimidated and called me. “Donnie, at the airline they wanna know when I’m coming back.”
“We don’t know. Just tell them you want an open return.”
“What’s an open return?”
“That means you’ll have the return ticket already paid for and in your hands, but you just won’t have a date on it. Then when you’re ready to go back, you just call the airline and tell them the date you want to fly. ”
“You can do that?”
Lefty stayed about a week that first trip, then he wanted me to come back to New York with him. I told him I couldn’t because I had a potential big score that I had to look into. That pacified him. That meant money for him.
What I really had to do was go to Milwaukee. The Bureau had set up an operation there to bag the Milwaukee Mafia family, but it was slow getting off the ground. They contacted me to see if I had any ideas.
The undercover agent working the case went by the name of Tony Conte. Tony was a friend, a tough street agent. The boss of the Milwaukee family—which was answerable to the Chicago mob, rather than New York—was Frank Balistrieri. We knew that Balistrieri controlled all the vending-machine business in the city. The Bureau wanted to show that it was done illegally through hidden ownerships and mob muscle. The idea was for Conte to set up his own vending-machine business and try to get his machines into various stores and bars and clubs. Then if Balistrieri tried to muscle him out of business, we could make an extortion case.
Conte had set up his fake personal background, opened a small office in Milwaukee, applied to the city for a vending license, bought a couple of machines. And he went around to the clubs and bars trying to solicit business. But he hadn’t made any inroads.
The problem was, Balistrieri had the city tied up so tight that nobody would accept any of Conte’s machines. The places that Conte went refused his machines because they already had machines that belonged to Frank Balistrieri. Nobody wanted to move Balistrieri’s machines out to put Conte’s in.
After a month or so he still hadn’t been able to install any of his machines, and nobody had approached him to warn him off. So he called me and asked if there was any possibility that I might get some of my New York contacts involved. If I could get somebody from New York interested in Conte’s vending business, then they might try to form a partnership with Balistrieri.
So I made a trip to Milwaukee. I checked into a motel and called Conte. He came over with the case agent, Mike Potkonjak. It didn’t matter if Conte was seen with me, because he was operating undercover, anyway, so nobody out there knew who he really was. And only the case agent in Milwaukee knew who I was. They filled me in on the operation—exactly what Conte had done so far.
It sounded feasible to me. I said I would try to introduce the idea to Lefty and see what happened.
I went to New York. I had given up my apartment, so on these visits now I took a room either at the Holiday Inn on Route 80 on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, or at the Sheraton Centre on Seventh Avenue. It was just a place to sleep, anyway. Most of the time I was with Lefty. He was always after me to come back to New York to stay; he didn’t like me being in California. Partly it was because he missed me, partly it was because he really thought California was for lying on the beach and hustling broads and getting your brains scrambled. He was always after me to take an apartment in Knickerbocker Village, where he lived. In fact, eventually he had it all set up for me to take an apartment and just keep it for my visits.
Whenever I was coming in, he’d say, “What do you want to eat when we get home?” Because he would cook for me and his wife, Louise. He would go out and buy special veal cutlets from the best outlet. Or maybe he’d make lasagna from scratch. Or if we decided to eat out, we’d wait for Louise to get home from work, then go to a Chinese restaurant. He liked to talk to me about his kids, his grandchildren, any problems he was having with Mike Sabella or anybody else.
On this trip I planted the seed for Milwaukee.
For everything I did, every operation with Lefty, I first laid a foundation, introduced the matter in casual conversation, and dropped it. Brought it up again, dropped it. Then finally brought it up and made it stick. On Milwaukee I didn’t want to lay it all out at once, about having a friend out there who’s trying to get into the vending business and is having trouble, etc. Because I figured I was going to be cultivating Lefty for other operations down the line, and I didn’t want him to say, “Hey, how come you always got a friend in trouble someplace?”
We’re just shooting the breeze about California, and I say, “You know what, Left, I ran into a guy that I knew ten years ago in Baltimore. We pulled a few jobs together back in those days. Now he tells me he’s been semi-legit for all these years since, and now he’s about to go into business. I think he’s going into the vending-machine business.”
“Oh, yeah?” Lefty says. “Tough racket.” That’s all he says.
I didn’t even tell him where it was. I just let him swallow that first mention, let him digest it. Conte was ready to move in Milwaukee. I had started priming Lefty. In coming weeks I would mention it again in little ways. All we needed now were the right circumstances. I went back to California.
The Bureau had come up with some more places they wanted checked out. “You know, Left,” I said over the telephone, “I really like California. You ought to give it a chance. You’re always talking about how you’d like to open up a bar of your own somewhere. I’ve got a line on a couple places out here. Why don’t you come out for a little vacation; we’ll look these places over.”
So in May, Lefty came out to San Diego again. I showed him a good time. We went to the track a few times, and we looked into a couple of bars and restaurants.
Then I got a break on Milwaukee.
Lefty got a call from his daughter. His son, Tommy, had been arrested for armed robbery in Manhattan. Apparently he had tried to stick up some guy who was carrying a bunch of diamonds in the midtown diamond district. Cops chased him; he fired some shots.
The fact that
Tommy had committed a robbery and shot at cops and been caught was no big deal. That’s part of the game, to get arrested and spend time in jail. A wiseguy doesn’t worry about his kid being in jail like a citizen would. What made it a big deal was that it turned out that the guy he robbed was a connected guy with another family.
Lefty was very upset. “Can you believe it?” he says to me. “That dumb shit Tommy. This guy is connected to a heavyweight. There’s gonna be a sitdown over this, Donnie. I just hope I can work something out so Tommy don’t get whacked out over this. Donnie, I need a thousand right away. Where can we come up with a grand?”
He was hitting on me for money to take to the sitdown so he could patch things over with a payoff. That didn’t mean he didn’t have the money. It was another instance of a wiseguy avoiding using his own money if at all possible-even when his son’s life was in danger. He knew I didn’t have the money either—or that I would be as reluctant as he was to part with my own.
But it was an opening for me. Typically money was the key. These guys, money is their whole life, scamming people, getting money from somebody for free. They’re never going to go to a bank for a loan.
I say, “Hey, maybe we could call that guy—remember that old friend I told you about, the one I knew in Baltimore? If he’s got money to open a vending-machine business, maybe we can get something from him. It’s worth a shot.”
“Yeah, try that,” Lefty says.
I went to my room and called Tony Conte in Milwaukee. “Tony, I think we got the opening. We might have to come up with some bread for Lefty.” I explained the situation. I never intended to give Lefty all he asked for. “Maybe we can get away with five hundred.”
“That’s no big deal,” Tony said. “Let’s do it.”
We always had to consider the value when we laid out relatively big taxpayer bucks. But here we were talking about the possibility of getting to a major crime boss, what the hell’s $500?
Donnie Brasco Page 17
