Donnie Brasco

by Joseph Pistone

  “You guys are really fucking wiseguys,” the sergeant says. “That’s all right. You’re going to jail.”

  Now it was about two-thirty in the morning. They took us back to King’s Court.

  Sonny was still sitting at the round table, smoldering like a volcano about to go.

  “Him too,” the cop says. “We take all you New York guineas in, you’ll understand a little better how we do things down here.”

  They put the cuffs on Sonny.

  I wanted to smack these cops for hassling us, insulting us, for being unprofessional. Rossi and Shannon were both ex-cops. We all knew what proper procedures were for cops.

  There was nothing wrong with these cops uncovering an illegal operation, which was the gambling at King’s Court. But our undercover operation was being jeopardized because a couple of them were taunting us unnecessarily. What if Sonny blew up? What if somebody got trigger-happy because of all the insults and bullshit?

  They marched the four of us out in handcuffs—three FBI agents and a Mafia captain.

  Sonny leaned toward me. “Where’s your identification?”

  “Trunk of my car.”

  “Show it. Otherwise we’re all gonna be in jail. We need somebody out on the street to get us out of the can.”

  In the parking lot I say to the cops, “Hey, I just remembered where my ID is. It’s in the trunk of my car. I put it there so it wouldn’t get stolen.”

  Shannon says, “Mine’s in my glove compartment, I just remembered.”

  The cop had to take my cuffs off so I could open my trunk. “This is the last chance you get,” he says.

  Shannon and I produced our driver’s licenses and were released.

  Sonny was in the back of a patrol car, his hands cuffed behind him. The window was down. “Donnie.”

  I went over. The cops were talking together on the other side of the car.

  “I got a knife in my pocket. Take it or they’ll hit me with a weapons charge too.”

  I reached in through the window and into his jacket pocket and pulled out the long folding knife and slipped it into my pocket.

  “Hey!” a cop hollers.

  I had a frozen moment: Maybe he thought he saw a gun, or that I was cutting Sonny loose.

  “Get away from that car! You don’t want to be rearrested, do you?”

  “No, sir.” I got in Rossi’s car and followed the sheriff’s cars to the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in New Port Richey.

  In the small jail they booked Sonny for resisting arrest and Rossi for gambling. I asked the officer what the bail was. He said it was $1,000 for Sonny and $5,000 for Rossi.

  At four A.M., it was too late to find a bail bondsman, which was the route we wanted to take to protect our identities. Eddie and I headed for the Tahitian, to find Carmine.

  I told Carmine what had happened after I got everybody out of the club.

  “Donnie, all I got on me is a thousand dollars,” he says.

  We went back to the jail. They were photographing and fingerprinting Sonny.

  “Tony,” I say, “I only got enough money to bail one out, and it ain’t you.”

  Shannon started laughing, I started laughing. Tony didn’t laugh. They finished up with Sonny, we paid the bail.

  “See you tomorrow,” I say to Tony.

  When they searched Sonny at the jail, they had found his driver’s license in his pocket. It had his real name on it, but the name didn’t mean anything to them. As his occupation he had given, “route salesman, self-employed.”

  On our way to the hotel, Sonny was ripping mad. I couldn’t get him to cool down about Rossi.

  “Yesterday the Old Man gave us the Pasco County territory to do whatever we wanted,” he says. “Now look how fucking embarrassed this leaves me. I’ll fucking strangle Tony.”

  “We had a lock on it, Sonny. Somebody must have snitched.”

  “Find out. Whoever gives us the snitch, we’ll pay. Then we’ll whack out the snitch.”

  “We’ll try to find out.”

  Sonny and Carmine took the next flight out to New York. We got hold of a bail bondsman and bailed Rossi out.

  We went to the club. The sheriff’s boys had wrecked the joint. The money from the night was gone—Sonny’s $10,000, the FBI’s $2,000, about $8,000 in profits. They had taken both of Rossi’s guns. They had emptied the desk and dumped everything all over. They had even torn apart boxes of Christmas ornaments and scattered them around. They had taken the slot machine.

  Rossi was not in a good mood, anyway, after a night in that rattrap jail, and now this. “I’m gonna grab that fucking sergeant and smack him in the mouth. I want to go down there and tear that fucking station apart.”

  We were all steamed. We ourselves had conducted a lot of legal searches. You just search for what your warrant says, you don’t wreck a place. We were out $20,000, half of which was Bonanno family money. We had embarrassed Sonny, and now there was the threat to kill the snitch. And we had to worry about whether the cops might stumble onto our real operation and blow our cover. We had to worry about what really had happened to cause the raid.

  The anonymous phone tip was a ruse because nobody lost much money and there were no hassles. But somebody had turned us in. We narrowed it down. Rossi had some beefs with another club owner who complained that we stole his business. Rossi was pretty sure that was the guy. But so what? We couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t tell Sonny. We had to keep Sonny from finding out.

  The next day I called Sonny with a progress report: It was possible the charges would be lowered or dropped because of an illegal search, but the prosecutor wouldn’t know for two or three days.

  “You make sure Tony gets me that ten grand back,” he says. “I don’t care how he gets it.” He wanted the bail money to repay Carmine, and he wanted his driver’s license back. “What happened that they came to begin with?”

  “Sonny, it was a fluke.” I told him that Captain Donahue had been on the street until midnight and everything was okay. Then somebody lost a few bucks at the blackjack table, got pissed off, went outside, and called the cops. I figured it was safest just using the story the cops gave us.

  “Listen, Donnie, there’s a big gift in it if he can give us the guy who called.”

  “That’s what we’re working on now. In fact, Tony was on the phone with the captain for a couple hours yesterday.”

  “What’s he doing on the fucking phone? It could be that guy we’re talking about, and he could be wired. That’s Tony’s voice, that’s better than fingers. Tell Tony to meet the guy in person. Let’s start getting smarter instead of stupider.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s a tap on the phone, you hear it? There’s an echo.”

  My recorder again. “It’s this phone here, Sonny. They were supposed to come and change the wire, but they didn’t come yet.”

  Sonny wouldn’t talk to Rossi for about three weeks. I had to hear from Lefty every day about how I fucked up because I didn’t keep a better control of Rossi to make sure he didn’t fuck up.

  “Get the fucking money from Tony,” he tells me. “Remind fucking Tony that he’s nothing without us. And listen, Donnie, forget about how it’s not Tony’s fault. You should be looking out for me, not Tony.”

  Finally Sonny said he had to have the money and told me to take it out of the shylock money and both of us bring it to New York.

  Rossi and I each carried half the money. Sonny and Boobie met us at JFK, and we handed them the $10,000.

  “Okay,” Sonny says. “Now, I want you guys to start making connections for coke and heroin—especially the H, because I got the outlets up here. Also, I bought a machine to make Quaaludes, so find some connections for the powder to make them with.”

  Eventually the charges against Sonny were dropped. Rossi, however, was supposed to go to trial. We got it put off and put off until the entire operation was over.

  One of the regular King’s Court members brought in a doctor
friend from Tarpon Springs. The doctor talked to Rossi about having friends in the Mafia. Talk got around to drugs. The doctor said he’d done a lot of dealing and had even been busted for drugs. In fact, he had access right now to $1 million worth of heroin—sixteen kilos—in Wichita, Kansas. He had just come back from Wichita. He said it was confiscated heroin in the possession of an ex-FBI agent. He said he could put together a deal for us. If he had known we were interested, he said, he would have brought a sample back with him.

  I told Lefty and Sonny about the approach, and they wanted us to push it, get a sample.

  The doctor said he would have a sample brought to Florida. A date was set for delivery.

  I joined Lefty in Miami. The plan was that Rossi would get the sample from the doctor and bring it to us in Miami where Lefty had a guy on hand to test it for quality. Sonny was standing by in New York with a potential buyer. Lefty and I took a room in the Deauville to wait for Rossi.

  I kept calling Rossi to see if the doctor had shown up. Lefty kept calling Sonny to say the doctor hadn’t shown up yet. We didn’t dare leave the hotel room together for fear that we’d miss the call from Rossi, saying he was on his way. It was like waiting for a sitdown. We ordered up room service, or one of us went across the street to get sandwiches at a deli.

  Every couple of hours we made our phone calls. Rossi kept saying he hadn’t heard from the doctor. After three days we gave up. I went back to Holiday, Lefty went back to New York.

  We pursued the deal for weeks. The doctor said there was one delay after another in getting the sample to Florida.

  “I’m embarrassed with this thing,” Lefty says. “Everybody’s disappointed up here. I’d like to shake him down for just the expense money. It hurted me. You gotta put your foot down. Grab him by the throat. I didn’t say smack him around. Just grab him by the throat.”

  The three of us sat down to look at the situation—Rossi, Shannon, and me. Together we represented a lot of years of street experience. Rossi got it first. He says, “This guy’s setting us up. Somebody’s trying to do a number on us with this heroin. This guy ain’t got access to any more heroin than the man in the moon. This is a setup by somebody.”

  We agreed. Rossi had it right on the nose. This doctor had been busted for drugs before. Somebody had him in a squeeze and was using him to trap us.

  It could have been state or federal cops, or the DEA—the Drug Enforcement Administration. It could have been badguys, maybe amateurs who didn’t know how to finish off the deal. We couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. But somebody had this doctor in their clutches, and it looked like he was scared to go through with it.

  Rossi decided to carry it out, lean on the doctor to bring us the sample. Nobody would ever see us touch it.

  Rossi called the doctor and said he had twenty-four hours to produce the sample. That night the doctor showed up.

  He came into the club at nine P.M. He was very nervous. He took Rossi aside and told him he had tossed the sample into the shrubbery just outside the door.

  The doctor had a drink at the bar. After a while Shannon ambled outside. It was pitch dark, which was great, because nobody could see anything. He felt around and found the little bag. He brought it into the office.

  The next day we had it tested. It was talcum powder. The doctor swore, in a panic, that he didn’t know, he had just accepted the sample. We believed him. Because if we had been legitimate badguys, for sticking us like this we might have killed him. At least we would have given him a bad beating.

  Since we were agents, though, we couldn’t really do anything. “Next time you want to play around with somebody,” Rossi told him, “don’t play around with the big boys.”

  We never found out who set him up to set us up. We had enough of a reputation that we were aware of the chances we could be set up. We could be set up by a law-enforcement agency to take a fall, which would have jeopardized the operation. Or we could be set up by badguys jealous of our success or their turf.

  An undercover agent going by the name of Charlie Sacco—we called him “Charlie Chains” because he wore so much gold—was uncovering corruption and gambling involving the sheriff of a town near Charleston, South Carolina, and he set up a gambling hall. He brought Rossi into it because some of his clientele were Greeks that Rossi knew from the Greek community of Tarpon Springs and were frequent visitors to King’s Court. Rossi, Shannon, and I made a few trips to the Charleston area to play our roles on behalf of Charlie Chains.

  Rossi met a Greek named Flamos, who claimed he was from Harlem and could get us any kind of drugs in any volume we wanted.

  “Don’t bullshit me if you can’t produce,” Rossi says, “because the people I deal with in New York City won’t stand for it.”

  The guy insisted he had great connections.

  I came in as Rossi’s New York man. Charlie had rented a condominium right on the beach at the Beach and Racquet Club in Isle of Palms, where we stayed. He made an appointment for Flamos to come and see me.

  Rossi and I are lying on the beach. Flamos comes walking across the sand in street clothes. Rossi introduces me as his friend Donnie from New York. “Tell Donnie what you can get for us.”

  Flamos says he can get anything.

  “Heroin,” I say.

  “I got a direct contact in Katmandu,” he says. “But I need some front money to go to Katmandu, fifteen grand.”

  “Do I look like a fucking goofball or what? Katmandu?”

  Flamos gets indignant. “I don’t know you. How do I know you’re straight? I’m from New York too. I got some friends up there that are righteous people.”

  “If you got the right friends up there, ask them to check out Donnie from Mulberry St. who’s a friend of Lefty’s. If your friends can’t check out Donnie and Lefty from Mulberry Street, then your friends ain’t worth shit.”

  Flamos turns to Rossi. “I don’t want to get involved. Your friend’s coming on too strong.”

  “Hey,” I say, “you’re coming on that you can come up with anything under the sun, so don’t bullshit me.”

  “I’ll come back in two days,” he says.

  The next day, Flamos comes back and comes right up to me. “Look, Donnie, I’m sorry if I offended you. I checked with my friends in Harlem, and when I mentioned Donnie and Lefty from Mulberry Street, these guys had nothing but the highest respect for Lefty, and they had heard of you being with him. Geez, Donnie, I didn’t realize you’re with the Bonannos.”

  “Hey, let’s not have names here. We don’t mention families. The bottom line is, can you get us the dope?”

  “I can get the heroin, Donnie, but I got to go to Katmandu. Forget the fifteen, but I need five grand for traveling expenses.”

  “Forget the five and forget Katmandu. What could you bring here tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow? I got hashish in my stash. What I got is worth seventy-five grand on the street. I got to get twenty-five for it.”

  “All right, bring it over.”

  “Wait a minute, we gotta set up a correct deal, you know.”

  Rossi says, “What you do is, you deliver it to this warehouse we got, and when it’s in there, you let us know, we’ll have somebody check it. You come back, we’ll give you the money.”

  “That’s your correct deal,” I say.

  When he left, Rossi says to me, “We ain’t giving this guy twenty-five grand. Once that shit’s in the warehouse, it’s ours. We’ll give him five grand, and let him holler.”

  Flamos makes the delivery to the warehouse. Charlie Chains goes over and checks it and calls us to say that it’s all there, good stuff. Rossi hands Flamos the money.

  Flamos counts. “Ho, wait a minute, there’s only five grand here.”

  “That’s what you get,” I say. “You don’t want it, give it back and you’re out everything. Because the hash stays with us.”

  “Oh, man, this ain’t gonna go down with my people.”

  “Go to your people in Harlem
if you want to, go see whoever the fuck you gotta see. They’re gonna contact Lefty. Lefty’s gonna say we gave you twenty-five and you must have glommed the other twenty. Who they gonna believe?”

  So we got $75,000 worth of hash off the street at a cost to the government of only $5,000, while actually enhancing our credibility as legitimate badguys.

  Lefty called me to Miami because he wanted us to look at a lounge together. He said that the lounge at the Sahara Hotel, next to the Thunderbird, might be available for $15,000, and Sonny gave us the green light to go after it.

  “All the wiseguys from New York hang out at the Thunderbird,” he says. “We can get all the overflow. Because all the guys will come, New Yorkers and ex-New Yorkers like Joe Puma, and people will follow them. Get a good piano player.”

  We hung out at the bar in the lounge and looked the place over. We agreed that it looked good.

  I was aware of the tension within the Bonanno family, because the infighting was causing tension with Lefty and Sonny. I couldn’t ask a lot of direct questions about it, but I strained to pick up what I could. Partly that was for intelligence. Partly it was to make sure I stayed alive.

  Now, at the hotel, Lefty gave me some news.

  “The Commission met in New York. They named Sally Farrugia acting boss for how long Rusty is in jail.”

  Salvatore “Sally Fruits” Farrugia had been a captain.

  “When Rusty gets out, Sally will step down,” Lefty says. “And Sonny is now the main captain. Every family has a main captain. When Rusty gets out, Sonny wants to become consiglieri.”

  “Oh, yeah? I didn’t know that.”

  “The consiglieri has to be voted by the whole family, you know, not appointed like the captains. Another thing, the Commission ordered the two sides in the family to keep the peace while Rusty’s in the can.”

  “Is there gonna be peace or what?”