Donnie Brasco

by Joseph Pistone

  The next day I came into the Motion Lounge wearing the same brown-checked sport jacket I wore a lot in Florida.

  “Donnie, you got to get rid of that fucking jacket.”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “You look like a fucking tourist. I don’t even like it for Florida. Let’s go get some fucking clothes that don’t embarrass you.”

  He took me to a clothing manufacturer who was a friend of his, and I bought a couple of jackets and pairs of slacks. “I feel better now,” Sonny says.

  Boobie had told Nicky Santora that I needed some samples of Quaaludes to take back to Florida, and at the club Nicky said that he had to see a guy about it that afternoon. When I was about to leave to catch my plane, Boobie said the samples were over at Boot’s place, the Capri Car Service across the street.

  We walked over there. Boobie took a small brown paper bag out of the desk and gave it to me. I put it in my pocket and left for the airport.

  On the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a car pulled alongside me. It was agent Pat Colgan, who was heading the surveillance team. He motioned for me to follow. We pulled off the road near the airport. I took the bag out of my pocket and opened it. The pills were in a plastic bag inside the paper bag. We counted twenty-five. We initialed and dated the bag, and Colgan took it with him to turn it in.

  I went on to La Guardia and flew to Tampa.

  19

  THE CONTRACT

  Rossi and I drove across Florida to Hallandale and went to Joe Puma’s Little Italy restaurant. We walked in at seven P.M. Sally Paintglass was already there. We went over and sat down.

  “Joe ain’t here,” Sally says. “I can’t find him. The people here, his wife, they don’t know where he is.”

  Puma, afraid we might be coming to whack him, had fled.

  “I know. I just talked to Lefty. Sonny is ripping.”

  “His partner is supposed to be here at eight o‘clock. I drove down from New York, drove straight through. Then I found out this guy ain’t here. I was fucking mad.”

  “The other guy know where he went?”

  “I spoke to him on the phone. He went up north. So let Sonny put him on a fucking plane and let him come.”

  “That’s what Lefty told Sonny: Tell these fuckers, Joe and Steve, to come up here. Sometimes Sonny’s too easy.”

  “He figures the guys will be nervous if you call them up there,” Sally says. “They’re both a little scared. See, we’re doing them a favor to come over here in their home grounds.”

  “Yeah, so they feel at ease.”

  “I brought my wife so the cocksuckers would feel comfortable. Because the other guy was dodging me all night. I said to him, ‘Come to the hotel and have coffee. My wife’s here, bring your wife.’ ”

  It was a simple, if ominous, proposition. We were there to tell these guys that they belonged to Sonny. We wanted them to accept that and relax. We didn’t want them to think they were still on the other side and be gunning for us.

  Steve Maruca came in. He always looked like an intimidating old-time gangster. “Geez, it’s hot in here,” he says, sitting down with the three of us.

  Compared to the last time, though, when I had seen him with Lefty, he looked nervous and whipped. His voice was a little shaky. “Ain’t it hot here?”

  Sally turned to me privately. “I don’t want to be rude or nothing, but I don’t know Tony. Could you tell him to go sit at another table while we discuss?”

  Tony went to a table by himself.

  Maruca fidgeted. “You say you got those three, uh...”

  We explained to him that the three captains were gone, there was new leadership, everybody was now under Sonny Black.

  “Does everything look good?” Maruca asks. “Everything’s settled?”

  “Everything is finished,” Sally says. “Just with that one guy. If you hear anything, right away call.”

  “I seen him, only met him once, at the wedding when Mike’s son got married. I talked to him for a minute.”

  “It’s a must,” Sally says. “Anybody who sees him, it’s a must.”

  I say, “He sniffs, you know. Three thousand dollars a day, he sniffs coke. That’s why he’s gotta come out of the woodwork, to get that shit.”

  “Wow,” Maruca says. “How do you keep a habit like that?”

  “He’s a no-good fucking kid,” Sally says. “Wanted to live off his father’s record. Sonny Red. Very nice guy.”

  “I only met Sonny Red about three times,” Maruca says, distancing himself quickly. “I don’t know him.”

  “He was a gentleman,” Sally says, “but everybody makes mistakes.”

  “Things like this happen,” Maruca says. “You can’t question.”

  “No, there’s no questions,” Sally says. “One thing you gotta realize. Anything happens, it happens for a reason. ”

  Maruca clears his throat. “And you can’t bring it up and you can’t give opinions.”

  “There’s a reason for everything that’s right,” I say.

  “I wasn’t aware, you know. Mike called me and said, ‘Listen, everything’s fine, just stand pat, and there’s no more talking about it.’ ”

  “Right.”

  “This is why they sent me down here at a big expense,” Sally says, “because youse guys would feel comfortable. I mean, they didn’t want to send two guys you didn’t know.”

  “If they sent somebody we didn’t know,” Maruca says, “we can’t talk to him. Gotta send somebody we know.”

  “What good is strangers?” Sally says. “So now you’ll feel comfortable?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Because I didn’t do nothing wrong. When you don’t do nothing wrong, you ain’t got nothing to worry about, right?”

  “Right,” we say.

  “Now my crew’s in power,” Sally says. “But Sonny Red, Phil Lucky, I’m gonna sit down and argue with them? They were in power long enough. Under-the-table power.”

  “But they were there,” I say.

  “Calling the shots,” Sally says.

  “I didn’t know what the fuck was going on,” Maruca says. “He wasn’t telling me nothing at all. He was telling me very little.”

  “Now we’re working under an honor system,” Sally says. “You gotta be honorable amongst our fellows, right?”

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Maruca says.

  “Well, you’re with the right guy,” I say, “with Sonny.”

  “Yeah, he’s gonna be a big shot now,” Sally says. “Because if the doors open up there, he moves. We’re all under Sonny Black. Everybody.”

  “In other words, you told them—Sonny Black.”

  “Any problem, you call me,” Sally says.

  “There ain’t no problem,” Maruca says. “What have I got to lose here?

  “You did the right thing,” I say.

  “If I’d have done something wrong, I’d have been loony.”

  We got back on the subject of Anthony Bruno Indelicato, my target. “See, he’s got to come out,” I say. “That stuff, when you take it, you’re only high like twenty minutes. Then you need more. It’s not like heroin where you stay four or five hours. That’s why they get crazy.”

  “Marone,” Sally says, “this guy needs sacks full.”

  “That’s why it costs so much,” I say. “So he’s gotta come out of the fucking woodwork. He had connections down here for that stuff.”

  “I never saw him before,” Maruca says.

  “I met him three or four times,” Sally says. “And I remember his mouth.”

  “The only time he does anything is when the coke is up,” I say. “Otherwise, forget about it.”

  “Our guy over there said that he’s capable of anything,” Sally says.

  “He might come in and start fucking shooting,” I say.

  “He come into the O.K. Corral,” Sally says, “he didn’t care.”

  “You gonna be around here?” I say. “Because I’m gonna be down here for a
few days looking for this kid, so if I need something, you know . . . Can I get you over here?”

  “Use my home number,” Maruca says. “I’ll come running. You want me heavy, just say, ‘Come heavy.’ ”

  “Okay.”

  “Just tell him it’s chilly out, get dressed,” Sally says.

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t wanna say that,” Maruca says. “Just say, ‘I’m buying a car and I want you to check it out.’ ”

  “Okay. Nobody down here knows me. I’ll know him, but he doesn’t know me at all, so I can go in a lot of these joints. I’m at the Holiday Inn down here at the beach.”

  “How long you gonna be down?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’d like to go home sooner if he could clean the dishes up,” Sally says. “For once we’re independent, completely. There’s no fucking dictators.”

  “That’s right,” I say.

  “Hope Lefty’s in favor,” Maruca says.

  “Forget about it,” I say.

  After the meeting I called Sonny to report.

  “You’re gonna have to do a lot of traveling back and forth for me,” Sonny says. “Say hello to that fucking clownzo with holy underwears.”

  I called Lefty. He knew that Puma wasn’t in Florida—he was in New York.

  “I met here yesterday with him,” Lefty says. “Everything is straightened out with him.”

  I told everybody that I was hitting a lot of joints looking for the kid. I did show my face around. I wasn’t worried about running into him—or having somebody run to me with a tip that he was around the corner—which would have put me in a bad situation. After all, the mob was looking for him. So was the FBI, which hoped to snatch him off the street for his own protection, at which time I could tell Sonny that I had done the job. If the mob and the FBI couldn’t find him, I didn’t have much to worry about.

  The only thing some of the people at the Bureau were concerned about was that as word got round that I had the contract on Anthony Bruno, he might start looking to whack me out.

  Sally and I stayed in the Miami area for about a week. Then Sonny called me. “I don’t think he’s down there. I think we got him up here in New York. So you go on back to Tampa.”

  A couple of days later, during my routine daily call, Lefty says, “What’s happening?”

  “Nothing. Just out seeing if I could hustle anything up, make some bread.”

  “I hope so. I hope so.”

  “Nothing going on?”

  “No,” he says. “Just buy today’s Post, that’s all.”

  “I don’t get it down here until tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow you get it. Give me a call in the morning.”

  The article in the New York Post had the headline: MOB SNUFFS OUT AMBITIOUS BOSS.

  The article said that the body of Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato had been found in a shallow grave in a vacant lot in Ozone Park, Queens, and described the body as “bullet-riddled.” A couple of kids had been playing, and they say a cowboy boot sticking out of the ground.

  Two close associates of his were missing and presumed dead. I found out that the day before the article, the New York Police Department had notified the FBI that the body was positively identified as Sonny Red, and that he had died of gunshot wounds.

  I called the next morning. “I saw that article.”

  “Yeah. Heh! There’s a lot of warm heat over here. Forget about it.”

  “Over that?”

  “Yeah. Over a lot of things.”

  “We’re all right, though, huh?”

  “Lotta heat. But I can’t say nothing. Our phones over here are no good no more, you know?”

  Now that there was open warfare, with key family members being murdered, Headquarters wanted to pull me out and close the operation. They wanted to close it right away, by June 1. More murders were expected. Jules Bonavolonta felt that since I was close to Sonny and had been given a contract, I myself was a target to get whacked. I could understand their concern, but I didn’t agree with it.

  I was so close to getting made and becoming a real wiseguy that I could taste it. Soon Rusty Rastelli would be out of prison. I was sure that Sonny planned to move fast on it. He gave me the contract so that I would have that credential when he put my name up. He needed as a close ally a soldier he could trust and who could face other wiseguys as an equal. Sonny had already said that I would be doing a lot of traveling for him. As a made guy, I would have enormous clout as his emissary. I would be able to sit down with anybody. As a wiseguy, I would be Sonny’s partner. Sonny could have used me almost like an ambassador, an intermediary with other families.

  The help I could give to other investigations, as a made guy, was limitless. When it ultimately became known that I had penetrated the mob and become a made guy, it would humiliate the Mafia and end forever the myth of the Mafia’s invincibility. I wanted to stay under until at least August.

  There were arguments against becoming a made guy. Some felt that if I became made, I would have less flexibility and independence. I would no longer be excused for “dumb mistakes,” which were really things I had done, moves I had made or not made, for the benefit of the investigation. I would have to do what they told me to do. I could be ordered to commit crimes. Jules was one of those against my staying in and getting made.

  Primarily the question boiled down to safety. Nobody thought I was safe enough any longer. They felt that we had already made a bundle of important cases, and it wasn’t worth the risk of staying under just to make a couple more. I felt safe enough. As much as it hurt to face ending the operation after five years, I had to accept the decision.

  We had a meeting outside Washington, D.C., at the Crystal City Marriott. Rossi, Shannon, Jules, me, various supervisors, and Headquarters people and case agents. There were several other operations involved in one way or another with ours, and that made it rather complex to end our operation cleanly. We needed to give these other operations time to bring their work up to a point where they could do without me in the picture. They went around the table. Everybody was asked to cut estimated time. If somebody needed a month, they were asked to wrap up in two weeks. After going around and around, we got a fix on the amount of time needed by everybody concerned.

  We set a date to end the operation: July 26.

  Shortly after that, we had another meeting to finalize the ABC’s of closing up. That was in New Jersey, at the Howard Johnson’s near the George Washington Bridge. The two big items on the agenda were to determine what telephones we wanted to put wiretaps on, and which Bonanno guy we should approach first to tell of my true identity.

  The two matters were related. Nothing about our operation would be made public until we had indictments, months down the line. In the meantime, when the operation ended on July 26, agents were going to reveal my role to the Bonannos so that they didn’t go after me as an informant. Historically the mob did not seek vengeance against cops and judges, because that brings down too much heat on the mob. The second reason was that we wanted to stimulate a lot of telephone conversations that would contribute to the evidence of mob business, locations, conspiracy, who was who.

  To pick up these conversations we needed wiretaps. For wiretaps we needed court orders. For court orders we needed to provide as much up-to-date supporting information as possible. We needed to be specific. You can’t just walk into a court and get a hundred wiretaps. We needed to finalize these decisions now, so we could get the court orders and install the taps by the time I came out.

  We pinpointed the most important phones to tap, those used most by the most important people, where the most business was transacted.

  Then we turned to who to tell first. Almost everybody at the meeting said it should be Lefty. He was the most involved with me on a daily basis. He would get on the phones and scream to everybody and let slip all kinds of information.

  I insisted that it had to be Sonny. Sonny was the top Bonanno guy on the st
reet now. He was calm and cool and rational. Lefty would get on the phones and scream to everybody about everything under the sun. But Sonny would make more important calls and would be more specific. Sonny’s orders would be more serious and would be taken more seriously. There was no question about it, it had to be Sonny.

  They agreed on Sonny. Then the question was: Who should tell him? Some thought I should tell him. There was no way I would be the guy to tell him. That would be the worst kind of slap in the face. It would be rubbing salt into raw wounds. It would be unfair and unnecessary. It should be other FBI agents, including somebody Sonny has met before so that he will believe what he is told.

  Everything was set. I went back to work.

  Now the job no longer was to penetrate deeper into the family. I was simply to work for as much information as possible in the six weeks before I had to come out. Actually that wasn’t so simple. I still had to play my role. I still had to maintain my personality and character—I couldn’t start looking especially eager to learn things all of a sudden. For the mob it was business as usual, and it had to seem like that with me, too; which included navigating through the family warfare.

  Some people at Headquarters wanted us to branch out all of a sudden and start asking questions of other people about other people, for some last-minute intelligence. But we resisted those requests. If we made a mistake of pushing too hard, suddenly we wouldn’t even have six weeks anymore. We might have to pull out in a day.

  Boobie’s daughter was going to get married, and we were all invited to the wedding on June 20. I went up to New York on June 15 to be with Sonny and the crew. They were still looking for the kid, Anthony Bruno.

  On my way into the Motion Lounge I ran into Nicky Santora. I said, “The kids’s not in Miami, Nicky. We scoured the fucking place.”

  “We got a few feelers out now. We’ll know this week. He might have crawled into a hole and stayed for a while. But when he comes out, we’ll get him.”