Текст книги "Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia"

Автор книги: Joseph D. Pistone

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Over the door there is a transom. I hear giggling. They have boosted up one guy, and he is looking through the transom and laughing like hell at my predicament.

Then they come in and make the bust.

We started hearing about armed robberies in the rooms. Pimps would hide in the rooms and stick up the johns when they came in.

One of the girls that was working with her pimp this way picks me up and takes me to the room. This time I know the cops are backing me up because this is serious.

I say I want to hang my jacket up in the closet. The pimp isn’t in the closet. Then I have to go to the bathroom. The pimp isn’t in there. I go back out in the room with the hooker. I give her the money. She is very edgy. I know the pimp is in there.

It dawns on me he is behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. The curtain was open, gathered at one end of the tub. I hadn’t moved it to look in that corner of the tub. I tell her, “Why don’t you get undressed. I just want to wash my hands again.”

The pimp will have a gun. But if I pull my gun and the girl starts screaming, who knows what the guy will do? So I’ll just have to surprise him.

I go into the bathroom, turn on the water in the sink, then spin around and smack the shower curtain away. The pimp is standing there with an automatic in his hand. I slap his arm, put a wristlock on him, make him drop the gun. He starts trying to punch, but it’s over. With the commotion the cops come into the room, and I turn the dude over to them and leave.

After eighteen months I was transferred to Alexandria, Virginia. That office had a heavy load of applicant cases—background investigations on people nominated for government jobs. Newcomers to that office were routinely assigned to a squad that got the brunt of those cases. Suddenly I was in a tame area. I asked the Special Agent in Charge—the boss of the office—if I could work criminal cases once I got the applicant cases done. He said he didn’t care. So I would get all my applicant cases out of the way by maybe noon. In the afternoon I would hook up with guys who worked criminal cases.

I developed a string of informants who were instrumental in solving a lot of bank robberies and nabbing fugitives. This was the end of the VietNam era, and in Alexandria, like in Jacksonville, I worked a bunch of deserter cases.

I was in Alexandria four years. It was a nice life. We belonged to a country club where my wife was social director.

Along the way I had gone back to school at Quantico for short “in-service” training courses in such things as gambling and undercover work. In those days there was no such thing in the Bureau as long-term undercover assignments. Undercover was a day or two in a “buy-bust” situation. For example, you get information that somebody has some type of stolen property, you negotiate a buy from this thief, and then the thief is arrested.

I also had SWAT training when they first formed the Special Weapons Assault Teams in the early 1970s to deal with hostage situations such as were occurring in skyjackings or with potential terrorist assaults. The teams were formed from specially picked agents who showed superior physical skills. We were trained in the use of various weapons, methods of assault on a building; we rapelled with ropes from buildings, cliffs, helicopters. There was survival training in the wilderness and in the water. We worked on hand-to-hand combat. I loved the camaraderie, the physical challenge.

In 1974, I was transferred to New York City and put on the Truck and Hijack Squad.

We had a good squad, a busy squad. We worked at least six days a week, sometimes two or three days around the clock. But long hours was not unusual in the Bureau. The average agent probably gets to work at six-thirty or seven A.M. and works a twelve-hour day. And we were intercepting six or seven hijacked loads a day.

And then came my break into long-term undercover work—the assignment that led to my work with the Mafia.

The Tampa, Florida, office was working on a ring of thieves that were stealing heavy equipment and luxury cars. They discovered the ring by chance. They had arrested a teenage boy on some unrelated charge. But it turned out that the kid’s father was involved in the theft ring.

The father was desperate to keep the kid from going to jail. He came to the agents and said, “You cut my son a deal, I’ll work for you busting up a big ring that’s stealing heavy equipment and luxury cars all over the southeastern United States.”

With cooperation from the Florida Highway Patrol, the Bureau made the guy an informant to see what he could produce. He proved himself. The ring was directed by a guy out of Baltimore and operated all over the southeast. They stole everything to order: trucks, bulldozers, road graders; Cadillacs, Lincolns, and airplanes.

The Bureau thought that maybe they could introduce an agent to work undercover with the guy in busting the ring. It’s always better to have an agent’s testimony in court. The guy said that the only thing was, the agent would have to know how to drive things like an eighteen-wheeler and a bulldozer. That led the Bureau to me. I was one of the few agents with that kind of experience.

I sat down alone in a room with the guy, whose name was Marshall. We had to get a sense of each other, decide whether we could trust each other enough to risk our lives together. He was massive, maybe 6’1”, 250, with reddish hair, a thick red beard, and huge hands. He wore overalls. He was a truck mechanic who could steal anything. I told him I didn’t know how to steal cars and trucks. “No problem,” he said. “I can teach you that in a minute.” We talked about our attitudes, experiences, families. I felt comfortable with him. He felt comfortable with me. He said that prior to meeting me he had the impression that agents were guys with wing-tip shoes and pin-striped suits who didn’t know anything about the street. But I was different. “You seem like you could handle yourself okay,” he said, “and come off as a thief. I can work you in.”

For this operation I needed a name. I didn’t give it much thought. For some reason a name had stuck in my head from an old movie or book or something: Donald Brasco. That’s who I became. The Bureau furnished me with a driver’s license and credit cards under the name. The plan wasn’t conceived originally as being long-term undercover. But it ended up extending over about six months.

Marshall gave me a rundown. The head of the ring was a guy named Becker. A lot of the thieves who scouted locations and actually hooked the stuff were young guys, nineteen or twenty years old. Heavy equipment was usually stolen from construction sites. Cars were stolen right off the new-car lots. Customers were construction companies and businessmen. In the case of the luxury cars, customers were just people with enough money.

Marshall had to deliver a stolen Ford XLT pickup to a couple of guys in Lakeland, Florida, who were supplying trucks to outfits working the phosphate mines. That was the first thing I would go along on.

We were about to leave when the agents in charge of the case said they wanted to wire me up. They wanted me to wear a Nagra tape recorder. I wasn’t in favor of it because it was so hot and muggy that you couldn’t even wear a windbreaker. I had on a Banlon shirt and Levi’s. “How the hell am I going to conceal a Nagra?” I asked. “We’ll tape it to your back,” they said.

This was my first outing, and I didn’t want to seem like a prima donna, so I agreed to it. They taped the recorder, which is four by six inches, three-quarters of an inch thick, to the small of my back. In the mirror I looked like I had a growth under my shirt.

Marshall said he would introduce me to the other thieves as a guy he met through a guy named Bobby, who had been killed in an automobile accident. He told me enough about Bobby to get by. Since Bobby was dead, nobody could question him.

We drove the pickup to the storage garage where we were to meet the customers. We got out and met the guys. They walked around the truck, looking it over. I had to keep moving so that I was always facing them and nobody got behind me, because I had this hump on my back. The customer, Rice, was talking about how many trucks he can sell to the guys in the phosphate mines, and how much other equipment he can use, and he kept moving around, so I kept moving around to keep my back from his view.

The price we put on this truck was $1,500. In 1975, it was worth probably $4,000. Finally Rice decided that this particular truck didn’t have enough extras to suit him, so we would have to hook him another one.

When I got back to the Holiday Inn where Marshall and I were staying, I called the agents. “That’s the last time I’m wearing a goddamn wire,” I said. “I felt like a hunchback.”

As it turned out, the machine malfunctioned and the tape didn’t come out, anyway.

In a couple of days we were supposed to meet the ringleader, Becker, in Panama City, Florida, out on the panhandle on the Gulf. We stayed at a motel in Lakeland, east of Tampa. Marshall spent the weekend teaching me the business. He taught me how to get into a vehicle using a tool called a “slim jim” that you slide down between the outer door panel and the glass to hook the locking bar. He taught me how to take out a dashboard in five minutes to get at the vehicle identification number. The VIN was stamped in metal and riveted. We would pop the rivets and replace the metal with plastic tape stamped with a new number. He taught me how to “hot-wire” ignitions and how to punch out the ignition barrel on the steering column by using a “slide hammer.” Once the ignition is popped out, you’ve bypassed the ignition lock and can start the engine. You replace the ignition the next day with a part from an auto-parts store. He taught me how to disconnect steering-wheel locks from under the car. It was a real school.

We went to Panama City to meet Becker. He was a rough, ruddy, fast-talking ex-convict and con artist. He bragged about having friends in the mob, in motorcycle gangs, on the docks.

He pumped me on how long I had known the late Bobby and on what I did. I said I hadn’t known Bobby all that long, but we did a few jobs together and so on. I didn’t try to pass myself off as a longtime car thief because I still didn’t know all that much about it. I said I was mainly a burglar and that lately I had spent most of my time in California and Florida.

He bought it because Marshall was there to vouch for me.

I also asserted myself. I told Becker that some of the gang may have more technical knowledge than I do about hooking cars and trucks, but I knew about planning, organization, security. So if I was going to go out with these young punks, I was going to have a say in how the operation proceeded. I said I wasn’t going to be just a $100-a-night car thief; I wanted to be in on the business end of it too.

I had to take a leadership attitude, because I had to keep these guys in check when we went out on jobs. While we were getting evidence I had to steer the thing away from violence. So I told Becker that Marshall and I had to call the shots.

He said okay, he would pass that on to the younger guys.

Becker told me about orders he had lined up, specific models, colors, extras. We were selling everything at a price around one quarter to one half of retail value. For Lincolns and Caddies loaded up with extras and worth maybe $12,000, he was getting $2,500. White Freightliner truck-tractors were bringing $10,000 to $15,000. Pickups were bringing $1,500 to $2,000, dump trucks $4,000.

The payoffs we got went to the FBI. Marshall received a monthly fee as an informant. He couldn’t keep anything from these jobs.

Becker wanted us to hook a White Freightliner. He had spotted one in a lot just outside Panama City and had a customer in Miami willing to pay $15,000 for it. The next day Marshall and I went to case the lot. We parked across the street at a liquor store. We wanted to see where the truck was, whether it was being moved, and to time the operation.

We’re sitting there twenty minutes when a sheriff’s car pulls in and the officer comes over to us. He says the liquor-store owner has become suspicious and wants to know why we’re sitting there.

“Just making up our minds what to buy, Officer,” I say. “Now we know.” We go into the liquor store and buy some beer.

That night, before we went back to hook the tractor, Marshall gave me the rundown on it. I was going to hook it myself, to see if I could do it. From memory he described the wiring and what I had to do. The White tractor was a snub-nosed job, complete with a sleeper compartment and air-conditioning, the cab up over the engine. Everything I had to do could be done from inside the cab.

We went to the lot and cased it for a while to check when the sheriffs patrols went by and how much time there was between them. Marshall stayed outside as the spotter. I went into the lot. It took me five minutes to get in, start the engine, and drive the tractor out.

I drove it the first leg, three hundred miles to Lakeland, where we would sleep a few hours during the day before heading on to Miami. We parked it in the parking lot at our motel. While we were sleeping, our agents went over the Freightliner, getting all the numbers and data from it for records.

The next day we drove the tractor to Miami and met with Becker and the customer. The customer was supposed to resell it to a contractor for road building in Europe. But the customer had changed his mind and didn’t want it.

Becker had to go back to Baltimore. He told us: “You guys stash this thing somewhere around here until I can find another buyer.”

Where were we going to stash a White Freightliner in Miami? I told our guys about it. The guys from the State Highway Patrol said we could stash it at the Department of Transportation yard, outside of Miami. I wasn’t too hot on that, putting our stolen truck in a government yard. But they said it was a big yard with several barns and it would be well hidden.

So that’s where we put it, for the time being.

Most of the car and truck lots had no special security, just lights and a chain across the entrances. Usually we had maybe fifteen minutes or a half hour between police patrols. If everything went smoothly, we could hook a car in five minutes.

When we went out on a job, I was on my own. There was no surveillance by the FBI or the Highway Patrol. On an undercover operation like this you don’t want either the badguys you’re working with or any law-enforcement agency to spot a surveillance. Cops aren’t clued in about what’s going on. The fewer people who know about it, the better.

I carried no FBI identification. I didn’t want to risk getting caught with it. There was no official policy about carrying ID. Some guys carried credentials undercover. My feeling was, carrying ID was just another thing to worry about. You get stopped by cops, you talk your way out of it. Or you take the bust—that’s no big deal. If you got into a jam, I felt that one of the most important things was not to tell any law-enforcement officer what was going on. You take the bust and let the people running the operation decide what they want to do. Law-enforcement credentials are part of what you have to leave behind you when you’re working undercover.

Hooking the stuff was easy, but when I went out to do a job, the adrenaline really flowed. Even though this was a sanctioned operation, I was out there by myself, without surveillance or protection. When you’re stealing cars with hardened thieves, ex-cons, guys who may or may not be packing guns, you don’t know what’s going to happen, and a lot of things are going through your mind.

You want to get the evidence for the case. You’re keeping an eye on the subjects to make sure they’re not deviating from the plan and heading for something disastrous. You’re worrying about getting caught.

If these guys get caught, how are they going to react? Are they going to try to fight their way out of it? If a cop comes across three or four guys stealing cars, what’s his reaction? If one of the guys makes a move, will the cop start shooting?

If we’re all busted together, what position does that put me in? How do I protect the operation? How do I protect Marshall? How do I protect myself?

All this stuff, all these angles, are going through your mind when you’re out pulling or casing a job. And we were stealing five to ten pieces a week.

We had an order for three Cadillacs. We found what we wanted near Leesburg, Florida, in the middle of the state, two on one lot and one on another. That night I went in with two other young guys and got the Caddies. We headed for Lakeland, to our hotel. Marshall drove the tail car. Naturally we were in a hurry. These cars have new-car stickers on the windows, and we wouldn’t have the fake registrations until the next day.

We’re spread out along the highway, booming along. All of a sudden flashing red lights show in my mirror, and I get pulled over by the Florida Highway Patrol. In these early days I carried a 9-mm automatic, which I had stashed under the seat.

So I get out of the car right away and ask the officer what the problem is.

“You were going over the speed limit, sir,” he says.

I have a Donald Brasco driver’s license, but no registration for the car, and a gun under the seat, so I figure I better be right up front with him, defuse any interest he may have in looking in the car. While I take out my license and hand it to him, I say, “You know what, Officer, you’re probably right. I’m transporting the car from a dealer in Leesburg to a dealer in Lakeland, have to get there so they can clean it up and have it ready on the lot by first thing in the morning.” I give him the name of a dealer in Lakeland. Since it’s about three A.M., I know there’s no risk of him calling the dealer to check. “So I don’t even have the papers with me.”

He is a real nice guy. “Okay,” he says, handing me back my license. “But take it easy, because the next guy may not be so understanding.”

I never carried a gun in this operation after that.

Every time we got an order, I called in to the contact agent and told him what we were looking for. Then later I called to tell him we’d found it. After we hooked the vehicle I’d call as soon as I could and give a description of what we hooked, where we took it from, everything about the job, so the Bureau could keep a record, then, later on, after the operation, could work with the insurance companies and dealers in getting the vehicles back.

Becker had finally located a buyer for the White Freightliner that we had stashed near Miami. These guys were dopers. They moved stuff between Florida and California, hiding cocaine and marijuana among boxes of vegetables and fruits in refrigerated trucks.

Marshall and I were staying at our usual place, the Holiday Inn in Lakeland. Becker said his customers would be calling us.

They called and told us to leave the hotel and check into another one. We did that. We waited for two days, and finally these guys came to our room. Two guys, rough and dirty, long hair, in their mid-twenties, both with gun bulges under their belts.

They said they had made the deal with Becker to take the truck for $10,000.

“Bullshit,” I say. “The price is fifteen grand.”

“We made the deal with him,” one guy says, “and you guys were just supposed to deliver the truck.”

“We’re going to deliver it and make the exchange,” I say, “but I’m not just working for this guy; we’re partners. He can’t make a ten-grand deal on his own when we had all decided on fifteen. That means I would lose more than a grand of my cut on this deal.”

“That’s your tough luck, pal, because we made the deal and that’s all we’re paying.”

I’m hassling these guys because the original price that I knew of was $15,000, and as a thief you don’t just accept somebody’s word that the price was changed. Plus, if I accepted their word without checking with Becker, it might make him suspicious. If I was such a hotshot, why would I accept a deal different from our original price from guys I didn’t know?

If the deal had been changed, Becker should have let me know. But maybe he didn’t let me know on purpose; maybe he wanted to see how I’d handle it.

Marshall went into the other room and called him. Becker affirmed the deal. We had had the truck too long, it was too hot, and we needed to get rid of it.

“Okay,” I tell these guys. “But anything else you want like this is gonna cost you fifteen grand.”

“We’ll worry about that when the time comes,” the one guy says.

“We won’t worry about it at all,” I say.

We made arrangements to meet at noon the next day near Miami, at an exit off the Sunshine Parkway.

The next morning Marshall and I drove to Miami and went to the Department of Transportation yard and got the Freightliner.

We meet the guys at the highway exit. “Before I give you the keys,” I say, “I want the money.”

“Sure,” he says. He puts a soggy, grimy, stinking brown paper bag in my hands.

“What the hell is this?” I say.

“That’s the money,” the guy says. “What we do with our cash money is, we bury it.”

Becker got a contract to hook two Caddies down in Miami. He had this dealership staked out, had found two cars fitting the order. Marshall and I went back there with him about an hour before closing time and parked across the street at a Burger King. We hung around waiting for the dealer to close, checking how often the sheriffs patrols went by.

When the place closed, we saw that they had a guard wandering around the lot. We hadn’t known about the guard. Now we had to plan to deal with him.

Becker wanted to go around to the back of this big lot and make noise to draw the guard off back there while the other two of us would hook the cars and go out the front. I didn’t like that because of the chance for violence with the guard. I started trying to talk him out of it, saying it was too risky.

A sheriff’s car pulled into the Burger King lot and parked near us. Two cops on their coffee break.

We’re leaning against our car. Suddenly Becker puts his arm around my shoulders in a chummy way. He nods toward the patrol car. “Don’t worry about cops. I been in this business a long time,” he says, “and I can smell cops, even plainclothes guys. The easiest to spot, though, are the FBI agents.”

“Oh, yeah?” I say. “Why is that? I never met any FBI agents.”

“The way they dress, talk, act. I can smell them miles away.”

I am thinking: Why is he suddenly talking about FBI agents? Is he testing my reaction? Is he suspicious because I’m trying to talk him out of hooking the two cars across the street? He’s never been chummy with me before. I put my arm around his shoulders. “How’s your nose now?” I say. “You smell anything?”

“No, nothing more than those two cops in the car.”

I was able to talk him out of that job because of the guard. He decided we’d go back up north to hook cars. He had to go back to Baltimore. He sent Marshall and me up to the area around Orlando to scout.

We found two satisfactory Caddies again. Marshall brought along two of the younger guys. Marshall was the spotter outside the lot; the other two guys and I cut the chain and went in.

The sheriff’s patrol car comes by. Apparently he notices the chain down over the entrance, because he turns into the lot and starts flashing his spotlight around.

I and the other guys dive under cars. I don’t know what’s going to happen if the cop finds us. Maybe these guys are carrying guns. Maybe this cop will be trigger-happy. I have this vision that I am going to die right here under this car, shot as a damn car thief.

The cop drove around for about five minutes, then went out. We hooked the two Caddies and got the hell out of there.

Becker had stolen a bulldozer in Baltimore and wanted us to deliver it to the customer in Lakeland, so we drove up and put the bulldozer on a flatbed trailer to haul it back. Becker said he was filling contracts for airplanes. He had already had a twin-engine job flown out to Caracas, Venezuela, and now he had another customer for a single-engine Cessna.

When we got the bulldozer back to Lakeland, Marshall and I scouted small airports and found the plane at a strip where nobody was on duty at night. Another guy was going to fly it out, so we took that guy out there that night. Marshall got in and wired the plane up and got it started, and the pilot took off. We didn’t want this plane to get out of the country, so I had tipped off our guys ahead of time and they had made arrangements with the FAA to divert the plane to Miami. So when this guy took off, I called in, and they ordered him to land in Miami. So as not to blow our operation, they used as a reason that they suspected it was a drug plane.

A couple of the car thieves lived in Daytona, and one Sunday afternoon we went over there. They lived with their girlfriends in this dumpy little house, and there were two little kids running around in diapers. The place was a mess, and there was nothing in the house to eat except junk food and beer.

Marshall and I went out and bought a load of groceries, including baby food. They served the baby food to the kids while I cooked up pots of spaghetti sauce and pasta and sausage and peppers for the adults. So we had a big meal with the thieves and their girlfriends and kids that Sunday afternoon.

Because we had things going all the time, I got home only twice in five months. In addition to the separation, the operation was putting a financial strain on my family.

At that time all an undercover agent got was a per diem for expenses. Out of that you had to pay for hotel and meals. It was never enough. Often when I was with badguys, I picked up a check, and often it came out of my own money. I called home a lot, and for security reasons I didn’t want any phone numbers on my hotel bill, so I always called collect. I didn’t get reimbursed for my home phone bill, so I ended up eating that, which was a big sum over the long haul. Sometimes I had to ask my wife to wire me money because I had run out of cash. Naturally, my wife wasn’t happy about seeing our money used this way. In the end I used a total of about $3,000 of my own money in this operation. But I couldn’t stop the operation to argue with the office about expenses.

The office had a strict policy about having receipts for everything. I got into a flap over the time when the guys were buying the White Freightliner and they asked us to switch hotels. I had two hotel bills for one day. The auditors at the Bureau rejected my reimbursement claim because the rule was one hotel room per day. I drew the line, flat out refused to eat that expense. I explained about how it was operating undercover, how expenses didn’t always fit the normal routine. Eventually that was straightened out. I was given a larger weekly amount, to use how I saw fit.

The problem was, this kind of extended undercover operation was new to everybody.

In February 1976, the FBI and Florida Highway Patrol arrested Becker and the entire ring—thirty people—and recovered a million dollars’ worth of stolen vehicles from Florida, Maryland, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia. They said it was one of the largest, most lucrative theft rings ever busted.

Trials went on for more than two months. In exchange for his cooperation in busting the ring, and his testimony, Marshall went into the federal Witness Protection Program, on which he and his family were relocated to an undisclosed place and given new identities.

For my work I got a letter of commendation from Clarence M. Kelley, Director of the FBI, and an award of $250.

What meant more to me than that was a letter that one of the defense attorneys sent to Director Kelley. The letter said, in part, “Mr. Pistone ... was a most impressive witness and had obviously done an excellent job in his undercover capacity, but the most outstanding elements of his character were his candor, dedication and sincerity.”

For a defense attorney who lost the case to take the time to write such a letter—that gave me real satisfaction.

I came back to New York to resume work with the Truck and Hijack Squad. But the success of this operation had changed the course of my career and headed me toward the Mafia.