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

Автор книги: Joseph D. Pistone

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

To the Bureau’s credit, they consistently came around to our way of thinking after things were explained.

Lately Jules had been testing my condition. “Are you getting tired? You getting home enough? You think you should come out soon?”

Now, with the hits, Headquarters was nervous. When they found out that I was going to a meeting with Sonny, a couple of people thought that maybe he was setting me up, that they were going to kill me. I said,

“What would they kill me for? I’m with Sonny. He’s the one that asked me to come up.” Jules agreed with me that Sonny wasn’t setting me up.

Still, there was a lot of nervousness. Sonny was now a target for retaliation. I was close to him—that made me a target too.

They wanted not only a surveillance team on me, which was reasonable, but they wanted SWAT guys hidden on the roofs. “Are you crazy?” I said. “In that neighborhood, Sonny’s neighborhood, you’re going to put guys on rooftops with rifles? Just put a good crew on the street, I’ll be all right.”

Jim Kallstrom was the coordinator of technical services, which includes surveillance teams. I specifically requested that I get a crew headed by Pat Colgan as street supervisor.

A surveillance crew is not just a passive monitoring outfit. If there’s trouble, they have to move in. Most of the agents didn’t know me except from pictures. They didn’t know my way of talking, Sonny’s way of talking. That, along with the static and interference that made transmissions chancy, could lead to the crew misunderstanding the conversation, making a move too soon, busting in on us, and screwing up our whole operation.

A surveillance team that screwed up was more dangerous to me than no surveillance team at all. If they got made on the street in that neighborhood, where’s the first place a guy’s going to go to tip somebody off? He’s going straight to the Motion Lounge to tell Sonny Black, who is the main man in that neighborhood.

As I was walking up the block toward the Motion Lounge, I knew the surveillance team was there somewhere. I was looking for them to make sure they were in place. I am trained and experienced to spot such things on the street. I looked carefully. I knew they were there. I never made them. I never saw them at all. That’s how good they were.

Sonny was waiting at the bar. The scene looked placid. Boobie was playing the electronic pinball machine. Charlie was behind the bar. Jimmy Legs was there. And there was one other guy I hadn’t seen before. His name was Ray. He was, I later learned, Ray Wean, an informant for the FBI who did jobs with Joey Massino and with Sonny. In fact, it was Wean who had shot himself in the hand during the abortive burglary at the townhouse of the Shah of Iran’s sister in 1980. Neither of us knew who the other really was at the time.

I walked in, gave Sonny, Boobie, and Jimmy a kiss and a hug—normal greetings. “How you doing?” “How’s Florida?” Everything was normal. Sonny asked me to come into the back room. We sat at a card table.

“You know we took care of those three guys,” were his first words. “They’re finished. You got any reliable people in Miami?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Because one guy got away, Bruno. You know Anthony Bruno?”

Anthony Bruno Indelicato was Sonny Red’s son. “I may have seen him, I don’t know.”

“I think he went to Miami because he’s got a $3,000-a-day coke habit and he’s got connections with the Colombians down there. I want you to find him. When you find him, hit him. Be careful, because when he’s coked up, he’s crazy. He’s not a tough guy with his hands, but if he has a gun, you know ...”

“Yeah, okay.”

“He might be down there with his uncle, J. B. If you come across them both, just kill them both and leave them there in the street. You want me to send Lefty down there with you?”

“You kidding? I’d rather be by myself. That makes it so much quicker.”

“Those two guys on the beach, Puma and that guy Steve, do you know them?”

“Yeah, I know them.” Joe Puma and Steve Maruca. The beach was a phrase they used to indicate the Miami area.

“What do you think of them?”

“Joe Puma, I met a few times. What can I say? He didn’t strike me as a stand-up guy.”

“Now they’re down there, they got the fear of God in them. Well, that’s too bad for them. Their time has been coming. I got to do a lot of work.”

“Sonny, you know me, I don’t ask questions, I don’t know nothing. There’s a couple places down there that these guys hang out. I’ll contact a couple of guys that I know. Once I get everything set up, then we can lay up for a few days down there and see what’s going on.”

“All right, any way you want to do it. Now, when I come down there, you got guns down there? I can’t be walking around with nothing. I need two. You got two?”

“Yeah, we got a couple. One thing, I gotta have a description of the kid.”

“I know him, but I can’t give you any good description. He’s like 140, 150 pounds. Smaller than you. Thin-faced kid. Italian-looking, dark. Always complaining about his bald head. In his late twenties. Bantam-weight, petite-looking. He’s a dangerous little kid. He’s a wild man when he’s coked up.”

“High roller, huh?”

“Likes his broads.”

“Suppose I come upon him, right? Then I get a chance to take him out, I don’t have to call you and ask if it’s okay?”

“No, no—go ahead, of course. You take him, leave him right in the street.”

“All right, don’t get excited. I’ll do it right.”

“I’m gonna come down maybe next week or so. Then I was gonna talk to the Old Man. Have you got a place to lay up over there now?”

“We can go to a lot of places down there. There’s the Deauville. Broads. A stockpile of broads.”

“All right. Now, we’re leaving it to you to get down there.”

“Joe and Steve are with you now, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, because their guy is one of the guys that went.” (Meaning Philly Lucky.) “It all comes in circles. We’re gonna lock everything up over there. It’s a tough situation. I got a lot of work to do. My game is a waiting game. Whatever happens, you get it when you can get it. It’s coming to you one way or the other.”

We went up on the roof to feed his pigeons. There was a guy up there hooking up a cable line for Sonny’s TV. “Getting the Home Box up today,” Sonny says. He was tapping into the system illegally, like all the wiseguys do. He had ninety-five pigeons. “Out of ninety-five” he says, “we lose about four. Soon as I got the heater in there this winter, we never lost a bird from the cold.”

He brought up the matter of Quaaludes. He wanted me to take some samples down to Florida and see if I could find a market. They were costing him eighty cents apiece, and he thought maybe we could get a dollar each for them.

We went downstairs. The guy named Ray had left. What none of us knew at the time was that he had left to call Pat Colgan, his contact at the FBI and coincidentally the guy who was running the surveillance team on me. He called Pat to tell him this guy named Donnie had just shown up from Florida, and he was apparently a good friend of Sonny Black’s because they kissed and hugged, and apparently he was a pretty big drug dealer.

Sonny and I went across the street to the Caffe Capri for demitasse and cannoli. We sat at a table in the rear.

Sonny said he was making a lot of changes. “I’m forming a good crew, people you can go to bed with and trust.”

I asked him about Mike Sabella.

“He thought I was gonna clip him,” Sonny says, “but we had a good talk. He said he had stayed with the other side because they intimidated him, but I told him, ‘You’re my man now.’ He was pleased. He’ll be loyal.”

He said that the day before the hits, Tony Mirra had said he was going with the opposition. On the day of the hits, Sonny called Mirra’s uncle, Al Walker, and told him to come to the Motion Lounge. They sat him down, put a guy at either side of him, and made him sweat until word came that the hits had gone down. “When he heard that,” Sonny says, “he turned ash-white. He thought we were gonna hit him too. But I just reamed him out about Tony, told him Tony was no good; and that he’d better recognize that and act right himself. He agreed, Donnie.”

I asked him how Joe Puma and Steve Maruca would feel with me sitting them down and telling them the terms, since they were wiseguys and I wasn’t.

“Don’t worry about it. Long as you’re my representative, they’ll listen to you. I also want you to meet a guy I’m gonna send down with you, in case you need some help. You going to see Lefty later?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell Lefty to call Sally Paintglass and have him meet me at the lounge at ten o‘clock, and you be here too.”

Sally “Paintglass” D‘Ottavio was a made member of the crew who got his name because he owned a couple of auto body shops.

I left Brooklyn and headed for Manhattan. As I went across the bridge I saw that I had picked up a tail. It was an unmarked van with a white guy and a black guy. I was curious, but I didn’t try to shake them. It didn’t matter. I figured they were cops. I was going into Knickerbocker Village. They weren’t going to do anything. I didn’t see them again.

I didn’t find out until two years later, when I was testifying, that these were N.Y.P.D. organized crime cops that had Sonny’s club under surveillance since the hits. They had no idea who I was at the time. So they and the FBI were both surveilling the Motion Lounge at the same time, and neither knew the other was there.

Lefty was home, sick with a cold. We sat on the couch and I started to tell him about my conversation with Sonny.

“I already know what Sonny asked you to do,” he says. “He’s in control of the family now. Donnie, I’m really happy that he’s having you clip Bruno, because it’ll look good in the eyes of the bosses that you did some work. It’s a good contract.”

“Yeah, I’m glad, too, Left.”

“The kid was supposed to be there. He didn’t show because he was all coked up, too high.”

He called Sally Paintglass and set up the meeting with Sonny. I said that before I went back to Brooklyn, I was going over to see my girl for a short while.

“All right,” he says. “I would go with you to Brooklyn, but I’m dying here.”

I did go to Jersey. I went across the George Washington Bridge to the Holiday Inn off Route 80, where I met with agents Jimmy Kosler, Jerry Loar, and Jim Kinne. I told them the whole story of the afternoon. Even though theoretically the conversation had been received from the transmitter and recorded, we couldn’t count on that, so I wanted to relay the information as soon as possible. I gave them the transmitter because the batteries were shot, anyway.

I felt good. I wasn’t a made guy, but I was given a contract to hit a made guy. And I was going to Miami to tell two other guys that they were now under Sonny. All the wiseguys could see how close I was to Sonny, who was becoming the main power in the family—aside from Rusty Rastelli, who was in the can.

The Motion Lounge was crowded at ten-fifteen. Sonny introduced me to Sally. “Donnie is with me, Sally. You can trust him as much as you trust me.”

Sally Paintglass was about 5’9”, sturdy, about five years older than me. He was a tough, greasy-looking guy with a weak chin. We agreed to meet three days later, on May 17, at Joe Puma’s restaurant, Little Italy, in Hallandale.

Sonny says, “This is the first time in over ten years that the family has control over itself instead of being controlled by the Commission. Donnie, watch out for the kid. I got to get him before he gets me, because I can’t rest at night and we can’t go places until we get this kid. That’s our only obstacle.”

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 street 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.”

I went over to Manhattan to the Holiday Bar to see Lefty. We went out for a walk on Madison Street. He was aggravated with everybody, and a walk on the street was the only place he could really let his hair down. He wasn’t getting a proper split of profits, he was being ignored or unappreciated or mistreated. His longtime loyalty wasn’t counting for anything. Boobie was a phony; Joey Massino had all the men and money in the world and didn’t know how to do anything; Sonny was greedy.

“They got all the connections and I’m a jerk-off. Who’s gonna pay me? Sonny’s trying to hold me back. Push me for like two hundred a week here, two hundred a week there, to pacify me. Meanwhile he’s making like thirty thousand a week. Sooner or later he wants to get rid of me by making me a captain, but I gotta do it in Miami. He gives me a couple thousand, then I’m gonna go to Miami. Meanwhile they’re knocking it down. Boobie’s got fifteen hundred a week in salary. And they got all the junk. They took it all.”

“How come you’re not in on that?”

“Why? Because he’s a greedy cocksucker,” he says, meaning Sonny.

“You did all the work for him.”

He grunts. “Donnie, they gave me the contract now on the kid. Once I do that, the guy can go fuck himself.”

“They found that one body, huh?”

“Yeah. That was a mistake. Joey Massino, he’s the one fucked it up. Sonny’s really hot about it.”

Sonny Red’s body, like the others, was supposed to have been chopped up and gotten rid of properly, not buried quickly and whole.