Lefty suggested I come down to the club some nights. There were crap games or three-card monte games in the neighborhood. Some of them were heavy-duty. There would be regular games in a couple rooms upstairs from Fretta‘s, the meat market on Mulberry Street. Or they’d move around to different empty lofts. They’d move the games every week or two, just to keep on the safe side. They were pretty safe, anyway, in that neighborhood, as far as trouble from the cops was concerned, but you didn’t want to shove it in anybody’s face. Mainly I’d just watch. Guys could be winning or losing $100,000. Too steep for me on an FBI budget.

Lefty ran the bookmaking operation for Nicky Marangello, the underboss of the Bonanno family. One day he asked me to drive him uptown, to an address on lower Fifth Avenue. “I gotta see one of my biggest bettors,” Lefty said. “This guy makes men’s clothes, mostly shirts, up on the fourth floor. He put down $175,000 this weekend. I gotta collect.”

I gathered that in this instance Lefty collected between $5,000 and $10,000. “That’s a good week for me with him,” Lefty said. “One week last season I dropped sixteen grand in football bets to this guy.” He began regularly having me drive him around to make collections and payoffs on the betting operation. Sometimes he would meet somebody at the Biondi Coffee House on Mulberry Street to pick up money to pay off the bettors. His fortunes varied widely in the betting business.

“Couple weeks ago I got beat thirteen grand for the week,” he said. “Last week I booked fifty-two grand and my losses were only seventeen-fifty.”

One afternoon he had to run off somewhere, and he asked me, “You want to handle the phone while I’m gone?”

So I started taking bets over the phone for Lefty.

Lefty was very different from Mirra. He talked a lot and was excitable. He had a big reputation as a killer, but on a daily social basis he wasn’t as likely to inflict damage. Lefty and Mirra were both soldiers but under different captains. Mirra was under Zaffarano (until he died). Lefty was under Mike Sabella.

Sabella owned a prominent restaurant on Mulberry Street, CaSa Bella. Occasionally we went there for dinner. Lefty introduced me to Sabella, a short, paunchy man with baggy eyes. “Mike, this is Donnie, a friend of mine.”

One time during the Feast of San Gennaro, Lefty and I and Mike Sabella were sitting in a club across the street from CaSa Bella, which Mike usually closed during the feast because he hated tourists.

Jimmy Roselli, the Italian singer, had his car parked out on the street. He opened the trunk, and it was filled with his records. He started hawking his own records out of his car trunk right there at the feast.

Mike couldn’t believe it. He went outside and said to Roselli, “Put the fucking trunk down because you’re fucking embarrassing me by trying to sell your fucking records here on the street!”

Roselli closed the trunk immediately.

“He’ll act different from now on,” Lefty says.

Nicky Marangello, the underboss, stopped by Lefty’s club regularly. Called Nicky Glasses or Little Nicky or Nicky Cigars, Marangello was a small man with slicked-back hair, thick glasses, and a sharp nose. He never smiled. Because of his thick glasses, he seemed always to be staring. Lefty introduced me to him. “Nicky, this is Donnie, a friend of mine.” I wasn’t invited to join in conversation, so I would walk away while they talked.

Marangello had his own social club, called Toyland. It was Mirra who first took me to Toyland, at 94 Hester Street, on the outskirts of Little Italy and Chinatown. Toyland wasn’t the same kind of social club as Lefty’s.

The first time Mirra asked me to drive him there, he told me, “Toyland is Nicky’s office. You don’t go there unless you’ve got business there, unless he wants you there, or somebody like me or Lefty sends you there. You don’t hang out there. Nicky is usually there from about twelve-thirty to about four or five in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. You take care of your business with Nicky and then you leave.”

On the door was “Toyland Social Club” in painted script, and under that, “Members Only.” The room inside had a few card tables, a counter, a coffee machine—it looked typical for the little social clubs all around the neighborhood that were hangouts for wiseguys and connected guys. But it wasn’t social. Guys talked to Nicky one at a time. Others waited outside.

That was where I first heard about the “zips.” Mirra pointed out some of the guys hanging around Toyland, and he referred to them as “zips.” He said the zips were Sicilians being brought into the country to distribute heroin and carry out hits for Carmine “Lilo” Galante, the boss of the Bonanno family. This operation, Mirra said, was strictly in the hands of Galante. The zips were effective because, although they were in the family, they were unknown in this country—no police records. They were set up in pizza parlors, where they received and distributed heroin, laundered money, and waited for any other assignments from Galante.

The zips, Mirra said, were clannish and secretive. They hung out mainly by themselves in the area of Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. They were, he said, the meanest killers in the business. Unlike the American Mafia, zips would kill cops and judges.

Two of those he pointed out were Salvatore Catalano and Caesar Bonventre. Bonventre was lean and stylish. Catalano was chunky and narrow-eyed.

This was the first solid information I got on what was going on with the Sicilians. We knew there were Sicilians showing up, some coming into the country legally, some smuggled through Canada. But we didn’t know who was behind it, or what these Sicilians were being brought in for.

It’s an example of the importance of intelligence information even when you’re not making a particular case at the time. I was then primarily intent on working my way into the Bonanno family. When I first came across the zips with Mirra, I didn’t even know what I was on to. I just picked up the information and passed it on. Several years later my information on the Sicilians was put together with other intelligence, and a full-scale investigation was launched. It resulted in the huge Pizza Connection case in New York in 1986—the largest international heroin-smuggling case ever.

Eventually Lefty started sending me to Toyland to report on weekly bookmaking operations to Marangello. There was no chitchat. I would deliver the figures, how much we won over the weekend, how much we got hit for, what the total “handle” was—the total taken in. Maybe I’d answer a couple of questions. Then I’d leave. But I noticed that Marangello was looking me over.

Other people were looking me over, too, though I didn’t know it then. In separate operations, both the New York Police Department and the FBI had Toyland and CaSa Bella under surveillance during this time for other investigations. I showed up in their surveillance photographs. They had no idea who I really was. The NYPD identified me as Don Brasco, an associate of the Bonanno organized crime family.

Lefty and Mirra had once been partners, but now they hated each other. Each of them saw me as a potential good money-earner, so jealousy developed.

“Why you so friendly with that fuck Lefty?” Mirra would ask me. “He can’t do nothing for you.”

“That Mirra’s a crazy rat bastard,” Lefty would say. “He’s nothing but trouble. You shouldn’t be spending time with him.”

It was a dangerous game, being in the middle between those two guys. With each of them bad-mouthing the other to me, and each wanting me to drop the other guy, I was in a squeeze, too much in the spotlight. Eventually I would have to choose.