I decided to carry a transmitter.

I met our contact and picked up the transmitter. Rossi and I tested it in my apartment. Rossi put in a call to agent Mike Lunsford, who was on location. I spoke into the transmitter. Lunsford couldn’t hear anything coming over the radio. We tried it again and again as time drew short. Lunsford wasn’t picking up anything.

Rossi says, “What the fuck we got all this fancy equipment for if it doesn’t work?”

It’s hard to explain to anybody how it makes you feel. You risk your life and exposure of the operation by carrying this piece of equipment. You go through maybe a whole day or night with this on you. You think you’ve got some dynamite conversations. But nothing came in on the receiver, or all you got on your tape was beeps and noises, or just silence. It was good equipment. Maybe it was used a lot before they gave it to you. There’s no way to know when it’s going to malfunction.

If I got caught with a transmitter, the first thing these guys would think is that I was an informant. If you’re a cop or an agent, maybe they’ll think twice because you’re doing your job. I had been with these guys four years now. There’s no way they would believe I was an agent. They would think I just turned and went bad. No leeway. They would kill me.

So here I was about to go out with Sonny Black, who was going to meet with Santo Trafficante, and I had a piece-of-shit transmitter. It was better to find out ahead of time. But the more. Rossi and I tried to make it work and the more we talked about it, the more aggravated we got.

Finally I wound up and threw the transmitter at the wall. It hit right next to the window and clanked down on the floor, bent and sprung. “At least nobody else will get stuck with this piece-of-shit transmitter,” I say.

Rossi and I went to the coffee shop. Sonny was sitting at a table with Trafficante and Husick. He motioned for us to sit at another table by ourselves. Husick came over and wanted us to take him to look at a potential bingo site on Ridge Road in New Port Richey. When we came back, Sonny and Trafficante were still talking. Sonny told us to sit at the counter.

Half an hour later Sonny came over and told Rossi to make dinner reservations for three at the Bon Appetit restaurant in Dunedin. “You guys go up to Lefty’s room,” he says.

Lefty’s room was next to Sonny’s. Lefty was lying on the bed watching TV. Rossi got on the phone as instructed. I was standing in the doorway.

Sonny and Trafficante came walking by. Sonny motioned for me to come into his room. Inside, he introduced me.

“Donnie, this is Santo. Santo, Donnie.” Santo looked at me with narrow eyes through thick glasses. I shook hands with my second Mafia boss.

15

DRUGS AND GUNS

Sonny wanted me to come to New York to update him on all the various rackets we supposedly had under way—bingo, numbers, gambling. I went to his neighborhood for the first time.

The Withers Italian-American War Veterans Club, Inc., Sonny’s private social club, was at 415 Graham Avenue, at the corner of Graham and Withers Street in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. The neighborhood was quiet, safe, and clean, mostly small shops and storefront businesses in two-story or three-story apartment buildings. It was similar to the neighborhood in the Bensonhurst section to the south, where I had been involved four years earlier with Jilly’s crew and the Colombos. One of the main similarities was that both neighborhoods gave you the feeling that outsiders would be noticed quickly.

The Withers club had a big front room with a small bar and a few card tables, and a back room with a desk, telephones, a sink, and the men’s room.

Diagonally across the intersection, at 420 Graham Street, was the Motion Lounge, another private hangout for Sonny and his crew. There was no sign at the front door. The exterior wall of the club was covered with fake fieldstone siding. The upper floor of the three-story building was sheathed with brown shingles. In the front room of the lounge was the bar, a large-screen projection TV, a pinball machine, a couple of tables. Behind the bar was a big tank of tropical fish. In the back room was a small stage, a pool table, a jukebox, a few card tables. A kitchen was off the back room.

As it was with the clubs in Little Italy, the wiseguys in Sonny’s crew lounged around inside and outside during the summer. Their cars—mostly Cadillacs—were parked and double-parked on the block.

Sonny said I shouldn’t bother with the expense and inconvenience of a hotel; I should stay at his apartment. That was on the top floor above the Motion Lounge, a three-story walk-up. It was a modest, utilitarian one-bedroom place. You entered into a hallway with a small kitchen to the left, a dining room ahead, and a living room with a pullout sofa bed to the right, and Sonny’s bedroom off that. There were no doors. A sort of ladderlike set of stairs led up to the roof, where he kept his racing pigeons.

He didn’t have air-conditioning in the apartment, because the building wasn’t wired for it, and the heat that night was brutal. He kept the windows open, which looked out over the adjoining roof. I slept on the pullout couch in the living room; he slept in the bedroom.

I fell asleep on my back, sweating. I woke up. Something touched my chest. At first, in my daze, I thought it was hands, fingernails feeling for my neck—somebody was going to strangle me.

But it was claws—a rat!

I froze, afraid to open my eyes. Sleeping in the apartment of a Mafia captain didn’t bother me at all. But I am terrified of mice or rats. I shudder when I see them dead or alive. If there is a mouse in my home, my wife or kids have to deal with it.

Now I was going to get bitten by a rat and die of rabies.

I held my breath while I counted down. Then I swung my hand with everything I had and swatted it across the room. The rat thudded to the floor as I hit the light switch.

It was a cat I glimpsed, leaping for the window and disappearing into the night across the rooftops.

Sonny came running in. “What the fuck happened?”

I told him. He started laughing like a son of a bitch. “Big, tough guy, scared of a fucking cat,” he says. “Wait till I tell everybody this story.”

I was shaking. “Sonny, you better not tell anybody this story, not anybody. If you got some fucking air-conditioning in here, we wouldn’t have to leave the windows open and let any fucking animal in the world in here.”

“Okay.”

“Anybody could come in through that window, Sonny, it ain’t safe.”

“Okay, okay.” He went back to his bedroom, still laughing.

At about six-thirty he woke me up. He had already been to the bakery across the street to pick up pastry and had made coffee. We sat around his kitchen table in our underwear, drinking coffee and bullshitting about the business.

He had weights and a weight bench in his bedroom. We lifted weights together.

We went up on the roof so he could show me his pigeons.

He was proud of his racing pigeons. He loved to spend time up on the roof. He had three coops. Both the roof of the building and the roof of his coops were topped with miniature white picket fences.

He told me about blending their food, adding vitamins for stamina. He explained about the different breeds, how you matched different breeds to get birds that could fly long distances. Each pigeon had a band on its leg for identification. He said there were lots of races in different cities. The pigeons would fly home to their coops. Owners had a clock that would stamp the time on the band. He said you could win up to $3,000.

He said he did some of his best thinking up on the roof taking care of his pigeons.