“Tomorrow? I got hashish in my stash. What I got is worth seventy-five grand on the street. I got to get twenty-five for it.”

“All right, bring it over.”

“Wait a minute, we gotta set up a correct deal, you know.”

Rossi says, “What you do is, you deliver it to this warehouse we got, and when it’s in there, you let us know, we’ll have somebody check it. You come back, we’ll give you the money.”

“That’s your correct deal,” I say.

When he left, Rossi says to me, “We ain’t giving this guy twenty-five grand. Once that shit’s in the warehouse, it’s ours. We’ll give him five grand, and let him holler.”

Flamos makes the delivery to the warehouse. Charlie Chains goes over and checks it and calls us to say that it’s all there, good stuff. Rossi hands Flamos the money.

Flamos counts. “Ho, wait a minute, there’s only five grand here.”

“That’s what you get,” I say. “You don’t want it, give it back and you’re out everything. Because the hash stays with us.”

“Oh, man, this ain’t gonna go down with my people.”

“Go to your people in Harlem if you want to, go see whoever the fuck you gotta see. They’re gonna contact Lefty. Lefty’s gonna say we gave you twenty-five and you must have glommed the other twenty. Who they gonna believe?”

So we got $75,000 worth of hash off the street at a cost to the government of only $5,000, while actually enhancing our credibility as legitimate badguys.

Lefty called me to Miami because he wanted us to look at a lounge together. He said that the lounge at the Sahara Hotel, next to the Thunderbird, might be available for $15,000, and Sonny gave us the green light to go after it.

“All the wiseguys from New York hang out at the Thunderbird,” he says. “We can get all the overflow. Because all the guys will come, New Yorkers and ex-New Yorkers like Joe Puma, and people will follow them. Get a good piano player.”

We hung out at the bar in the lounge and looked the place over. We agreed that it looked good.

I was aware of the tension within the Bonanno family, because the infighting was causing tension with Lefty and Sonny. I couldn’t ask a lot of direct questions about it, but I strained to pick up what I could. Partly that was for intelligence. Partly it was to make sure I stayed alive.

Now, at the hotel, Lefty gave me some news.

“The Commission met in New York. They named Sally Farrugia acting boss for how long Rusty is in jail.”

Salvatore “Sally Fruits” Farrugia had been a captain.

“When Rusty gets out, Sally will step down,” Lefty says. “And Sonny is now the main captain. Every family has a main captain. When Rusty gets out, Sonny wants to become consiglieri.”

“Oh, yeah? I didn’t know that.”

“The consiglieri has to be voted by the whole family, you know, not appointed like the captains. Another thing, the Commission ordered the two sides in the family to keep the peace while Rusty’s in the can.”

“Is there gonna be peace or what?”

Lefty chuckles. “Let me tell you something. Sonny’s strength is that he’s close to Rusty.”

The ABSCAM scandal broke, arrests were made, the story was all over the news. I didn’t pay too much attention to it. I was too busy trying to dope out the power struggle within the Bonanno family.

I was in Miami with Lefty and a bunch of the guys. At three or four in the morning, after a night of bouncing around, one of the guys suggested that we go to Nathan’s for something to eat.

I started to sit down with them. Lefty grabs my arm. “Sit over here at this other table. I want to talk to you.”

We sat at a table over in the corner. “Donnie, what do you know about that boat we went out on?”

I started to answer when it hit me what he was driving at, and at the same time he whipped out a folded page from Time magazine, opened it up, and slapped it down in front of me.

“That’s the boat, Donnie.”

I was stunned. There, as part of a story about ABSCAM, was a picture of the Left Hand, the boat we had partied on, and a description of how the FBI had used it in the sting. My life was on the line right here, with how I handled this.

“Gee, I don’t think that’s the boat we were on, Left.”

“Don’t give me bullshit, Donnie. One thing I know is boats. We went out on a fucking federal boat!”

“I’ll tell you this, Left, if that’s the boat, we were in good company, and we were better than they were.”

“Huh?”

“That fucking guy with the boat, he scammed congressmen and senators, and he tried to scam us. If he can scam those people, I ain’t no Phi Beta Kappa that he can’t scam me. But he didn’t get a fucking thing on us, right? We had a great party and we walked away from it.”

“You sure?”

“Hey, did they get us? We’re sitting here, Left. We beat those FBI guys!”

“I don’t know, Donnie,” he says. He keeps shaking his head and looking at the picture. “I hope you know who the fuck you’re messing around with. A fucking federal boat.”

Lefty called me at my apartment. Tony Mirra was causing trouble. He had gone to the boss and put in another claim on me. Mirra said that I had worked for him at Cecil’s disco when I first came around, and that entitled him to claim me.

“There’s gonna be a sitdown on this, at Prince Street. Sonny and I have to go to the table and straighten this whole thing out. That’s this afternoon. Last week Mirra won a decision that he gets $5,000 a week from Marco’s.”

Steve Cannone’s social club was at 20 Prince Street. Marco’s was a midtown restaurant that used to be Galante’s place.

“Left, no way I’m gonna be with Mirra.”

“You ain’t got nothing to say about it.”

17

THE SITDOWNS

Around the middle of March, informants were telling the FBI of unusual activity on Prince Street in Little Italy. An apparent series of sitdowns was taking place at 20 Prince Street, the social club owned by Bonanno consiglieri Steve Cannone.

“I gotta control my temper,” Lefty says over the phone. “You have no idea what we went through. This went on for fucking eight days with this motherfucker, for you. I mean, heavyweights had to sit down. Saturday was the meeting in New York. I had a four-and-a-half-hour meeting about you again today.”

“For what?”

“Don’t say, ‘For what.’ ”

“How come you never tell me? I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Who else is involved but Mirra?”

“Well, what’s this guy want now?”

“I’ll tell you what, you son of a bitch, fucking asshole that you are. You got me aggravated about this Rocky.”

Mirra was always trouble. And now Rocky. The undercover cop’s name was coming up too often. In addition to taking Rocky out on the ABSCAM boat, I had brought him up to the New York area and set him up in the car-leasing business, the cover for his undercover operation. He had gotten involved with Mirra. That there were sitdowns over me, involving Mirra and Rocky, was not good news. “What about Rocky?”

“Rocky admitted that you made two hundred and fifty grand in excess amount of money. I’m not burning my phone up, and you know what I’m talking about. That you took a hundred and twenty-five off him!”

“From where?”

“Anthony Mirra says that you shook Rocky down and youse made it in fucking junk money!” Lefty’s voice was barely controlled. “I’m fed up with this bullshit over here!”

“What are you talking about, junk money? I never cut any junk money with him. Who did Rocky tell that

I cut two hundred and fifty grand?“

“Anthony Mirra and his men—don’t you understand, you fucking jerk-off? I just got off the table.”