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.”