The Good Guys Read online

  Copyright © 2005 by Bill Bonanno, Joe Pistone, and David Fisher

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: January 2005

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-1307-5

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to dedicate my contribution to this story to all those men who have understood and tried to live by a natural law that supercedes all manmade laws: The promise to pledge their faith and trust in mutual confidence, to transcend all injustices and be possessed with the ability to speak with honesty, think with sincerity, and act with integrity. To all the people who lived by our Tradition.

  Bill Bonanno

  I would like to dedicate my contribution to this story to the men and women in law enforcement and the armed services, wherever they serve their country. Brave people who have given of themselves to bring justice to a chaotic world.

  Joe Pistone

  The Good Guys is a collaboration between Bill Bonanno and Joe Pistone. The story is told from both points of view. These two narrators tell their story, which includes some personal insights, in alternating chapters. The story begins from inside the Mafia. Chapter Two begins the story as seen from within the FBI.

  ONE

  Fuck that no-good motherfucking fucker, Tony,” Little Eddie said, his face turning almost the color of the cherry Danish on his plate. “I ain’t kidding this time. I swear to God, I see that fucking guy come around here again, I’m gonna fucking rip out his heart and stuff it down his throat till he’s shitting it out. I’m fucking pissed off.”

  “Listen to me, kid,” Tony Cupcakes said calmly. “You can’t hold back like that. You got something to say, you gotta say it right out loud. Holding your feelings inside like that, it ain’t good for you.”

  Everybody laughed, even Little Eddie. This conversation was taking place on a crisp September afternoon in 1985, inside the Freemont Avenue Social Club, which naturally was on Elizabeth Street in New York’s Little Italy. The truth is that I grew up in social clubs just like this one. For made members and associates of our organization, the social club is the center of the universe. Years ago the social clubs were very important places in the neighborhoods. Almost sacred. This was the place people would come for help. If they needed three dollars so their child could visit a doctor, they could get it at the social club. If they needed a job or were having problems with the landlord, they would go to the social club to ask for assistance. And they would be welcomed there.

  But as the neighborhoods changed, so did the function of the social club. It became the place where people in my business would hang out while waiting for the next deal; it became the office, our home away from home, the place for real men to be together. Everything in life that mattered started there. If the great poet Robert Frost had known the people in my life, he might have written that the social club is that place that when you go there, if you’re a friend of ours, they have to take you in.

  Then they would probably offer you some cannoli.

  My father, Joe Bonanno, the man who served as the model for The Godfather, operated out of two clubs, the Rex Spinola Democratic Club in Brooklyn and the Shoreview Social Club in Manhattan. The Rex Spinola Club was for our neighborhood. It had a large meeting hall in the front and several private rooms in the back. One or two days every week the local people would line up to meet with my father in a back room. They believed that he was a great man who was concerned about their problems and had the power to help them. And mostly they were right.

  The Shoreview Social Club was on East 12th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A. It was a long way from the nearest shore, and the only view through the front windows was of the tenements across the street. My father brought me there for the first time when I was six years old. But I remember it very well; I remember the feeling of being someplace very special. From the first day I was there everything about it felt comfortable. Being my father’s son meant that people were always bringing me small gifts as a way of showing their respect for him. So for me the social club meant candy, ice cream, and small toys. It was heaven.

  It was there that I began to understand the importance of relationships among good people, that I began to realize how few things really matter in life.

  I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent inside social clubs since then, but that feeling never went away. And I’ve learned that after a while all social clubs seem to be pretty much the same. The same things matter. Wherever the club is located, whatever crew hangs out there, the cappuccino tastes the same, the shafts of cold sunlight slant through the windows in the late afternoon the same way, the same Sinatra and Vic Damone music is playing on the radio, and the scent of loyalty, friendship, and money is always in the air.

  As the function of the social club evolved, the most important requirement became that it not attract unwanted attention. Which meant just about any attention. In fact, after John Gotti went to prison, due at least in part to his insatiable love of publicity, the family closed down all its social clubs and operated mostly out of restaurants and back rooms. Not that it made any difference in terms of business. The Freemont Avenue Social Club, which was located in the former King Television and Radio repair shop, satisfied the primary requirement. From the outside it looked about as inviting as a federal prison. People who lived on the block and the people who had business there knew exactly what it was. Everybody else in the world didn’t matter.

  Directly in front of the Shoreview was a fire hydrant that didn’t appear on any city maps and was not connected to any water supply. Like the plugs in front of several Park Avenue buildings, it just appeared magically in place one night. Its only actual function was to guarantee that there would always be a parking spot available for Henry Franzone, the captain, or capo, of the Freemont Avenue crew. Two large bay windows on either side of the recessed front door were covered from the inside with sheets of faded white plasterboard from the bottom to about three feet from the top. The brown steel door had a fan window near the top that had been cloaked with colored plastic that was supposed to look like stained glass but served to make it impossible to see inside. Directly above the steel door a wheezing air conditioner was framed by unpainted plywood. This air conditioner leaked, so on hot days people who belonged to the club knew to squeeze left when they came inside. Next to the door was a buzzer rather than a bell, and in the name slot above the black button someone with a sense of humor had slipped in a piece of paper on which was written, in faded black ink, “J. E. Hoover.”

  The Freemont Avenue Social Club was never closed. What was going on inside was the life. The good and the bad of it. It didn’t matter what time it was, almost always you could find several men eating and talking and drinking cappuccino and playing cards or dominoes and laughing and complaining and planning. Always planning. The next job, the next scam, the next split. In the end, whatever was going on, it was always about money. Someone told me once that the quality of a social club could be measured by the availability of food and the quality of the complaints. By that standard the Shoreview was a good place to belong. Food first, though.

 
On this fall afternoon Little Eddie LaRocca was griping about a street hustler they knew as Benny Rags. This was a guy who was always coming around with something to sell. Stuff that fell off the back of a truck, from cheap watches to ladies’ shoes. Little Eddie was little in nickname only. He was a big, fat, tough guy. He was Little Eddie only because he was Big Eddie’s younger brother; physically he was much bigger than Big Eddie. But Big Eddie had started bringing him around when he was a kid and he made some friends and proved he could earn and eventually was invited to become an associate of Franzone’s crew. Nobody ever knew Little Eddie’s exact weight, but it had to be two seventy, two eighty, and the guy wasn’t quite six feet tall. But even carrying all that weight he moved quick when he had to, even gracefully.

  Little Eddie was a matter-of-fact guy. What is, is. What isn’t, wasn’t his business. Once there had been a lot of people like him around, people who believed without reservation in the family. Men who found great comfort in structure and predictability. Good soldiers. It used to be a joke that in some crews you were allowed to do anything you wanted to do. First the capo told you what you wanted to do, then you did it.

  In fact, some clubs were run pretty tough; for example, you weren’t allowed to change the station on the radio unless you had permission. But Freemont Avenue wasn’t one of those places. The club belonged to Henry Franzone, who ran things pretty loose. As long as his people kept earning, and as long as he got his piece of every deal, his crew had a lot of independence. But when the bosses needed something done, it got done first. Everything else was tied for second.

  The thing that was pissing off Little Eddie were the Banlon shirts he’d gotten from Benny Rags. “You wear the fucking things one time, the threads start coming out. Makes me look like shit.”

  From across the room Georgie One-Time asked, without looking up from the cards in his hand, “How much you pay him for those shirts?”

  Everybody knew that Little Eddie never paid Benny Rags for anything. “That ain’t the point,” Little Eddie said. “You don’t embarrass me by letting me wear this shit. What if somebody sees me?”

  Fast Lenny said casually, “Hey, don’t worry about it, Eddie. I see you. And you look okay to me. Honest. Well, except maybe for that thing what’s hanging over your belt there, what do you call that?”

  Tony Cupcakes answered, “Holy shit! You mean you got a name for that thing?” And again everybody laughed—except the Duke, who just went about his job, cleaning and serving. Duke was the aging deaf-mute who had done all the cleaning and most of the cooking in the club for the past quarter century. No one even knew if he had a last name. Or where he came from. Everybody just assumed he was Italian. He’d been “the Duke” for all that time, named in honor of Duke Wayne by the late Frankie “Fat Fingers” Ianiello after he’d seen Wayne playing The Quiet Man on TV. “Ain’t nobody quieter than that guy,” he’d supposedly said in bestowing the nickname.

  Duke had been the perfect choice to take care of the club. He lived in the back, sleeping in a windowless converted storeroom, and left the place only to shop and occasionally visit a sister in Rego Park. Apparently his sister really was a Sister, Sister Mary Rose or something like that, which once caused Fast Lenny to wonder, “If the Duke could talk and his sister came around, would he introduce her as his sister Sister?” Because Duke lived in the club, nobody could come in without him knowing about it. No FBI, no cops, no DEA, no nobody. And because he was deaf and dumb, people could talk around him without worrying that something they said would be repeated. They used to tell a story about an old-timer named Danny Boo-Boo, who objected to the Duke being called deaf and dumb, pointing out that “Just because the guy can’t say nothing don’t mean he’s dumb. Who the fuck knows how smart he is if he can’t tell you?”

  Following Little Eddie’s Banlon shirt eruption, Duke was the topic of conversation. Fast Lenny wondered aloud if foreigners spoke some kind of foreign sign language. “Like, I mean, you know in English that a chair is called a chair, but in French it ain’t a chair. It’s a whatever the fuck it is. So if Duke were speaking to a French guy who couldn’t speak too, how would he tell a French guy what was a chair if he needed to?”

  “He could just point to it,” Georgie One-Time suggested.

  “No fucking shit,” Fast Lenny snapped. “I know that. But all I’m saying is that if people from wherever the fuck they come from can’t talk, do they all have the same signs? How hard a question is that to understand?”

  Nobody knew the answer. Little Eddie started to suggest that they ask the Duke, then remembered why the conversation had started in the first place.

  Right in the middle of this conversation Bobby San Filippo, or Bobby Blue Eyes, or Bobby Hats, as different people knew him, silently slipped in smooth as a Sinatra song. Even this early in the afternoon he was handsomely dressed in a tailored Kasper business-gray suit, a Burberry overcoat, and an Elite gray fedora with a black silk band, all from Brooks Brothers. This dressing expensive was a new thing in the organization. In the old days everybody dressed neatly, but nobody wore designer clothes. And while some people might have worn hats, that had gone out a long time ago. In those days people just didn’t do anything that would attract attention. There was no future in it. But some of the up-and-comers, the John Gottis and Bobby Blue Eyes, had started dressing to kill. So to speak.

  As Bobby walked toward the card table in the back of the club, he caught Duke’s eye, squeezed his thumb and forefinger together, and tipped them to his lips. Duke nodded. Then Bobby turned up the volume on the radio sitting on top of the refrigerator and joined the group at the table. One of the many things people liked about Bobby was that he always acted like one of the guys, while everybody knew he was going to the top. There was no big shot inside Bobby Blue Eyes. The Duke placed a cup of cappuccino in front of him. “There’s the man,” Little Eddie said, then without even a slight pause changed the subject completely. “So, Bobby, who’s this fucking guy we’re supposed to find?”

  Bobby shook his head slowly, as if wondering what he was going to do with this cafone. “What do I look like—Mr. Jeopardy? How the fuck do I know? He’s the guy that Franzone told me to find. What else do we need to know?” Bobby San Filippo was clever in every area in which it was necessary to be clever. But even more important, he had an understanding of history. He was third-generation, and although he’d graduated from the University of Miami, at thirty-four years old he’d already risen higher in the ranks than either his father or his grandfather. Both of them had been reliable earners and stand-up guys, although neither of them had ever been made. His grandfather died of the Big C with a smile on his face after the Miracle Mets won the World Series in 1969. Five years later his father left his house in Rego Park one night and they’re still waiting for him to come home.

  “No disrespect, Bobby,” Little Eddie continued, “but how we gonna find this guy if we don’t know nothing about him? You can’t find nobody if you don’t know his right name, know what I mean? It don’t make no sense. Like, if you don’t know his name, how you gonna know when you found him? Maybe you find somebody else and think it’s him. I mean, that’s a pretty tough thing to ask a person, am I right or am I right?”

  Bobby was always diplomatic. “Well, you know, Eddie, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do without asking too many smart questions. And we know he’s a teacher and we know where he teaches and what he teaches. I mean, that’s a pretty good start right there. We’ll go talk to some people, that’s all. We find him, we find him.” Bobby would never admit it out loud, but he was a little puzzled by this one himself. Usually the job was explained pretty carefully: Meet with this guy and do this, go there and do that. Pick up a payment for a carload of cigarettes, find a buyer for thirty thousand rolls of Fuji film, see this dentist and remind him to pay his debts—the work of everyday life.

  But this was different. All Franzone had told Bobby was that the boss of another crew, Tony Cosentino from over on Bath S
treet, needed to find a man real quick. And that the job took precedence over everything else. Actually it wasn’t all that unusual. In the organization people did favors for people all the time. And often without knowing why it was being done. Once many years ago, when I was active, I was told to fly from New York to Florida, go to a certain restaurant and eat dinner. That was it, eat dinner at this restaurant. Then I could return to the city. I didn’t ask, I ate. It was steak and potatoes and no questions.

  Much later I found out that some people had been having problems with some other people, and they needed to show off their bona fides. They needed to prove that they had reach. Getting Joe Bonanno’s son to show up for dinner was a demonstration of power. My presence alone solved their problem.

  Back then life within organized crime was pretty simple. What mattered was loyalty first, and earning money tied for first. But you couldn’t have one without the other; they were tied together. People did what they were told to do for the good of the family. It was like the Musketeers: one for all, all for one. That started changing when the people who had been in control for decades, people like my father, got old and had to step aside or were pushed. Then the lines got a little blurred, and the thing that mattered was loyalty to money. This search for a teacher with no name took place in New York right about the time things were beginning to change. On the surface, though, the waters still looked calm. So when a man like Bobby Blue Eyes was told by his captain to do something, he did it without asking questions.

  In this particular situation Tony Cosentino had asked Henry Franzone to help find a guy known around as the professor. Or Professor G. Somebody had to know his full name and who he was—otherwise he would never have been permitted to hang around—but the people who knew didn’t tell it to anybody. In this world last names don’t matter. People can know each other for years without knowing each other’s last name. Unless, of course, your last name is something like, say, Bonanno. Or Genovese. Then people know it and respect it. But the professor was just “the professor.” About all Bobby was told was that the professor really was a professor and that he taught Russian at Columbia University. A college professor. That was it, that was what they knew. If anybody knew where he lived or what he looked like or if he bet the horses or shot smack or anything at all, nobody was talking.