Donnie Brasco Read Free Page B

partner is out of the car and running after us. “Shoot him!” he hollers to me.
    We have strict guidelines on using our firearms. You’re not allowed to fire warning shots. You shoot only to defend yourself; you shoot to kill. But I wasn’t going to shoot this guy. I was burning at myself that I had let this guy get the drop on me. It’s hard running in a suit and tie, but I catch him and clobber him over the head a few times with my handcuffs before I slap the cuffs on his wrists.
    My partner comes running up. “Why the hell didn’t you shoot?” he says.
    “There wouldn’t have been any satisfaction in that,” I say. The guy had scared me to death. I was angrier at myself than at him, because I hadn’t gotten out of the car with my gun drawn. But by the time the guy panicked and tossed the gun, there wasn’t any reason to shoot him, anyway.
    In Jacksonville, I worked fugitive cases, gambling, bank robberies. I started developing informants. I feel that one of my better talents was in cultivating reliable sources from the street world.
    I grew up as a street guy. I did not look down at guys who survived by their wits and street smarts, tough guys, thieves. You promise informants that you will protect their relationship with you. You never completely trust them, and they never completely trust you—you’re on the side of law and they’re not.
    I didn’t try to rehabilitate anybody. If you become too involved in the social-work aspect, it gets in the way of your investigative abilities.
    Some of my first informants were women, because I worked a lot of prostitution cases—cases made federal under the Mann Act, for bringing women across state lines for prostitution. The prostitutes were the victims. We went after the pimps who beat them or burned them with coat hangers for not bringing in enough money or whatever.
    Sometimes I would try to talk a prostitute into getting away from her pimp. I didn’t try to talk anybody out of being a prostitute, because that’s just a waste of time. My attitude was: Hey, if that’s the profession you’re going to choose, I’m just giving you some advice on how to survive, that’s all. I got some of them away from their pimps. That made me feel good. And I got some of them to be informants, which made me feel even better.
    I had an informant named Brown Sugar. I talked her into at least moving out of the lousy neighborhood into a better, safer area. She didn’t have anything for a decent apartment. I asked my wife if we could give her some of our old pots and pans for her apartment. “I’m not giving my pots and pans to any Brown Sugar,” my wife said. We didn’t have much, either, in those early days of my career, trying to support a family with three kids.
    With my partner I did a lot of work in cooperation with the Jacksonville Police Department vice squad. There is a lot of interagency cooperation among guys working the street, because they need each other. Resentment and jealousy between agencies occurs more often at higher levels, where people are looking for publicity.
    My partner and I didn’t want publicity because we ended up doing some good but unauthorized work to help out the vice-squad cops. I especially didn’t want publicity because this was my first year as an agent, and in the first year you are on probation; you can be dismissed without cause.
    There was a rash of prostitution at the better hotels in the area. High-class hookers were working the bars and lobbies, picking up businessmen.
    Everybody in the hotels knew these vice cops because they had been around awhile, but nobody knew me. So to help them out on local cases I would pose as a businessman, get picked up by a hooker and taken up to a room. The local cops would follow us up and wait outside the door for two or three minutes, long enough for the transaction, then they’d come in and make the bust.
    I wasn’t a kid—I was thirty—but since I was a new guy on the job, these vice-squad