He was yelling in front of everybody in the coffee shop. When he calmed down, he said to Conte, “Tony, you get in touch with Frank. Go down there today and tell him that Donnie can’t take the gambling job because Mike just called this morning and he wants him free to be back and forth to New York for another job.”

He wouldn’t look at me. “Go to California and don’t bother me. I’m too mad to talk to you now. Go fuck with the broads on the beach and call me in a couple days when I cool down. Tony, take me to the airport.”

Lefty had been pushing Conte to rent him a car through Best Vending and have the business pay for it. It was a typical wiseguy way of thinking: Muscle into any business that you can, get a weekly cut, and squeeze out any extra perks you can.

Conte had been stalling. Now we reconsidered. Lefty had been good for the investigation. By cultivating him and keeping him happy, we had shortcut a lot of effort. He got us a sitdown with Balistrieri, got us the partnership. If he hadn’t come out to Milwaukee, Conte would be dead.

So we figured, what the hell, let’s rent him a car and let him keep it for a couple of months. Conte rented him a maroon Thunderbird and drove it to New York and presented it to him.

Mike Sabella wanted to talk to me. Lefty hadn’t told Mike that I had turned down the gambling job. “Don’t say nothing to upset him,” Lefty says. “He got enough in his mind. Work on his restaurant is gonna cost him six hundred grand now. Yesterday he smacked the contractor and almost killed him. And with the feast, there’s a new guy down there from the precinct, and he ain’t gonna allow no wheels down there, and Mike is blowing his top because of that.”

“Wheels” were roulette wheels, a major source of profit at the Feast of San Gennaro.

We went to CaSa Bella. Mike told me, “Don’t advertise what we got going in Milwaukee, because we don’t want everybody in New York to know about it. Permission came from Lilo and Nicky, and we want to keep it between bosses. Frank has Fort Lauderdale sewed up. We’d like to get into that action, through Frank. We don’t want any other crews fucking up our deal.”

He wanted to keep all the information among just Lefty, himself as our captain, boss Carmine Galante, and underboss Nicky Marangello.

Then suddenly everything changed. The Balistrieris started avoiding Conte. They weren’t giving him leads on routes to buy. They weren’t returning his calls. There was no explanation. Conte and I went to see John Balistrieri, Frank’s son and lawyer, to try to dope out what the hang-up was.

We met with John at his office. Conte did the talking because this involved his business. He didn’t bring up the problem directly, just tried to sense the situation. He reiterated Lefty’s invitations to all of them to come to the Feast of San Gennaro and be wined and dined by the New York crew. John was courteous. He said his father was tied up with some kind of grand jury matter lately, but he was sure his father wanted to come if he could get free, and they’d get back to us.

John seemed friendly, but he didn’t say what we wanted to hear, which was why they had retreated from business dealings with Conte. And they didn’t get back to us.

Lefty’s reaction was, “Maybe Frank’s just got his balls twisted over that grand jury. They were gonna bury him. Then twenty-three guys went in there and took the Fifth. Maybe that’s what’s been taking his mind up. But listen, you should’ve never gave up that goddamn bookmaking thing with him. And that would’ve only been a start, for chrissake. Then he starts sending you around to Vegas and Florida and Kansas collecting money. You messed the whole thing up. You should’ve listened to me. We would’ve been on easy street.”

The situation with Balistrieri didn’t improve. Nobody would return Lefty’s calls now, either. And finally Mike got involved, putting out inquiries through channels. Nothing. Even his calls were not returned.

Two weeks later, in early September, Conte got a letter from Balistrieri’s lawyer-sons dissolving the partnership with Conte.

Lefty called me back to New York. We met at Lynn‘s, a restaurant on East Seventy-first Street.

“It don’t make no sense to me,” Lefty says. “Maybe they think he’s a shady character. Maybe they’re afraid to put money in his hand because he’s a swindler. They won’t even pick up a phone for nobody over there, understand? This is an introduction through you. What is the story on this gentleman? I can’t explain this situation to anybody. You gotta tell me what the story is.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Left. I knew the guy ten years ago, he was okay.”

“Maybe he’s a ladies’ man. Listen, Donnie, last time he was in New York, he brought that car in, I took him to a joint, he bought drinks for three ladies in there. I lectured him about that. Now I hear that he made a play for one of Frank’s girlfriends out there, in one of his joints. Is that true, Donnie?”

“How the hell do I know, Left? I ain’t with him night and day. I never saw him do anything.”

“You know the way Mike feels about somebody that insults a wiseguy’s wife or girlfriend: That’s worse than being a rat or a pimp. Mike and I are embarrassed now because we introduced him to Frank. I’m in jeopardy over here. And you brought him in. You got to do something about this, Donnie.”

“What you want me to do?”

“You say you knew him in Baltimore. Go to Baltimore and check him out. Find people who knew him. Maybe he’s a snitch. We don’t know who the hell he is. If you check him out okay, maybe we can still salvage the situation out there.”

So I went to Baltimore. Of course, I didn’t do anything. I hung out for a few days, then went back to New York.

I told Lefty I had found a few guys who knew Conte in the old days, that he’d never done anything wrong as far as they knew, that he wasn’t a “wire”-which is a snitch or informant—he never got out of line with the ladies, didn’t insult people.

“All right,” Lefty says, “now we gotta get this guy in here and talk to him. Go out to Milwaukee. Bring him in.”

I went to Milwaukee. Conte and I analyzed the whole matter. We tried to think like wiseguys think.

Two families had put a business together through a sitdown. Now Balistrieri had canceled the agreement without explanation and hadn’t returned phone calls from a top Bonanno captain for more than a month. That was a major discourtesy, meaning he had a major cause. Something had spooked Balistrieri. Conte could get whacked at any time.

We were convinced that for whatever reason, the partnership was finished, Balistrieri wasn’t coming back in. So there was no need to continue with a vending business.

But Conte and I couldn’t just fold it up, either. A citizen like Conte can’t retire from doing business with a mob guy. Once a guy like Lefty gets his hooks into you, he’s going to keep draining you. You run the business, he’s your partner and gets fifty percent. Or you’re going to sell everything and he’ll take fifty percent of that. If you say no to those alternatives, I get a call, as Lefty’s man on the scene, and he tells me to work this guy over, do a number on him. You always have to pay a price for getting out.

At this same time Lefty was pushing for money for a score. There was a load of Betamax videocassette recorders that he could take for $15,000. He could make $18,000 in ten days. But he didn’t have the money. Mike had agreed to lend him $5,000 for ten days, at a price of $2,000. Lefty wanted Conte to invest the rest, $10,000.

We needed to buy some time both to come up with a safe evacuation plan and to avoid Conte having to cough up ten grand. So Conte faked a heart attack.