He complimented us for the Florida operation, and me for being under so long in my other operations and penetrating as deep as I had. He congratulated us for the sacrifices we were making to work undercover and carry out this dangerous assignment, and how well we were doing it. He knew the case, who the major players were. He asked for some details, but this wasn’t really storytelling time, so it was brief and general. Basically he was concerned about our welfare and wanted to make sure we were getting the proper support, everything we needed from the Bureau. That’s why he was there, he said; he wanted to see for himself.

We made no complaints. We were honored.

• ^**

Sonny wanted me to come up to New York and bring $2,500 from our bookmaking “profits.” He said they got hit bad on their football book for three weeks in a row, and he needed the money to put back on the street.

“Remember when you came in the last time you came by John’s house?” he says. “Is that issue still available, the problem that you brought over?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the guy.”

“Well, see him.”

“All right. What about if I can’t get that stuff?”

“You don’t have to get it, just so long as it’s open, it’s still there. I’m interested in that one issue.”

Lefty called shortly afterward.

“Let me get a pencil and get these figures,” he says, “because I gotta go see the guy. What we win yesterday?”

“Yesterday, eleven-sixty.”

“And the other day?”

“The Thursday game? The Dallas game?”

“Yeah.”

“We won twenty-four-eighty.”

“So you’re still up by fifteen hundred for the week.”

“Yeah. Now don’t forget, tell him I’m gonna take a thousand out for that guy’s salary. I wanna give him some money.”

“I don’t know if he’s gonna accept that.”

“Well, I’ll hold off, and then when I see Sonny Wednesday I’ll explain it to him myself.”

Lefty was moaning and groaning. “I don’t feel good. Maybe flu. The doctor gave me a shot, ordered me home for a week. I made reservations for a chest X-ray. I ain’t got no money. Nobody will even take my bets. Listen, Donnie. When you come up here with that for him, you gotta bring me a hundred and five bucks for that rental car, you know? Because that hundred and five I give to my wife. She’s gotta pay the American Express card. I told him about it.”

I delivered the $2,500 to Sonny and told him that the marijuana was still available. He told me that John, the guy whose apartment I stayed at the time I delivered the sample, owed loan sharks more than $200,000. “And since he’s with me,” Sonny says, “I had to vouch for him. He owes sixty grand of that to Carmine. I made him put up a hundred and fifty grand in jewelry to Carmine. I tell you, if I don’t stick behind him, one of the guys is gonna fucking kill him. He runs up all these debts, and then he lies to everybody about them.”

Sonny had bought a hundred pounds of marijuana from a Cuban in Miami and made a deal with some people out on Long Island to sell it. He needed another hundred pounds as soon as possible. He had made a cocaine connection in Miami, and a sample tested out at eighty-one percent pure. He was buying it at $47,000 a kilo. He wanted us to push our heroin connections.

In the office at King’s Court, Pete and Tom Solmo, father and son, were trying to push their drug business to Rossi. Two cocky, bearded guys. Rossi sat behind the desk. Tom, the son, draped in gold necklaces and bracelets sat in an armchair in front of the desk. Pete stood with his arms folded, or paced and kept refilling their glasses with wine and Scotch.

“What we really need,” Rossi says, “is heroin.”

“Horse is tough,” Tom says. “How much marijuana do you need?”

“If you give me a sample, I’ve got people coming from New York on Wednesday and they’ll let me know.”

Pete explained how a marijuana transfer would work. “He comes down, checks into a motel. North Miami, Hollywood, Lauderdale’s fine. He gives me a call. We go to him. He’s got the bread, right? You give me the keys to your vehicle, I give them to my man. He goes, gets it loaded, brings it back. He comes up to the room and gives you the keys. And that’s it. Every bale will be numbered and have the weight right on it. Use us once, you’ll see.”

“My dad finances everything,” Tom says. “I go and work it all out. I know what stuff is good and what stuff is bad. I been down to Colombia many times.”

“He does all the dirty work,” his dad says. “He’s captained boats. He’s been a runner, bringing it in small ways, bringing it in by the ton.”

Rossi says, “The last I brought up to New York, he said, ‘What the fuck you bringing me all these seeds for?’ ”

“We got stuff got no seeds,” Tom says.

“You guys got a strong supply, huh?”

“Fantastic,” Tom says. “We’ll get you five thousand pounds every week. That’s no problem.”

Rossi says, “I gotta be totally up-front here. Up in New York he might say, ‘We’re totally overloaded here, let it go for a week, a month.’ I have no way of knowing. What I’m trying to say, I guess, is I can’t tell you how fast all this will be put together. You understand that I’m only like the fucking go-between.”

“On this other shit,” Tom says, casually taking a small plastic bag of white powder out of his jacket pocket, “it’s good stuff. You don’t know what you’re looking at.” He put the bag back in his pocket. “I don’t think you know that much about the product.”

“No, I don‘t,” Rossi says. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

“You don’t use it, you don’t know it,” Tom says.

“What’s the price on that?” Rossi asks.

“Right there?” Tom pulls out the sample again and lays it on the desk. “This is two-twenty-five.”

“What percentage is that?”

“I’d give it an eighty.”

“We’ve had a ninety-two,” Rossi says.

“How was it tested?”

“How the fuck do I know? All I’m telling you is that the guy gave it to another guy, had it tested, comes back and says, ‘Tony, it’s ninety-two percent.’ I said,

‘Is that good?’ He said, ‘That’s terrific.’ “

“You give me five minutes with your buyer, he’ll buy our shit, because I do have the best stuff in town.”

“You don’t need to have no time with my buyer,” Rossi says. “I just hand it to him. Your problem is when we tell you what we want and you get it, and then we come to you and it might not be the right thing.”

“If he likes that,” Tom says, waving the sample, “that will tell you what he’s gonna get.”

“What about ‘ludes?”

“It depends. If you want five hundred thousand, I got ‘ludes.”

“What they call those, ‘lemons’?”

“It depends. They’re all homemade now. Usually your lemon has Valium in it. You want quantity like that, we’re talking about thirty-five cents apiece. I can give your man anything he wants. Only positive request involved in this is C.O.D. I’m talking about for a start. Once it’s established, I don’t give a shit.”

“What I don’t want,” Rossi says, “is jacking around.”

I come into the office along with Eddie Shannon. Rossi says, “Donnie’s my partner from New York. Eddie’s the action guy around here. You meet Donnie before?”

“No,” say both Pete and Tom.

“Down at Joe Pete’s one night,” I say. “You guys were both drunk.”

They squirm around, embarrassed.

“They brought us a sample, Donnie,” Rossi says. “They said they could supply us with whatever we needed—everything with the exception of the horse, which is what we’re looking for.”

“No,” Tom says, “don’t say without it. We got it. But it’s ... we gotta find out ...”

“Fucking coke is nothing up there,” I say. “Forget about it. You can’t give coke away up there. Everybody is using the horse up there. When you gonna know about the H?”