We always stayed together in hotel rooms. He always had a cold. Sometimes, even in the summer, he would turn the heat on in the room. “It’s too damp in here,” he’d say. “Lefty, you’re fucking nuts. This is crazy. I’m getting another room.” He chain-smoked his English Ovals. If I was lucky, he had a room where you could open the windows.

This time we were staying in one of the penthouse suites, the three of us together. Finally Rossi and I went up to the room.

“Donnie, you cocksucker! You did this!” Lefty is stomping around the nice cool room.

“What are you talking about?”

“You turned this fucking air-conditioning up, and it can’t turn down!”

“Left, I haven’t been in the room since we left it this afternoon.”

“You fucking snuck up here and did this just to break my fucking balls! Call the maintenance, get this fucking air-conditioning fixed!”

“Why don’t you just turn it down?”

“It ain’t got no fucking switch!”

Rossi is laughing so hard, he can barely stand up, because Lefty is hollering at me and not him.

“I couldn’t even take a nap,” Lefty rants on. “I been up here two fucking hours freezing my ass off!”

“Why didn’t you call maintenance?”

“Because you did this thing!”

“Okay, I did it.”

“You ain’t going to dinner with me tonight!”

“Okay, I’ll eat by myself.”

Meanwhile Rossi is on his hands and knees. “Here it is,” he says, pulling the switch out from under the couch. He puts the switch back on and turns the air-conditioning off.

The room is filled with too much cigarette smoke and too much Lefty, and it’s making me crazy. I walk out. Rossi comes after me. I stop in the hall. “Tony, I’m going back in there and stab that motherfucker.”

“Hey, Don—”

“I can’t take him anymore. I’m gonna stab him. We’ll just go down to the pool, let them find him up here. Who’s gonna give a fuck if they find another dead wiseguy?”

“Hey, Donnie, take it easy.”

With everything else there was to worry about, I had to take this daily shit. Rossi thought I was serious. That’s how fed up I was with Lefty.

I talked to Lefty in the morning on May 5. It was a routine phone call. Nothing in his voice suggested anything unusual. Normal chitchat, good-bye.

I placed my usual call in the evening. Louise said Lefty wasn’t there, she didn’t know where he was.

I called the next morning. Louise said Lefty hadn’t come home, she still knew nothing.

I called Case Agent Jerry Loar in New York. I told him that Lefty was missing. He said they had received word from two informants that three Bonanno captains had gotten whacked the night before: Philly Lucky, Sonny Red, and Big Trin.

The three had apparently been summoned to Brooklyn to a “peace meeting,” to patch up differences, at a catering establishment. Our information was that’s where they were murdered. No bodies had been found.

The heart of the opposition to Rusty Rastelli and Sonny Black had been whacked out all at once. The other main rival, Caesar Bonventre, was in jail in Nassau County, New York, on a weapons charge. But the word was that he had decided to come over to Sonny’s side, anyway, and bring the zips.

Three days later Lefty called me in the afternoon. “I just got in.”

“Did you talk to Louise yet?”

“I called her this morning for two minutes, that’s all. You know why I come in, because she sent me all my clothes last night, whole box. She leaves the fucking pants out. She started crying at first. ‘What are you crying for?’ I says. ‘I got the clothes.’ ”

“I sent her a grand, you know, because I didn’t know how long you’d be gone.”

He had been holed up at Rabito’s apartment. “It’s gonna be a while yet, but let me throw a curve at you.”

“I’m listening, go ahead.”

“Everything is fine. We’re winners. A couple of punks ran away, but they’re coming back. They came back. We gave them sanctuary.”

“Is that right?”

“What we gotta do with you is, we gotta work out one more situation. I’m with that guy day and night. Have a little patience.”

“Yeah, well, I figured something was going on, so that’s why I just kept calling Louise. You don’t know how long you’re gonna be gone?”

“No. It’s just that I’m dead tired tonight, and I’ll be home the rest of the night.”

“You gonna stay in, then?”

“Ah, till I get a call. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Yeah.”

“Everybody is satisfied. Them two guys out at the beach—don’t mention names.”

“Yeah.” That was Joe Puma and Steve Maruca.

“They belong to us now. Now, don’t talk to me, Donnie. But visualize what took place.”

“Yeah, all right.” I visualized the hits.

“You understand?”

“I understand what you’re talking about.”

“Now they’re ours. How’s the weather down there?”

“It’s nice. Everything gets cleared up, maybe you can come down.”

“Well, we’ll see what happens. Right now I can‘t, I’m stuck over here. What’s happening?”

“I’m looking at something, you know, might be worth maybe about ten grand or something.”

“Ah, that’d be perfect, buddy. We can use it. I wanna clear up all these goddamn bills.”

“That’s why I figured I’d send that grand.”

“She appreciated it.”

“I figured you might be gone another five, six days.”

“Well, now it’ll be longer than that. Being that tomorrow’s Mother’s Day, everybody went home, you know. Everybody’s laid up. I gotta go see him tomorrow morning.”

“You still got another situation.”

“Yeah. All right, buddy, so long.”

Six days after the hits, the wife of Philip “Philly Lucky” Giaccone filed a missing-person’s report on her husband with the Suffolk County, New York, Police Department.

On Tuesday, May 12, Lefty called and said that Sonny wanted to see me right away. I told him I needed a couple of days to clear up some business, then I would be up. “It’s very important,” he says, “so let me know as soon as you make arrangements.”

I didn’t have any business to clear up in Florida. But even in this instance I didn’t want to seem too anxious. I was being summoned by Sonny for one of two reasons. Either I was going to be whacked, or I was going to be told about the hits and maybe involved in the “other situation” that was still left to take care of.

Either mission was crucial enough for me to make one arrangement, which didn’t take long.

I flew into La Guardia on the afternoon of May 14, got off the plane, and immediately saw the agent I was to look for, Billy Flynn. I followed him silently into the men’s room. He slipped me a wallet containing a transmitter. I dropped it into my sports coat pocket and went out.

I rented a car and drove to Graham Avenue and Withers Street in Brooklyn, and parked up the street from the Motion Lounge, arriving at about three-thirty. I didn’t park right in front because I wanted to walk and case the block.

In recent weeks I had been in regular telephone contact with Jules Bonavolonta at Headquarters. Jules and I had been street agents together in New York. Working undercover, it was important to have one guy on the inside that you could trust totally to understand you and your situation, somebody that you could talk to as a close friend yet who at the same time had the skills to maneuver within the bureaucracy. Jules had become that guy for me. He could handle internal politics, get me authorizations and support. I called Jules all the time with frustrations: “You ain’t gonna believe this,” I would say when I had run up against some starch.

To the Bureau’s credit, they consistently came around to our way of thinking after things were explained.

Lately Jules had been testing my condition. “Are you getting tired? You getting home enough? You think you should come out soon?”