Lefty’s Real Ending — Donnie Brasco Got It Completely Wrong – HT

 

 

Al Pacino sets his watch on the dresser. He slides the pinky ring off his finger. He kisses his wife and he tells her that if Donnie calls, she should say that if it was going to be anyone, he was glad it was him. Then he walks out the door. For almost 30 years, anyone who watched Donnie Brasco walked away believing they had just seen Lefty Ruggiero go to his execution.

 What nobody knew was the man who actually died that way was not Lefty. The real Lefty died in a way Hollywood never showed. Here is the part the movie spent 2 hours [music] on. Lefty Ruggiero was born in Hell’s Kitchen in 1926 to a family that had nothing. By the time he reached middle age, federal investigators believed he had personally killed somewhere around 26 men.

 Inside the family, they called him Lefty Guns, >> [music] >> Two Guns, and Mr. Violence. On a hit, he reportedly carried two pistols at once, always. He was never a boss, never even a captain, never even close. He was a soldier who killed people for a living and who gambled away every dime he ever made. In 1977, he paid off $160,000 [music] in gambling debt to a fellow Bonanno soldier named Nicholas Marangello.

[music] He got formally inducted as a made man and he was handed a project the same week, um, a young jewel thief named Donnie Brasco who needed a mentor. Lefty took it personally. He drilled him on protocol. He vouched for him in front of skeptical captains who wanted to know how Lefty had vetted this stranger from out of state.

 He picked him as best man at [music] his own wedding to his second wife, Louise, at New York City Hall in 1977. The man Lefty trusted to stand next to him on the most personal day of his adult life was wearing a wire. Every word Lefty said to him for nearly 5 years was recorded and cataloged. By the spring of 1981, he was weeks away from sponsoring an FBI agent for full membership into the Bonanno crime family.

Then three Bonanno captains got murdered in a single night during an internal power struggle. Lefty stood lookout. The instability spooked the FBI badly enough that [music] they pulled Pistone 2 months later. And on July 26th, 1981, Operation Donnie Brasco officially closed. That’s the movie.

 5 years of slow burn betrayal compressed into a clean three-act arc with a punchline ending. What followed isn’t. Three FBI agents walked into a bar in Williamsburg a few days after the operation closed. The bar was called the Motion Lounge. The bar belonged to a Bonanno captain named Dominic Sonny Black Napolitano who lived in the apartment above it and raised pigeons on the roof.

The agents asked him if he knew Donnie Brasco. He said he did. They told him Donnie Brasco was an FBI agent. Uh, they offered him protection and a new life. Uh, try to picture the geometry of that. Three FBI agents in suits walking into the headquarters of an active New York mob captain to ask him to please come quietly into the witness program before his own family killed [music] him.

 Sonny Black said, “No.” His exact words, recorded in agent reports, were that he knew better than anybody that he could not take that. But he knew how to get a hold of them. He was already a dead man and everyone in the room knew it. In the days after the FBI left, Sonny Black went up to the roof and sat with his pigeons.

 The birds up there were not random street pigeons. They were pedigreed racers descended from European bloodlines that had cost him a fortune uh, over the years. He gave the keys to his apartment to a friend so the birds would keep getting fed. He took the jewelry off and handed it to his favorite bartender. He said his goodbyes.

 On August 17th, 1981, according to court testimony, he walked down a flight of basement stairs in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn and the door slammed shut behind him. The slam was the signal. Two shooters were waiting at the bottom with .38 caliber revolvers. The first round did not kill him. He looked up at the men with the guns and said, “Hit me one more time and make it good.

” They did. He was 51. When his body turned up almost a year later at South Avenue and Bridge Street in Staten Island, both hands had been cut off, cleanly severed. The family wanted other captains to understand exactly what happens to a man who introduces a federal agent into the Bonannos.

 The severed hands were not random brutality. They referred to the handshake that starts every mob introduction. Remember that. Two shooters waiting in a basement and a man who gave his jewelry away the day before he walked into it. While Sonny Black was being shot in that basement, the FBI knew something the rest of the city did not.

 The Commission, the governing body of the five New York families, had ordered two deaths over Donnie Brasco. Sonny Black was the first. Lefty Ruggiero was the second. The FBI started watching a clock that nobody had told Lefty about. You’ve made it this far. Hit subscribe. New episode every week. More stories the movies got wrong.

 The funny thing is, Lefty himself did not believe any of it. As far as he was concerned, he had done his job. [music] He had vouched for a guy. The guy had turned out to be a fed. That was embarrassing, sure. Maybe it earned him a sit-down. Maybe a few hard words at a backroom table, um, but not a basement.

 The FBI knew better. They knew the family had already summoned him. On August 29th, 1981, uh, federal agents intercepted him on the way to that meeting and arrested him on the spot. The film jumps straight from [music] the operation closing to Pacino’s final scene monologue. The real arrest does not exist on screen. He was livid.

Not at the family, at the FBI. He kept asking why he had been picked up. He told them they had the wrong guy. According to multiple later accounts, Lefty actually tried to post bail and walk out of federal protective custody. He tried to get back on the street while the Bonanno family was [music] actively hunting him.

To bail himself out of the only building in the five boroughs, [music] uh, where he was guaranteed not to get shot in the next 48 hours. That detail tells you almost everything you need to know about Lefty Ruggiero. Um, the FBI offered him the witness protection program. They offered it more than once. They told him he could give them everything he had on the family and disappear with his wife.

 Uh, Lefty said no. He said no when they offered the second time. He said no when they showed him paperwork on the commission contract for his death. He proceeded [music] to a 6-week racketeering trial without testifying against a single Bonanno. His defense leaned [music] on attacking Pistone’s credibility, arguing the agent had crossed into entrapment.

 [music] The jury rejected that argument. In November of 1982, the jury came back in just over a day. Lefty got 15 years. But 15 years in federal prison was about to do something [music] for Lefty that the FBI couldn’t. There is a recording somewhere in the FBI vaults [music] of Lefty trying to explain to Pistone the moral universe he lived [music] inside.

He told him in plain language that as a wiseguy, you can lie, cheat, steal, and kill people legitimately. That was the framework Lefty was operating inside [music] when he refused to flip. He didn’t think of cooperation as a moral choice. He thought of it as betrayal, uh, of the only law he recognized.

 [music] I think that’s the moment Lefty becomes the most principled person in this entire story. He had every reason to flip. 15 years in federal prison, uh, a contract on his head. The man he trusted as [music] best man, a man at his wedding, recorded him for 5 years. Sammy the Bull Gravano took the deal. Henry Hill [music] took the deal.

 Joseph Massino, the boss who had ordered Sonny Black’s killing, would eventually take the deal. Lefty refused and he refused on principle >> [music] >> and the principle held. And here is where it gets strange. By refusing to cooperate, Lefty did the one thing that could buy him a pass. The Bonanno family quietly let the contract lapse.

 As far as the family was concerned, Lefty had done the only honorable thing left available to him. He had taken the prison time. He had kept his mouth shut. He was, in their reading of the situation, still a member in good standing. [music] The man the Commission had marked for death 2 years earlier was now somebody [music] the family was actually leaving alone.

 He served roughly 11 years. He had spent a lifetime chain-smoking English Oval cigarettes and by the early 90s his body was paying for it. Lung cancer, testicular cancer. In April of 1993 the federal government released him on compassionate grounds. He went home. He spent a year and a half quietly dying.

 On November 24th, 1994, Benjamin Lefty Ruggiero died in New York City at the age of 68. The film ends [music] in 1981. Uh the real Lefty kept living for 13 more years after that ending. [music] None of it made the screen. The mob never came for him. The contract from 1981 stayed lifted. Cancer did what the Bananos could not, but Hollywood was about to do one [music] more thing to Lefty Ruggiero that even cancer never touched.

Now back to that scene. Pacino removing his jewelry. Pacino >> [music] >> telling his wife to pass on the message. Pacino walking out the door knowing he is going to die. Here is the part nobody talks about. That scene was never Lefty’s. It was Sonny Black’s. The jewelry given away, the keys handed over so the pigeons would be fed, the quiet dignity of a man getting his affairs in order before walking knowingly into a hit.

The line about how if it was going to be anyone he was glad it was him. Um that came from what Sonny Black’s girlfriend told [music] Pistone that Sonny had said uh in the days before he was killed, not anything [music] Lefty ever said. Uh every one of those beats, uh the jewelry, the keys, the message, um the calm acceptance, um all of it belonged to Dominic Napolitano.

Hollywood took the most haunting moments of one man’s death and stitched them onto the body of another man who did not die that way. The movie kept Lefty alive on screen. It just borrowed Sonny Black’s [music] death to give itself an ending. I would argue that is the most dishonest thing the film does.

 Sonny Black got robbed twice. Once by his own family in that basement and once by Hollywood uh which took the most dignified moments of his death and handed them to somebody who chose to live.  Joseph Massino, the Bonano boss who ordered Sonny Black’s killing, uh eventually flipped to the federal government in 2004.

 [music] He was the first sitting boss of a New York family in history to break omerta. The man who had killed two soldiers for breaking the code eventually broke it himself. Lefty had been dead for 10 years. Pistone, for what it is worth, is still alive. He lives under an assumed name and changes locations regularly.

 45 years after the operation [music] closed, uh the half-million-dollar contract on his head has never been formally rescinded. Paul Castellano, the Gambino boss, reportedly talked the other families out of acting on it. Killing a federal agent would have brought overwhelming heat on every one of the five families.

 The bounty stayed alive on paper. Nobody collected it. Pistone himself has acknowledged the film took liberties with the real story. So, go back to that scene one more time. Al Pacino sets the watch on the dresser. He removes the pinky ring. He walks out into the hallway. The door closes behind him.

 For almost 30 years that ending stood as the tragic end of Lefty Ruggiero. It was not. The man on screen was performing the death of a different captain who had already been shot in a basement on the other side of Brooklyn before uh the cameras ever rolled. The real Lefty was alive then and stayed alive and went to prison and refused every offer the FBI made him and came out and died of cancer in a hospital bed in the city he was born in.

 The movie chose uh poetry. The truth was stranger and harder to film. I would say the movie chose the wrong ending because the right one was too ordinary to dramatize. A man whose family had voted to kill him died of his own bad lungs in a hospital bed at 68 years old. Real loyalty is not a basement and a bullet.

 It is 11 years in prison saying no. [music] More stories the movies got completely wrong are on screen now. Click the next one. Subscribe. Another one is coming next week.