The Other Hollywood (26 page)

MIAMI
1978

BILL BROWN
:
It was June 21, 1978. I’d just come back to my office, and there’s a message, “Call Bruce. Emergency.”

I called Bruce, and he said, “Pat’s been arrested.”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
I meet Andre D’Apice at the Pancake House in North Miami Beach. I pick him up in the pink Cadillac—the pimpmobile—and we’re gonna do one of our porn deals.

So Andre’s got a box of, maybe, twenty-four movies he brought down as samples, and he throws the box into the trunk of my car, and we jump in and start driving down One Hundred Sixty-third Street. That’s when we get pulled over by the police.

Fine. No problem. I get outta the car and, you know, give them my license. Fine. But then the cop says, “Come on back here. You have to open the trunk of your car.”

I said, “I don’t think I’m gonna do that.”

AL BONNANI (METRO-DADE POLICE DETECTIVE)
:
Our surveillance unit in the OCB [Organized Crime Bureau] was following Frank Cochiaro—Big Frank from the DeCavalcante crime family in New Jersey—and Livingston showed up with Andre D’Apice. They sat down, talking deal, and then they went to the trunk of the car. Our surveillance men made a determination—and they moved in.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY [FBI WIRETAP]
:
“Did you hear what happened to Pat? He got busted for possession of pornography. Yeah, it was a screwed up thing, man. They were following somebody—Frank Cochiaro—who was with Andre….”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Little did I know that Andre was being followed by the Metro-Dade Police. It turned out that, besides doing our porn deal, Andre was in Fort Lauderdale to do an alleged drug deal with Frank Cochiaro—prior to meeting with me. That’s why the Metro-Dade cops were following him.

AL BONANNI
:
I knew Pat Livingston was undercover as Pat Salomone and so did my bosses, but that was it. Only three or four people knew that we flipped the informant and had given him to Livingston—and no one knew we had turned our investigation over to Livingston and the FBI. So, of course, no one in OCB surveillance knew.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY [FBI WIRETAP]
:
“So the cop starts asking Pat all kinds of questions, you know, let me see your registration; this and that. But Pat hadn’t done anything wrong—nothing. Then another cop shows up and says, “This car might be stolen.” Pat says, ‘It’s not a stolen car; it’s a leased car. Here’s the lease papers—call the guy.’

“So the cops go back to their car for a while; then they go back over to Pat and say, ‘Get your hands on the roof.’”

“They put the cuffs on him. And the other cop goes into Pat’s car, takes the keys out of the ignition, and opens the trunk. There’s a box in there, all sealed up. The cop cuts it open and grabs the stuff. But it was soft-core stuff—you know, bondage, eight-millimeter films.

“Still, they threw Pat and Andre in jail for about six hours.”

BILL BROWN
:
This was really a disaster. Pat and Bruce had put a year into establishing their credibility—and now it’s all going down the tubes because Pat’s been arrested on a traffic violation.

AL BONANNI
:
Our guys thought it was a coke deal going down, but then the trunk was opened and they saw obscenity. So they took them to Station Six and called me. I went down, and there was Livingston with his little goatee. I told the cops, “You’ve got a problem here. You just arrested somebody you shouldn’t have.”

BILL BROWN
:
When Bruce called to tell me Pat had been arrested, he was jumpy and nervous—and if you know Bruce, he doesn’t get jumpy and nervous. Then he told me Andre had been arrested with Pat.

Andre D’Apice is bad news—New York, Star Distributors, Robert DiBernardo. Andre is the number three man in this organization.

Andre D’Apice made my blood run cold. I was afraid of him.

So I said, “Okay, I’ll get them out. What’s the bond?”

Bruce said, “A thousand dollars.”

Andre and Pat were being held in the North Miami Substation, so I called the bondman—and we drove up there to bail them out.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
When they took us to jail, they started asking us questions, you know, “What’s your occupation?”

I said, “Well, I’m self-employed….”

I was talking bullshit, but I carried a little notebook in my back pocket—and in it was a list of names and numbers of organized crime guys, names of porn contacts, names of informants. So they got that and thought they really had something.

BILL BROWN
:
Pat and Andre were arrested around noon. I got the call at three and drove up there at about three-thirty to bail them out.

Pat came out, snapping fingers—you know, real cool, “Hey, what’s happening?” Pat’s just rolling with it. He’s feeling good.

I’m nervous.

Then Andre walks out. Andre is a mean motherfucker.

So we start talking, and Andre’s real grim because—I found this out later—he’d been told not to deal with Pat and Bruce because they were on the watch list. They were suspected of being FBI.

So Andre thinks that this is
the
bust—and that Pat and Bruce have set him up.

BILL KELLY
:
Andre was the muscle; he was the scare guy. If Robert DiBernardo ever wanted to intimidate anybody, he’d send Andre. And, of course, DiBernardo had Don Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano behind him. So Andre was dangerous.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Andre thought I might be an informant. It was like, “Why did we get stopped? Why were they following us?”

Andre knew it wasn’t Frank Cochiaro. So if it wasn’t him, he had to think, “Maybe it’s this other guy, Pat Salamone.”

So, oh God, yeah—I had to go through a dance to convince Andre that I wasn’t an informant. I was saying, “What the hell is goin’ on here? Why’d they arrest us? They’re not lookin’ at me! Are they lookin’ at you? Have you done any drug deals? I haven’t done any drug deals!”

We both didn’t know until afterward. We had no clue.

BILL BROWN
:
Andre kept saying to me, “All the stuff we had in the car was soft-core—none of it was hard-core….”

And I’m talking like a lawyer, “Well, Andre, the basis for obscenity is community standards, so you never know what might be considered obscene and against the law.”

But Andre keeps saying, “But it was all
soft.
…”

And I was uncomfortable because I’m representing Pat, and I don’t like being in a quasi-legal capacity for Andre.

Then Andre’s lawyer from New York calls me, an attorney by the name of Joel Steinberg, and now I’ve got to lie to him—give him a line of bullshit, which I didn’t like at all.

JOEL STEINBERG (CONVICTED OF MANSLAUGHTER IN DEATH OF HIS SIX-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, LISA; EX-HUSBAND OF BATTERED WIFE HEDDA NUSSBAUM)
:
Bill Brown didn’t disclose that he was FBI. But Brown became friendly with me, and when I went down to Florida I hung out with him. He was appreciative of my legal knowledge because, you know, I was the “New York lawyer.”

BILL BROWN
:
I knew if Andre D’Apice got convicted, I could envision Joel Steinberg standing up before a bar association trial for malpractice—saying, “This lawyer, Bill Brown, was telling me things about the case that were simply not true, and I represented my client based on those misrepresentations. Andre was convicted and went to jail based on those lies.”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Joel Steinberg was just your typical sleazy lawyer. And he’s telling Bill Brown, “Lemme get up and say something. I gotta look good for Mr. D’Apice here. Lemme get up there….” He didn’t do anything.

JOEL STEINBERG
:
Basically, I came into the case immediately after Andre D’Apice was arrested. What happened was that they drove up in their pink Cadillac convertible to the airport, took delivery of this brown paper-wrapped package—which I think had four canisters of video in it—thinking it was drugs.

But they reviewed the film—and you can’t do that. It’s a first amendment violation, search and seizure. A first amendment claim, all of which was over Bill Brown’s head because I realized in a minute he wasn’t a criminal lawyer.

BILL BROWN
:
Joel Steinberg suffered the problems of any lawyer coming from out of town—or coming in on a case late. He’s lost control; he’s got to justify his existence, so he’s saying, “Let’s ask for a jury trial….”

But my game plan was to get the prosecutor to drop the case. Because once they swore in witnesses it was all over for Pat because he had already received orders from high up in the FBI: “Do not lie under oath.”

They said, “If you have to take the oath, that’s the end of it—we’re throwing in the towel—because the first question is: ‘State your name.’”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
After the arrest I went to the Bridge Restaurant to meet Andre. The Bridge Restaurant was one of three or four places that were
hangouts for wiseguys. So whenever we went to those places, we made a big splash as Salamone and Wakerly.

We threw a lot of money around at the Bridge in particular and got to know the owner and the chef well. When we’d come in for dinner, the owner would take us back in the kitchen, you know, “Hey, what’s the special tonight?”

So that night I go to meet Andre—I was there by myself—I go into the kitchen, and there’s two guys with guns waiting to take me off into a car. I didn’t know them, okay?

We drive out on Western to Fort Lauderdale, then further west out onto a sandy road. Then we get out of the car. They open the trunk, hand me a shovel, and say, “Start digging.”

BILL BROWN
:
Fortunately, the arrest didn’t make any sense. They got Pat on an expired tag. Pat didn’t own the car. So it was a bad arrest.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
I started digging a hole. The two guys are saying, “Look, we know you’re a snitch. We know that
you
know that there’s a problem here. So you might as well tell us right now….” They were claiming I was an informant.

BILL BROWN
:
So my argument was that the officer had made an illegal arrest, and I could prove it. And once the initial arrest is improper, then anything that flows from that is fruit from the poisoned tree. In this case it was those two cartons of porn films in the trunk of the car. If you can’t introduce the films at trial, you have no evidence—you might as well drop the case.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
They were saying, “Who are you working with? The FBI? Broward County? Dade County?”

I’m getting down to about my ankles, and I can’t say, “I’m a cop.” I’d be dead then. My only chance was to say, “Look, you can kill me, but you’re going to die because you’ve made a big mistake here.”

And I kept digging.

BILL BROWN
:
I made an appointment with the prosecutor and went up to his office—I wore my brown clothes, no flashy clothes, because I was trying to come off as someone who did not present a challenge.

I said to him, “Look, you’ve got a bad arrest here. They arrested him initially for an expired sticker, and it wasn’t expired, and I’ll show you why….”

I’d been to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and gotten a copy of the law and the lease agreement. He said, “You’re right. We’ll drop it. What do you want to do?”

I said, “I’d like you to make an announcement that you’re dropping the case—either now or at the hearing next week.”

And he said, “Why don’t we wait and make the announcement at the hearing?”

I said, “Okay.” But now I’m worried. Is he going to remember? Or is there going to be another prosecutor transferred in? Or is the supervisor going to say, “You’ve been dismissing too many goddamn cases. I want you to go in there and fight and win.”

You never know.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
I didn’t have a gun on me. I didn’t have identification. The only way out was to be who I was. I was Salamone.

I had to convince them that they’re wrong—and if they did kill me, that they’re going to die, too.

After a while, they said, “All right, let’s go.” They threw the shovel back in the trunk, and we drove back to the Bridge Restaurant and had dinner with Andre.

And I tried to eat the Italian meal that was in front of me.

BILL BROWN
:
When we finally went to court, I walked up to the prosecutor and said, “Do you remember me? I’m Bill Brown. I came to your office?”

He looks at me. He’s seen a thousand lawyers in that three weeks.

I said, “You told me that you were going to dismiss this case? I think you made a note on the outside of your file right there….”

He looks at it and says, “Your Honor, we’re dropping the prosecution. Thank you very much.”

JOEL STEINBERG
:
I ended up standing up and representing all these people because Brown said, “You handle it.” We went to court—one case; I appeared, and it was suppressed.

BILL BROWN
:
This was a significant event: probably thirty people in the audience and another thirty up around the bench.

Like all winning clients, Pat wants to stay and chat. It’s the winning lawyer’s job to grab the client and drag him out of the courtroom before the judge changes his mind.

I said, “C’mon, Pat.
C’mon!
”

The room was full—the FBI people on one side and representatives of the New York mob on the other. All the mafiosos there to see if their guy was gonna get caught, and all the FBI brass waiting to see if their operation is going to get blown. It was really something to see.