(Facts checked) You’ve got your story straight.
You’ve spent months prepping to go undercover and infiltrate the Italian-American mafia.
You are no longer named Joseph Pistone and from now on you’ll only answer to the name
your crew calls you.
You’ve got a fake driver’s license that bears that name and you’ve got a swagger
befitting a gangster.
You know how to use that Mafia twang and say, “How ya doin’?”and “fuhgeddaboudit”
in just the right way.
You are going to try and fool some of the most dangerous criminals in the world and
bring them down.
That will mean seeing some disturbing things, and as you move through this new life every
day could be your last.
This is the story of one of the biggest lies the FBI ever told.
The story of a man who was once known as Donnie Brasco.
Joseph “Joe” Pistone was the right fit for an undercover cop who would infiltrate
an Italian-American crime family.
He was part Sicilian, grew up in New Jersey where the mafia presence was strong, and so
he had the background and knew the patois of those gangsters.
He looked the part, sounded the part, and when the time came he was ready to be a “wise
guy.”
In fact, a much wiser guy than the wise guys he worked with.
His early life didn’t consist of petty crime and fighting in the mean streets of New Jersey.
He studied hard, attained a degree in anthropology and later went to work for Naval Intelligence.
It wasn’t until 1969 when he was 30-years old that he started working for the FBI.
Five years later he was moved to New York where he joined the truck hijacking unit,
with hijacking trucks being a big money-spinner for the mafia.
Sometimes the truck drivers were in on it, too, and took payment and maybe a black eye
for a pay-off.
Hundreds of trucks were getting done over and millions of dollars of items were being
stolen.
It didn’t really matter what the bounty was, it could all be sold on.
In 1974, when Pistone joined that unit, the truck hijacking businesses was bringing in
$4.2 million a year.
Something had to be done.
But it wasn’t the truck hijacking that made Pistone a well-regarded name in the FBI, it
was when he went undercover for the first time and brought down a vehicle theft ring.
30 people were arrested and the FBI knew they had a man they could use.
It was 1976 when Pistone put his hand up and said he was willing to go undercover again,
but this time the assignment was about as dangerous as could be.
He said he’d infiltrate one of the “Five Families” that ran New York city’s criminal
underworld.
That was the Bonanno crime family.
He spoke Italian fluently, including the street slang of gangsters.
He’d grown up among them, had Sicilian heritage, and as he’d proved, he could work well undercover.
There really wasn’t a better man for the job.
He just needed to create a backstory, and that meant everything, from fictional fights
he had in high school and how much he loved his grandmother’s “pasta con le sarde”
and mouthwatering “cassata siciliana.”
He had to know names in the Mafia and how the organization worked.
He had made-up past loves.
He had been kicked around the tough streets and that’s how he got into crime.
His principle income was jewel thievery, and if you’re a jewel thief you have to know
a thing or two about jewels.
This was a tricky part of the back story and Pistone had to spend some time studying gemology.
He passed with bright flying colors.
His name was erased.
He was expunged from history.
There was no Joe Pistone now, only Donnie Brasco, the jewel thief.
It was intended that he’d stay this way for six months, but as you’ll see, things
didn’t quite work out that way.
One day this man named Donnie turned up in Little Italy.
He frequented restaurants and hung out in bars.
He always seemed to have lots of cash on him, and while he didn’t immediately tell the
folks he met why this was, he did get particularly friendly with a bar man at one place.
Then he let it be known he had jewels and he knew where he could get more jewels.
He was useful to any criminal empire.
With all the cash he had he was obviously pretty good at his job.
You have to think about how dangerous this was.
It wasn’t as if he was working in Alaska.
He could have easily been spotted by someone he knew and if met on the street and called
“Joe” he was done for.
To prevent anyone from letting the story out only a few people in the FBI knew about the
operation, while his co-workers just thought he’d moved on some place.
His own friends didn’t know where he’d gone.
The man was a ghost.
He couldn’t be seen to be big time otherwise someone would have already heard of him, but
the act was that while he was small time he could certainly get involved with bigger things
and likely earn for a family.
It actually took about six months before he got a break and was introduced to someone
from the Colombo crime family.
There he started working for Jilly Greca and his crew, an outfit that got most of their
money from stealing and hijacking.
This wasn’t really the higher echelons of mafia crews, but it was a start.
The funny thing is, because he was so undercover the New York cops soon had a file on him.
That file said he was a crook and a new addition to the Greca crew named Don Brasco.
Then he got another break and met a man with a violent temper and a will to kill.
That man was Anthony "Tony" Mirra and he was part of the Bonanno crime family.
Now things got serious, because Tony was known for his temper.
It’s thought he killed 30 to 40 people during his criminal career.
Brasco worked more closely with other members of the family, including Dominick “Sonny
Black” Napolitano and Benjamin "Lefty Guns" Ruggiero.
He developed a close friendship with the latter, and this is how the many exploits of the mafia
got back to the FBI.
During this time his life was filled with patches of boredom and loneliness.
Months and years passed and he had no real friends or anyone to love or confide in.
It was a dangerous job, but one of the worst aspects of working undercover was basically
not being able to be you and enjoy unadulterated emotions.
When it came to the more dangerous side of this life, Brasco was never involved in things
like big shoot outs and he never had to “whack” a guy.
He just played the part, stayed in character, and listened.
Of course he had to witness violence, though.
Unlike some undercover agents that would follow, Brasco never lost sight of who he was.
While he acted well, he was always aware that he was an FBI agent and his friendships were
not real.
He might laugh and joke around with them and the laughter wasn’t fake, but he also knew
that one bad move would mean those guys laughing with him would fix him a pair of cement boots
and send him for a swim in the Hudson.
He also had a wife and kids who depended on him.
They knew nothing about what he was doing and he only got to see them once every few
months.
At one point he had a car trunk filled with Christmas gifts and was about to go home to
his family, but then he bumped into some of his crew and they took him out on a wild night.
He had to play the part.
The guys in the crew thought Donnie was a bachelor and would be spending Christmas alone
in his room.
They sympathized with the man.
They even visited him at his room and brought a surprise Christmas tree, after which they
helped him decorate it.
“Whatya gonna do, it’s Christmas time, ba da bing ba da boom.”
There was even one time when Brasco’s wife had a near fatal car accident, and he had
to go missing for several days.
Upon returning he couldn’t show sadness and had to make up a story as to where he
had been.
One of the scariest aspects of the job as time went by was when he was summoned to a
mob meeting.
Every single time he showed up he wondered if his real identity had been exposed and
he would get whacked there and then.
On another occasion he and Lefty were blamed for messing up a job, and he could have been
taken out for that, but instead they let him off.
Brasco ended up in Florida, where he ran quite a successful operation.
At this point the ill-tempered Mirra had just got out of jail and discovered that Brasco
was making a lot of cash.
He demanded part of that, seeing as it was him that gave him his start.
This was also a troublesome time when lives were on the line.
But when he was alone with Sonny or Lefty much of the time they just lived like normal
friends.
They didn’t always talk about Mafia stuff.
You have to remember this went on for years and years, and while movies or TV might depict
Brasco’s life as being crime 24-hours a day, it just wasn’t like that.
Most of the time was spent sitting at home watching TV or going to the bar and playing
cards.
Brasco didn’t know too much about the inner workings of the crime family because he wasn’t
a made man.
You know what you need to know, is how the Mafia dealt with things.
They knew very well that in New York city you are never more than a few feet away from
a rat.
From time to time things slipped, though, and a big break for Brasco is when Sonny told
him about three captains that had been whacked.
They’d been told to come to a meeting and when they got there they were shot by Lefty
and other men.
Sonny was now confiding in Brasco, which was good…and bad.
The downside to becoming a closer member of the family was doing what family members did,
and that was dealing in violence and sometimes murder.
Sonny said to Brasco, I need you to take out a person, but you know what, I’m gonna try
and make you a made man.
You’ll be one of us.
We’re going to make some serious money.
He was now in too deep for his own good.
One, because killing someone was too extreme an act to follow, and two because now he was
so close to Sonny he was a target for the people he was supposedly warring against.
He might get taken out both as a wise guy and in the line of duty.
It was too much.
The FBI pulled him out.
That aftermath was to say the least chaotic, and at first Brasco’s old crew didn’t
believe the truth.
They thought this was some kind of wicked lie, a trap laid by the FBI.
They soon discovered it wasn’t a lie and Donnie Brasco, their friend and associate,
had never existed.
Sonny was soon murdered for getting close to Brasco and not unearthing the truth.
Lefty ended up in prison.
Mira went into hiding, but things weren’t looking too good because the Bonanno family
boss, one Joseph Massino, had ordered his murder.
A mafia solider named Joseph D'Amico did the business in the end, shooting him a few times
in the head.
Ironically, D’Amico would also later become an informant.
As for what happened during the job, the friendships he made, Pistone once said, “I had no sense
of guilt.
All during the course of the operation, I knew it was a job.”
He did say later, though, that he didn’t want his old comrades to be killed.
He only wanted them imprisoned.
The Mafia put a $500,000 contract out on Pistone’s life, and counter to what some people believe,
he says it has never been rescinded.
He and his family live with false names which they change occasionally.
No one knows where they are, and they certainly stay away from locations where there is a
Mafia presence.
Time might have passed, but Pistone believes there’ll be some big shot out there who
wants to say he was the man that took down the FBI’s most famous undercover cop.
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