Strife And Death in the Family

By David Brand

Benjamin Ruggiero -- "Lefty Guns" to the mobsters he hung around with in New York City's Little Italy -- always remembered a conversation. No one knew that better than FBI Undercover Agent Joseph D. Pistone as he sat with Lefty, his Mafia chief and partner, in Nathan's in Miami Beach one morning in 1980. Several months before, Pistone had borrowed a white yacht from a fellow agent for an oceangoing party to impress Lefty and his Mafia pals. A girlfriend's rich brother had provided the boat, Pistone explained. Now an unhappy Lefty was looking at a page of TIME with a picture of the very same yacht: it had been used by the FBI in the Abscam scandal to help catch several crooked Congressmen accepting bribes from agents posing as rich Arabs.

"Lefty, that's not the same boat," a wary Pistone insisted. Lefty was adamant: "Tell me about this boat. How did we get on this boat?" Thinking fast, Agent Pistone recalled the story about the rich brother and then pointed out that if they had partied on a fed boat, they had been a lot smarter than the Congressmen: they had not been caught. "We're sitting here, Left. We beat those FBI guys."

It was probably the closest Pistone came to being unmasked and "whacked" (killed) during the five years that he posed as Jewel Thief Donnie Brasco with the Bonanno and Colombo crime families. When he emerged from under cover in 1981, he was closer than any previous outsider to the inner sanctum of the Mafia.

His upcoming book Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia (New American Library; $18.95), written with Richard Woodley, reveals the full extent of his dangerous voyage into the underworld. Pistone lived with mobsters, gained their trust and came close to being initiated as a wise guy -- a "made" Mafioso. He helped arrange business deals between crime families in different parts of the country and was the subject of three Mob-style tribunals, or "sit-downs," any of which could have resulted in a contract on his life. "In the Mafia, it's always someone you know real well who kills you," says Pistone, 48, a tall, swarthy, bearded man with the build of an athlete.

Danger still lurks: the Mafia commission put out a $500,000 contract on Pistone's life, forcing him and his long-suffering family to live under an assumed name somewhere in New Jersey. Pistone, who left the FBI in 1986, is no longer protected by the agency but carries a .38-cal. pistol at all times. The Mob has reason to rage at the former agent: his daring double life was instrumental in gaining more than 100 federal convictions of organized-crime members. He was a key witness in the "pizza connection" case involving Sicilian heroin importers, as well as the 1986 Mafia commission trial in New York City.

Of equal importance, Pistone exposed the degree to which Government crime- busting efforts have weakened the Mafia, says Ronald Goldstock, director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force. The Mob, which once ran thorough security checks on any stranger, simply lacked the "discipline and internal controls" to unmask the agent, he says.

Pistone shows the Mafia as holding a disregard for human life that is terrifyingly amoral. As a wise guy, Pistone quotes Lefty as saying, "you can cheat, you can steal, you can kill people -- legitimately. You can do anything you want, and nobody can say anything about it."

Several times Pistone came within a telephone call of being exposed. In 1977, shortly after he had infiltrated a small gang of crooks attached to the Colombo family, two mobsters became suspicious that Pistone was a stoolie and demanded that he provide a criminal reference. Months before, Pistone had asked another FBI agent to instruct a Mob informant in Florida always to be ready to vouch for Donnie Brasco. But had the agent passed on the message? And if he had, would the informant remember? For several tense hours Pistone played cards with the rest of the gang, while a mobster checked out his story. Finally the gangster returned. "Your guy okayed you," he said.

Incredibly, Pistone lived in this fashion for five years without once stepping out of character. That was possible, he says, because he simply remained himself, an Italian American who had grown up in New Jersey around neighborhoods where mobsters lived. He had a sense of their behavior and values. "I knew how to act natural so no alarms would go off," he says. So natural, in fact, that as a Mob hanger-on, he got close to Mafia Soldier Lefty Ruggiero, a neurotic worrier, chronically short of cash, who became Pistone's mentor in check-cashing scams and drug and gambling deals. Pistone also "felt a kind of kinship" with Dominick ("Sonny Black") Napolitano, a killer who kept pigeons on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building and was to become the acting boss of the Bonanno family.

His own family knew he was an undercover agent but little else. His wife and his three daughters, now 25, 23 and 21, sometimes would not see him for weeks at a time. While Pistone's family was sitting at home on Christmas Eve, Donnie Brasco would be out "bouncing" around with mobsters, planning criminal scams from loan-sharking to extortion. Even getting home for a day required making elaborate excuses to his Mafia bosses. In a telephone interview, Mrs. Pistone, a 47-year-old former nurse, admits, "It was horrible. I was always having to do without my husband, making excuses to friends, having children unhappy because their father wasn't around, having to placate them and tell them that they didn't have a lousy father."

Pistone's dual loyalty to his mission and his family was sorely tested in 1978, when his wife was injured in an automobile crash. Pistone stayed with & her during her eleven days in the hospital and for a week when she returned home. Then he was back on the job, explaining that he had been taking care of a sick girlfriend.

Five years were far more than the family had bargained for when Pistone began the undercover operation in September 1976 with the idea of spending six months infiltrating fences who dispose of Mob swag. Pistone's name was erased from agency files, and contact agents were selected to deliver his spending money (sometimes meeting him in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and to take his phone calls several times a week. Donnie Brasco (Pistone chose the name at random) never took notes and rarely carried a recorder or radio transmitter because they might be discovered when he greeted fellow Mafiosi with the traditional hug and kiss. He began by frequenting Manhattan clubs and restaurants where wise guys hang out and gradually joined the fringes of the Colombo family. As he started establishing relations with Bonanno Family Members Lefty Ruggiero and Sonny Black, the FBI decided to continue the operation.

A constant problem was how much Pistone could participate in Mob dealings without breaking the law himself. He could not initiate or encourage crimes, but to win credibility he had to participate in such activities as unloading stolen trucks and buying stolen guns. "What would happen, I thought, if I'm out with Sonny and Lefty and we get caught in a battle," he recalls. The situation never arose, but as he came closer to being initiated into the Mob, he was given a contract by Sonny Black to kill a fellow Mafioso. Before Pistone could run the mobster to earth, the FBI ended the operation, and on July 26, 1981, Agent Pistone came in from the heat.

Lefty at first refused to accept that his buddy Donnie would testify against him, but he was forced to believe it when he was confronted by Pistone on the witness stand in federal district court in Manhattan in 1982 and was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Sonny Black disappeared 17 days after Donnie Brasco's identity was revealed. In August 1982, Black's body was found on Staten Island. His hands had been chopped off, a symbol of a violation of Mafia security. "I felt a little bad," says Pistone, "but I always kept in mind that if he had found out who I was, he would have had no hesitation about killing me." For the undercover agent, as for the mobster, it was just business.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/New York