Strife And Death in the Family

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."