Strife And Death in the Family

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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.