In 1968, Peter Maas’s The Valachi Papers was published, offering the first inside account of life in the Mafia as related by the first actual member of the Mafia to break the code of omerta and turn government informant. As such, the book was a literary landmark–it created a new genre. In the years that followed, other gangsters who became federally protected witnesses would pick up extra bucks by plying the literary trade: among the books, My Life in the Mafia by Vincent Teresa; The Last Mafioso, the story of James “the Weasel” Fratianno as related by Ovid Demaris; and the best work of the genre, Wiseguy, the story of Lucchese family associate Henry Hill as told by Nicholas Pileggi.
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Published in 1987, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia by Joseph D. Pistone (with the assistance of Richard Woodley) details FBI agent Pistone’s infiltration of a crew within New York’s Bonnano crime family. Pistone, who posed as a jewel thief, eventually wound up close to Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, a high-ranking Bonnano family capo, as well as to Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, a family soldier. While undercover, Pistone had to be careful to avoid certain things–using drugs, committing any serious violence, and getting involved with any woman hanging around mob guys. “Regardless of morality,” he writes, “that kind of thing will come back to haunt you when you testify in court against these guys.” Truer words were never spoken, as the undercover agent who is the subject of the second book, Joan Barthel’s Love or Honor, was to learn.
To be sure, what Pistone and other undercover agents subject themselves to requires an incredible amount of courage, day by day, minute by minute. He writes, “In the beginning of my undercover role as Donnie Brasco, I had occasional fears about the dangers of being an agent. Now I also had fears about the dangers of being a badguy. As things had now developed into family warfare, I could get whacked for being either an agent or a badguy.”
As it turned out, Sonny did get killed because of Pistone. Before leaving for a meeting with bosses in New Jersey, he turned over all his jewelry and cash and the keys to his apartment to the bartender of his neighborhood tavern. He knew he wasn’t coming back. Realizing he was defeated, he nonetheless refused to deal with the FBI, nor did he run. He just went to the meeting–and a year later his badly decomposed body was found in a body bag in a Staten Island creek, his hands chopped off. Others closely tied to Pistone also got killed. And an open-ended $500,000 contract was put out on Pistone himself–highly unusual since American mafiosi generally steer clear of going after law-enforcement agents, figuring they’re just doing their job. They must have decided that Pistone had crossed some line they had a gentleman’s agreement about.
Which, no doubt, Sonny would have been pleased to hear.
For his part, Anastos finds himself growing so involved with Marty that instead of using her to get at her father, he winds up protecting her father for Marty’s sake. One Sunday at her parents’ house he realizes that a garment-district businessman at dinner is an informant trying to set Marty’s father up for a loan-sharking charge. So he crashes the conversation, steering it off in other directions whenever it is about to enter incriminating territory–essentially he obstructs justice.
One other thing disturbed me about these books. Pistone writes that the FBI did not try to turn Sonny into an informant–that the opportunity was always there if he so chose, but to suggest it to him would have been an insult. But I wondered. I wondered whether a part of Pistone was calculating that perhaps there was only one book in this story, that the publishing world wasn’t big enough for the two of them. As people on both sides of the fence–mafiosi turned federally protected witnesses as well as undercover law-enforcement agents–start crowding the publishing field, it’s inevitable there’ll be some conflicts of interest. The question is, will fewer manuscripts piling up on agents’ desks mean more bodies piling up on the streets of Brooklyn?
