I maintained a low profile, the way I’m comfortable. I didn’t volunteer more about myself than was necessary ; I didn’t ask questions that didn’t need to be asked—even though information I wanted was often just out of reach. But I knew that certain things I did would catch the eye of people or have people talking. I had to be patient, just let things develop.

Guido was Jilly’s right-hand man, and he was a tough guy. He was tougher than the other guys in this crew. He looked different too. An Italian with blond hair and blue eyes. He had a mustache. Because he wasn’t a made guy, he, like me, could have a mustache. He was about 6’1”, 200 pounds. Late thirties. His arms were tattooed with snakes. He wore tinted glasses. He told me he had been in and out of jail most of his life, for various offenses. He was a shooter, but he had never been convicted of murder. Guido’s crew under Jilly was sophisticated enough to operate with walkie-talkies. Jilly told me he thought Guido was too much of a cowboy, took too many risks, but that he had done a lot of “work” for the Colombos, meaning he had participated in hits.

If Guido was your friend, he would be with you till the end. If he was your enemy, forget about it—he would get you. Everybody showed respect for Guido.

One day soon after I started hanging out with the Jilly crew, Guido and I were riding around in my car.

He said, “Hey, Don, what’s that squeak?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t bother me.”

“Yeah, it’s a squeak,” he said, leaning forward and cocking his head, “in the dashboard.”

We got back to Jilly‘s, and I pulled up at the curb across the street.

He said, “I’ll take that dashboard off and find that squeak and fix it.”

“Hey, Guido, don’t waste your time. It don’t bother me.”

“It bothers me. It won’t take long.”

Guido always carried a set of burglar tools in a toolbox in his car. He went and got them and crawled in under the dashboard and started taking it apart.

I said, “Why go through all this trouble just to find a squeak? It’s no big deal.”

In five minutes he had the whole dashboard off. He looked all over behind it. “It’s okay,” he said. He started putting it back in place.

“Well, what the hell did you take it apart for?” I said.

“To tell you the truth, you’re new around here. I just wanted to see if your car was wired up or anything. It’s clean.”

“Well, fuck you,” I said. “You think I’m a fucking cop with a fucking recorder in my car? Why don’t you just ask me, face-to-face?”

“Take it easy, Don. We gotta be careful, that’s all. There’s lots of operations they got going on around here. You’re just new to us, that’s all. Forget about it.”

Actually I wasn’t all that surprised to have somebody snooping around to check me out. If they did it once, they could do it again. So for all the years I was on this undercover job, while I would eventually have reason to wear hidden transmitters and tape recorders and would ride around in other agents’ cars which were equipped with recorders, I would never have my own car wired.

I couldn’t play it entirely safe. Any chance I would get, I myself would snoop around. If the guys were out front in the store or outside, and I was alone for a couple of minutes in the back room, I would always be looking in the desk drawers. There would usually be guns, both automatics and revolvers. There would also be other burglary paraphernalia stashed in there, like wigs and ski masks. If anybody had come in, my snooping would have been fatal. But my job was to find out what was going on, after all. I wasn’t just curious.

If I was who I said I was, I couldn’t just be sitting around listening to their schemes. I had to have some things of my own going.

Early in 1977, I made a few small deals with Vinnie the fence. Vinnie wasn’t a heavy-duty guy. He was a family-type guy, from Staten Island, who used to hang around Jilly’s during the day and then go home to his family at night. He didn’t go out on actual jobs; he wasn’t a tough guy. He just got rid of swag for people.

I wanted to make it look like I was moving stuff here and there to make a few bucks and trying to work my way up the line to bigger fences. Vinnie started me out with perfume.

We arranged a meeting for downstairs from my apartment, outdoors at the corner of Ninety-first Street and Third Avenue. Around noon he arrived driving a rented white Ford Econoline van. It was filled with cartons of perfume—by Lanvin. “I pick this up every week right at the factory where they make it,” he said. “I pay a couple of guys who work there.”

Perfume wasn’t really my line, but it’s not too far removed from jewelry. And mob thieves don’t turn up their noses at anything where they can make a profit. You want to be a good customer, but not so good that you become a mark. I bought one carton of the perfume—Eau My Sin and Yves St. Laurent Rive Gauche—for $220.

The perfume, like everything else I bought in my role, I turned over to the FBI.

A few days later I met him at the Woodbridge Auction on Route 9 in Woodbridge, New Jersey. The auction was like a flea market and drew big crowds. Vinnie had a booth there where he sold swag that he hadn’t sold to other fences. There, with the public and families all milling around, Vinnie would be in his booth selling stuff from hijacks or burglaries. I used to swing over there to see what new stuff he had, or if I had something that he might want to sell out of the auction. He got rid of a lot of swag from that booth.

I even took my wife there once. I got to spend so little time with her in those days that I figured the risk was tolerable. She got a kick out of it. The only problem was that once, right in front of Vinnie, who called me “Don,” she called me “Joe.” But he didn’t seem to pick up on it. And, anyway, supposedly she was just some broad I knew—I could have been using any name with her.

He had some Enigma perfume for me, $250 a case, which contained fifteen boxes. “This stuff retails for forty dollars a box,” he said. I bought a case.

I told him I had made a score, and had fifty to sixty watches and a good haul of fine turquoise jewelry. I showed Vinnie two sample wristwatches—gold Pateau Mitsu Boshi Boeki digitals, which were fairly new at the time, with red faces, worth maybe $80 apiece—and he bought them for $20 each. “I’ll show these to Jilly in Brooklyn,” he said, “and see how many more he wants.”

Most of the “swag” I sold was stuff confiscated by the Bureau, loot recovered from previous thefts but which could not be traced back to the owners. These watches and jewelry were not from the Bureau. I had wanted the stuff in a hurry to make this deal, so I had bought them at a wholesale place on Canal Street. I worked it this way a few times. It meant there was no paperwork, nobody would know where the stuff was going. Like some other things I did, it might have left me open to internal criticism, but I had to make the decisions about my own security and pace. And nothing I did was a shortcut that would damage a case.

Vinnie said that he and his partner were about to make a score on a load of Faded Glory jeans, for which a buyer had already agreed to pay $125,000. “The load is a hundred and twenty-five thousand pairs,” he said, “so it comes out to a buck a pair.”

Three weeks later he called and said he wanted fifteen more watches, which I sold him for $300, and some of the turquoise jewelry. I sold him necklaces and bracelets for $150.

I said, “Did you get that load of jeans?”

“Part of it. The guy who took it, he made a couple other deals. So we only got part. You know how it is.”

These small deals helped me get accepted by the crew at Jilly’s store and by the people they associated with. One of the first things Jilly himself offered me was a white sable coat, part of the haul they had taken in a burglary the night before. “It’s worth eleven grand,” Jilly told me. “You can have it for twenty-five hundred bucks if you want it.”