I lean over to Fitz. “He grabs me again, I’m gonna have to clock him,” I say.

“No problem,” Fitz says. He is standing there, all 6’5” of him. “When you’re ready, let me know, I’ll take care of those other two guys.”

The drunk grabs me by the shoulder. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

“Okay, Fitz,” I say. I reach over and belt the drunk, and he slides off the stool. At the same time Fitz clocks the second guy, and then the third guy, one right after the other. All three of them sink to the floor.

Everybody in the joint turns away. Where wiseguys are concerned, nobody wants to know anything.

I say to the bartender, “You saw and you heard, right?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“So if anything comes down regarding this, just say how this guy was out of line. Fitz knows how to reach me and my people in New York.”

It turned out the guy was a member of the Lucchese family. Word did get right back to New York. Everything was smoothed over. It helped my image.

Fitz and I cruised the Miami-area hangouts that had been identified as likely places for contacts: Sneaky Pete‘s, Charley Brown’s Steak Joint, the Executive Club, Tony Roma’s, Gold Coast up in Fort Lauderdale.

But we weren’t able to lure the big-timers into conversation. For several months I went back and forth between the Colombos and the Bonannos, between New York and Florida.

Fitz and I were out one night in a nightclub near Fort Lauderdale. We were sitting at the bar. Fitz introduced me to a lot of people he knew in there. “This is Don from New York.” Guys were going into the john to snort coke. I was just sitting at the bar bullshitting with a couple of half-ass wiseguys and their girlfriends.

Then this one guy comes out of the john and comes over to me holding this little open vial. He holds it out to me and says, “Here, Don, have a snort.”

I smack his arm, sending the bottle flying and the cocaine spraying all over the place. I grab him by the lapels and hoist him. “I don’t do that stuff,” I say, “and you had no business offering it to me. Don’t ever offer it to me again. I make money off it, but I don’t use it. I keep my head clear at all times.”

“But look what you did,” he whines, “all my stuff!”

“Write it off to experience,” I say. “You wanna fuck up your head, that’s up to you. Don’t bring it around me.”

I didn’t do these things to be a tough guy. But with things like drinking and drugs, you can’t be a fence-sitter around these guys. If you smoke a joint or take a snort the first time—maybe just to show that you’re a regular guy—or if you say, “Maybe later,” it gives the impression that you do drugs. If you’re a fence-sitter, then you’re in a bind. You just invite people to keep offering it to you. And if you say, “Not now,” and then keep refusing and refusing and putting it off, they begin to wonder: What’s up with this guy? But if you draw the line right in the beginning—I don’t do it; I ain’t ever gonna do it—then that’s it, nobody cares anymore.

A lot of people have the misconception that mob guys are all big drinkers or dopers. Some of them are—a greater proportion of young guys do drugs than older guys. But so many guys don’t do anything that you don’t stand out by saying no—it’s no big deal. Tony Mirra killed twenty or thirty people, and he drank only club soda.

The thing is, even though it’s a fake world for you as an undercover agent, it’s a real world for the people that you’re dealing with. And you have to abide by the rules in that world. And those rules include how you establish your own standards, credibility, and individuality. I know one or two guys that drank or did drugs while they were undercover just because they thought they had to do that to blend in or show they were tough guys. It was an enormous mistake. You can’t compromise your own standards and personality. Smart wiseguys will see right through your act. You look like somebody that has no mind of his own, hence no strength.

I don’t use drugs, and I wasn’t going to start using them then just for an undercover role. How could I tell my kids not to use dope if I was out there sniffing coke just for the job?

And there’s another reason, very practical. As an FBI agent, someday down the line I was going to be in court testifying on all these cases we were making. I was not going to lie. And I was not going to tarnish my credibility and risk failing on convictions by taking drugs or getting drunk or doing anything that would suggest I lacked commitment or character.

This line of thinking is not arrived at on the spur of the moment. I didn’t think it over when the guy offered me the coke. I acted spontaneously, because I had sorted all this out in my head and established my priorities and standards before I ever went out on the job.

In any event, I accomplished what I wanted to. While later on I would get involved in drug transactions, nobody ever again offered me drugs for my personal use.

I was down in Miami one time working with Fitz for a week. I had told Jilly and his guys that I would be down there. But I didn’t call them back with a telephone number where I could be reached.

As it turned out, they had tried to find me because they wanted me in on a big job they were going to pull down there.

They had connections in Florida. Guido told me that he had been dealing drugs in Florida for nine years, especially in the Key West area, where he had the fix in with the police department and the district attorney’s office. Vinnie told me that he had a friend who owned a nursery on Staten Island where he was growing a big marijuana crop, and that when it was harvested in August, Guido would take it to Florida for sale.

In this instance they had information about a house in Fort Lauderdale where they could pull off an easy $250,000 cash score. It was a four-man job. When they couldn’t locate me, Jilly joined Guido and Patsy and Frankie. When I got back to New York, they filled me in on what had happened. They had pulled off the job, and it had been a disaster.

The information their Florida tipster gave them was that an elderly lady kept the cash and diamonds in a safe. Guido bought safecracking tools for the job in Miami. They went to the house, flashed their detective shields to the lady, and said they were on an investigation and needed to come in. They handcuffed the lady. But there was no safe. And there was no quarter of a million in cash.

What they found were bullet holes in the ceiling, bank books showing that a huge deposit was made the day before in a safe-deposit box, and a little cash lying around. By the time they accounted for plane fare and tools and other expenses, they came out of the job with about $600 apiece.

Their information had been good, but late. Later their tipster filled in the story. The lady’s husband had died and left the quarter mill. He had promised a large chunk of that to his nephew. But the widow didn’t like the nephew and didn’t want to give him the money. The nephew came to collect. He tried to frighten the lady. He pulled out a gun and fired two bullets into the ceiling. But she didn’t give up the money. The next day she put it all in a safe-deposit box. That was the day before Guido and Jilly went there to steal it.

“If I‘d’ve known all this ahead of time,” Guido told me, “I never would have pulled the job.”

Jilly got 1,200 ladies’ and children’s watches from a job at the airport. He brought samples into the store. As usual, he offered me a piece or all of the load if I could find a market. He gave me a sample to show, a Diantvs.

Meanwhile he had located a potential buyer. A couple of guys were interested in part of the load. The next afternoon, we were in the back room when these two guys walked in.

I recognized one of them as a guy I had arrested two years earlier on a hijacking charge, back before I went undercover and I was on the Truck and Hijack Squad.