And then I would have to remember facts and names and faces and numbers until I could call in a report to my contact agent.

That’s why when I would get home for my one day or evening in two or three weeks, it would be difficult to adjust and focus deserved attention on my family. Especially when they didn’t know what I was doing and we couldn’t talk about it.

One hot August afternoon I was in the store when they came in from a job. Jilly, Guido, Patsy, Frankie, and a couple of other guys, one of them named Sonny. Jilly was nervous as hell. I had never seen him so nervous.

“We hit this house in Bayonne this morning,” he told me. “The guy was a big guy [I wasn’t sure whether he meant physically big or important] and I thought I was gonna have to shoot the motherfucker because he wouldn’t open the safe. I had my gun on him, and I said I was gonna shoot him if he didn’t open it up or if he tried anything. I really thought I was gonna have to shoot him. Finally he opened it and we handcuffed him and the woman and taped his mouth shut.”

He was visibly shaken, and I didn’t know why, because he’d been out on any number of similar jobs.

They had opened a black attaché case on the desk in the back room. Without making a point of sticking my nose into it, I could see jewelry—rings and earrings and neck chains—some U.S. Savings Bonds, plastic bags of coins like from a collection, a bunch of nude photographs of a man, and a man’s wig.

Also in the case were sets of handcuffs of the type you can buy in a police supply house, several New York Police Department badges they probably stole someplace, and four handguns.

“We posed as cops to get in,” Patsy said. “Tell him about the priest.”

Sonny said, “I was in the getaway car across the street from the house, with the motor running. I happened to be in front of a church. I’m sitting there waiting for the guys to come out, and this priest comes walking by. And he stops to chat! ‘Isn’t it a lovely day,’ this priest is saying to me. And he goes on about it. I can’t get rid of him. I don’t know how the guys are gonna come out of the house, running or what, and this priest is telling me about the birds and the sky. I couldn’t leave. Finally he said good-bye and walked away. I could still see him when the guys came out.”

Jilly handed me a small bunch of things. “Get rid of this junk, will you? Toss it in a dumpster in Manhattan when you go back.”

It was stuff from the robbery they didn’t want, and didn’t want found in the neighborhood: a pink purse, a broach and matching earrings, the nude photos, a

U.S. passport.

What I wanted was the guns. They were stolen property that we could trace back to the score and tie Jilly’s crew to it. And we always wanted to get guns off the street.

“If you want to move those guns,” I said to Jilly, “I got a guy that I sold a few guns to from my burglaries, so maybe he’d be interested in these.”

“We should get $300 apiece for them,” he said.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

He gave me the guns: a Smith & Wesson .45; a Smith & Wesson .357 Highway Patrolman; a Rohm .38 Special revolver; a Ruger .22 automatic. Whatever else the owner was, he was not a legitimate guy. Two of the guns had the serial numbers filed off. They were stolen guns before Jilly’s guys got ahold of them. Generally, filing the numbers off doesn’t cause us too much of a problem. Most of the time the thieves don’t file deep enough to remove all evidence from the stamping process. Our laboratory guys can bring the numbers back up with acid.

The next day I put them in a paper bag and walked over to Central Park at Ninetieth St. My contact agent, Steve Bursey, was waiting for me. I handed him the bag. We decided we would try to get by with offering Jilly $800 for the guns. You never give them all that they ask in a deal. First, it’s government money, and we don’t want to throw out more than we have to. Second, you want to let them know that you’re hard-nosed and not a mark.

The next day I went back to the club and told them that my man offered me $800.

“That’s not enough,” Patsy said. “You said you could get twelve hundred bucks.”

“I said I’d try,” I said. “The guy is firm at eight hundred. ”

“No good.”

With some deals I would have just said okay and given the stuff back. But not with the guns. I didn’t want to give the guns back. “Look, I got the guns, I got eight hundred on me. You want it or you don’t.” I tossed the money down on the desk, trusting to their greed when they saw the green. There was some squabbling.

“We could have got more somewhere else,” Patsy said.

“Hey, if you can get more, take the fucking guns and bring them somewhere else. But who’s gonna give you more than two hundred apiece for guns that are probably registered and have been stolen and the numbers filed off? You think I didn’t push for all I could get? There’s eight hundred of my own money. You want the deal, I’ll just collect from him.”

“Okay,” Jilly said. He picked the money up and gave $100 each to Guido, Frankie, and Patsy as their share, and $100 to me for peddling the guns.

I handed in my $100 to Agent Bursey. So the guns cost the FBI $700.

Guido was bitching about a bunch of people that had recently been made in the Colombo family. He mentioned both Allie Boy Persico and Jerry Lang. Allie Boy was Alphonse Persico, the son of Carmine “The Snake” Persico—sometimes referred to as Junior—who was the boss of the Colombo family. Jerry Lang was Gennaro Langella, who some years later would become underboss of the Colombo family and acting boss when Carmine The Snake went to prison.

“I’ve done more work than half the guys that were made,” Guido said, meaning that he had been in on more hits, which is one of the prime considerations in getting made, “and I ain’t got my badge. That kid Allie Boy is just a wiseass punk. He never did a bit of work to earn his badge. The only reason he got made is because his old man is boss.”

“You better shut up,” Jilly said. “People walking in and out of the store all the time, we don’t know who hears what. We’re gonna be history from that kind of talk about the boss’s son.”

I was standing outside Lefty Ruggiero’s social club on Madison Street in Little Italy when Tony Mirra came by and told me to drive him to Brooklyn.

That set off an alarm in my gut. Although it was known that I was moving between crews of two different families, that kind of freewheeling eventually draws suspicion. Pretty soon, if you don’t commit to somebody, they think you can’t be trusted. Suddenly Mirra, a Bonanno guy and a mean bastard, wants me to go with him to Brooklyn where I have been hanging out with Colombo guys. Was he taking me there for some kind of confrontation?

In the car Mirra said he had an appointment with The Snake.

Recollections came rushing into my head. The guy in Jilly’s that I recognized as somebody I had once arrested—had he known me, after all? Guido’s remarks about Allie Boy Persico—had those remarks about his son gotten back to The Snake? The recollections didn’t make me feel good. Was I going to be grilled about Jilly’s crew, things I had heard, what I was doing there?

If The Snake had heard about the complaints, was I going to be pressured to rat out the people doing the complaining? If I was pressured for information, would it be some kind of test?

My mind was racing as we cruised over the Brooklyn Bridge. I tried to sort out the possibilities and options. I definitely would not rat anybody out. That was for sure. If I turned rat on anybody to save my own skin, I would have to pull out of the operation, anyway, because my credibility would be blown. So if I was pressured to rat anybody out, I would just take the heat and see what happened. If they were testing my reliability, I would pass the test, and that would put me in solid.