He encouraged me about my future in the mob.

“The thing is, Donnie, you gotta keep your nose clean. You gotta be a good earner and don’t get into trouble, don’t offend, don’t insult anybody, and you’re gonna be a made guy someday. Now, the only thing is, they might give you a contract to go out and whack somebody. But don’t worry about it. Like I told you, I’ll show you how. You got the makings, Donnie. You handle yourself right, keep your nose clean, keep on the good side of people, I’ll propose you for membership.”

Lefty says, “Come on, we got to go up to Sabella’s.”

It’s a hot July night. We go to CaSa Bella but we don’t go in. There are five or six other guys standing outside on the sidewalk, guys I recognize as being under Mike Sabella. We stand on the sidewalk with these other guys.

I ask Lefty, “Why the hell are we standing here?”

“We’re out here to make sure nothing happens to the Old Man. He’s in there.”

The Old Man is Carmine Galante, the boss of the Bonanno family. He just recently got out of prison. I look in the restaurant window and I can see him sitting at the table reserved for big shots; he’s hawk-nosed, almost bald, has a big cigar in his mouth. Sabella and a few others are seated with him.

“What’s the big deal?” I say. “What’s gonna happen to him?”

“Things are going on,” he says. “There’s a lot of things you don’t know, Donnie. Things I can’t talk about.”

“Well, why can’t we go inside and make sure nothing happens to him in there, where at least we could sit down?”

“Donnie, Donnie, listen to me. You don’t understand nothing sometimes. In the first place, Lilo don’t sit down with anybody except captains or above—bosses. He don’t sit down with soldiers or below, like me and you. He doesn’t have anybody around him except people he wants. You can’t even talk to this guy. You got to go through somebody higher, somebody that can talk to him. He don’t want nobody in the restaurant except those people in there, and that’s it. ”

“Okay, if you say so.”

“You don’t know how mean this guy is, Donnie,” Lefty goes on quietly. “Lilo is a mean son of a bitch, a tyrant. That’s just me telling you, it don’t go no further. Lot of people hate him. They feel he’s only out for himself. He’s the only one making any money. There’s only a few people that he’s close to. And mainly that’s the zips, like Caesar and those that you see around Toyland. Those guys are always with him. He brought them over from Sicily, and he uses them for different pieces of work and for dealing all that junk. They’re as mean as he is. You can’t trust those bastard zips. Nobody can. Except the Old Man. He can trust them because he brought them over here and he can control them. Everybody else has to steer clear of him. Theresalot of people out there who would like to see him get whacked. That’s why we’re here.”

This happened a few times, Lefty and I going down to CaSa Bella to stand guard outside while Carmine Galante held meetings inside. Lefty was nervous, out there on the sidewalk. He and the other guards, except me, were carrying guns in their waistbands under their shirts. He watched people and cars going by. He watched windows across the street.

I wasn’t comfortable, either. Here I was, an FBI agent, worried about getting whacked on this sidewalk on Mulberry Street because I was trusted enough by these mobsters to be standing guard over the feared boss of the Bonanno family.

Every few days I would call in to my contact agent. There was a special telephone line installed in the New York office for my calls only, and it would be answered by my contact agent. I would give him a rundown on what had been going on and what was coming up. Sometimes, for other operations, he would ask me to find out what’s going on at this or that club, who’s showing up or what’s being discussed. If I needed anything checked out—like a name or what a guy was into—he would take care of that for me. Any information I gave him that was noteworthy and that might be useful as evidence would be typed up as what we call “302s.” Once in a while the contact agent would bring along a handful of these reports for me to initial.

Once or twice a month, depending upon my circumstances, I met with a contact agent to get an envelope of cash for me to live and operate on. We would meet only briefly, usually just a couple of minutes. Often we met at museums—like the Guggenheim or the Metropolitan on Fifth Avenue. We would just be browsing, looking at the exhibits, he’d slip me the money. Sometimes we met on a bench in Central Park. Sometimes at a coffee shop.

We were approaching the end of 1977, and I had been undercover now for more than a year. The Bureau was about to close down the “Sun” part of Sun Apple in Florida, just settle for what Joe Fitz had been able to get so far without risking him down there any longer for minimal gains.

Once in a while my supervisor asked me how I felt, if I wanted to go a little longer. I felt fine. I wanted to keep right on going.

There were a couple of new considerations. I now had a good foothold with Lefty and the Bonannos. I was in pretty solid. The Bureau had started other undercover operations around the country. We could use my new mob credentials to establish credibility of other undercover agents in some of these other operations. I could be brought around to vouch for these other agents—attest that they were “good” badguys. Badguy targets of these other operations could check me out: I’m a friend of Lefty’s in New York.

It would be easier for me to do this if I wasn’t based in New York City, under Lefty’s thumb and eye on a day-to-day basis. If I moved someplace else while remaining Lefty’s partner, I could more easily slip around to these other undercover operations without having to ask permission to go out of town and without having Lefty knowing of my every move and questioning me about it. Also, conceivably I could bring Lefty out to these other operations, introduce him, hope that he might horn in, establish a link with the Bonannos that would form a conspiracy under the law.

I could still regularly come back to New York for two or three weeks at a time, continue to develop my association with Lefty, and maintain the partnership.

The other consideration was my family. Earlier I hadn’t been too concerned about protection of my family. I would get home to our house in New Jersey maybe one night every ten days or two weeks. I was always careful and covered my tracks. But by the fall of 1977, I was beginning to think that if I continued to get deeper into the mob, eventually my family was going to have to move away. There was always the chance of momentary carelessness that could be disastrous. I knew I was under surveillance by cops because I was being followed. Three or four times I was stopped and searched—for no apparent reason. Suppose I didn’t shake them off my tail sometime and they followed me right to my house? Or what if Lefty or some other wiseguy decided to follow me?

It was time to get my family out of there. That would eliminate that problem. And if I was going to be transferred out to another area, we might as well combine the two.

Through December and into January, I discussed this with my supervisor. He took the matter to headquarters. It was a pretty simple proposition. We decided to make the moves on February 1.

My family was used to moving. We had already moved four times for my job. But now my daughters were at an age where attachments to friends and boyfriends were more important. We had close relatives in New Jersey. When we moved back there for my earlier transfer to the New York office, we had supposed we would be staying. Nobody wanted to move again. My wife understood that it was necessary, without knowing the details. We didn’t have big discussions about it, because I didn’t present it as a choice. I was being transferred. They still didn’t know how deeply involved I was with the Mafia. They didn’t know the move had to do with their safety.