Fernandez put the proposition to this Cuban banker that he do business with Lefty and me, wiseguys from New York. The banker readily agreed and set up a meeting for us at his bank to work out details.

Lefty and I went with Fernandez to this banker’s office. The banker preferred to speak Spanish, so Fernandez was the translator. We sat down and began asking about details of prices and so forth, how the operation would proceed. Suddenly the banker became evasive. He didn’t know anything about the drug business. He didn’t know anything about money laundering. Clearly there would be no deal, and Lefty and I quickly lost patience with this guy’s tap dancing—I wanted the banker busted, Lefty wanted big cocaine bucks.

We left. We couldn’t figure out what spooked this guy. Maybe Lefty, who can be a very intimidating wiseguy, had made him nervous.

It wasn’t Lefty. It was me. Later Fernandez went back to ask him what went wrong. The banker said, “I look in those eyes of Donnie and they’re killer eyes. If something goes wrong in Colombia or anywhere, he’ll come back and kill me. I don’t want to have anything to do with that Donnie.”

Lefty laughed. “I’m the fucking mob killer, and he’s afraid of you.”

But it wasn’t funny to him that we had blown a drug connection in Colombia. Lefty told Nick, “Somebody should sit this banker down and explain to him how you can’t make promises and then back out on it and waste our time. That’s not the way Italians do things.”

An agent going by the name of Tony Rossi was in Florida trying to infiltrate the gambling business that might lead to a connection with the Santo Trafficante family. Trafficante, who had been operating out of Tampa for twenty-five years, was the biggest Mafia don in Florida. He ran gambling casinos in Havana until Castro came to power, and achieved a lot of public notoriety when he admitted participating in a CIA plot to assassinate Castro during the Kennedy administration.

Rossi got a job as an enforcer, a strong-arm guy protecting card games. After a few weeks of this Rossi and the supervisor, Tony Daniels, decided that this wasn’t moving fast enough.

Tony Conte joined Rossi, adding his experience from the Project Timber operation in Milwaukee. They came up with the idea of opening a nightclub. The operation using the nightclub as a way to get to Trafficante was code-named Project Coldwater.

Four case agents worked as contacts for the undercover agents: Jim Kinne, Jackie Case, Bill Garner, and Mike Lunsford. In the fall of 1979, they rented a club in Holiday, in Pasco County, forty miles northwest of Tampa, on busy U.S. Route 19. It was an octagonal building on five acres that had been a tennis club, with six tennis courts. They named it King’s Court.

Rossi was established as “owner.” So that King’s Court didn’t have to deal with the liquor authority, it was a private “bottle club” that you could join for a membership fee of $25. People brought their own bottles and left them in little lockers behind the bar. They paid for setups.

Rossie and Conte hired a manager for the tennis courts, and bartenders, waitresses, a piano player, and a club manager. Nobody knew it was an FBI operation. The club was all redecorated, new bar, new drapes, new oak tables, and padded oak chairs. The front door had a peephole, and signs saying: KING’S COURT PRIVATE LOUNGE; NO BLUE JEANS: MEMBERS AND GUESTS RING BELL TO ENTER.

They started running poker games out of a back room in the club, the house taking five percent. They paid off a member of the Pasco County Sheriffs Department for protection. They managed to entice in some local hoods who pulled small swag deals, drug deals. A couple of the guys that came in had garbage-collection businesses, so they came up with the idea of starting a Cartmen’s Association by which members would control that business in the area and keep newcomers out.

Some half-assed wiseguys began hanging out there—ex-Chicago guys, ex-New York guys. They indicated that they had big connections, maybe leading to Trafficante. But nothing happened.

Conte suggested that maybe I could bring the Bonannos in, like we had done in Milwaukee, and get something going with Trafficante. A liaison with the Florida boss, allowing them to operate in the area, would be just as interesting to the Bonannos as it was to us. We might facilitate a sitdown with Trafficante as we had with Milwaukee. Of course, Conte had to pull out of it. He was leaving, anyway. His past had caught up with him.

All of a sudden, on an October day, word came down from FBI Headquarters that I was to pull out, end the Donnie Brasco role. The Bureau had found out what had spooked Frank Balistrieri in Milwaukee: Balistrieri had learned that Tony Conte was an agent. By mob rules, Balistrieri’s next move should have been to tell the Bonannos in New York. It was just another quick step to them implicating me.

The decision had been made at the top without consulting me. I had to talk them out of it. I was certain that I had laid enough groundwork to continue.

I flew to Chicago to meet with Mike Potkonjak who had been the case agent for Project Timber. I presented my case.

Evidently Balistrieri had not yet passed on his information to New York. We had to assume that eventually he would. Then what would happen?

It was true that there wouldn’t necessarily be any warnings if New York got the word and they decided to ice me. But I didn’t think it would happen. It was true also that I had brought Conte in. But I had been very careful to vouch for him only to a certain extent. If Lefty questioned me, I would say, “Look, like I told you, he and I did some things ten years ago and I had no complaints. So maybe he was an agent ten years ago—so what? I didn’t know about it then, I don’t know anything more now.” Lefty would believe me. Plus, Lefty was in a box. In order to convince Balistrieri of Conte’s reliability, Lefty had told Balistrieri that he himself knew Conte, that Conte was a friend of his. And further, at the Icebreaker Banquet, Balistrieri had introduced Conte as his friend from Baltimore.

Potkonjak was on my side. So was the guy I trusted most in the whole outfit, an old friend, Jules Bonavolonta, coordinator of the Organized Crime Program in New York. But the matter was very intense. We had to work quickly, and all by telephone. We convinced Jimmy Nelson at Headquarters, who was the supervisor on Project Timber and with whom I had worked earlier in New York.

They went to work on the very top levels at Headquarters. Finally everybody came around. I was allowed to continue as Donnie Brasco. But there would remain a lot of concern in Washington. Every once in a while after that, people got nervous for my safety and thought I should come out. To their credit they were convinced, time after time, that I should stay under—that I could survive, that the stuff we were getting was better and better.

I was pretty sure I was right. But from then on this circumstance was always in the back of my mind. Every time I was called in for a meeting with anybody in the family, I wondered whether it might be because Balistrieri had finally passed on his information, and my number had come up.

My wife and daughters flew in to New Jersey to spend the Christmas holidays with relatives.

The day of Christmas Eve is when all the mob guys go around and pay their respects to other wiseguys at all the social clubs. You have a drink with everybody you know. Lefty and I hit all the spots, including CaSa Bella and other restaurants where guys hung out.

Christmas Eve I went to Lefty’s apartment and had dinner with him and Louise. They had a little Christmas tree on the table. Lefty and I exchanged presents-a couple of shirts for him, a couple of shirts for me.