He sighed. “Six fucking years and you still don’t know nothing.”

Dennis the ex-cop and Jimmy Legs joined us in that car. Boobie rode with Rossi.

On the way to the Tahitian, Boobie asked Rossi, “How many guns do you have?”

“Three.”

“Good, except I don’t want any small guns like .25s.”

“I’ve got .32 automatics.”

“Those are okay. We aren’t going to do anything now. We’re just looking things over and running time tests, learning the streets in St. Petersburg. We’ll be back next week to do this job if everything works out.”

Time tests related to casing a job—the time it takes to pull something off, to get there and get out.

That night we sat at the King’s Court until maybe five A.M., bullshitting, laughing. We talked about everything from the difficulty of hiring reliable waitresses, to the prime lending rate at banks, to the value of education.

Jimmy Legs says, “When I was up in Canada doing some work guarding the Old Man, I had a lot of time on my hands, so I decided to take some philosophy courses at the college up there.”

Boobie asked Rossi how it was going with the fugazy jewelry he had brought down from Sonny’s cousin, Carmine. We had it on display for sale. Rossi said that some of the less expensive items sold okay, but some of the heavier stuff wasn’t going to go. He sold a “Rolex” watch to one of the waitresses. “It’s a good-looking watch,” Rossi says, “but it turned her arm green.”

Lefty says privately, “Donnie, I can’t tell you about this job because it’s not my score. But when we’re ready to do it, I’ll let you know what it is. We’re probably going to use your apartment to stash the loot and maybe to hole up in.”

The next morning, the four of them took off in the big car. A surveillance team followed them to the St. Petersburg area but lost them in the vicinity of Route 19 and Forty-ninth Street.

That night, the seven of us went to a Greek nightclub in Tarpon Springs where they had belly dancers. The girls were dancing around our table, and the guys were putting $5 and $10 bills in their bras and panties.

The guys started debating about who was the best-looking guy, which of us the girls would go for. Boobie slapped a $100 bill to his forehead, where it stuck, and said, “This is the best-looking guy.”

The following day, the surveillance team stayed with them to Pinellas Park, just outside St. Pete. The agents watched them case the LandmarkTrust Bank. That bank is only a block from police headquarters.

Later that day, Lefty said they had decided against the score. “Things didn’t look right,” he says.

Behind the scenes, Rossi and I were dealing with one of the primary frustrations of working undercover. We couldn’t get clear authorization to give these guys the guns if it came to that.

We often had difficulty getting decisions fast enough from Headquarters on what we could and couldn’t do.

On the street you have to make decisions on the spot, often during conversations with a badguy. That’s normal, an everyday part of undercover work. But we might need an authorization for something from Headquarters in a day, and it takes two weeks. Part of the reason for this was that we were asking for authorizations in legally sensitive, potentially controversial areas where things weren’t black-and-white.

But these were crucial situations for our investigations. Often they were life-and-death situations. With myself and most of the undercover agents I talked to in the course of my whole career, the greatest frustration was that they couldn’t get an answer when they needed it.

You get a deal worked out with the badguys. You ask Headquarters: “Can I do this?” Nobody wants to say yes or no, so it gets drawn out. So that puts you in the position of having to draw out your story for the badguys, keep them on the line.

You might request money or approval to make a buy. You can string a buy out for a couple of days, that’s no big deal. But you can’t string it out for a month. If you go weeks with excuses, that knocks down your credibility—especially if at the end of that time you can’t go through with the deal. If you pull that two or three times, it gets old. The badguys are going to think, This guy’s got no power, he’s not worth dealing with. Word gets around the street that you’re a bullshitter. Or maybe you’re a snitch.

Earlier, when I was working the cashier‘s-check scam with Lefty, I had the okay from a U.S. Attorney—it was okay to do it as long as I made a record of the purchases so that when the case was over, we could go back and repay the merchant. Later on, another U.S. Attorney took over the case and said that he would have been opposed to what I did from the beginning and might have prosecuted me for carrying out the scam.

That’s why an undercover agent always has in the back of his mind: Even if I keep proper records, make proper reports, follow approved procedures, and nail the badguys, is it possible that I myself might be prosecuted for something? Am I going to be prosecuted for doing my job?

In this case, with Lefty and Boobie and the others, it involved these guns.

When Sonny or Lefty had asked, I told them we had guns stashed down in Florida. I’m supposed to be connected, so naturally I have access to guns. You can’t carry guns back and forth on planes, so the most convenient thing is to have guns waiting for you where you need them.

So when the guys came down to case the bank job, Boobie asked Rossi if he had guns available, and Rossi gave the right answer: Yes, we’ve got guns.

Then Rossi got in touch with the contact agent and asked what we should do if we were asked to give them these guns—would it be okay? The question was passed on to the U.S. Attorney. He said, “Sure, just make the guns inoperable so they can’t fire.” That’s no big deal, it’s easy to do. So then you’re not on the spot, because if anything happens that these guys try to use the guns, they will misfire, and nobody will get shot with our guns.

Then Headquarters was asked. They needed time to ask the legal department. The debate went on for three days. Meanwhile Lefty’s crew decided not to pull the bank job, so they didn’t need the guns. Then our legal department said no.

So we had the U.S. Attorney, who was going to be prosecuting the case, saying yes. We had FBI Headquarters saying no. I work for the FBI, not the U.S. Attorney. Ordinarily I go with whatever the FBI says.

What would I have done in this case? I would have made the guns inoperable and given them to Lefty’s crew. There are some decisions you have to make on your own.

Word came that FBI Director William Webster was impressed by our work and wanted to meet us, the undercover agents working Project Coldwater, in Florida, under whatever circumstances necessary to assure security.

At first I wasn’t too keen on the idea. There would be a security risk to the operation, no matter what. He couldn’t come to us at the club or apartments, so it involved our driving someplace. You never know who is going to see you somewhere, and anyone seeing the three of us together—Rossi, Shannon, and me—would wonder what the hell we were doing there.

But since the FBI officials setting it up were willing to let us call the shots, and since it was the Director, we decided to go ahead with it.

We set it up for midnight in Tampa at the Bay Harbor Hotel, George Steinbrenner’s hotel. It was near the airport, a busy hotel, a place we went to on occasion. It was better there than farther away, because if we were spotted at some really out-of-the-way place, it would be even more suspicious.

The three of us went into the hotel lounge and had a couple of drinks. We didn’t leave for the Director’s room together. We went up one by one, separated from each other by a few minutes.

The Director was there with an aide, and with Tampa Case Agent Kinne, who had coordinated the meeting. Judge Webster—he’s a former federal judge—is a quiet man who spoke so softly that sometimes it was difficult to hear him.