Finally it was time for me to make my move with Marty the bartender. Typically, what an undercover cop will do, in a buy-bust situation, is try to buy something from you. Cops always buy, never sell. I was going to sell. So I brought in some pieces of jewelry. A couple of diamond rings, a couple of loose stones, and a couple of men’s and ladies’ wristwatches.

When there was nobody else at the bar, I opened the pouch and showed the stuff to him.

“If you’d like to hold on to these for a couple days,” I said, “you can try to get rid of them.”

“What’s the deal?” he asked.

“I need $2,500 total. Anything over that is yours.”

He didn’t ask if the stuff was stolen. He didn’t need to, because it was understood. During the course of recent conversations I had given him the impression that I wasn’t on the legit. So it was obvious. You say as little as possible in a situation like this. Actually, of course, the stuff was from the FBI, things that were confiscated during investigations and used strictly for this type of purpose.

He took the items and held on to them for three or four days. Then one night he said, “Don, some people want it, but I can’t get you the price tag that you want.”

Now, I don’t know if he’s testing me or what. You never take it for granted that somebody trusts you. I could have said, “Well, get me what you can for it, and I’ll give you a piece.” But that’s not the way you work. Things have a certain street value, and a street guys knows what that is. I knew what the going rate for swag was from dealing with my informants before I went undercover. So I could talk sense about price for diamonds, gold, jewelry with anybody, whether I was going to buy or sell. So if I have swag worth $2,500, I stick with that. If you say, “Okay, just give me $800,” then they might doubt that you know what you’re doing.

So I said, “Okay, just give it back, no big deal. I’ll be getting more stuff, so maybe we can do business another time.”

He said, “Anything you come across, Don, let me see it. If I can get rid of it, I will. I can move a lot of stuff. I come across a lot of swag.”

“The only things I’d be interested in,” I said, “are jewelry or good clothes for myself.” But I never bought anything from him.

I did place some bets through him. He talked about Nicky, the bookie, told me about his business. And I placed some bets on the horses.

All of this served the purpose of solidifying my place.

My agent friend, Chuck, had an undercover operation going in the music business: records and concerts. Sometimes we’d hang out together, back each other up—as when he would come with me to Carmello’s. Chuck was putting on a concert at the Beacon Theatre on Broadway, featuring the soul singer James Brown. He asked me if I’d give him a hand. That would help him and would also help me—it would show the mob guys downtown that I was doing something, that I was a mover.

He had sucked into his operation a couple of connected guys with the Colombo crime family. He introduced me to one of them, a guy named Albert. “Connected” means that you associate with Mafia members, do jobs with them, but do not share in all the rewards and responsibilities of an actual Mafia member. A true Mafia member is a “made guy” or “straightened out,” or a “wiseguy.” Albert’s uncle was a made guy in the Colombo family.

Albert was a half-ass wiseguy—just a connected guy, not a made guy. He was a big guy, maybe 6’ 2”, about thirty years old. He was a con artist dealing in paper—a stocks-and-bonds type guy. I didn’t think he ever did anything very heavy. He was a bullshit artist.

But he was not a bad guy to hang around. Chuck introduced me to Albert so that maybe I could get some introductions into the Colombo family. So I started running sometimes with Chuck and Albert, bopping around different night spots. Albert liked to hit all the in spots, discos, and restaurants.

When the James Brown concert was coming up, Albert and a couple of his buddies from Brooklyn came up with the great idea that they were going to stick up the box office. He came to Chuck and me and said, “Look, near the end of the concert, when the box office closes, let’s stick it up.”

He wanted to stick up our own box office. Chuck and I couldn’t allow guys with guns to come in and do that, but we couldn’t just veto it, either, without drawing suspicion. We really didn’t know how the hell the thing was going to go.

We told Albert, “Look, if these guys come in and knock off the box office, that’s less split for us, because we’re gonna cop this box office, anyway. We can split it three ways. If you bring in your two friends to stick it up, that’s a five-way split.”

He went back to his guys with that explanation, but they wanted to do it, anyway. They wanted it all.

It was the day before the concert. We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t tip off the cops, because the tip would have been traced right to Chuck or me.

“What should we do?” Chuck says to me.

“I don’t know,” I say, “this is your operation. I’ll go along with anything you want to do as long as we don’t jeopardize my operation.”

Chuck had an idea. “I think I’ll hire a couple of off-duty cops, just have them hang around the front of the lobby, like for crowd control, and maybe it’ll deter these guys.”

He hired the off-duty cops. They arrived in uniform and stood around. Albert and his friends showed up. “What the fuck’s with these cops?” Albert said.

I said, “I don’t know. Probably they’re on the job and figured they’d stick around and hear James Brown. I don’t know.”

“What the fuck,” Albert said to his friends. “How can we stick up the place with cops around?” They discussed it for a few minutes, standing outside, watching the cops in the lobby. They decided it was a no-go.

So we slipped that one. And it helped me out, because now I could tell guys that I had a piece of this guy, Chuck, who’s got this Ace Record Company in his pocket.

I was trying to get home to my wife and daughters at every opportunity, even if it was just for breakfast. I would often just end up the night and head across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey to spend a few hours at home. My wife and I socialized very little when I was home, and our few social friends were Bureau people. And while of course they knew I, too, was with the Bureau, they didn’t know what operation I was on.

I was very friendly with an agent named Al Genkinger in the New York office. All during the time I was undercover, Al and his wife stayed close to my wife, took care of anything that came up. Anything my wife needed, she would get in touch with them. That was a comfort.

We told neighbors and others that I was a salesman, on the road a lot.

My daughters were already developing the habit of evading conversations with others about what I did, or even of asking me questions about my work. They would say, “What do you do when you go to work?” And I would say, “I just do my work like anybody else.” After a while they stopped asking.

They were becoming cheerleaders at school. My oldest daughter had boyfriends. My wife and I became friendly with a lot of boys on the athletic teams. We went to high school wrestling matches on Wednesdays when I could make it home. She went without me if I couldn’t make it.

I set up a weight lifting program for some of the guys in our basement. I had been a weight lifter for a long time. They ate it up. They didn’t ask personal questions. They would come over regularly and follow the program I set up. My wife made pizzas.

It seemed I was home very little. My wife and daughters were not happy with the extended absences, especially when I didn’t give much explanation. We didn’t know it then, but that period gave me the best home time that I would have over the next five years.