I bopped around with Albert and got to know him pretty well. I took him up to Carmello’s a few times, so he could see that guys there knew me. It’s the kind of thing that feeds on itself: He sees that people know me and acknowledge me, so he feels he can introduce me to other people who know him. It enhances my credibility to be hanging out with a connected guy whose uncle is a wiseguy in the Colombo family. For his part, Albert sees that I’m accepted where I go, so it’s good for him to be seen with me.

Getting established is a subtle business, a matter of small impressions, little tests, quiet understandings.

Albert lived in Brooklyn. But he loved Manhattan. One night there was a big snowstorm and he didn’t want to drive home to Brooklyn. So I let him stay over in my apartment. From then on he was always trying to weasel in, to stay over at my apartment so that he didn’t have to drive home to Brooklyn. I wanted to keep cultivating him, but I didn’t want him parking in my apartment.

Between trying to get myself set up, establish credibility, and hanging around with Albert and others, I hardly got home at all during the month of December—maybe two or three evenings up to Christmas. So I was especially intent on getting home at a reasonable hour Christmas Eve, to spend that and part of Christmas Day with my family. I planned to knock off early Christmas Eve and get home by maybe eight o‘clock. I had bought presents for everybody and stashed them in the trunk of my car.

In order to get home to my family, I started celebrating Christmas early in my Don Brasco world. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, we started bouncing around to the various spots, having drinks and wishing people we knew Merry Christmas. Chuck, who was a bachelor, and Albert, who didn’t ever like going home, brought along a couple of girls they had been going out with.

One place led to another. I had to act like I wasn’t in a hurry to get anyplace. It was after ten o‘clock. We were going down Eighty-sixth Street, heading for Carmello’s. The street was pretty empty. On the corner there was a guy still selling Christmas trees. I happened to mention, “It’s Christmas, and I don’t even have a Christmas tree in my apartment.”

Albert yells, “Pull over! Pull over to that guy there—he’s got trees! I’m gonna buy a tree!”

I pull over at the corner. Albert jumps out and goes over to where the guy has Christmas trees. The guy has only three or four trees left. They are barely trees, more like sticks tied together. Albert picks one out and brings it over to the car. I never saw anything so scraggly. There was a trail of needles from it on the sidewalk. The top was bent over.

“What are you gonna do with that?” I ask.

“Let’s put it up and decorate it in your apartment!” “Come on, I got no decorations. All the stores are closed.”

“We’ll find something to decorate it with,” he says, “won’t we, girls?”

“Yeah, yeah!” they say.

“We can’t let you be alone on Christmas Eve,” Albert says.

So we go up to my apartment with this scrawny tree. When we stood it up, you could see that it was even missing some branches. “I got no stand to put it up in,” I say.

“We’ll use this!” he says. I had one of those big water-cooler bottles that I threw pennies in.

They put the tree in that. Then the two women rummaged around in the kitchen and came back with some tinfoil. They started making Christmas balls and decorations out of tinfoil. They hung these things on what few branches there were. Every time they hung a tinfoil bird up, a million needles fell on the floor.

“We couldn’t let you go without a Christmas tree,” Albert says. “Bad enough you don’t have a date on Christmas Eve.”

They all proceeded to make sure I enjoyed Christmas Eve and wasn’t lonely. They sang Christmas carols until after midnight, sitting around this ugly tree, Albert and the girls all boozed up.

I was thinking about my kids, and all the presents in the trunk of my car, and I was angry for letting myself get into this situation.

I said, “Come on, everybody, that’s enough, I’ve had it with Christmas.”

They wanted to keep partying. I took Chuck aside and said, “You gotta get ‘em outa here. I want to go home.”

So he herded them up and left. I waited about a half hour, then I went down to the garage, got my car, and headed home.

I managed to have Christmas morning with my family. I was back on the job in the afternoon. Five more Christmases would pass by before I would have a normal one with my family.

Things began to happen, some movement. Shortly after the first of the year, 1977, Albert introduced me to some active Colombo guys. We were out bouncing, and we went to Hippopotamus, the popular disco at Sixty-first Street and York Avenue. A lot of mob guys hung out there.

Albert said he’d like to introduce me to a Colombo guy that did a lot of business with swag.

He brought me over to a table and introduced me to a guy. “Jilly, this is Don, a friend of mine.”

Jilly was maybe five years older than me, average build, 5’9”, 160, with dark hair, prominent nose.

We sat down and talked for a while, and Albert told Jilly and the guys with him that we had been hanging out for a few months. Jilly headed up a crew that hung out mainly in Brooklyn. He said I should stop by his store over on 15th Avenue and 76th Street in the Bensonhurst section.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that,” I said.

For a couple of months now I had been playing this game of trying to be noticed without being noticed, slide into the badguy world and become accepted without drawing attention. You push a little here and there, but very gently. Brief introductions, short conversations, appearances one place and another, hints about what you’re up to, casual mannerisms, demeanor, and lingo that show you know your way around—all these become a trail of credibility you leave behind you. Above all, you cannot hurry. You cannot seem eager to meet certain people, make certain contacts, learn about certain scores. The quickest way to get tagged as a cop is to try to move too fast. You have to show that you have the time to play it by the rules of the street, and that includes letting people check you out and come to you.

You have to have confidence in how you’re handling yourself, because while you’re playing this game, much of the time you don’t know where you stand. Nobody tells you you’re getting in solid or getting to know the right people or heading in the right direction. Nobody tells you if you’re safe. You have to sense it. Badguys on the street are sensing you. You can be wrong. Obviously, so can they. But the street is no place to doubt yourself.

These initial months were not a time of high excitement in terms of events. But I felt excitement. I had a foothold. Nobody in the outside world knew where I was or what I was doing, hour by hour, day by day. On the street, people didn’t know who I was or what I was really doing. I was on the job and on my own. There was excitement in that.

One night I came out of Carmello’s and started to drive downtown to make the rounds of the regular spots. I thought a car was following me. To check it out, I didn’t try to shake them right away. I just led them on a wild-goose chase for a while. I went across the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee, New Jersey, turned around, and came back. The other car stayed with me but made no move.

It had to be some sort of law-enforcement unit. Nobody else would have reason to follow me. My assumption was that there was an informant in Car mello‘s, or one of the other places, who had passed on the information that there was a new guy hanging around, making friends with badguys, a guy who obviously doesn’t work and yet has money to spend. Or else they could have been spot-checking the place, surveilling it, and they saw my car there a few times, with out-of-state tags, saw me come and go, and got into it that way.