My day would pretty much follow the same routine as theirs. I’d get to the club between ten and eleven and hang out all day with these guys. By late afternoon or early evening, I’d go back to my apartment, maybe take a nap for an hour, get up and shower, and about nine o‘clock or so go back out on the street to wherever it was we were going to meet. Sometimes I would go back to Brooklyn, sometimes bounce around in Manhattan; sometimes with them, sometimes by myself in places where people had gotten to know me through these guys.

But even when we’d cruise around to the different night spots, the talk was always on whatever scams or hustles were going on or coming up. What they did for a living was on their minds more than it was with ordinary people. They never put that aside. Nobody ever had enough money, no matter how much they had, and it was always feast or famine. Half the time their schemes came to nothing. Or worse, they went bad in the execution and cost them either money or jail time. But that didn’t cool their dedication. They did not have a sense of humor about their failures, or those schemes they came up with that were hare-brained. They stuck to their routine.

A small-time fence named Vinnie, who hung around Jilly‘s, was overweight and had a bad heart, for which he took some pills—maybe nitroglycerin. One afternoon we were all in a card game. It was a hard game, for quite a few bucks. And at the same time they were kicking around the prospects for a house burglary over in Bayonne, New Jersey.

All of a sudden Vinnie falls down on the floor, gasping for breath and grabbing at his chest.

“Hey, you guys,” I say, “Vinnie’s got a problem.”

Nobody moves. They keep playing cards. Vinnie is gasping and grabbing, and still nobody moves.

“He’s having a heart attack!” I scramble over to him. “We gotta get him to the hospital! Come on, somebody help me with him!”

“Aw, he does that all the time,” one of the guys says. “He’s just having one of his regular attacks. Let him pop a few pills, he’ll get over it.”

This was one of the situations that often came up where I wanted to fit in with the badguys, but I still had my own sense of morality.

I can’t just let the guy croak. I manage to get him up and out to my car. I drive him to the emergency room. A couple of hours later he comes out. “I ran out of my medication,” he says.

We drive back to Jilly’s. They are still playing cards. “See?” somebody says. “We told you he’d be all right.”

It was easy to get lulled by this daily routine with these guys. Most of the time it was boring. They were not Phi Beta Kappas, but they were very streetwise. Just under the surface of their routine there was always something lurking that could trip me up. While I was constantly taking mental notes in order to report relevant information to my contact agent, I had to be alert for traps. Most of these guys were, after all, killers.

The FBI wouldn’t let me actually go out on hijackings and burglaries, because the crew went armed. There was too good a chance somebody would get shot. In these pioneering days, thinking upstairs in the bureaucracy was very conservative. Somebody suggested that if I went along on crimes where guys were packing guns, I might be liable for prosecution myself.

The guys would ask me to go out on jobs with them. I would find ways to back off. I would tell them, “Hey, packing a gun and all that stuff, that’s too cowboy for me. I’ll help you out later on with the unloading.” And they had enough guys so that adding me didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t like I was crucial. Plus the fact that for every man that doesn’t go along on a job, that’s less split they had to do on the proceeds.

They bought it. But if I had tried to push for myself to go along, get all the information I could about the score, and then back out of it—that would have made them very suspicious. I was always up-front with them. I stayed low-key, and it was no big deal that I was around.

But once they got a little used to me, they let me sit in on their planning sessions. I’d go out with them when they cased a score. And gradually I started imposing myself. They would come and ask my advice on certain scores. I would sit down with them and go over the plans of the job, pick out flaws in it. That showed them that I knew something about what I was doing. In some cases when I could show them what was wrong with pulling a job, it deterred them from pulling them—part of my job, after all.

It was a delicate situation. I couldn’t initiate or encourage crimes. Yet to be permitted to hang around I had to participate in some fashion. The Bureau didn’t have any firm guidelines for everything I could and couldn’t do. I was pretty much on my own. It required some tap dancing.

I helped unload stuff at the store. They would hijack any kind of truck, from eighteen-wheelers down to little straight jobs. They would seize the truck, unload the stuff into smaller trucks or vans, and take it to the “drop,” which might be a vacant warehouse or factory, and bring samples to Acerg to show prospective buyers. The load would be parceled out to fences who could get rid of it.

When they hijacked a truck, they would usually just tie the driver up. But most of the hijacked loads were giveaways—setups. The drivers of the heisted trucks would be in on the heist for a percentage. The crew would go wherever they got the information that a guy had a good load on. Most of the heists were in the city. They’d pull them right on the streets in Brooklyn. Some were in Jersey.

Their burglaries were all over—in the city, out on Long Island, over in New Jersey, in Connecticut, in Florida. Stuff came from the airports all the time. Jilly had a steady supply from JFK International Airport, utilizing somebody inside the cargo operations.

I’d unload cases of coffee, sugar, frozen food, whiskey, bags of cocoa, truckloads of sweaters, blouses, jackets and jeans. They would take anything. The best loads were food loads—shrimp, coffee, tuna—because you can get rid of that stuff anywhere, like restaurants and supermarkets. Frozen shrimp and lobster were favorites. Pharmaceuticals—over-the-counter stuff like razor blades, aspirin, toothpaste—were prime targets because so many stores wanted them and the markup was great, even on the straight market. Clothes were good, especially leather, and women’s clothes. Liquor was always a big item, especially around Christmastime. There were women’s leather gloves, ski gloves, even a load of hockey gloves.

The commodity didn’t make any difference, as long as they could sell it. Now, something like men’s hockey gloves—where would you move them? They might have gotten stuck with them. But it was a load they could take, so they took it. It doesn’t cost anything to steal hockey gloves.

Managers at places like restaurants and supermarkets had to know the stuff was hot, because the price was below anything on the wholesale market. But they bought it, anyway. Some of the best places. When you see how that works, it changes your view of some of the bargains and discount stores. It makes you more cynical. Sometimes the circle was very neat. They would burglarize an A&P warehouse one night, sell the cases of coffee and tuna to other stores a couple of days later.

TVs and VCRs were big. Robbing boxcarloads of them from the railroad freight yards was nothing unusual. They had a railroad employee who would give them a bill of lading and point out the right boxcar. Just back up a truck and load it.

When they hit houses, they were usually looking for jewelry, stocks and bonds, cash, or guns.

Anything that wasn’t tied down, they would steal. Those were the days when Mopeds—motorized bikes or motor scooters—were popular. They would steal Mopeds off the street and rent them by the day out of the store.