So a snitch would be running at least as much risk as the guy he was ratting on. Nothing is hated more in the mob than a snitch.

While I was not getting to the big fences, I was getting a lot of information. Every few days, or when there was anything significant to report, I passed on the information to my contact agent. Occasionally, when they had pulled a particularly big job, we were tempted to have them busted from the outside. The contact agent and I talked it over. But we couldn’t do that. Since I was the new guy on the block with this Colombo crew, if any busts did go down, the finger would point at me. I’d be the guy that was the snitch. I was caught in the middle. Like everything else I was involved in at this stage, we couldn’t make any busts that might compromise me as a snitch. So a lot of my information just went into the files for later. And later—years later in some cases, because of my continued involvement—the Bureau busted people for some of these scores, or we turned the information over to local police departments for action.

Two guys from Jilly’s crew got out of prison, Frankie and Patsy. And naturally they came back and picked up right where they left off with the gang. They were a couple of tough guys, hard-nosed general-purpose thieves who were used to calling their own shots. And right away they were not too pleased with my presence, because I was new and had worked my way in while they were away in the can.

Frankie was about 5’ 10”, slim and stylish, in his late thirties. If you were casting for the movies, he would be perfect for the classic, shifty-eyed thief. Patsy was maybe ten years older, three inches taller, and ten pounds heavier.

They were big on daytime house burglaries. They would get information on a house where there was cash or jewels or guns. Their gimmick was to pose as detectives to gain entry, then handcuff anyone who was home and ransack the place. They had regular detective shields they could show, and they always had a guy in a getaway car outside.

They decided that a couple of houses in Hicksville, Long Island, were great prospects for burglaries. They went out there and posed as morning joggers to trot by and case the places. They would park their car down the road a ways and jog by the houses in their sweat suits.

The morning they were to hit this one house, they drove up and discovered there were a whole bunch of cars parked in the driveway. They canceled the job.

They jogged past the second house to case it. When they jogged back to their car, they saw a woman writing down their license-plate number. They canceled that job.

Jilly and Frankie and I went out in Jilly’s car to case a job in Hicksville. They had information that the owner of the house, supposedly the head of some retail dry-cleaners’ association, had a bed built over a safe in which there was a lot of cash. Apparently our car was noticed as being strange to the neighborhood and suspicious, because somebody called the cops. The cops came by, stopped, and talked to us. They asked us what we were doing. We said we were just looking for potential properties to buy. On the car seat was a black attaché case in which were two revolvers, one a .38 and one a .32; some loose bullets; and several sets of handcuffs. The cops were satisfied with our explanation. But that blew that job.

By now I was used to putting my two cents’ worth in on plans for scores, while still trying to avoid participating. It was part of my function to discourage them from pulling jobs, especially those where somebody might be in the house or somebody might get hurt. So when I had a chance, that’s what I did. Anyway, at the same time I was gathering a lot of information on criminal activity, which was also my job.

They had cased a job in Mountainside, New Jersey, and they wanted me to take a run over there and check out the alarm system, see if they could get by it. Since I was a burglar and a jewel thief, I had to know about alarm systems.

So I went over to this house. It was a mansion surrounded by a big fence. It looked like it would be a good house to hit. Of course, I didn’t check out the alarm system. I didn’t go anywhere near it.

But I went back to Jilly’s and told them it looked like the place had a very complicated alarm system that I didn’t know how to bypass, plus probably a secondary backup system that I couldn’t observe. Plus, it looked to me like there wasn’t a good escape route for getting out of the place in case the alarm was tripped. My recommendation was that they forget about that job.

Patsy really wanted to pull that job. He was pissed because I was trying to squelch it.

“It’s not worth a shot at getting caught,” I said.

“You just don’t want to come with us on this,” he said. “You’re fucking afraid.”

“You’re right, I don‘t,” he said. “If I can’t get by that alarm, what am I gonna do? Break a window and go in like some fucking two-bit junkie? But you guys can go ahead and do it, just count me out.”

Then the other guys decided they didn’t want to do it, either.

Their next house job they pulled off without telling me about it—some wealthy woman’s house over in Jersey someplace. When I came into the club the next morning. Patsy was parading around showing off this huge diamond he was so proud of. Everybody was oohing and aahing because of how much money it would bring. It was three carats, Patsy said.

He got around to me. I took the diamond and looked it over. “I wouldn’t get too excited about it,” I said, “because this is fake, a fugazy.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Patsy said, grabbing the stone.

“It’s a zircon, is what I’m saying.”

Patsy snapped his head back like I had shoved a stick up his nose. “You’re full of shit,” he said. “That broad wouldn’t have no fugazy diamonds in her house. We had information the broad didn’t have no fake jewelry. It’s three fucking carats!”

“It’s a fugazy,” I said. “Take it home for your kid to play with.”

“You’re such a smartass, like you know everything.”

“Hey, Patsy,” I said, “you just got out of the can, and I never been in jail, so I must be just a little smarter than you. You want to embarrass yourself, pal, take that stone to your fence, the jeweler you talk about.”

“That’s exactly what I’m gonna do,” he said. He stomped out with the gem. I could have been wrong, of course, and at least my credibility would have been hurt. But I had taken that gemology course, and I wanted to demonstrate that I knew something about gems. The stone was just too big—nobody would have this big a stone lying around in their house. And the color was a little off. I just had a gut feeling about it.

Half an hour later Patsy was back, his tail between his legs. He wouldn’t look at me. “How’d you know?” he said.

“I’m a jewel thief all my life, so I shouldn’t know about diamonds? You oughta stick to hijacking coffee and sugar, because that’s what you know.”

“Gettin’ on my nerves,” he muttered.

“Hey, I was trying to do you a favor. You’re supposed to know this shit. You take it to the guy and he tells you it’s a fugazy, what’s he gonna think of you next time you come in with a stone?”

“Your fucking time will come when you won’t be such a smartass,” he said.

A couple days later I came in and they were planning a burglary of a clothing factory nearby in Brooklyn. The job was to involve me and six other guys, including Frankie and Patsy.

This was a small place that made sport clothes, jeans, blouses. They had been discussing this idea for days, and I had stayed out of it. Now they had it finalized.

I sat down at the table and said, “How we going about doing it?”

It was a beaut. Supposedly there were about twenty or twenty-five people working at this place, most of them women, most of them Italian. Quitting time was five P.M., so at around four-thirty, when most of the salesmen would be gone and just employees left in the place, they’d back a forty-foot trailer truck up to the loading dock. The crew would go in, announce a stickup, handcuff everybody, and load up the trailer.