One time I was hanging out with Lefty Ruggiero at his social club in Little Italy, and he and a bunch of guys were laughing about a job. They had gotten a contract to hit a guy. They tailed this guy for a week, looking for the right opportunity. Then they were told the contract’s off, don’t hit the guy. And it turned out it was the wrong guy they were following. They would have hit the wrong guy. To them it was the funniest thing in the world. “What the fuck you think of that? We’re following the guy for a week and it’s not even the right guy—ha, ha, ha! We’re out every fucking night following this jerk-off. Piece a fucking luck for him, right? Ha, ha, ha!”

On the Fourth of July weekend Jilly had a cookout for everybody. He had a house down at the Jersey Shore, in Seaside Heights, a block from the beach, and he had all the guys down with their wives and girlfriends.

I went to Fretta‘s, the Italian meat market in Little Italy, and bought sausages and cold cuts and cheeses and took it down there for the cookout.

I wasn’t married, of course. Supposedly I had a couple of girlfriends here and there, but I never brought any of them around. The guys used to get on me sometimes about never bringing a girl around, but I told them there wasn’t anybody I cared enough about.

I always wear an Irish Claddagh ring that my wife gave me. It has hands holding a heart, and a crown on it, symbolizing love, friendship, and loyalty. Nobody had ever mentioned the ring.

We were sitting outside at this picnic table, and one of the guys’ girlfriends says, “That’s a nice ring you got on, Don. That’s an Irish Claddagh ring, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Aren’t those rings for love? Aren’t they used as wedding rings?”

“Yeah, sometimes,” I say. One of the guys asks about it, and I go into the history and so forth.

Then she says, “Well, what are you wearing it for? I didn’t think you were married or anything.”

“No, I’m not. But one of the few girls I was ever in love with gave it to me. Then a couple months later she jilted me. I keep wearing it because I don’t ever want to forget her.”

One of the guys looks puzzled. He says, “You sure you’re not married?”

“Why?”

“Because I just can’t figure it out. You mean, you loved that girl so much that you keep wearing that ring after she jilted you?”

“Sure, why not?”

“I just didn’t think you were the type of guy that could love anybody. You know, the way that you’re here, you’re there, you got no allegiance, no ties to anybody.”

“Well, there always comes a time in somebody’s life when there’s a girl that you love, somebody that’s special, so I’d rather remember it than forget about it. I just want to wear the ring, that’s all. What’s the difference to anybody else?”

The only time I take the ring off is when I work out lifting weights. I wore it during the whole operation. And that was the only time anybody ever mentioned it.

What with hanging out with Jilly’s Colombo crew and with Mirra and Ruggiero’s Bonanno crews and going to Florida to work with Joe Fitz on Sun Apple, I wasn’t getting home much at all. I missed the school sports seasons and watching my daughters cheerlead. I missed two of the girls’ birthdays. I wasn’t home for my birthday, either. I wasn’t home for our sixteenth wedding anniversary—to celebrate, my wife went out with a couple named Howard and Gail who had been close friends of hers for a year before I even met them. I was home maybe two or three nights a month.

And when I was home, I was a little harried, trying to make up for lost family time but unable to put mob business out of my mind completely.

I managed to make it to my younger brother’s wedding. It was a regular big Italian wedding, lots of cash and checks. After the wedding the bride and groom were leaving directly for their honeymoon. They didn’t want to take all this money with them. He asked me to take care of it until they got back. “Who could be safer to leave all this with,” he said, “than my brother the FBI agent?”

I put this big envelope of cash and checks under the front seat of my car and headed back to New York City.

A week later my brother asked me for the envelope. It wasn’t in my apartment. It wasn’t anywhere. It was still under the front seat of my car. I had been all over the place since then, to different neighborhoods in the city. My car had been parked on streets and in garages. I had totally forgotten about the money.

None of my family knew the depth of my involvement. My brother later told me that he began to suspect that I was into something heavy when I forgot about his money. The distractions of my job were causing friction in my family.

The situation was tolerable because it was temporary. A few months undercover. But now we had passed the six-month limit to the operation. I hadn’t reached the big fences. But unexpectedly I was getting deeper into the mob, with my association with Bonanno members Mirra and Ruggiero in Little Italy and their introduction of me to others. My undercover assignment was extended indefinitely.

Physically I was often feeling tired. But the daily challenge stimulated me. I felt good about how things were going.

All this time I was trying to remember everything. Since I didn’t take any notes—didn’t dare to take any notes or write anything down, even in my apartment—I had to remember. Anything of a criminal nature discussed in conversation, any new guy that came through the clubs, the different deals and scores and the different guys involved and amounts of everything—I had to try to remember it all. Eventually federal court cases would depend on the accuracy and credibility of my memory.

It was a matter of concentration. That and little tricks. Like remembering license-plate numbers or serial numbers on weapons in series of threes. The frustration always was that I couldn’t ask a lot of questions, which is one of the things I was trained to do as an FBI agent. A lot of the things I had to remember were things I overheard, and I couldn’t ask for these things to be repeated, or for what I thought I heard to be confirmed. When swag came in and out, I couldn’t ask to look it over more closely, or where it came from, or who it was going to. I had to hope those facts were volunteered. I had to be just a hang-around guy who wasn’t more interested than was good for him.

Concentrating on conversations was draining. Most of the talk was idle, simplistic bullshit about the most mundane things—getting a haircut or a new pair of Bally shoes; how the Mets or Giants were doing; how the Chinese and Puerto Ricans were ruining neighborhoods; how much better a Cadillac was than a Lincoln; how we ought to drop the bomb on Iran; how we ought to burn rapists, each guy would gladly strap the perverts in and pull the switch himself. Most of these guys, after all, were just uneducated guys who grew up in these same neighborhoods.

But they were street-smart, and the thread of the business ran through everything all the time, and the business was stealing and hits and Mafia politics—who was up, who was down, who was gone. Somebody might be talking about a great place to buy steaks at a cut rate and in virtually the same sentence mention a hit, or somebody new getting made, or a politician they had in their pocket. These tidbits would lace conversation continually but unpredictably, and they flew by. If I wasn’t always ready, I would miss something I needed to remember. And I couldn’t stop them and say, “What was that about paying off the police chief somewhere?”

What’s more, to be above suspicion I had to adapt my conversational style to theirs. Occasionally I would change the subject or wander away from the table purposely, right in the middle of a discussion about something criminal that might be of interest to the government—precisely to suggest that I wasn’t particularly interested. Then I would hope the talk would come around that way again or that I could lead it back, get at it later or in another way. It was a necessary gambit for the long term.