Unless, of course, they really wanted me to talk, and decided to hit me if I didn’t. They could whack me out over there and dump me in the Gowanus Canal where I wouldn’t be found until I was unrecognizable. Nobody would know.

Mirra was silent. We drove to Third Avenue and Carroll Street in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, not far from Prospect Park. We parked and waited. Carmine Persico drove up in a white Rolls-Royce convertible with New Jersey plates—444-FLA. I recognized him from pictures. A sturdy guy in his middle forties, with thinning hair, a long neck, baggy eyes, and a fleshy nose and mouth. He and a much younger man, maybe in his early twenties, got out of the Rolls and talked to Mirra for a few minutes.

When Mirra got back in the car, he said, “That was his son with him, Allie Boy. He just got straightened out.”

“Straightened out” means made. I didn’t say anything.

“Tommy LaBella’s supposed to be the Colombo boss,” Mirra said, “but that’s in name only, because he’s so old and sick. The Snake is the real boss. I had to talk to him about a shylock business we’re trying to put together with him.”

A shylock business between the Bonanno and Colombo families was all it was. I was so primed, I actually felt a letdown. Given the options, I’ll take a letdown.

You could never relax with these guys, because you never knew what would be heavy-duty and what would be light.

I was getting itchy. Jilly’s crew seemed to be a dead end. One of my functions was to gather evidence to make cases directly. Another was to gather intelligence that the government might use in other investigations. At the time you hear or see things, you can’t always know how important they are, which way the information might be used, or whether it might be useless. You’re reluctant to ignore anything, but you can’t recall and report everything. You have to make choices on who and what to focus your concentration upon. How effective your choices turn out to be depends upon experience, instinct, and luck.

By midsummer of 1977, we had enough information on hijackings, burglaries, and robberies to bust up Jilly’s crew any day in the week. But I wasn’t moving up. I was making more inroads with Mirra and Ruggiero and the wiseguys in Little Italy than I was with the fences in Brooklyn.

I began to think, instead of concentrating on fences, what about a direct shot at the Mafia?

I brought this up in a telephone conversation with my supervisor, Guy Berada. It intrigued us both. We even risked a rare meeting in person, for lunch at a Third Avenue Manhattan restaurant called Cockeyed Clams, near my apartment.

We reevaluated our goals. The more we thought about it, the more we thought, if I get hooked up with a fence, that’s all I’m hooked up with. But the Mafia had a structure and hierarchy; if I could get hooked up with wiseguys, I had a chance at a significant penetration of the mob itself.

It would mean a greater commitment from the Bureau, an increase in risks and pressures. So far as we knew, the FBI had never planted one of its own agents in the Mafia.

Finally the opportunities outweighed all other considerations. It was worth a shot to abandon the fence operation in Brooklyn and “go downtown,” throw in with the wiseguys in Little Italy.

I would continue to operate alone, without surveillance. Little Italy is a tight neighborhood, like a separate world. You couldn’t park a van with one-way glass on a street down there without getting made in five minutes. I would continue to operate without using hidden tape recorders or transmitters because I was still new, and there was always the danger of getting patted down. The Bureau had informants in Little Italy. They wouldn’t know who I was, I wouldn’t know who they were. I didn’t want to risk acting different around somebody because I knew he was an informant, or having somebody act different around me.

Having made the decision, I couldn’t just abruptly drop out of the Brooklyn scene. I still had to use the Brooklyn guys as backup for credibility. In all likelihood, sooner or later the downtown guys would check me out with the Brooklyn crew, and I didn’t want any of Jilly’s guys to say I just disappeared one day. I wanted to ease out gradually.

I hung out more and more with Mirra and Ruggiero, less and less with Jilly’s crew. Gradually it got to where I was just phoning in to Jilly once in a while. By August I was full-time around Little Italy.

Jilly stayed loyal. Agents routinely show up to talk to wiseguys like Jilly, show pictures of people they’re interested in, see if you have anything to say, let you know they’re keeping tabs on you. One such time, agents came out to talk to him. They showed him several pictures, including a picture of me. These agents didn’t know who I really was. They told him that I was a jewel thief and burglar, that they had information that I was hanging out around there, and they wanted to know what he knew about me.

Jilly wouldn’t acknowledge whether he knew me or not. Even though I wasn’t around there anymore, he wouldn’t give up anything about me.

Two years later Jilly got whacked. He was driving his car near his apartment. He stopped for a red light and some guy on a motorcycle pulled up beside him and pumped a couple of .38 slugs into him. It was a regular mob hit. Our information was that they thought Jilly was talking. But he wasn’t.

7

TONY MIRRA

J Edgar Hoover didn’t want his FBI agents to work undercover because it could be a dirty job that could end up tainting the agents. Times have changed. Undercover work is now a crucial tool in law enforcement.

Informants are valuable but unreliable. They are crooks buying their life-style or freedom with information, and they may lie or exaggerate to get a better deal. A government agent working undercover, sworn and paid to uphold the law, is more trustworthy, more credible, before a jury. But it’s a risky business. You can get dirty, you can get killed.

Not every agent can work undercover. You have to have a strong personality. Strong means disciplined, controlled, confident. It doesn’t mean loud or abrasive or conspicuous. It means your personality can withstand the extraordinary challenges and temptations that routinely go with the work. It means you have an ego strong enough to sustain you from within, when nobody but you knows what you’re really doing and thinking.

It means you don’t forget who you are, not for a day, not for a minute. You are an FBI agent making a case.

You have to be an individualist who doesn’t mind working alone. Really alone, more alone than being by yourself. You’re with badguys continually, pretending to be one of them, cultivating them, laughing at their jokes, keeping feelings and opinions and fears to yourself, just like your true identity. You do this all day, every day. You don’t leave this life every once in a while to share stories with friends or family about what’s been going on undercover. You have nobody to talk to about what you’re experiencing, except your contact agent. I talked to my contact agent for a few minutes by telephone maybe a couple of times a week. I saw him for a few minutes once a month, to pick up my spending money.

While you are pretending to be somebody else, there are the same personality conflicts you would find anywhere. There are guys you like and don’t like, guys who like you and don’t like you and will continually try to bust your balls. You have to override your natural inclinations for association. You cultivate whoever can help you make a case. You’re not a patsy, but you swallow your gripes and control your temper.