The FBI then had fifty-two offices throughout the country. They gave us the choice of five areas in which to relocate. As far as my work was concerned, where we lived didn’t matter because I would still be assigned to the New York case, and otherwise I would be roaming to different parts of the country. My wife and I picked an area.

I managed to get home late Christmas Eve and spend most of Christmas Day at home. In January, my wife and I took a trip to find a new house. We found one right away—smaller than our house in Jersey but in a pleasant neighborhood. The next week we put our New Jersey house up for sale. I had a friend who was a mover. I told him we needed to move and that he shouldn’t talk about it.

There were lots of family tears shed over the move. Nobody wanted to stand in the way of the work I was doing, but neither did anybody really know what I was doing. Had my family known more, they might have been more tolerant of my situation. But if that would have decreased the weight on me, it would have been at the cost of more fear to them.

For me and my colleagues in the Bureau, there had been no expectation that this job would go on so long. Now there was no guess at how long it would continue. What started with the idea of getting to fences had become penetrating the Mafia in Little Italy and now had evolved to me representing the mob in other places. It could have been mind-boggling except for the fact that we didn’t know where we were headed, and so we had no good perspective on where we were. The only certainty was that to continue at all I had to continue full-out. Donnie Brasco had the momentum.

The FBI had a couple of situations in San Diego and Los Angeles that they wanted me to look into. I told Lefty I had decided to go back to California—where I had supposedly spent a lot of my earlier jewel-thief life—for a while. “You know, Left,” I said, “I’m not making all that much money here right now. Why don’t I go out there and start making some good scores, you know, and come back and forth? You could even come out there, hang out for a couple weeks, see if we couldn’t get something going.”

He thought that was a good idea. So I took off for California.

In L.A., we had an agent going by the undercover name of Larry Keaton. Larry was a longtime friend of mine. He was trying to get in tight with some thieves who were engaged in all kinds of property crimes: thefts of stocks and bonds, checks, cars—the whole spectrum. These badguys were not necessarily Mafia, but some of them were ex-New Yorkers, and naturally they were respectful of wiseguys and connected guys.

They liked to hang out at a particular restaurant, and Larry would mix with them, trying to get in deeper. It happened that a bartender from a New York restaurant came out on vacation, and he hung out at this L.A. restaurant and was friendly with some of these badguys. Larry didn’t know anything about this bartender. He thought maybe he was a badguy too. Since the bartender was from New York, Larry thought it was just possible I might know him.

It so happened that I did. It was a coincidence that on occasion Lefty and I went to La Maganette, a restaurant on Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street—not a Bonanno hangout, just a place where he and I and a couple other guys would go have a couple drinks and eat. We got to know this bartender, Johnny. Johnny wasn’t himself a badguy, wasn’t into anything, but like a lot bartenders, he knew who was who. He knew who Lefty was, and that as Lefty’s partner I was a connected guy. So this was a chance for me to give Larry some credibility with these badguys.

I went to this L.A. restaurant where Larry was hanging out and saw Johnny there. “Hey, Johnny,” I said, “how you doing?”

“Donnie, how you been? What’re you doing out here?”

“Hanging out, looking around.” Larry was in the group, so obviously he had already met Johnny. “I see you know Larry here. Larry’s a friend of mine. We may be working on a deal together.”

We chatted a little while, and the job was done. I knew that Johnny would tell the badguys there that I was a connected guy back in New York, and that Larry was a friend of mine, so he was all right.

On and off I would hook up with Larry like that to help him gain credibility. Sometimes we’d go to the track with some badguys, things like that. I was just somebody to introduce. I never worked on his cases. He took it from there. He started making a bunch of cases. It was the type of operation where the government was continually arresting people as Larry brought in the evidence. Eventually he had to testify in court several times and got a load of convictions.

In the middle of this, Larry had occasion to come to New York to pursue yet another case of stolen stocks. I was also back in New York at that time, on one of my regular trips. Larry called Johnny the bartender to tell him he would be coming in. They set up a meet at P. J. Clarke‘s, on Third Avenue because that’s where Johnny liked to hang out in the afternoon.

So I hooked up with Larry and we went down to P. J. Clarke’s together. Johnny had a table in the back of the room with a bunch of people. We joined them.

Johnny introduced us around, and we were sitting there an hour or so.

Now, Larry is black. That means that in some badguy situations he was conspicuous. But he was smooth enough to make it work.

I see a guy headed for our table. Suddenly Larry whispers to me, “Let’s get outa here. Back door, quick.” He stands up and says to Johnny, “I just forgot, we got an appointment.”

I hustle Larry out the side door.

“Pretty close,” Larry says. “Did you see that guy coming toward our table, the guy in the suit? He was a defense attorney from L.A. He’s seen me testify in court.”

“I got us covered from this end,” I say, “with Lefty, just in case.”

“Good,” he says. “And I’m outa here tomorrow, anyway. ”

This kind of situation—a chance discovery or somebody reporting back on you—can happen at any minute of any day. You can’t wait for it to happen and then think of a way to protect yourself. You have to lay groundwork to cover yourself ahead of time—all the time. I knew Lefty would get a call on this.

From the time I began in California, I stayed in virtual daily touch with Lefty. He didn’t know how to reach me directly. I said I was always moving around. While Lefty was schooling me, I was also schooling him about me. I wanted him to get used to the fact that I was unpredictable. I would be vague about what I was doing, where I was. When I needed to cover myself, he would already be used to my style.

I had a couple of “hello” phones where he could leave messages, and I called him. In this case, after meeting Larry and Johnny out there, I had called Lefty and told him about running into Johnny in California. “Guess who I bumped into in L.A.,” I had told him. “Johnny. He was out there on vacation, seeing a bunch of guys. He was with this one guy named Larry who was into some kind of stocks-and-bonds deal. In fact, I think I’m going to look into that. I think we can make some money there.”

That’s what I had told Lefty. Because even without this surprise at P. J. Clarke‘s, I knew that sometime when I was with Lefty at La Maganette, the bartender Johnny was going to say something like, “How’s that guy Larry in L.A.?” And then Lefty was going to say, “Who’s Larry?”

So this way I had already introduced the name to Lefty. I had also suggested that Larry was hanging around with Johnny rather than with me—just enough of an offhand twist to protect Larry and me.

Sure enough, the next day Lefty grabbed me at the club.

“Hey, Donnie, that guy you were with in L.A., what’s the story on him?”

“Larry? That’s the guy I told you about that I met through Johnny the bartender. The wheeler-dealer I told you I was trying to do a stocks-and-bonds deal with. What are you upset about?”