My wife was in the hospital for eleven days. And then when she came home, she was nearly helpless. For a long time she couldn’t see well. She had to wear special dark glasses, and even a satin sleep mask at night, because light was agony to her eyes. There were still pieces of glass embedded under her skin. She would need plastic surgery, but first she would have to heal for a year. The cast on her arm allowed her fingers to move. But sometimes when she was holding something, like a cup or a glass, it would just suddenly drop from her hand. Things like that would bother her.

My wife was always self-reliant, energetic, optimistic. She was athletic, always playing tennis, doing aer obics, on the go. She was always doing things for everybody else. And now, suddenly, she couldn’t do things for herself. Her spirits were down. I wouldn’t say she was depressed. In the thirty years I’ve known her I’ve never seen her depressed. But now she was down, not able to do ordinary things.

For the first time our daughters saw her in this almost helpless state. They started getting on me harder about not being home more. I wanted to be home more. But what could I say?

When my wife came home from the hospital, I stayed one more week. We all had a pretty good time, given the circumstances. It was the most time we had all spent together in years. We had outdoor barbecues and everything. I had fun with the girls. It was going to take a while for my wife to heal. Her eyes were still extremely sensitive to light, so she had to keep them covered most of the time. But at least we were together.

My wife is basically a pretty understanding person. But this was a bad time. She wanted me to quit the undercover job. I could see her point of view. It had come up before: “You’re just away too much at one time. It wouldn’t be too bad if you were gone a day or two, but you’re gone three weeks at a time, then you come home for one or two days.”

But I had come too far. By now, quitting wouldn’t involve just me. I had brought Lefty around to other operations, and the people running those operations were depending on me to keep their operations going. If I backed out now, a lot of people would be left holding the bag. Quitting was something I couldn’t do.

She knew I was working with the mob. I gave her a few more details, some of the circumstances in Milwaukee, to try to ease the tension a little bit, to show that my being away weeks at a time couldn’t be helped. She knew of Tony Conte because she had talked with him on the phone a few times. I explained to her that if I pulled out, Lefty and the others in New York would stop working with Conte.

I didn’t talk to anybody else about these concerns. Nobody. Because nobody else but me was going to make the decision to leave the job or stay. I didn’t feel it concerned anybody else. No matter what anybody said to me, the decision was going to be mine. I had to stay on the job.

I was in touch with Lefty throughout this time, by telephone. I had left a California “hello phone” number where supposedly he could reach me. He left messages, I called him back.

I told him my girlfriend was fine and that everything ought to get moving again in Milwaukee after the Fourth of July holidays.

He was busy spreading Tony Conte’s money around and trying to arrange for a sitdown with the Milwaukee mob. Mike Sabella was entertaining people. Sabella had borrowed $200,000 for a major renovation of CaSa Bella, but the contractor had quit on him. “He’s in trouble there,” Lefty said, “that cocksucker contractor.”

One day he said to me, “You see that David Suskind Show last night? They had two informers, you know, paid by the government. On TV. You know, guys that already cooperated, and now the government gave them a different identification and put them out there. They said they got 2,250 informers and half of them are in the San Diego and L.A. area.”

“Wow.”

“So these guys, some guy that’s writing a book accidentally cracked it out about them. So now they’re ratted out, and guys are looking to get rid of all these guys.”

“Whack ‘em out, right?”

“Yup. They don’t give a fuck, the government. So these two stool pigeons say anybody that becomes a government informer is fucking crazy. Unbelievable. How’s your girl?”

Over a period of time I got so I could understand just about everything Lefty said. Two guys in the federal Witness Protection Program had been accidentally exposed, so now they had bared their resentments about the government’s carelessness over TV, and that the mob was looking for all these protected informants.

“My girl’s good. Everything’s all right.”

“Why can’t your girl come into New York or Milwaukee with you?”

“She’s working. She don’t get vacation now.”

“Well, you gotta get back out there and get the groundwork. And once you get that, you’re gonna stay there a long time.”

“Yeah, I know. We gotta start making some ends out there. When are you going out there, after the Fourth?”

“When I’m gonna get out there, I don’t know. I’m feuding with the wife now. We had a fight about she wants to go away somewhere for a vacation. I gotta go reach out for people for late this afternoon. Tonight I got an appointment. Tomorrow night I got an appointment. I got meetings in Philadelphia.”

“Mike likes this Milwaukee deal, right?”

“Right. No question about it. I’ll tell you something: Everything’s green lights.”

Lefty had been given the full go-ahead by a message from Carmine Galante in prison. While he was arranging for the sitdown, I went back to Milwaukee. For the first couple of days I didn’t tell Lefty because I wanted some time with Conte to go over things without having to account to Lefty for every minute of every day. Then Conte and I hit some more spots, trying to place machines, and again ran into a stone wall. But we were gathering evidence of the case, and by being seen by more and more people, we were establishing more credibility as guys trying to hustle a buck. We were also insuring that word got back to the Balistrieri people that we were out there pushing a vending-machine business.

We made a visit to Pioneer Sales and Service, a vending-machine wholesaler in Menomonee Falls, to look over the various machines available. Along with Conte and me was Conte’s “employee” that he had told Lefty about. The “employee” was another undercover agent who went by the name of Steve Greca. Conte told the president of the company that he wanted to buy machines for distribution in the Milwaukee area, and that he would also be interested in purchasing any vending routes that became available. He told him that Best Vending was a serious, licensed operation, not fly-by-night, and he showed the guy the city and state licenses for the business. The president said he would be happy to cooperate with Best Vending, and he gave us a tour of the place, showing us the various machines, and handed us a mess of brochures.

Just to give the impression that we were moving the business along, I called Lefty and told him that Conte had ordered some machines—when in fact he hadn’t.

The mob blew up a guy in Milwaukee. Somebody put a bomb under the car of a guy named Augie Palmisano. The murder was in the newspapers, plus our people came up with some information about it. Palmisano was with the Balistrieri family, and the mob suspected he was an informant. The word was that guys were starting to put remote-controlled starters in their cars.

The killing made Conte and me a little nervous.

Lefty called and told Conte, “I got a meeting tonight with those people from Chicago at my man’s place. We reached out, you know. I might have to fly out there later to get a proper introduction. That’s the way they do it. We didn’t sleep on this thing. I’ve been with people every day. But everything is fine. No problems whatsoever.”