Lefty and I were in Miami in August when a bunch of guys came down from New York for a vacation with their wives or girlfriends. They kept talking about how nice it would be to have a boat and go for a sea cruise. Lefty, who missed having a boat of his own, was always yearning to get on the water.

This was during the time that the undercover sting operation that became known as ABSCAM was under way. Eventually several Congressmen would be caught taking bribes from agents posing as rich Arabs. For the operation the FBI was using a boat to entertain their targets. Called the Left Hand, it was a white Chinese-made yacht, one of only two or three such models in the world. It had a full-time captain on board.

I happened to know the agent working ABSCAM. His undercover name was Tony Devita. I got in touch with him and explained what I had—a bunch of wiseguys and their ladies who would be very impressed if I could take them out on that boat. I asked him if ABSCAM was going to break anytime soon, and if not, if the boat could be available. He assured me that nothing would break publicly on the case for a long time. He found an open date in the schedule and set it up for us to use the Left Hand.

I told the guys that a girl I had been fooling around with up in Fort Lauderdale had introduced me to her rich brother, who owned a fancy boat. The brother was living in California but kept the boat at Pier 66 in Fort Lauderdale. She introduced me to her brother when he was visiting, and we hit it off. He put me in touch with the captain and said if I ever wanted to use the boat, I was welcome. So I had reserved the boat for a day.

Everybody was excited. There were about a dozen of us, including Lefty and one of the bartenders from 116, the Holiday Bar. We went out and bought Italian cold cuts and bread and olives and pickles and side dishes. The women made up sandwiches. We stuffed coolers full of beer and wine and sodas. We piled into our cars and headed up to Pier 66.

They went nuts when they saw the boat—especially Lefty, because he was proud of how his partner could produce for the crew. “What a fucking boat!” he says. “Donnie, you did some fucking job getting a boat like this.” Everybody was oohing and aahing as we went on board.

“Where’s your broad?” Lefty asks me. “The one with the brother?”

“She couldn’t make it.”

I did, however, bring along another guy. As a favor to another agent running another operation, I introduced an undercover policeman into my Mafia crowd. The cop’s undercover name was Rocky. Bringing Rocky along on the cruise helped establish him with some of the badguys he might be running across in his operation.

Out on the ocean we went. We cruised around all day, ate and drank and had a wonderful time. A couple of the people had cameras, and everybody enjoyed posing with everybody else.

Then we came back and pulled into the slip where the boat was docked, and we ate and drank some more. “Never been on a boat that big,” people were saying. “Like a fucking ship! You could go to the Bahamas on it!”

It was a great day. Afterward I just put ABSCAM and the boat out of my mind.

Lefty brought his wife, Louise, down to Miami. I went with them to the Thunderbird for dinner and the show. We arrived late, so even though we were tight with the maître d‘, we had to sit at a table right in front of the stage because the joint was packed.

A comedian comes on. I think he was from Australia. He starts working the crowd, cracking jokes at people sitting near the stage, and pretty soon he is focusing on us.

Lefty waves the guy off. “Don’t bother us over here.”

The comedian thinks he has a live one to banter with, so he goes at Lefty with wisecracks.

“I’m telling you, go take your microphone over there.” Lefty points to the other end of the stage.

The guys keeps it up. All of a sudden Lefty goes up on the stage, grabs the mike from the guy, walks it to the far side, plunks it down, and walks back to the guy. “Now that’s the last time I’m gonna tell you.”

Lefty says to me, “If this guy comes back here, you go up and drag him off the fucking stage.”

The guy stays over there but throws a few more barbs at our table. The crowd reacts like this is all part of the act.

When the show ends, Lefty says to me, “Go talk to that guy so he don’t come back over here next show.”

I catch up with the guy and grab his arm. “Hey, pal, next time you’re told something, you listen. We walk in here again, you just make like you don’t even know we’re here.”

“Listen,” he says, pulling away, “this is what I do with the audience all the time, and I’m not changing my act just because you don’t like it.”

I give him a right-hand shot to the stomach, which doubles him over, and start dragging him out toward the back.

The manager has reached us by now. “Donnie, what’s the matter?”

“You saw us try to tell this guy to leave us alone.”

“Yeah, I was trying to catch his eye. Sorry about it. ”

I let the guy walk away. Next day he was fired.

Lefty got a phone call from a New Jersey wiseguy, one of Sam “The Plumber” DeCavalcante’s guys, who was responsible for hiring this comedian. He apologized for what had happened and invited us all back down to the place that night for dinner.

We went for dinner. Everything was on the house from this guy, and he kept apologizing over and over.

“Forget about it,” Lefty says. “The guy was a mutt, that’s all. Donnie straightened him out.”

Chuck, the undercover agent who had the record business and put on concerts back in the beginning of my operation, was working on an operation in Miami on banks that were laundering drug money for Colombian and Cuban customers. The FBI code name was Bancoshares. The mob is always looking for ways to launder money. Chuck thought maybe I could lure the Bonannos in.

I told Lefty about it and suggested that maybe we could steer some customers down there and get a cut. He decided we should go down and meet with the brains behind the scheme. Chuck couldn’t meet with Lefty because he had met him years before when he was a “straight-up” agent-not undercover-in New York City. We brought in Nicholas J. Lore, an agent who had been working in California and has since retired from the F.B.I. to live there. He would pose as a big-shot free-lancer who was the brains behind everything—the guy who put the deals together with all the banks.

I told Lefty that coincidentally, Nick was the guy who owned the boat we went out on, the brother of the woman I knew. It was no more than putting a flesh-and-blood person into the story, instead of just a name, to add reality.

We came down for the meeting with Nick. Lefty was impressed with Nick’s access to big money. Nick wined and dined us at a joint on Key Biscayne. He introduced Lefty to “Tony Fernandez,” an agent who was supposedly his middleman in dealing with the banks. Tony was working with the president of a Miami bank—a Cuban who was deeply involved in laundering drug money through his bank.

Lefty wanted to get a piece of the banker’s action on money laundering by bringing in contacts from New York. He also wanted to get going on some cocaine smuggling. At that time you could buy a key— kilogram—of coke in Colombia for $5,000 to $6,000 and sell it in New York for maybe $45,000. But his attitude on drugs was: To hell with middlemen and cutting profits up with anybody, let’s do it ourselves and keep it to ourselves. Donnie himself can go to Colombia and get the loads. “I don’t need nobody in New York City,” Lefty says. “Donnie comes in with it, nobody knows his business.” Not splitting with the family could get you rich, killed, or both. But since we were dealing with people who weren’t wiseguys-not even Americans—Lefty figured it was worth a shot.