There were arguments against becoming a made guy. Some felt that if I became made, I would have less flexibility and independence. I would no longer be excused for “dumb mistakes,” which were really things I had done, moves I had made or not made, for the benefit of the investigation. I would have to do what they told me to do. I could be ordered to commit crimes. Jules was one of those against my staying in and getting made.

Primarily the question boiled down to safety. Nobody thought I was safe enough any longer. They felt that we had already made a bundle of important cases, and it wasn’t worth the risk of staying under just to make a couple more. I felt safe enough. As much as it hurt to face ending the operation after five years, I had to accept the decision.

We had a meeting outside Washington, D.C., at the Crystal City Marriott. Rossi, Shannon, Jules, me, various supervisors, and Headquarters people and case agents. There were several other operations involved in one way or another with ours, and that made it rather complex to end our operation cleanly. We needed to give these other operations time to bring their work up to a point where they could do without me in the picture. They went around the table. Everybody was asked to cut estimated time. If somebody needed a month, they were asked to wrap up in two weeks. After going around and around, we got a fix on the amount of time needed by everybody concerned.

We set a date to end the operation: July 26.

Shortly after that, we had another meeting to finalize the ABC’s of closing up. That was in New Jersey, at the Howard Johnson’s near the George Washington Bridge. The two big items on the agenda were to determine what telephones we wanted to put wiretaps on, and which Bonanno guy we should approach first to tell of my true identity.

The two matters were related. Nothing about our operation would be made public until we had indictments, months down the line. In the meantime, when the operation ended on July 26, agents were going to reveal my role to the Bonannos so that they didn’t go after me as an informant. Historically the mob did not seek vengeance against cops and judges, because that brings down too much heat on the mob. The second reason was that we wanted to stimulate a lot of telephone conversations that would contribute to the evidence of mob business, locations, conspiracy, who was who.

To pick up these conversations we needed wiretaps. For wiretaps we needed court orders. For court orders we needed to provide as much up-to-date supporting information as possible. We needed to be specific. You can’t just walk into a court and get a hundred wiretaps. We needed to finalize these decisions now, so we could get the court orders and install the taps by the time I came out.

We pinpointed the most important phones to tap, those used most by the most important people, where the most business was transacted.

Then we turned to who to tell first. Almost everybody at the meeting said it should be Lefty. He was the most involved with me on a daily basis. He would get on the phones and scream to everybody and let slip all kinds of information.

I insisted that it had to be Sonny. Sonny was the top Bonanno guy on the street now. He was calm and cool and rational. Lefty would get on the phones and scream to everybody about everything under the sun. But Sonny would make more important calls and would be more specific. Sonny’s orders would be more serious and would be taken more seriously. There was no question about it, it had to be Sonny.

They agreed on Sonny. Then the question was: Who should tell him? Some thought I should tell him. There was no way I would be the guy to tell him. That would be the worst kind of slap in the face. It would be rubbing salt into raw wounds. It would be unfair and unnecessary. It should be other FBI agents, including somebody Sonny has met before so that he will believe what he is told.

Everything was set. I went back to work.

Now the job no longer was to penetrate deeper into the family. I was simply to work for as much information as possible in the six weeks before I had to come out. Actually that wasn’t so simple. I still had to play my role. I still had to maintain my personality and character—I couldn’t start looking especially eager to learn things all of a sudden. For the mob it was business as usual, and it had to seem like that with me, too; which included navigating through the family warfare.

Some people at Headquarters wanted us to branch out all of a sudden and start asking questions of other people about other people, for some last-minute intelligence. But we resisted those requests. If we made a mistake of pushing too hard, suddenly we wouldn’t even have six weeks anymore. We might have to pull out in a day.

Boobie’s daughter was going to get married, and we were all invited to the wedding on June 20. I went up to New York on June 15 to be with Sonny and the crew. They were still looking for the kid, Anthony Bruno.

On my way into the Motion Lounge I ran into Nicky Santora. I said, “The kids’s not in Miami, Nicky. We scoured the fucking place.”

“We got a few feelers out now. We’ll know this week. He might have crawled into a hole and stayed for a while. But when he comes out, we’ll get him.”

I went over to Manhattan to the Holiday Bar to see Lefty. We went out for a walk on Madison Street. He was aggravated with everybody, and a walk on the street was the only place he could really let his hair down. He wasn’t getting a proper split of profits, he was being ignored or unappreciated or mistreated. His longtime loyalty wasn’t counting for anything. Boobie was a phony; Joey Massino had all the men and money in the world and didn’t know how to do anything; Sonny was greedy.

“They got all the connections and I’m a jerk-off. Who’s gonna pay me? Sonny’s trying to hold me back. Push me for like two hundred a week here, two hundred a week there, to pacify me. Meanwhile he’s making like thirty thousand a week. Sooner or later he wants to get rid of me by making me a captain, but I gotta do it in Miami. He gives me a couple thousand, then I’m gonna go to Miami. Meanwhile they’re knocking it down. Boobie’s got fifteen hundred a week in salary. And they got all the junk. They took it all.”

“How come you’re not in on that?”

“Why? Because he’s a greedy cocksucker,” he says, meaning Sonny.

“You did all the work for him.”

He grunts. “Donnie, they gave me the contract now on the kid. Once I do that, the guy can go fuck himself.”

“They found that one body, huh?”

“Yeah. That was a mistake. Joey Massino, he’s the one fucked it up. Sonny’s really hot about it.”

Sonny Red’s body, like the others, was supposed to have been chopped up and gotten rid of properly, not buried quickly and whole.

“You have no idea,” Lefty says. “The guy choked.” He put a hand to his throat in the gesture used about athletes who don’t come through in the clutch.

“How’d you manage Big Trin?” I ask, “huge as he is?”

“I couldn’t move him. Boobie could. Trin was all cut open and bleeding. There was little pieces around from the shotgun. Boobie got blood all over him trying to pick him up. I couldn’t believe how strong Boobie is. He don’t look it. But I was amazed. Boobie could move him. Then they cut him up and put him in green plastic garbage bags.”

He said that the guys in on the hits were himself, Jimmy Legs, Nicky Santora, and a guy named Bobby Capazzio. When they came out of the building, Jerry Chilli told them that the kid was right around the corner.

“I said, ‘Bobby, let’s go over there.’ He says, ‘No, no, no, Lefty. Sonny Black told you to go to Brooklyn.’ The kid was around the corner, Donnie. We could have boxed the corner.”

So they went back to the Motion Lounge before going to Rabito’s to hole up.