On January 17, 1983, I went with my wife and brother to Washington, D.C., to attend the annual presentation of the Attorney General’s Awards. Before the ceremonies we had lunch with FBI Director William Webster and his assistant directors in his private dining room in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, which is FBI headquarters.
The ceremonies were held in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice. The room was jammed with dignitaries and government officials.
Among the awards was one for me. Attorney General William French Smith and FBI Director Webster presented me with the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award as the outstanding agent in the FBI. They cited my length of service undercover, how no agent had ever penetrated so deep into the Mafia before, and how much personal sacrifice was required. I got a big round of applause.
Next to testifying in my first Mafia trial, this was the best moment in my professional life.
2
THE BEGINNINGS
I was working out of the Alexandria, Virginia, office in my second year on the job. We had been chasing a bank-robbery fugitive for about a month, just missing him several times. I and my partner, Jack O‘Rourke, got a tip that he was going to be at a certain apartment in next-door Washington, D.C., for about a half hour. We alerted the D.C. office so they could send a couple cars, and we took off for the place. When we pulled up, we saw this guy coming down the stairs.
He was a black guy, huge and hard—6’4”, 225. He had pulled off a string of bank jobs and hotel robberies, and had shot a clerk.
This is the middle of a black neighborhood. The guy spots us and takes off through an alley. I jump out of the car and take off after him, while my partner wheels the car around the block to cut him off. We go over fences and down alleys, knocking over garbage cans and making a racket. I don’t draw my gun because he doesn’t show one. Finally, in another alley, I catch up and tackle him. Then we go at each other with fists. Up and down we go, throwing punches. We roll around smacking each other, busting each other up, while a crowd gathers and just watches. I can’t subdue him. I manage to get my cuffs out of the small of my back, put a hand through one, and finally I hit him a good shot that dazes him. That buys me a couple of seconds to get him in a hammerlock and slap one cuff on him.
The other cars arrive, and we subdue him.
We’re walking him to the car and he says to me, “You gotta be a Eye-talian.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, ‘cause there’s only two types that fight like that, a nigger or a Eye-talian. And I know you ain’t no nigger.”
It was a sad story. The guy was an ex-Marine with medals for heroism in VietNam. He got discharged and came back and couldn’t get a job. Nobody wanted him as a VietNam vet. He became a heroin addict and a bank robber. About three years after this bust, he got out of prison and went back to the same stuff, and when they were trying to arrest him, he came out shooting, and a buddy of mine had to blow him away with a shotgun.
I felt bad about that guy. But I wasn’t a psychologist or a social worker. I was an FBI agent.
And an Italian. My grandparents came from Italy. I was born in Pennsylvania. I grew up there and then in New Jersey. My father worked in a silk mill and at the same time ran a couple of bars. He retired when he was sixty-two. I have a younger brother and sister.
In high school I played football and basketball, mostly basketball, guard and forward. I was only six feet tall but a leaper, good enough to be second-team AllState. I went to a military school for a year to play more basketball, then went to college on a basketball scholarship. I knew I wasn’t good enough to be a pro. Basketball was just a way for me to go to college. I majored in social studies. I wanted to be a high-school basketball coach. After two years of college I left to get married. I was twenty.
I stayed out a year working, as I had during off times from school, in construction, driving bulldozers, in a silk mill, tending bar, driving tractor-trailers. My wife was a nurse. After a year out, I went back to school to get my college diploma. But I didn’t resume basketball. My wife was pregnant. I had to work full-time. There wasn’t time for basketball. After our first daughter was born, my wife went back to work as a nurse to help put me through college.
Nobody in my family had been a cop. But as a kid I had thought about being a cop or an FBI agent. In my senior year of college a buddy was going to take the exam for the local police department. He wanted me to go in with him. I said I wanted to finish my last year of school. He urged me to take the exam, anyway. I scored in the top five on the written exam, and number one on the physical exam. I told the police chief that I wanted to take the job with the department, but I was in my last semester of college and I wanted to finish and get my diploma. I asked him if it was possible to get an appointment where I would work only the nighttime shift until I graduated. He said he didn’t think there’d be a problem.
But when it came time for the swearing-in, he told me he couldn’t guarantee night shifts for me. So I turned down the job with the police department to finish school.
I got my diploma and taught social studies for a while at a middle school. I liked working with kids. By the time I graduated from college, I had two kids of my own.
I had a friend who was in Naval Intelligence. The Office of Naval Intelligence employed civilians to investigate crimes committed on government installations where Navy and Marine personnel were based, or crimes committed by Navy or Marine personnel in the civilian sector. There were investigations of all types: homicides, gambling, burglaries, drugs, plus national security cases such as espionage.
Often Naval Intelligence agents worked closely with FBI agents. In the back of my mind I had always wanted to be an FBI agent. But you had to have three years of prior experience in law enforcement, along with a college degree.
Naval Intelligence interested me. For that you needed only a college degree. I passed the required exams and became an agent in the Office of Naval Intelligence. I had three daughters by then.
I worked mostly out of Philadelphia. It was basically a suit-and-tie job, normal straight-up investigations, some of the work classified. I worked some drug cases, some theft cases, and so on, and did some intelligence work in espionage cases. I made cases, testified in military courts.
My work there satisfied the FBI’s requirement for prior law-enforcement experience. I passed the written, oral, and physical exams, and on July 7, 1969, was sworn in as a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
For fourteen weeks at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, I was schooled in the law, the violations that come under the FBI’s jurisdiction, and in proper procedures and techniques of interviewing people and conducting all types of investigations. I was trained in self-defense tactics, proper procedures and techniques of car chases and making arrests, and in the use of every type of firearm that the Bureau uses.
In Naval Intelligence I had preferred street work, criminal work, to the intelligence investigations. So when I went into the Bureau, I knew I wanted to do street work. That’s where everybody starts, anyway.
I was assigned to the Jacksonville, Florida, office.
I had been on the job less than a month when I had my first serious confrontation as an agent. We had a warrant for a fugitive, an escapee from a Georgia prison. He was a kidnapper and had shot two people. He had fled across the state line into Florida. My partner got a tip from an informant that this fugitive was going to be in the area, driving a van on the way to some kind of crime job.
We stake out the location with a couple of cars, spot the van going by, and tail it, figuring to move in when he gets to where the job is going down. But after a couple of miles he makes the tail and swerves off the highway and onto side roads to try to shake us. We have to make our move. My partner is driving. He draws up alongside the van and forces it off the road to a stop to our right, my side, so that my door is even with the driver’s door of the van.
The fugitive and I jump out of our cars a
t the same time, facing each other maybe five feet apart. He has his gun drawn. I’m new on the job. I haven’t pulled my gun. The guy points at me and pulls the trigger. Click. He pulls again. Click. Two incredible misfires.
This all happens in a few seconds. The guy drops the gun and takes off. I’m right on his heels. My partner is out of the car and running after us. “Shoot him!” he hollers to me.
We have strict guidelines on using our firearms. You’re not allowed to fire warning shots. You shoot only to defend yourself; you shoot to kill. But I wasn’t going to shoot this guy. I was burning at myself that I had let this guy get the drop on me. It’s hard running in a suit and tie, but I catch him and clobber him over the head a few times with my handcuffs before I slap the cuffs on his wrists.
My partner comes running up. “Why the hell didn’t you shoot?” he says.
“There wouldn’t have been any satisfaction in that,” I say. The guy had scared me to death. I was angrier at myself than at him, because I hadn’t gotten out of the car with my gun drawn. But by the time the guy panicked and tossed the gun, there wasn’t any reason to shoot him, anyway.
In Jacksonville, I worked fugitive cases, gambling, bank robberies. I started developing informants. I feel that one of my better talents was in cultivating reliable sources from the street world.
I grew up as a street guy. I did not look down at guys who survived by their wits and street smarts, tough guys, thieves. You promise informants that you will protect their relationship with you. You never completely trust them, and they never completely trust you—you’re on the side of law and they’re not.
I didn’t try to rehabilitate anybody. If you become too involved in the social-work aspect, it gets in the way of your investigative abilities.
Some of my first informants were women, because I worked a lot of prostitution cases—cases made federal under the Mann Act, for bringing women across state lines for prostitution. The prostitutes were the victims. We went after the pimps who beat them or burned them with coat hangers for not bringing in enough money or whatever.
Sometimes I would try to talk a prostitute into getting away from her pimp. I didn’t try to talk anybody out of being a prostitute, because that’s just a waste of time. My attitude was: Hey, if that’s the profession you’re going to choose, I’m just giving you some advice on how to survive, that’s all. I got some of them away from their pimps. That made me feel good. And I got some of them to be informants, which made me feel even better.
I had an informant named Brown Sugar. I talked her into at least moving out of the lousy neighborhood into a better, safer area. She didn’t have anything for a decent apartment. I asked my wife if we could give her some of our old pots and pans for her apartment. “I’m not giving my pots and pans to any Brown Sugar,” my wife said. We didn’t have much, either, in those early days of my career, trying to support a family with three kids.
With my partner I did a lot of work in cooperation with the Jacksonville Police Department vice squad. There is a lot of interagency cooperation among guys working the street, because they need each other. Resentment and jealousy between agencies occurs more often at higher levels, where people are looking for publicity.
My partner and I didn’t want publicity because we ended up doing some good but unauthorized work to help out the vice-squad cops. I especially didn’t want publicity because this was my first year as an agent, and in the first year you are on probation; you can be dismissed without cause.
There was a rash of prostitution at the better hotels in the area. High-class hookers were working the bars and lobbies, picking up businessmen.
Everybody in the hotels knew these vice cops because they had been around awhile, but nobody knew me. So to help them out on local cases I would pose as a businessman, get picked up by a hooker and taken up to a room. The local cops would follow us up and wait outside the door for two or three minutes, long enough for the transaction, then they’d come in and make the bust.
I wasn’t a kid—I was thirty—but since I was a new guy on the job, these vice-squad cops liked to have a little fun with me, bust my chops. Like one time I go into the room with this hooker. I give her the money. I wait for them to come through the door. Nothing. She starts undressing. “Come on, honey,” she says, “aren’t you gonna take your clothes off?” I hem and haw. Nothing is happening at the door. She is naked and starts trying to pull off my clothes. I try to push her hands off my buttons and zippers, and I don’t know what to do. My job is on the line here because this is not federal business.
Over the door there is a transom. I hear giggling. They have boosted up one guy, and he is looking through the transom and laughing like hell at my predicament.
Then they come in and make the bust.
We started hearing about armed robberies in the rooms. Pimps would hide in the rooms and stick up the johns when they came in.
One of the girls that was working with her pimp this way picks me up and takes me to the room. This time I know the cops are backing me up because this is serious.
I say I want to hang my jacket up in the closet. The pimp isn’t in the closet. Then I have to go to the bathroom. The pimp isn’t in there. I go back out in the room with the hooker. I give her the money. She is very edgy. I know the pimp is in there.
It dawns on me he is behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. The curtain was open, gathered at one end of the tub. I hadn’t moved it to look in that corner of the tub. I tell her, “Why don’t you get undressed. I just want to wash my hands again.”
The pimp will have a gun. But if I pull my gun and the girl starts screaming, who knows what the guy will do? So I’ll just have to surprise him.
I go into the bathroom, turn on the water in the sink, then spin around and smack the shower curtain away. The pimp is standing there with an automatic in his hand. I slap his arm, put a wristlock on him, make him drop the gun. He starts trying to punch, but it’s over. With the commotion the cops come into the room, and I turn the dude over to them and leave.
After eighteen months I was transferred to Alexandria, Virginia. That office had a heavy load of applicant cases—background investigations on people nominated for government jobs. Newcomers to that office were routinely assigned to a squad that got the brunt of those cases. Suddenly I was in a tame area. I asked the Special Agent in Charge—the boss of the office—if I could work criminal cases once I got the applicant cases done. He said he didn’t care. So I would get all my applicant cases out of the way by maybe noon. In the afternoon I would hook up with guys who worked criminal cases.
I developed a string of informants who were instrumental in solving a lot of bank robberies and nabbing fugitives. This was the end of the VietNam era, and in Alexandria, like in Jacksonville, I worked a bunch of deserter cases.
I was in Alexandria four years. It was a nice life. We belonged to a country club where my wife was social director.
Along the way I had gone back to school at Quantico for short “in-service” training courses in such things as gambling and undercover work. In those days there was no such thing in the Bureau as long-term undercover assignments. Undercover was a day or two in a “buy-bust” situation. For example, you get information that somebody has some type of stolen property, you negotiate a buy from this thief, and then the thief is arrested.
I also had SWAT training when they first formed the Special Weapons Assault Teams in the early 1970s to deal with hostage situations such as were occurring in skyjackings or with potential terrorist assaults. The teams were formed from specially picked agents who showed superior physical skills. We were trained in the use of various weapons, methods of assault on a building; we rapelled with ropes from buildings, cliffs, helicopters. There was survival training in the wilderness and in the water. We worked on hand-to-hand combat. I loved the camaraderie, the physical challenge.
In 1974, I was transferred to New York City and put on the Truck and Hijack Squad.
We had a
good squad, a busy squad. We worked at least six days a week, sometimes two or three days around the clock. But long hours was not unusual in the Bureau. The average agent probably gets to work at six-thirty or seven A.M. and works a twelve-hour day. And we were intercepting six or seven hijacked loads a day.
And then came my break into long-term undercover work—the assignment that led to my work with the Mafia.
The Tampa, Florida, office was working on a ring of thieves that were stealing heavy equipment and luxury cars. They discovered the ring by chance. They had arrested a teenage boy on some unrelated charge. But it turned out that the kid’s father was involved in the theft ring.
The father was desperate to keep the kid from going to jail. He came to the agents and said, “You cut my son a deal, I’ll work for you busting up a big ring that’s stealing heavy equipment and luxury cars all over the southeastern United States.”
With cooperation from the Florida Highway Patrol, the Bureau made the guy an informant to see what he could produce. He proved himself. The ring was directed by a guy out of Baltimore and operated all over the southeast. They stole everything to order: trucks, bulldozers, road graders; Cadillacs, Lincolns, and airplanes.
The Bureau thought that maybe they could introduce an agent to work undercover with the guy in busting the ring. It’s always better to have an agent’s testimony in court. The guy said that the only thing was, the agent would have to know how to drive things like an eighteen-wheeler and a bulldozer. That led the Bureau to me. I was one of the few agents with that kind of experience.
Donnie Brasco Page 2
