Joe Pistone

Born: September 17, 1939, Erie, Pennsylvania
Nicknames (undercover): Donnie Brasco
Associations (undercover): Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano

In New York City in the mid-1970s, the FBI investigated a rash of truck hijackings. The agency assigned special agent Joseph “Joe” Pistone to a six-month undercover operation to find out where the Mob-connected thieves had taken the stolen cargo.

His undercover name was “Donnie Brasco.” He infiltrated the hijacking ring, which fenced cars, trucks and other stolen goods through the Mob. He was so effective at impersonating a mobster that the FBI let him keep it up.

No one knew how far the FBI’s investigations into organized crime would lead, or mean, for Pistone, who started with the FBI in 1969. By the mid-1970s, as “Donnie,” Pistone began working undercover as an associate of top members of the Bonanno crime family, one of the five major crime families in New York. No FBI agent had worked inside a Mob family before.

The trial testimony he provided in the 1980s produced 200 indictments of Mob associates and 120 convictions. The results decimated the Bonannos.

His incredible journey while undercover, impersonating a mobbed-up jewel thief, lasted five years, from 1976 to 1981, during which he penetrated the upper levels of the Bonanno crime family. He had the Bonanno circle so convinced that it moved to have him join their ranks as a “made” man shortly before the FBI ended his assignment.

Pistone took a class to learn about jewelry to make his cover as a jewelry thief believable. For about the first six months of his assignment, he roamed bars and restaurants in Brooklyn and Manhattan frequented by Mob types, where he sought to blend in and meet contacts.

His unique ability to fit in came from the street smarts he absorbed in his younger years as a working-class Italian American kid in Paterson, New Jersey, where he went to Italian social clubs and encountered local hoods. “I grew up in an area where there was Mob influence,” he told The Boston Globe in 1991. “I knew Mob guys. I knew the sons of Mob guys.”

That experience would prove crucial to his effort to hoodwink suspicious and cynical Mafiosi. “Growing up where I did, I had a pretty good schooling about the traits of a Mob guy. When you should talk and when you should keep your mouth shut – things that a Mob guy will pick up when someone new comes around. It’s a clue to them whether the guy is a street guy or somebody just trying to pretend.”

It took about a year of hanging around Mob haunts before his marks started opening up to him. Low-level mobsters described their lucrative criminal schemes and how he could join in. He wore a wire to record conversations and committed to memory names and license plates because taking notes would, obviously, raise red flags. By 1976, he won the trust of important Bonnano mobsters, notably Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, a soldier said to have killed 26 people, and capo Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano. On Ruggiero’s recommendation, he joined the crew.

Pistone’s Mob activities centered in New York and Florida, taking him away from his wife and kids for extended periods. Pistone even had to vacation with his demanding gangster cohorts. He moved his family out of state for their protection.

As Donnie Brasco, Pistone abetted Ruggerio in transferring stolen property and selling firearms. He engaged in loansharking, extortion and illegal gambling, while resisting entreaties to commit murders. Once, while he pretended to be an expert in burglar alarms, Mob associates intent on committing burglaries demanded he reveal the name of a mobster who would vouch for him. The FBI enlisted an informant to quell their suspicions.

In 1981, the situation intensified again when Napolitano, who had risen to acting boss, ordered Pistone to kill an adversary in Florida as proof that Brasco deserved “made” status. Pistone knew he had to at least make it look as though he carried out the demand. The FBI hatched a plan to kidnap the adversary and tell people the missing man had died. However, the agency could not locate the target, adding to the pressure on their undercover agent.

Instead, the FBI pulled Pistone out of the sting. It was time to start making federal cases and for him to testify, as himself, in open court in New York. Starting in 1982, Pistone’s testimony over the next several years in racketeering cases would send more than 120 mobsters to prison. Prosecutors considered him crucial in the convictions of 21 defendants in the 1980s “Pizza Connection” case, in which mobsters in America used pizzerias to traffic heroin and launder money for the Sicilian Mafia.

The revelation of Pistone’s status as an undercover agent brought humiliation and trouble to his former associates, especially for acting boss Napolitano, who knew he faced death. True to his old-school mentality, “Sonny Black” made no attempt to avoid his fate after receiving the call for a sit-down. Napolitano stopped by a bar to have a last drink with a bartender friend, and then made his way to his final meeting. Days after Pistone began testifying in court, authorities recovered Napolitano’s body from a creek in Staten Island. His killers had cut off both of his hands as a message. Ruggiero lucked out: The feds arrested him before the Mob could reach him. Released after serving 10 years in prison, “Lefty Guns” died of cancer two years later.

Pistone, who went into hiding with a $500,000 contract on his head, retired from the FBI, unscathed, in 1986.

In the 1990s, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, former underboss of the Gambino family who turned FBI informant, said that embarrassment from the Donnie Brasco case drove the bosses of New York’s crime families to suspend the Bonanno family from the Commission, the Mob’s board of directors.

Pistone could not stay retired. In 1992, at age 53, he requested reinstatement with the FBI, which agreed only if he would enter the agency’s strict 16- week training class in Quantico, Virginia. Pistone endured the rigorous course alongside recruits in their 20s. He passed and was rehired until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 57.

Pistone’s 1988 book on his undercover experiences, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, became a bestseller. Based on the book, actor Johnny Depp portrayed Pistone in the 1997 feature film Donnie Brasco with Al Pacino as Ruggerio and Michael Madsen as Napolitano.

In 2004, Pistone published another book, The Way of the Wiseguy, detailing the “etiquette” of Mob members, such as keeping away from any female associated with another mobster – wife, girlfriend, daughter – never strike another wiseguy, and never answer a summons to a grand jury.