Word: agent
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...importance, Pistone exposed the degree to which Government crime- busting efforts have weakened the Mafia, says Ronald Goldstock, director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force. The Mob, which once ran thorough security checks on any stranger, simply lacked the "discipline and internal controls" to unmask the agent, he says...
...came within a telephone call of being exposed. In 1977, shortly after he had infiltrated a small gang of crooks attached to the Colombo family, two mobsters became suspicious that Pistone was a stoolie and demanded that he provide a criminal reference. Months before, Pistone had asked another FBI agent to instruct a Mob informant in Florida always to be ready to vouch for Donnie Brasco. But had the agent passed on the message? And if he had, would the informant remember? For several tense hours Pistone played cards with the rest of the gang, while a mobster checked...
...family knew he was an undercover agent but little else. His wife and his three daughters, now 25, 23 and 21, sometimes would not see him for weeks at a time. While Pistone's family was sitting at home on Christmas Eve, Donnie Brasco would be out "bouncing" around with mobsters, planning criminal scams from loan-sharking to extortion. Even getting home for a day required making elaborate excuses to his Mafia bosses. In a telephone interview, Mrs. Pistone, a 47-year-old former nurse, admits, "It was horrible. I was always having to do without my husband, making excuses...
...battle," he recalls. The situation never arose, but as he came closer to being initiated into the Mob, he was given a contract by Sonny Black to kill a fellow Mafioso. Before Pistone could run the mobster to earth, the FBI ended the operation, and on July 26, 1981, Agent Pistone came in from the heat...
...Island. His hands had been chopped off, a symbol of a violation of Mafia security. "I felt a little bad," says Pistone, "but I always kept in mind that if he had found out who I was, he would have had no hesitation about killing me." For the undercover agent, as for the mobster, it was just business...