Pistone, Joseph D. 1939(?)–

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Pistone, Joseph D. 1939(?)–

(Donnie Brasco)

PERSONAL: Born 1939 (some sources say 1940), in Paterson, NJ; father a bar manager; married; wife's name Maggie (a nurse); children: three daughters.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Running Press, 125 S. 22nd St., Philadelphia, PA 19103-4399.

CAREER: Writer. Worked as a teacher, c. 1960s; employed by federal government in Navy intelligence section for three years, late 1960s; Federal Bureau of Investigation, agent, c. 1970–86; security consultant, 1986–96.

WRITINGS:

(With Richard Woodley) Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, New American Library (New York, NY), 1987.

Donnie Brasco: Deep Cover, Penguin (New York, NY), 1999.

Mobbed Up: A Donnie Brasco Novel, Onyx (New York, NY), 2000.

Snake Eyes: A Donnie Brasco Novel, Onyx (New York, NY), 2001.

(Under name Donnie Brasco) The Way of the Wiseguy: True Stories from the FBI's Most Famous Undercover Agent, Running Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.

(With Bill Bonnano and David Fisher) The Good Guys, Warner Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Unfinished Business: The Donnie Brasco Story, Running Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including People.

ADAPTATIONS: Donnie Brasco was released as a motion picture, directed by Mike Newell and starring Johnnie Depp as Pistone, 1997. Several of Pistone's works have also been adapted to audiocassette.

SIDELIGHTS: "The man who walks into the trattoria, carefully folds his sports jacket on the seat, and orders a plate of risotto used to be known as Donnie Brasco, veteran jewel thief and trusted insider with the Bonanno crime family." So began a Washington Postprofile of Joseph D. Pistone, one of many articles that were written following the 1997 release of the film Donnie Brasco, which starred Johnny Depp as Pistone. The motion picture, which also features Al Pacino and Michael Madsen, as Pistone's Mob associates Benjamin "Lefty Guns" Ruggiero and Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano, has been lauded by critics for its realism. Unlike The Godfather and the many movies it spawned that portray financially successful, articulate, and even principled Mafiosi, Donnie Brasco—both the film and Pistone's book, on which the film is based—show mobsters as "small-time hustlers," in the words of Paula Span in the Washington Post, "perennially short of cash, flubbing as many scores as they pulled off." Washington Monthly reviewer Selwyn Raab commented: "Pistone's observations demystify the myths concocted by novelists and moviemakers about a benevolent, roguish side to the Mafia. As witnessed by Pistone, daily life for the rank-and-file mobster is as dreary as toiling on an assembly line." The subjects' lives are characterized by severe boredom, punctuated with moments of sheer terror. "The mob you see in this movie," Pistone told Span, "that's the true Mafia." There is a reason for this authenticity: the hero of the tale, and the events in which he participated, are all real.

For five years, from 1976 to 1981, Pistone, then an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent, penetrated the Colombo and Bonanno crime families by posing as "Donnie Brasco" (he chose the name at random), a jewel thief and small-time hoodlum. As a result of information he uncovered, the federal government was able to arrest and convict some one hundred mobsters, making Pistone one of the most successful undercover agents in the history of FBI Mafia sting operations. So successful was he, in fact, that he almost became a "made guy"—that is, a formal member of the Mafia—but the FBI pulled him out before this happened. In 1982 Pistone began testifying in a series of trials, at which time he also began living under an assumed identity in an undisclosed location. His wife and three daughters, who by then were adults, also took on new identities.

The son of a bar manager, Pistone came from a working-class background in Paterson, New Jersey. He was an excellent basketball player, and he married his high school girlfriend, Maggie, in 1961, when he was in his early twenties. After trying a career in teaching, as well as work with the U.S. Navy's intelligence section, Pistone signed up with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the late 1960s. He quickly moved toward undercover work and found himself at the right place at the right time. For half a century the Bureau, under director J. Edgar Hoover, had virtually ignored the Mafia: Hoover claimed not to believe in its existence, or at least in its existence as a formidable crime force, and directed FBI efforts elsewhere. The death of Hoover in 1972 ushered in a new era, and when the FBI needed an agent to go undercover in the Mob, a shortage of Italian agents made Pistone ideal for the role.

Pistone had the credentials to fit in: not only his heritage (non-Italians cannot be "made" in the Mafia), but his background and his way of speech, which qualified him as a Mafia type. "I don't have an axe to grind," he later told Michael Arena of in Newsday. "[Growing up,] I had friends who were Mob guys, you know what I'm saying. You hang around the clubs, the neighborhood, they're just guys. You don't get to see the other side. The murder side. You don't see the leg-breaking and the extortion. The gambling is all you see. So when I went on the job, that's all it was. A job…. Being Italian, being a street guy, I was logical for the job."

Both the book and the film adaptation offer insights into the Mafia mind as only someone like Pistone—someone, that is, who is very like a mobster except for being on the right side of the law—can offer. There is, for instance, his explanation of the word "Fugeddaboudit" (Forget about it), which can mean any number of things, ranging from "Yes, absolutely" to "You must be kidding" to "Don't mention it" to "Forget about it." Likewise, there is the syntactical distinction between the way a mobster refers to someone outside the Mafia—"He's a friend of mine"—and the way he identifies a "made man": "He's a friend of ours."

In the motion picture version of Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, Pistone begins as very much "a friend of mine" to Lefty, Pacino's character, only establishing his bona fides after a great deal of testing. In actuality, he was much closer to Sonny, Madsen's character, but that is one of the movie's few departures from the actual story. As for the testing, that continued throughout his five years. Thus in 1977, as David Brand reported in Time, "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 out his story. Finally the gangster returned. 'Your guy okayed you,' he said."

Then there was the incident, as Brand also reported, when Time magazine itself very nearly got Brasco killed. In Miami, "Pistone had borrowed a white yacht from a fellow agent for an oceangoing party to impress Lefty and his Mafia pals. A girlfriend's rich brother had provided the boat, Pistone explained. Now an unhappy Lefty was looking at a page in Time with a picture of the very same yacht: it had been used by the FBI in the Abscam scandal to help catch several crooked congressmen accepting bribes from agents posing as rich Arabs." Pistone insisted to Lefty that the boat was not the same one and later covered himself by saying that he had been smarter than the congressman and had "beat those FBI guys."

Needless to say, Lefty was shocked when he found out that his friend Donnie was really an FBI agent. Thanks to Pistone's testimony, Lefty ended up serving ten years in a federal prison, dying of cancer two years after his release. He was more fortunate than Sonny, who disappeared soon after Pistone's identity was revealed. According to Span in the Washington Post, "Sonny Black's body washed up on Staten Island 10 days after Pistone began testifying in his first major racketeering trial in New York; the corpse was missing its hands"—special evidence of disgrace in Mafia terms. As for any feelings of guilt regarding his betrayal of former confreres, Pistone was philosophical: if they had found out who he was while he was among them, he reasoned, they would have had no qualms about doing away with him.

As Span reported, Lou DiGiaimo was also surprised to learn the identity of the testifying FBI agent. He and Pistone had grown up together and had met again in the 1970s, when they played basketball together regularly. And then, DiGiaimo recalled: "After a few months he disappeared. I'd call the FBI office, they'd never heard of a Joe Pistone." In fact, the Bureau had destroyed any evidence that he had ever worked for them, a precaution against background checks by corrupt law-enforcement officers. When DiGiaimo heard in 1982 about an unnamed agent due to testify regarding his infiltration of the Mob, he said, "I'm wondering, could it be Joe? Could it be?" His interest had a significance beyond their relationship: DiGiaimo worked in the movie business. When they finally got together after Pistone testified, DiGiaimo recalled: "I told him I thought what he had done was heroic and spectacular and I said it should be a book and a movie. He said he would think it over, but first he had years' worth of testimony to give."

After completing his testimony in a long series of trials, Pistone began writing Donnie Brasco with Richard Woodley. Ralph Blumenthal, reviewing the book in the New York Times Book Review, called it an "astonishing memoir" but lamented the fact that the author offered little insight into "the central mystery of the story—how did Mr. Pistone manage his extraordinary emotional feat? What was going on in his heart and brain?" Yet it would be hard to imagine a highly emotional, sensitive person who would also be capable of posing as a convincing Mafia associate. Blumenthal seemed to concede this when he quoted a passage from the book as evidence to back up Pistone's claim that he is "not inclined toward soulsearching": "I say, 'You wanna step outside?' 'Yeah.' He gets up off his stool, and I give him a shot right there, because I'm not going outside. Another guy jumps in, Mirra smacks him. The first guy comes at me again, I clock him with a bottle."

A decade after the book came the movie, with DiGiaimo—who had been casting director for The Godfather—as producer. "Johnny [Depp] called me maybe four times," DiGiaimo told Jason Cochran in Entertainment Weekly, to ask, "Are you sure Joe likes what I did?" According to Cochran, Pistone "cranks back a slow nod, like a wiseguy [gangster]. 'Better than 100 percent,' he murmurs." And Pistone told Span that "watching [Depp], I could see myself, the way he moved, the way he worked the room with his eyes, absorbing everything."

Pistone showed up on the set of Donnie Brasco several times, but because of his past, he must live furtively: at any time, a young Mafioso eager to prove himself could seek out Pistone and kill him. Nonetheless, Pistone has done security consulting, some of it with Britain's Scotland Yard, and has lectured at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Pistone has also began writing novels based on his undercover work as an FBI agent penetrating the Mafia. Span added ruefully that "he says writing is much harder work—'it's tedious'—than fooling bad guys."

Pistone's debut fictional effort appeared as Donnie Brasco: Deep Cover. In this first novel, "for the most part, he hits the mark," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Using his Brasco persona as a character and his real-life experiences as a point of departure, Pistone creates a story in which Brasco is forced undercover by a contract on his life. While investigating political corruption in Florida, Brasco must keep on the run from vindictive mobsters and endure a life-threatening force of a different type: a hurricane. A pair of mysterious widows, a group of Cuban refugees, and a collection of undercover FBI agents complicates Brasco's life. "Pistone's dialogue shines, giving credibility to the characters" in the book, the Publishers Weekly critic asserted. Pistone is also the author of such Brasco novels as Mobbed Up: A Donnie Brasco Novel and Snake Eyes: A Donnie Brasco Novel.

For a reading public still enthralled by the Mafia, transfixed by the movie The Godfather, its sequels, and the television series The Sopranos, Pistone offers further details on the inside life of a mob member in The Way of the Wiseguy. In this book, Pistone "details the habits, language, individual quirks and common connections that separate Wise Guys from normal society," noted an interviewer on the Bada-Bing Blog Web site. "With their strict ethics codes, many of their traditions reflect the nature of the civilian life and the corporate world of business. The book also shines light on the loyalty, opportunism, the culture, respect and revenge, that is all part of this phenomenon we call the mob." Characteristics of genuine wise guys, Pistone reported, are "they got no shame, and you can't embarrass them. They are similar to a salesman or some type of business in which you deal with people, you have to be persistent. They are persistent in going after their illegal conquests."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Pistone, Joseph D., with Richard Woodley, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, New American Library, 1987.

PERIODICALS

Entertainment Weekly, March 7, 1997, Jason Cochran, "An Audience with the Don," p. 45.

Library Journal, May 1, 2004, Jim Burns, review of The Way of the Wiseguy, p. 127.

Nation, March 31, 1997, Stuart Klawans, motion picture review of Donnie Brasco, p. 35.

Newsday, March 9, 1997, Michael Arena, interview with Joseph D. Pistone, p. C10.

New York Times, February 9, 1986, Arnold H. Lubasch, "Agent Tells about Tension in Bonnano Group," p. A47; January 26, 1988, Arnold H. Lubasch, "Inside the Mob: An Agent Recalls 'Game of Wits,'" interview with Joseph D. Pistone, p. B1; March 3, 1997, Bernard Weintraub, "A Tale of Gangsters and Schemers Rings True because It Is," motion picture review of Donnie Brasco, p. C11.

New York Times Book Review, February 14, 1988, Ralph Blumenthal, review of Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly, March 1, 1999, review of Donnie Brasco: Deep Cover, p. 66.

Time, January 18, 1988, review of Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, p. 21; January 18, 1988, David Brand, "Strife and Death in the Family; An Ex-FBI Agent Describes Five Chilling Years inside the Mafia," profile of Joseph D. Pistone, p. 21.

Washington Monthly, June, 1988, Selwyn Raab, review of Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, p. 58.

Washington Post, February 28, 1997, Paula Span, "The FBI's Veiled Threat: Joseph Piston Spent Six Years inside the Mafia and Lived to Tell the Tale," p. C1.