Joe Pistone

Joe Pistone arrives in sunglasses and is asked, immediately, whether the glasses are still an operational necessity. The answer is not entirely a joke: he lives somewhere in the United States where the neighbours do not know who he is, and he would like to keep it that way. What gives him away is not his face.

My neighbors have no idea that they're living next to Donnie

The voice, he concedes, is a different matter. It is a very distinct voice, and it has been on tape, and it will be on tape for as long as the case records exist. The interview then rewinds to the beginning, because the beginning is the only place the rest of it makes sense.

He spent three years in Naval Intelligence and always intended to end up in law enforcement; working out of Philadelphia meant constant contact with the Bureau on government installations, and he became friendly with agents who told him what the ceiling looked like. He aimed for it.

I didn't infiltrate the mob right from the get-go

He grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, in an Italian neighbourhood, and the men he is later paid to destroy were, at the start, simply the men on the corner. He knew them. He went to high school with their sons. He was allowed into the social clubs because he was a neighbourhood kid, which is the whole of his qualification and, in the end, the whole of his cover.

So I knew the streets.

His assessment of himself is unromantic: street smart, nothing more. His first assignments were bank robberies, fugitives and gambling, and the gambling cases carried him into his first small pieces of undercover work at a time when the Bureau was pouring resources into interstate betting.

The first real infiltration was a gambling house in Jacksonville, Florida, in the office where he started. It was craps, a regular casino, and he was comfortable in it for a reason that had nothing to do with training.

That comfort ran the other way too. He had grown up among gamblers but not among gangsters, so the men running the game did not frighten him. He could walk in, identify the players, work out who was running it, and leave — which is, functionally, the entire job.

being around gangsters was not, like, intimidating because I wasn't around gangsters growing up

Testifying was rarely required. Most defendants in that stratum plead out, because the exposure is a year or two rather than fifteen, and because a plea can knock time off a sentence that a trial cannot. He never had to appear in court on those cases, which meant his face stayed out of the record.

After that came stolen art, stolen stocks and bonds, swag of every description — four or five years of small, unglamorous cases that acclimated him to being somebody else. Then Tampa called.

The Tampa case was car theft, and the service the thieves offered was absurdly literal: you told them you wanted a Cadillac, they asked the colour and the model, and then they went out and hooked it. The Bureau flipped one of the crew, then flipped his son, and the father agreed to bring an agent inside.

He was introduced as a car thief, but only after a week of instruction, because the introduction would not survive five minutes of conversation otherwise. They taught him to pop an ignition, to cross the wires, and to hook a vehicle.

Then the harder skills: getting under a car to disarm an alarm, a slim jim to open a door, the ignition again. He was a quick study, or he was motivated; either way the crew took him, five or six men operating from Baltimore down to Florida, and he stayed a year and a half.

I did that for a year and a half.

The man who brought him in was not doing it out of civic feeling. He was in trouble himself, and his motive was his son, and the Bureau was content to hold that over him.

The operation produced arrests, a trial in Florida, and one story that Pistone still enjoys telling, which involves a Mercedes delivered to a house where the buyer was out and his wife was not.

You delivered a car to my house, right?

She recognised him outside the courtroom, worked out what he was there to do, and then — with her husband about to go away — asked him to dinner. He declined. The other men in the room suggested she might have poisoned him.

Back in New York he landed under a supervisor named Guy Berada, an Italian kid from the Bronx who ran the truck hijacking squad — a good street agent, which in that office was the highest available compliment. The squad's caseload was mafia work whether or not anyone called it that: eight to ten hijackings a day, trailers of pharmaceuticals, lobster, coffee.

Berada wanted to know whether something could be built from the inside, because the answer, at that point in the Bureau's history, was no. Informants existed. Penetration did not.

nobody had ever infiltrated the mob before

The plan was to come at the family sideways, through the fences — the men who bought and resold stolen goods — rather than through the soldiers. And a fence, or anyone adjacent to one, will not deal with a man who has no trade, so Pistone needed a profession. It also had to be a profession the government would permit: not one of violence.

So who's not violent? Jewel thief.

A jewel thief, then. Which meant diamond school, and precious gems, and a lens, because the way you get caught in that world is by opening your mouth in a room where everyone else knows what they are looking at.

It meant locks, too. Safes. Alarm systems. The Bureau's technical people taught him all of it over a few months, until he could talk about a Mosler the way a man who had actually opened one would talk about it.

Everything was done under the name. An apartment rented, a car bought, utilities and telephone in the name of a citizen who did not exist except on paper — and the paper was the Bureau's problem, not his, and he declines to explain how it was made.

Then came the part that is not taught in any academy: being seen. You do not walk into a bar and announce that you are a jewel thief. You find the bars and restaurants where the fences drink, and you become furniture, and you wait to be spoken to.

He could not claim a borough. Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx — every one of those was a lie that could be checked in an afternoon, because the men he was trying to meet had contacts in all three. So he claimed nowhere, and built a story that could not be verified because there was nothing to verify.

My background was I was an orphan.

An orphan has no parents to produce. No siblings he knows of. No ex-wife, because a marriage would require a second person who could be found. And to back it up, the Bureau located an orphanage that had burned down, taking its records with it.

This had to be a cold entree.

Five or six months of this, and nothing else — because the work is seven days a week. If the regulars see you Monday through Friday and not on the weekend, the weekend becomes a question, and questions are how a cover dies. His family was on the other side of the country for most of it.

It's a seven day a week job.