Joe Pistone being Donnie Brasco, accompanied by his wise guy mentor, Benjamin 'Lefty Guns' Ruggiero (centre). (Photo Wikimedia Commons)
Writer, producer, jeweller, FBI undercover man – the real Donnie Brasco speaks to Annette Basile about his Mafia role.
Telephone interviews usually begin with an operator’s voice, but Joe Pistone makes this call himself. He can’t give out his number – after all, there’s a contract out on his life.
Telephone interviews usually begin with an operator’s voice, but Joe Pistone makes this call himself. He can’t give out his number – after all, there’s a contract out on his life.
Pistone, who was portrayed on screen by Johnny Depp, is better known by his alias, Donnie Brasco – the name he used in the 1970s as an FBI undercover agent who got inside the Mafia and lived to talk about it.
Pistone is one of the subjects of a fascinating four-part myth-busting documentary series from the National Geographic Channel, called simply The Mafia. In the series, Pistone recounts his days as Brasco in a voice that’s a hybrid between a law enforcement officer and a wise guy. And in some strange way, that’s what he is. In a job he had expected to last six months, Pistone spent six years masquerading as jewel thief Donnie Brasco, reaching the rank of a trusted ‘associate’ within the Mafia hierarchy.
“I was nearly a made guy,” he explains. “A wise guy and a made guy are individuals that have been officially indoctrinated – have gone through the ceremonies to be in the Family. I was gonna be a made guy in the December, but we terminated the operation at the end of July.”
Before his incarnation as ‘Donnie the Jeweller’, Pistone took “extensive courses on jewels and precious gems and how to break into places,” he says with a laugh. He then spent nine months getting “his face seen, hanging out in different restaurants and bars, just getting people used to my presence being in these specific locations, and finally making contact”. As Donnie Brasco, Pistone spoke, dressed and acted like a New York mobster, participating in unsavoury activities to gain the Mafia’s trust.
In past interviews, he’s said he was instructed to “whack” certain targets, but never carried out the killings, and instead arranged “fake hits” through the FBI and the Witness Protection Program. The operation was slow, but the results spectacular. Pistone largely contributed to putting 120 Mafiosi behind bars.
“Being an Italian and knowing the culture, and knowing the Mafia from my younger years – as far as the neighbourhood and the town that I grew up in – I think that was very advantageous during my undercover activity.”
Pistone, a college graduate who studied history and psychology, is an ex-naval intelligence officer – a long way from one of his current identities as a movie producer. But there’s a sense he can’t quite shake Donnie Brasco – he’s not only written non-fiction accounts of life undercover, but also novels placing the Brasco identity in fictitious situations.
Henry Hill, the ex-Mafioso turned informer and the subject of the film Goodfellas, said what Pistone did took a lot of guts but he “enjoyed it”.
“Not everybody can work undercover,” says Pistone. “You gotta have a lot of nerve. Enjoy it? I enjoyed my job as an FBI agent and working undercover. Look, I was an FBI agent for 27 years and I worked undercover for 20 years, so I was good at what I did. If you’re good at something you stay with it, and you have to enjoy it – ‘cause if you don’t enjoy it, then you’re not gonna give you’re full concentration to it. In a way Henry Hill’s right.”
Johnny Depp has said that Pistone is “incredibly strong” and “strong-willed”. In response to Depp, Pistone says his strength is innate and that “you develop that strength through your childhood … Most good undercover agents have it.”
The Mob doesn’t take kindly to informants, infiltrators or any form of betrayal, and Brasco was very nearly a blood relative of the Family. Since the operation ended, Pistone’s been in the Witness Protection Program and lived with a price on his head – half-a-million dollars to be precise.
Asked how he copes so well with the constant threat of death, he puts it down to “mental toughness, an inner toughness that you have”.
“Let me put it this way: what’s the worst thing that can happen to you? They could kill you,” he laughs. “After that, there’s nothing left.”
Originally published in Foxtel and Austar magazines