Donnie Brasco Read Free

before, and how much personal sacrifice was required. I got a big round of applause.
    Next to testifying in my first Mafia trial, this was the best moment in my professional life.

2
     
    THE BEGINNINGS
     

     
    I was working out of the Alexandria, Virginia, office in my second year on the job. We had been chasing a bank-robbery fugitive for about a month, just missing him several times. I and my partner, Jack O‘Rourke, got a tip that he was going to be at a certain apartment in next-door Washington, D.C., for about a half hour. We alerted the D.C. office so they could send a couple cars, and we took off for the place. When we pulled up, we saw this guy coming down the stairs.
    He was a black guy, huge and hard—6’4”, 225. He had pulled off a string of bank jobs and hotel robberies, and had shot a clerk.
    This is the middle of a black neighborhood. The guy spots us and takes off through an alley. I jump out of the car and take off after him, while my partner wheels the car around the block to cut him off. We go over fences and down alleys, knocking over garbage cans and making a racket. I don’t draw my gun because he doesn’t show one. Finally, in another alley, I catch up and tackle him. Then we go at each other with fists. Up and down we go, throwing punches. We roll around smacking each other, busting each other up, while a crowd gathers and just watches. I can’t subdue him. I manage to get my cuffs out of the small of my back, put a hand through one, and finally I hit him a good shot that dazes him. That buys me a couple of seconds to get him in a hammerlock and slap one cuff on him.
    The other cars arrive, and we subdue him.
    We’re walking him to the car and he says to me, “You gotta be a Eye-talian.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah, ‘cause there’s only two types that fight like that, a nigger or a Eye-talian. And I know you ain’t no nigger.”
    It was a sad story. The guy was an ex-Marine with medals for heroism in VietNam. He got discharged and came back and couldn’t get a job. Nobody wanted him as a VietNam vet. He became a heroin addict and a bank robber. About three years after this bust, he got out of prison and went back to the same stuff, and when they were trying to arrest him, he came out shooting, and a buddy of mine had to blow him away with a shotgun.
    I felt bad about that guy. But I wasn’t a psychologist or a social worker. I was an FBI agent.
    And an Italian. My grandparents came from Italy. I was born in Pennsylvania. I grew up there and then in New Jersey. My father worked in a silk mill and at the same time ran a couple of bars. He retired when he was sixty-two. I have a younger brother and sister.
    In high school I played football and basketball, mostly basketball, guard and forward. I was only six feet tall but a leaper, good enough to be second-team AllState. I went to a military school for a year to play more basketball, then went to college on a basketball scholarship. I knew I wasn’t good enough to be a pro. Basketball was just a way for me to go to college. I majored in social studies. I wanted to be a high-school basketball coach. After two years of college I left to get married. I was twenty.
    I stayed out a year working, as I had during off times from school, in construction, driving bulldozers, in a silk mill, tending bar, driving tractor-trailers. My wife was a nurse. After a year out, I went back to school to get my college diploma. But I didn’t resume basketball. My wife was pregnant. I had to work full-time. There wasn’t time for basketball. After our first daughter was born, my wife went back to work as a nurse to help put me through college.
    Nobody in my family had been a cop. But as a kid I had thought about being a cop or an FBI agent. In my senior year of college a buddy was going to take the exam for the local police department. He wanted me to go in with him. I said I wanted to finish my last year of school. He urged me to take the exam, anyway. I scored