Whitey's Payback Read Free Page A

asked myself before I accepted the assignment.
    The Witness Protection Program was, and remains, a highly covert federal program. It was designed to be secretive, a program that you could not trace or expose.
    And so began a pattern for me of taking on certain reporting assignments with considerable fear and trepidation about whether or not that particular undertaking could be accomplished.
    The article about the Witness Protection Program took six months of research and went down many blind and frustrating alleyways before appearing in the April 1991 issue of the magazine. The editors at Playboy were pleased with the result and quickly came back to me with another assignment. They wanted me to write an article that charted the decline and fall of the Mafia in the United States.
    I had little interest in writing about the Mafia. In the early 1990s, I sensed there were many great stories to write about organized crime in America, but the story of the Mafia was old news. Even a story about the decline of the Mafia felt like old news. To me, magazine and newspaper editors were missing out on the most interesting crime phenomenon of our time: the emergence of newer ethnic crime groups that were using gangsterism and organized crime as a process of assimilation much like previous generations of Italians, Irish, and Jews had used crime as a way to carve out their own slice of the American Dream.
    I told the editor at Playboy that this was what I really wanted to write about. And so we came up with a compromise. I would do a series of three articles that would chronicle this transformation that was taking place in the American underworld. Two of the articles would be about the emergence of a new group, and the last article would be about the decline of the Mafia. The series was entitled “The New Mob” and it ran in the magazine over a nine-month period, from October 1991 to September 1992.
    Logistically and as a research assignment, the series was a challenge. It established a method for me that I have tried to continue throughout my career, which is to approach a subject with a wide lens and then zoom in on a particular storyline, to reveal the big picture and then focus on details within the big picture.
    To write each of these articles required absorbing a tremendous amount of information, not just about the criminal activity of the subject I was writing about, but also the cultural and political factors that helped shape a particular criminal phenomenon or gang, both in the United States and the country of origin.
    There was another proclivity that I established with this series that I have tried to replicate whenever possible, that of traveling, when it is called for, to complicated, challenging locales (in this case, Kingston and Hong Kong) on high-intensity information-gathering assignments.
    I am not a gratuitous thrill seeker. I do not bungee-jump or skydive on the weekends. And I do not, per se, take these assignments out of a Hemingwayesque sense of adventure. But I do relish the challenge of going into an environment that is new, a situation that requires street smarts and urban survival skills. I take pride in doing my homework and navigating these environments in a way that minimizes the opportunity for disaster. A successful research trip is one where you penetrate as deeply as possible, get the information you need—maybe even more than you hoped for—and then come home all in one piece, older and wiser and with experiences you remember for the rest of your life.
    I have learned that these trips are often filled with fascinating moments that sometimes never make it into the article I am working on.
    For instance, on my very first research trip for the Playboy series, I found myself in central Kingston, a place I had never been before. If you are not from Kingston, and have never been exposed to extreme Third World poverty, the conditions in the shantytowns and tenement yards are shocking. In 1991, when I was