Before he was an FBI agent, Joe Pistone was a wise-guy-in-training in his native Paterson, New Jersey, hanging out in after-hours gambling joints, with Mob ties NOT optional. “I grew up in an all-Italian neighborhood and didn’t know gambling was illegal until someone told me,” Pistone says. “Everyone had a bookie.”
The experience came in handy when, in his mid-20s, he became Donnie Brasco, the iconic undercover fed who spent five years infiltrating some of the nation’s biggest Mafia names. Pistone-as-Brasco posed as a jewel thief as he learned how various rackets were organized and where they operated, an infiltration that covered several states.
