FBI story, "Using Intel to Stop the Mob, Part 3" (March 13, 2008)

The third part of an FBI series titled “Using Intel to Stop the Mob,” posted on March 13, 2008 and kept in the FBI’s web archive. The same text appears, undated, on the FBI’s current history page for Pistone. This archived page supplies the date.

It begins: “Dominick ‘Sonny Black’ Napolitano just couldn’t believe it. On July 26, 1981, he and his fellow wise guys learned that Donnie Brasco—who they knew as a small-time jewelry thief and burglar, who they thought was their partner and even their friend, who they were about to officially induct into the Bonnano crime family—was actually FBI Agent Joe Pistone.” (The FBI’s spelling.) “Pistone had fooled them all with a masterful acting job that had begun in 1976 and lasted six long years.”

The page says “the decision to put Pistone into this undercover role was made by our office in New York City,” describes the work as “a longer-term undercover operation—one of the first of its kind,” and says it gave the Bureau a view of the Bonanno family “not only in New York, but in Florida, Michigan, and elsewhere,” and “ultimately led to more than 100 federal convictions.”

This is the FBI’s own account, written 27 years later. Its claims, such as “one of the first” and the count of convictions, are the Bureau’s and are quoted as such. The court record of the operation begins with the 1982 S.D.N.Y. opinion.