I developed a string of informants who were instrumental in solving a lot of bank robberies and nabbing fugitives. This was the end of the VietNam era, and in Alexandria, like in Jacksonville, I worked a bunch of deserter cases.
I was in Alexandria four years. It was a nice life. We belonged to a country club where my wife was social director.
Along the way I had gone back to school at Quantico for short “in-service” training courses in such things as gambling and undercover work. In those days there was no such thing in the Bureau as long-term undercover assignments. Undercover was a day or two in a “buy-bust” situation. For example, you get information that somebody has some type of stolen property, you negotiate a buy from this thief, and then the thief is arrested.
I also had SWAT training when they first formed the Special Weapons Assault Teams in the early 1970s to deal with hostage situations such as were occurring in skyjackings or with potential terrorist assaults. The teams were formed from specially picked agents who showed superior physical skills. We were trained in the use of various weapons, methods of assault on a building; we rapelled with ropes from buildings, cliffs, helicopters. There was survival training in the wilderness and in the water. We worked on hand-to-hand combat. I loved the camaraderie, the physical challenge.
In 1974, I was transferred to New York City and put on the Truck and Hijack Squad.
We had a good squad, a busy squad. We worked at least six days a week, sometimes two or three days around the clock. But long hours was not unusual in the Bureau. The average agent probably gets to work at six-thirty or seven A.M. and works a twelve-hour day. And we were intercepting six or seven hijacked loads a day.
And then came my break into long-term undercover work—the assignment that led to my work with the Mafia.
The Tampa, Florida, office was working on a ring of thieves that were stealing heavy equipment and luxury cars. They discovered the ring by chance. They had arrested a teenage boy on some unrelated charge. But it turned out that the kid’s father was involved in the theft ring.
The father was desperate to keep the kid from going to jail. He came to the agents and said, “You cut my son a deal, I’ll work for you busting up a big ring that’s stealing heavy equipment and luxury cars all over the southeastern United States.”
With cooperation from the Florida Highway Patrol, the Bureau made the guy an informant to see what he could produce. He proved himself. The ring was directed by a guy out of Baltimore and operated all over the southeast. They stole everything to order: trucks, bulldozers, road graders; Cadillacs, Lincolns, and airplanes.
The Bureau thought that maybe they could introduce an agent to work undercover with the guy in busting the ring. It’s always better to have an agent’s testimony in court. The guy said that the only thing was, the agent would have to know how to drive things like an eighteen-wheeler and a bulldozer. That led the Bureau to me. I was one of the few agents with that kind of experience.
I sat down alone in a room with the guy, whose name was Marshall. We had to get a sense of each other, decide whether we could trust each other enough to risk our lives together. He was massive, maybe 6’1”, 250, with reddish hair, a thick red beard, and huge hands. He wore overalls. He was a truck mechanic who could steal anything. I told him I didn’t know how to steal cars and trucks. “No problem,” he said. “I can teach you that in a minute.” We talked about our attitudes, experiences, families. I felt comfortable with him. He felt comfortable with me. He said that prior to meeting me he had the impression that agents were guys with wing-tip shoes and pin-striped suits who didn’t know anything about the street. But I was different. “You seem like you could handle yourself okay,” he said, “and come off as a thief. I can work you in.”
For this operation I needed a name. I didn’t give it much thought. For some reason a name had stuck in my head from an old movie or book or something: Donald Brasco. That’s who I became. The Bureau furnished me with a driver’s license and credit cards under the name. The plan wasn’t conceived originally as being long-term undercover. But it ended up extending over about six months.
Marshall gave me a rundown. The head of the ring was a guy named Becker. A lot of the thieves who scouted locations and actually hooked the stuff were young guys, nineteen or twenty years old. Heavy equipment was usually stolen from construction sites. Cars were stolen right off the new-car lots. Customers were construction companies and businessmen. In the case of the luxury cars, customers were just people with enough money.
Marshall had to deliver a stolen Ford XLT pickup to a couple of guys in Lakeland, Florida, who were supplying trucks to outfits working the phosphate mines. That was the first thing I would go along on.
We were about to leave when the agents in charge of the case said they wanted to wire me up. They wanted me to wear a Nagra tape recorder. I wasn’t in favor of it because it was so hot and muggy that you couldn’t even wear a windbreaker. I had on a Banlon shirt and Levi’s. “How the hell am I going to conceal a Nagra?” I asked. “We’ll tape it to your back,” they said.
This was my first outing, and I didn’t want to seem like a prima donna, so I agreed to it. They taped the recorder, which is four by six inches, three-quarters of an inch thick, to the small of my back. In the mirror I looked like I had a growth under my shirt.
Marshall said he would introduce me to the other thieves as a guy he met through a guy named Bobby, who had been killed in an automobile accident. He told me enough about Bobby to get by. Since Bobby was dead, nobody could question him.
We drove the pickup to the storage garage where we were to meet the customers. We got out and met the guys. They walked around the truck, looking it over. I had to keep moving so that I was always facing them and nobody got behind me, because I had this hump on my back. The customer, Rice, was talking about how many trucks he can sell to the guys in the phosphate mines, and how much other equipment he can use, and he kept moving around, so I kept moving around to keep my back from his view.
The price we put on this truck was $1,500. In 1975, it was worth probably $4,000. Finally Rice decided that this particular truck didn’t have enough extras to suit him, so we would have to hook him another one.
When I got back to the Holiday Inn where Marshall and I were staying, I called the agents. “That’s the last time I’m wearing a goddamn wire,” I said. “I felt like a hunchback.”
As it turned out, the machine malfunctioned and the tape didn’t come out, anyway.
In a couple of days we were supposed to meet the ringleader, Becker, in Panama City, Florida, out on the panhandle on the Gulf. We stayed at a motel in Lakeland, east of Tampa. Marshall spent the weekend teaching me the business. He taught me how to get into a vehicle using a tool called a “slim jim” that you slide down between the outer door panel and the glass to hook the locking bar. He taught me how to take out a dashboard in five minutes to get at the vehicle identification number. The VIN was stamped in metal and riveted. We would pop the rivets and replace the metal with plastic tape stamped with a new number. He taught me how to “hot-wire” ignitions and how to punch out the ignition barrel on the steering column by using a “slide hammer.” Once the ignition is popped out, you’ve bypassed the ignition lock and can start the engine. You replace the ignition the next day with a part from an auto-parts store. He taught me how to disconnect steering-wheel locks from under the car. It was a real school.
We went to Panama City to meet Becker. He was a rough, ruddy, fast-talking ex-convict and con artist. He bragged about having friends in the mob, in motorcycle gangs, on the docks.
He pumped me on how long I had known the late Bobby and on what I did. I said I hadn’t known Bobby all that long, but we did a few jobs together and so on. I didn’t try to pass myself off as a longtime car thief because I still didn’t know all that much about it. I said I was mainly a burglar and that lately I had spent most of my time in California and Florida.
He bought it because Marshall was there to vouch for me.
I also asserted myself. I told Becker that some of the gang may have more technical knowledge than I do about hooking cars and trucks, but I knew about planning, organization, security. So if I was going to go out with these young punks, I was going to have a say in how the operation proceeded. I said I wasn’t going to be just a $100-a-night car thief; I wanted to be in on the business end of it too.
I had to take a leadership attitude, because I had to keep these guys in check when we went out on jobs. While we were getting evidence I had to steer the thing away from violence. So I told Becker that Marshall and I had to call the shots.
He said okay, he would pass that on to the younger guys.
Becker told me about orders he had lined up, specific models, colors, extras. We were selling everything at a price around one quarter to one half of retail value. For Lincolns and Caddies loaded up with extras and worth maybe $12,000, he was getting $2,500. White Freightliner truck-tractors were bringing $10,000 to $15,000. Pickups were bringing $1,500 to $2,000, dump trucks $4,000.
The payoffs we got went to the FBI. Marshall received a monthly fee as an informant. He couldn’t keep anything from these jobs.
Becker wanted us to hook a White Freightliner. He had spotted one in a lot just outside Panama City and had a customer in Miami willing to pay $15,000 for it. The next day Marshall and I went to case the lot. We parked across the street at a liquor store. We wanted to see where the truck was, whether it was being moved, and to time the operation.
We’re sitting there twenty minutes when a sheriff’s car pulls in and the officer comes over to us. He says the liquor-store owner has become suspicious and wants to know why we’re sitting there.
“Just making up our minds what to buy, Officer,” I say. “Now we know.” We go into the liquor store and buy some beer.
That night, before we went back to hook the tractor, Marshall gave me the rundown on it. I was going to hook it myself, to see if I could do it. From memory he described the wiring and what I had to do. The White tractor was a snub-nosed job, complete with a sleeper compartment and air-conditioning, the cab up over the engine. Everything I had to do could be done from inside the cab.
We went to the lot and cased it for a while to check when the sheriffs patrols went by and how much time there was between them. Marshall stayed outside as the spotter. I went into the lot. It took me five minutes to get in, start the engine, and drive the tractor out.
I drove it the first leg, three hundred miles to Lakeland, where we would sleep a few hours during the day before heading on to Miami. We parked it in the parking lot at our motel. While we were sleeping, our agents went over the Freightliner, getting all the numbers and data from it for records.
The next day we drove the tractor to Miami and met with Becker and the customer. The customer was supposed to resell it to a contractor for road building in Europe. But the customer had changed his mind and didn’t want it.
Becker had to go back to Baltimore. He told us: “You guys stash this thing somewhere around here until I can find another buyer.”
Where were we going to stash a White Freightliner in Miami? I told our guys about it. The guys from the State Highway Patrol said we could stash it at the Department of Transportation yard, outside of Miami. I wasn’t too hot on that, putting our stolen truck in a government yard. But they said it was a big yard with several barns and it would be well hidden.
So that’s where we put it, for the time being.
Most of the car and truck lots had no special security, just lights and a chain across the entrances. Usually we had maybe fifteen minutes or a half hour between police patrols. If everything went smoothly, we could hook a car in five minutes.
When we went out on a job, I was on my own. There was no surveillance by the FBI or the Highway Patrol. On an undercover operation like this you don’t want either the badguys you’re working with or any law-enforcement agency to spot a surveillance. Cops aren’t clued in about what’s going on. The fewer people who know about it, the better.
I carried no FBI identification. I didn’t want to risk getting caught with it. There was no official policy about carrying ID. Some guys carried credentials undercover. My feeling was, carrying ID was just another thing to worry about. You get stopped by cops, you talk your way out of it. Or you take the bust—that’s no big deal. If you got into a jam, I felt that one of the most important things was
not
to tell any law-enforcement officer what was going on. You take the bust and let the people running the operation decide what they want to do. Law-enforcement credentials are part of what you have to leave behind you when you’re working undercover.
Hooking the stuff was easy, but when I went out to do a job, the adrenaline really flowed. Even though this was a sanctioned operation, I was out there by myself, without surveillance or protection. When you’re stealing cars with hardened thieves, ex-cons, guys who may or may not be packing guns, you don’t know what’s going to happen, and a lot of things are going through your mind.
You want to get the evidence for the case. You’re keeping an eye on the subjects to make sure they’re not deviating from the plan and heading for something disastrous. You’re worrying about getting caught.