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extended undercover operation was new to everybody.
    In February 1976, the FBI and Florida Highway Patrol arrested Becker and the entire ring—thirty people—and recovered a million dollars’ worth of stolen vehicles from Florida, Maryland, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia. They said it was one of the largest, most lucrative theft rings ever busted.
    Trials went on for more than two months. In exchange for his cooperation in busting the ring, and his testimony, Marshall went into the federal Witness Protection Program, on which he and his family were relocated to an undisclosed place and given new identities.
    For my work I got a letter of commendation from Clarence M. Kelley, Director of the FBI, and an award of $250.
    What meant more to me than that was a letter that one of the defense attorneys sent to Director Kelley. The letter said, in part, “Mr. Pistone ... was a most impressive witness and had obviously done an excellent job in his undercover capacity, but the most outstanding elements of his character were his candor, dedication and sincerity.”
    For a defense attorney who lost the case to take the time to write such a letter—that gave me real satisfaction.
    I came back to New York to resume work with the Truck and Hijack Squad. But the success of this operation had changed the course of my career and headed me toward the Mafia.

3
     
    PREPARATIONS
     

     
    The FBI was finally thinking about getting into long-term undercover operations—long—term being, say, six months. Our success in the heavy-equipment operation helped convince people that using an agent this way, instead of just turning an inside guy into an informant, was effective.
    My supervisor in New York, Guy Berada, who has since retired, wanted to get another long-term undercover operation going. He was in charge of the Truck and Hijack Squad, the squad I was assigned to.
    Beginning in the spring of 1976, we had meetings and bull sessions and came up with the idea to infiltrate big-time fences—high-echelon dealers in stolen property who were associated with the Mafia. I was a natural link for the hijack squad. You get a report of a hijacking, you investigate it, find out who pulled the job, where the drop was, and who was fencing the load. Our goal was to go strictly after the upper-echelon fences, those who more often than not dealt with the Mafia, the outfit with the money, the know-how, and the connections to distribute the stuff further. Some of these fences owned restaurants or bars or stores; some were actual Mafia members—wiseguys, themselves.
    It was decided to make it a one-man undercover job. I was picked because I had just come off the other successful operation, because I knew about hijacking, because I was familiar with the street world.
    And not least because I was Italian. That would help me fit in with the types we would be investigating, because if they were not themselves Italians, the people they were dealing with were.
    The idea was: You bust the fences, you wound the Mafia. That was the extent of our aims in the beginning, just to get the fences. Having decided on that, though, you don’t just walk out the door and begin work undercover. It took months of preparation, both for me and for the bureaucracy.
    Eventually we had to sell the idea upstream, to Washington, to the brass at FBI Headquarters. In order to do that we had to have everything calculated—money, time, targets, probabilities for success. Long-term undercover operations were so new to the FBI that there wasn’t even a formal set of guidelines issued for undercover agents and their supervisors to go by until 1980, years later. It was pioneer territory, and you had to sell the plan well.
    Just launching work on the proposal was exciting for me. I was in on the ground floor with the new long-term techniques. And it was targeted toward the mob, which intrigued me. We had new legal tools to use against organized crime.