[quote=Alfa Romeo] Good point about Rastelli. Often a boss is someone concerned about being implicated by association. With Rastelli in prison, there were less checks and balances over the people who recklessly let Pistone in. [/quote/]
yes, alfa, I think the FBI would pick the family that they thought would be the easiest to penetrate, there may be a lot we don't know about the bonanno's that the FBI knew that anyone else didn't.
and im quite positive that rastelli in prison, influenced their decision to put pistone in that family. I seriously don't think he would have gone as far as he did with any other family.
I'm not quite sure about that Binnie. In Pistone's book, he starts out by trying to penetrate the Colombo's. I don't think that he was even "aiming" for them so much as that's who he had his first contact with so to speak...just my two cents.
This is correct. While Pistone hooking up with Bonannos was fortuitous, after he makes his initial connections on the UES, he's out in Bensonhurst with Jilly Greca first; had things gone differently, he might well have gone further with Jilly's crew-- and might well have ended up like Jilly too.
Can't front on Pistone's ability to hang with a psychopath like Anthony Mirra but, as his prison record shows, Mirra wasn't the world's most careful gangster either.
Now here's a question: how many people in the FBI knew about both "Donnie Brasco" and their informant Gregory Scarpa? Had Pistone stayed longer with the Columbos, was there enough intelligence and communication to get him the fuck out before something happened?
