Joseph D. Pistone

Joseph Dominick Pistone (born September 17, 1939), is an American former FBI agent who worked undercover as Donnie Brasco between September 1976 and July 1981,[nb 1] as part of an infiltration primarily into the Bonanno crime family, and to a lesser extent the Colombo crime family, two of the Five Families of the Mafia in New York City. Pistone was an FBI agent for 17 years, from 1969 until he resigned in 1986. The evidence collected by Pistone led to over 200 indictments and over 100 convictions of Mafia members—and some responsible for his infiltration were also killed by other mobsters. Pistone was a pioneer in long-term undercover work. The FBI's former director, J. Edgar Hoover, who died in 1972, did not want FBI agents to work undercover because of the danger of agents becoming corrupted; Pistone's work later helped convince the FBI that using undercover agents in lieu of relying exclusively on informants was a crucial tool in law enforcement. Pistone detailed his undercover experience in his 1988 book Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, the basis of the 1997 film about his life. Pistone was born in 1939 in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is of Calabrian and Sicilian heritage, and grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, where he attended Eastside High School. He attended Paterson State College (now William Paterson University), obtaining a degree in anthropology in 1965.