Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in Mafia.

• Author: Raab, Selwyn

Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia.

For the American Mafia, these are hard times. Until recently, insight into the Mafia was limited to the scraps that investigators, journalists, and scholars occasionally excavated. Now, mainly through electronic eavesdropping by the FBI and the memoirs of Mafioso turncoats, relatives, and girlfriends, a number of illuminating portraits have emerged. The latest comes not from a Mafia traitor but from an infiltrator, FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone. Through incredible guile and unquestionable courage, Pistone manipulated his way deeper into the outer ring of several Mafia families than any previous law-enforcement agent.

Pistone's observations demystify the myths concocted by novelists and moviemakers about a benevolent, roguish side to the Mafia. As witnessed by Pistone, daily life for the rank-and-file mobster is as dreary as toiling on an assembly line. Most of their time is devoted to endless scheming for a share of someone else's illicit plunder and bickering over advancement.

During his half-century reign, J. Edgar Hoover delighted in infiltrating leftist groups but banned undercover work against the Mafia, allowing its corruptions to flourish. He apparently overrated the mob, viewing it as impregnable, and feared that undercover projects might backfire and tarnish the bureau's reputation for invincibility. In the mid-1970s, after Hoover's death, the FBI and the Justice Department finally launched offensives against the Mafia. The FBI and federal prosecutors discovered that through RICO--the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act--the mob could be wounded if not destroyed. The federal crackdown resulted in the first significant splintering of Omerta, the code of silence. A weaker generation of Mafiosi, faced with long sentences for racketeering or drug trafficking, proved vulnerable to providing information in exchange for a new life under the Witness Protection Program.

Unlike the...