All those years I dodged being a made guy in the mob and the joke was on me: I was now a made guy for the FBI.
The following Tuesday, Harry pulled into my mother’s driveway in a Chevy Impala with US government plates. Ah, the Chevy Impala. Reminded me of the secondhand, metallic blue beauty I drove in high school.
Piece of shit car, I laughed, watching from the window and inspecting Harry’s clothes and shoes as he walked to the door—khakis, cheap loafers, rumpled sport coat. Piece of shit clothes. When Harry knocked, I opened the door an inch.
“Hold up your ID,” I ordered. I was going to make this badly dressed asshole work for it. He held his badge up. My next move was classic Giacomaro, meant to take him off guard. I swung the door open wide, threw my arms open, and smiled.
“C’mon in, Harry! Hey Ma, come meet Harry!”
It was priceless; you shoulda seen it. Harry—a stocky, stoiclooking Fed shaking my tiny mother’s bony, overwashed hand. She even managed to blush. How could he be a cocksucker to me now that he’d met my mother? As we drove to the FBI office in West Paterson, I entertained Harry, telling him about my youthful misadventures in the warehouse section as a teen and made him laugh about playing Christmas music in September until I drove my father nuts.
In the witness interrogation room—an empty office with a desk, four metal folding chairs, and no phone—Harry introduced me to some other agents involved in the investigation of Camino, Barnetas, Kapralos . . . and me. They’d been watching us for two years, they said.
“Thank you for coming in,” said one, politely—too politely. “You did the right thing, coming to the good side of the law.” He was obviously playing the “good cop.”
“Look, we know everything you did,” said a second agent, “and we could put you away for twenty years if we wanted.” Bad cop. Got it.
“But we don’t want to put you in jail,” Harry continued. “We want to put Kapralos and Barnetas in jail and especially Camino. We want to keep him there for a long time. But we don’t want that for you. With you, we want to make a deal. Cooperate with us and help us put them away, and we’ll recommend to the judge that you get minimal or no jail time.”
I sneered. “You want me to rat?”
“It’s not ratting,” Harry said. “It’s making an alliance with me, it’s helping me.”
“It’s helping the FBI!”
“No, it’s helping me personally get this case done. You wouldn’t have to testify to the grand jury, just talk to me. No one would know. I want those other guys.”
Truth was, I had no allegiance to those other guys. I found out when I was in South Africa that all three had fucked me out of millions of dollars doing shit behind my back. Putting them away was justice in my mind—they deserved it, they hung themselves. Harry and the others already had enough information to take them down, they explained. I’d just help push them over the edge. In exchange I’d get minimal jail time and negotiate a plea agreement that covered me for all my past crimes.
“What about everyone else, the people I worked with? My friends? You’ve been interrogating them.”
“We’ll leave them alone,” Harry promised.
“We don’t need them now that we caught you,” said one of the others, with a smile. “You’re The Big Fish!”
Well, wasn’t that the truth: hook, line, and sinker.
“You got a deal,” I said.
As soon as I could, I saw Lauren. She came to the house and threw her arms around me, crying. I was home in time for her birthday, and with the money I got selling more diamonds (I’ll get to that), I bought her a new car, her first—a white Nissan Altima with a beige interior.
For the next six months, five days a week, Harry picked me up in the morning and took me to the FBI office in West Paterson for the “debriefing” phase.
Part of my deal was that I’d live with my parents during this time, which I assume was meant to keep me on the straight and narrow, and made it easier for them to keep tabs on me. Living at home again was like living in a twisted 1950s Twilight Zone episode. My fuckhead father had taken over my childhood bedroom and wouldn’t give it up—he liked having his own room and having my mother make his bed every day, taking care of him like a little boy. He liked to give her the coin-drop test every morning. My poor mother.
I set up a bed in the basement with racks of clothes lined up perfectly from my twenty-one suitcases. A week earlier I’d been shopping on Savile Row in London and chewing cigars in front of Kensington Palace, and now this? It gets worse. As an early Christmas present that year, my mother bought me a set of green-and-white Hess Toy Trucks like I was still a little boy, and artfully displayed them on the cocaine table. It was so fucked up.
At Harry’s request, I gave his phone number to my parents in case there was ever an emergency, like, if I got shot coming in or out of the house or something. The Feds weren’t after me anymore, but others were. It was the beginning of the nineties and the decade would not be a good one for the mob. John Gotti was all over the news that autumn and everyone was nervous. In December, he surrendered to federal authorities to serve a life sentence in prison. Over the next several years, the Mafia would lose its power as one by one, the big guys would go down.
But apparently, I was on the good side of the law now!
For five to seven hours a day, Harry and I and another agent sat in that bare interrogation room in West Paterson and I talked. And talked. He wanted to know everything about me, about all my criminal activities from the start. Poor Harry, he had no idea what he was asking. He hauled an electric typewriter onto the table and typed what I told him onto FBI 302 forms.
I told him about stealing money from my father’s wallet on Saturday mornings, and stealing steaks from the A&P and suits from Larkey’s in high school. I described Whitey Bulger’s thick wrists and Hoffa’s fateful prediction for my future. I told him about the evolution and brilliance of Golden Tongue, and how I fucked up my brilliant future forever with one snort of cocaine on a bad night. I describe how I crushed it with a machete in my parents’ basement, two feet from where I’d be sleeping that night.
I told him about putting people’s arms in the triggerfish tank until the water turned bloody, and putting bodies in dumpsters, and how Streaky wanted to kill me at Vesuvius that time. I told him about Nicky Scarfo’s French-cuffed shirts and nose-diving into the Passaic—I even stood up and pulled down my pants to show him the scars on my hip from surgery. I told him about how I fucked over Vito Zitani and the Cabbage Patch dolls and taping up the computer geek in Cincinnati. I told him how everyone thought I was possessed by the devil and about Alberto Lido and the Gigante brothers and hiding the diamonds under my balls, inside my Superman underwear.
And of course, I gave him the information he needed on Barnetas, Kapralos, and Camino. For the pension fund and the trucking companies, I pointed him in the direction of incriminating paper trails and filled in the blanks on information dozens of other people had already given him.
And I made Harry laugh. He typed page after page and he laughed. That was my MO and even the FBI agents couldn’t resist. I’m not a gansta, I’m a pranksta. I made it a point to charm everyone in that building, from the receptionist in the foyer (“Hey, how ya doin’, beeeoootiful?!”) to the FBI guys I passed in the hall as I came and went with Harry.
“Hey, Giacomaro, ain’t you locked up yet? We hear you came over from the Dark Side.”
“Take it easy, I’m one of youse now,” I’d say.
“Nah, you’ll never be one of us. It’s all right, though. Who’d want to be?”
Thirty years of confessions that should have gone to Father Stanley went instead to Harry Mount, my official FBI wrangler, in one six-month mother lode of a confession.
I told Harry almost everything, but not quite. I held a few choice tidbits back. And in the telling, I baited him and set a trap. As I listed my criminal activities, I described my high lifestyle, big money, best drugs, and hot women, all the while keeping an eye on how Harry reacted. I knew what those descriptions could do to a certain kind of man who made an average wage and worked in a drab office every day drinking crappy coffee, but wanting more in life. Like that other agent in the hall said: Who’d wanna be them?
I was showing him The Dream and reeling him in, for later. You’ll see.
In the car on the rides home, I asked Harry about himself. I asked about his family and found out he’d been a history professor and a Marine before joining the FBI. Even though I had ulterior motives, and so did he, I couldn’t help but like this Harry Mount. We were two guys on opposite sides of the law but we clicked. In another time, in another world, we might have been friends.
At the end of the day, Harry dropped me off at my parents’ or at Tina’s. My mother called Tina the morning after I got back to let her know I’d returned, mindful of any taps on the phone.
“Tina?” she whispered, “remember that package? You know, the package? Well it arrived from out of the country last night.”
Tina came right over and just like that, I was seeing her again. We’d go out drinking and partying and get fucked up like old times—something I wasn’t supposed to do while under the auspices of the straitlaced FBI and my parents’ watchful eyes. My behavior was an emergency, my frantic mother decided. So she called up my FBI handler and snitched on me.
“Harry, this is Yolanda Giacomaro, Tommy’s mother. Tommy’s out at a party with Tina and he’s drinking and taking drugs and yelling at me and causing trouble and he doesn’t get home until 4 AM.”
Give her a few drinks and my mother would blab to anyone. The next morning, I got the business from Harry.
“I got a call from your mother,” Harry smirked, when he picked me up. He gave me a speech about boozing and drugging and told me to quit it. Later that day, I made sure my mother would never call him again.
“Ma, are you fucking kidding me?” I yelled, when I got home. “This is an FBI guy. He’s not your friend. What are you thinking? He could put me in jail, you stupid fuck! Next time you call Harry Mount, I’ll twist your fucking neck!”
I sounded just like my father, and I hated myself for it.
Besides partying with me, Tina performed two other crucial functions those first few months I was back. She gave me a job and helped me liquidate the rest of my diamonds and other valuables I had hidden in the house.
Before I moved to Detroit a few years earlier, I’d hidden $100,000 in cash and jewelry in my mother’s basement, plus a dozen Rolex watches, cuff links, and a set of antique pens. I’d wrapped everything in towels and stuck them in the rafters. And I had the diamonds I came back with, too. I left South Africa with about $20 million worth in my Superman underwear, and after liquidating what I could in France and London and depositing the money in banks there, I came home with at least half.
Every Saturday and Sunday, Tina drove me to the diamond district on Canal Street in Manhattan to get rid of them. She double-parked and waited while I took my diamonds and Rolexes to the little booths just off the Holland Tunnel, a stone’s throw from Little Italy and Chinatown. I went back to Frankie Cam’s old connect, the guy who sold me my checkerboard diamond ring ten years earlier, and laid out my diamonds for him. At $8,000 per rock, I usually went back to Tina’s car with about $160,000 cash in my pocket, plus whatever I got for the watches and cuff links.
As for the job Tina gave me, it was the kind of place a guy like me goes undercover in some screwball comedy. Three times a week after debriefing was done, I logged in a few hours office work at Tina’s acting studio for kids to fulfill the “work release” program the Feds had me on as part of my deal. I worked as Tina’s office manager, answering phones and managing the books, surrounded by girls in tutus and boys in pirate outfits playing pretend. But I organized that dingy little office impeccably, even if I did scare the shit outta the mothers in my mob shirts and a cigar dangling from my mouth. It was a little different from my usual line of work.
Harry had bigger plans for me.
I was already considered a “cooperative” federal informant, delivering information on the cases I was involved in. But after a few weeks with me spilling my guts in the interrogation room, Harry sensed a gold mine. He saw I was smart—scary smart, he said, just like Enzo had. The more I told him about the dangerous but genius tales of Tom “Golden Tongue” Giacomaro, the more he realized how in-depth my involvement was in the trucking-and-looting schemes and how far-reaching my hand was in the mob world. He wanted to be the guy to bust everything open, and I was the guy to help him be that guy.
Harry, as I suspected from the start, did not want to stay a $50,000-a-year shmuck slurping bitter coffee from Styrofoam cups. And if there was something I knew about human nature after years of being a salesman—of drugs, of dreams, of trucking companies, and of people’s souls—it was this: people were motivated by two things, greed and fear.
Harry feared being mediocre and he was ambitious. Greedy for more. So it was a double whammy.
What was I to Harry?
I was a golden fucking goose, that’s what.
I had my Alberto Lido–Enzo Camino–Gigante crew in New York and New Jersey, tied to Vincent “The Chin” Gigante. I had my Philly link with the Nicky Scarfo–Tony Palma–Tyrone DeNittis family. I had the Tommy Barnetas crew in Long Island and the Harry Kapralos crew in Brooklyn. I was smack in the middle of a $3 billion trucking operation that was interwoven with three factions of the Mafia.
As he saw it, I could offer him and the FBI limitless insider information over the long run about top organized criminals in the Tristate area and beyond. How the hell, Harry wondered, was I able to move back and forth from one mob family to another, to yet another, as I had done? Bringing someone like me in on a more extended, in-depth basis would be a feather in Harry’s cap.
I had a feeling something was up. He was preparing to make me a new offer in our quid pro quo agreement, just between us. A few months into our talks, as we finished for the day, Harry gave me one of his serious looks from across the table.
“Tom, I want you to continue on as a special confidential informant,” he said, pausing for emphasis—“for the government’s crime syndicate operation.”
He wanted me to feed him information on the mob guys. And if I helped him, he said, not only would he keep me out of jail, but he’d let me “carry on my businesses as usual.” It would be part of the job, he explained, but also (he implied) he’d be looking the other way somewhat.
I sat back in the cold, creaking chair and thought for a minute. There was no way I’d ever really rat on the main mob guys—that I knew for sure. But could I string the FBI along and make them think I was, in exchange for my freedom?
My old Maislin regular, Whitey Bulger, had done something like that. The following year he’d go into hiding after his FBI handler tipped him off that agents were coming to arrest him when the jig was up. A few years after that, we’d read in the Boston Globe that Whitey had been an FBI informant for decades—something he denies to this day. I’m sure he conned his FBI handler, just as I was about to con mine. Guys like us weren’t informants, I once heard Whitey say, we were “opportunists.”
I for sure was an opportunist.
“Deal,” I told Harry.
A few weeks later Harry took me before federal judge Harold A. Ackerman to get me approved as an informant for the covert crime syndicate operation. Judge Ackerman put Streaky away, and he had recently presided over a two-year trial involving twenty members of the Lucchese crime family charged with gambling, loan-sharking, drug dealing, and fraudulent credit card operations. He approved me and also approved funds if I ever needed to go into the witness protection program.
“That’s so very reassuring,” I said to Harry, when he told me.
Also approving me was Michael Chertoff, New Jersey’s US attorney at the time (who would later be appointed by President George W. Bush to head the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and after that, as Secretary of Homeland Security).
As we all stood in the judge’s chambers, the court order that I was now working for the government as a confidential informant, plus my plea agreement, was officially sealed and put away—for ninety-nine years.
After that, strange and wonderful things began happening.
Like . . . oh, remember all that money I ran away with that everyone was screaming about while I was in South Africa? I was under FBI protection now and an important informant. There was no need to bother about such details. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about my surprising turncoat of events, but I had to rub it in my father’s face over dinner that night.
“Dad, looks like you were wrong,” I said, sitting across from him at the same old kitchen table. “Looks like I’ll be here for a while and I won’t be going to jail for the rest of my life after all, seeing as I’m now a special informant working for the FBI.”
My father looked like he was going to choke on his meat loaf.
“So you talked your way out of another jam once again,” he said, with a scowl.
Deep down inside, I think he was impressed. And maybe even a little bit jealous. But there was no way he’d ever admit either.
My special informant training started a few days after my fortieth birthday in February 1993, at the FBI Academy near Quantico, Virginia, population 480.
It was a huge complex hidden away on 385 acres of woodland and monitored like the Pentagon. The complex housed different kinds of schools—CIA school, DEA school, and (added after I got there) Homeland Security school. If you attempt to fly a plane or anything near it, you’d be shot down.
“You’re already dangerous smart,” Harry said, before sending me off for training, “and now we’re going to make you worse.”
I slept in a little dorm room on site and took classes all day. The instructors were FBI agents at the top of their fields, teaching us about martial arts, government law, racketeering law, computer technology, and how to use an F-Bird—a Federal Bureau Investigative Recording Device.
One week a guy came in to teach us how to handle covert instruments; another week it was weapons. I learned how to shoot and discovered I was an unbelievable marksman. Every day, a new guy came in who was an expert at something else. The curriculum was so organized and the teachers so smart, it was like an army for geniuses—and I loved it. I was good at it. I thrived there.
One of my favorite classes was how to escape potential deadly encounters. First tip: never get into a car if a guy is sitting in the driver’s seat and another guy is in the back seat.
“It’s a setup,” the teacher said. “Remember in The Godfather when Carlo gets in the car and Clemenza’s in the back and he garrotes him around the neck with a wire cord and Carlo kicks at the front windshield until he’s dead? Like that.”
If you’re sitting at a table and someone goes for their gun, but you forgot to hide a knife in your sock, “What do you do?” the teacher asked the room of thirty students. He had set up mock scenarios that mimicked diners, coffee shops, and the inside of cars so we could act everything out.
“Hopefully you thought to order a steak for lunch, because now you have the big steak knife. You grab it and stick it in their eye,” he said, going through the motions. “Their mission is to hurt or kill you, so you have to hurt or kill them first.”
The teacher asked me to come up to the front of the class and sit across from him to help illustrate the lesson.
“Okay, Mr. Giacomaro, I’m going to go for my gun and I want you to . . .”
In one swift move I grabbed a plastic knife off the table, lunged my entire body across it, knocked the teacher off his chair, and pretended to stab him repeatedly in the neck.
“Good, good!” he told the class, red-faced, as he got up off the floor and regained composure. He was impressed.
“As you can see, Mr. Giacomaro stabbed me in the side of my neck to hit the jugular! Very smart! The eye, the neck, the cheek. Don’t go for the body or the chest because you have to go through clothes. Always try to hit the skin. Stick a knife in their hand like when Luca Brasi gets it in the bar in The Godfather.”
Not surprisingly, I was adept at tactical and situational awareness and escape. The instructors taught us how to read the room and move fast, and I excelled at watching people’s eyes to recognize the fraction of a second before they went for their gun. The eyes will always tell you what the person is going to do, where they are going to go. And they’ll blink first, so you have a split second to make your move. All my years trying to guess when my father was about to hit me trained me for this one.
Every day I sat in class, I looked around in amazement. This is fucking fantastic. I don’t believe where the fuck I am. How did I pull this off?
When I left the compound eleven weeks later I was a fully trained government informant. They even gave me my own code name: Aquamarine. They should have just outfitted me in a white cowboy hat and white steed and stamped on my hat: “Good Guy.”
Back at the office in West Paterson, Harry explained the power of my new alias.
“If you ever have a problem,” he said, “you can call the office twenty-four–seven and say, ‘Aquamarine down,’ and we’ll come running to help you.”
In a matter of months, I’d gone from being hunted by the FBI to being their newest ace in the hole, their tactical maneuver guy on the street against the bad guys.
“You were a weapon before,” said Harry, as he poured us a cup of that shitty coffee, “but now the difference is you’re our weapon.”
I was a hunk of meat that was stamped “USDA approved.” My ass now had “Department of Justice” tattooed on it, and that made me laugh.
All those years I dodged being a made guy in the mob and the joke was on me: I was now a made guy for the FBI. It wasn’t so different.
“So Harry,” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant, “just out of curiosity, how long am I going to be your weapon?”
Harry gave me his serious face.
“Forever.”