5 Undercover Cops Who Didn’t End Up Sleeping With the Fishes

5 Joseph Pistone

The first entry is someone you probably already know, though by another name: Donnie Brasco. Joseph Pistone was the real policeman behind the movie, and the inspiration for the film Donnie Brasco. Donnie Brasco was also the actual name he used as an alias while infiltrating the New York Mafia. He would spend six years undercover, working his way up the ranks masquerading as jewel thief Brasco. When he met Lefty Ruggiero, a bona fide made man in the Bonanno crime family, he found himself where he needed to be. 

Though he had a series of close calls, including one unrelated to police work altogether where he was accused of holding back money from the heads of the mob, he got heaps of information on his bosses. He even convinced Ruggiero to “buy” a building owned by the FBI which had been filled with monitoring and recording devices, giving them an incredible amount of evidence. In 1981, Pistone was pulled, and the information he’d gathered led to the arrest and conviction of over a hundred high-ranking mafia members.

4 Jack Garcia

Though he never got an Oscar-nominated screenplay out of it, undercover agent Joaquin “Jack” Garcia does share a unique honor with Joseph Pistone. They’re the only two undercover agents to ever make it deep enough in the mob to be offered “made man” status. He also made his career off of dozens of successful operations, more than one signature bust. Often under the alias “Jack Falcone,” he went undercover in a staggering 45 long-term operations. Most notable among these was his infiltration of the Gambino crime family. In a mere 28 months, he got enough information to put not only the boss and underboss of the Gambino family in jail, but also 30 Gambino members and associates. He credits some of his success to his attention to detail, including, and I promise this isn’t a joke: the correct pronunciation of Italian foods like manicotti.

3 Michael Malone

Michael Malone wasn't an agent of the NYPD, the FBI, the CIA or any of the institutions you might expect. Michael Malone was instead, an investigator for the IRS. If you’re thinking that sounds like a safer gig, you should know exactly who he's responsible for taking down: Al Capone. When your job is to arrest mafia members, putting the single man most closely associated with the word “mafia” is a pretty good feather in the cap. 

In case you had any doubts about Malone’s absolutely leaden testicles, he stayed undercover in Capone’s business even after he’d been charged with tax evasion. Being undercover is scary. Being undercover when everyone is looking for the guy who just got them charged by the government? An all-time hold your water moment. He reportedly even got a begrudging admittance of his undercover excellence from Capone himself when they found themselves in an elevator in the courthouse, Capone saying, “You took your chances, and I took mine. I lost.”

2 Dominic Polifrone

Unlike the others on this list, Dominic Polifrone didn’t have to hobnob with scores of mafia members, or gather evidence of widespread crime. Polifrone only had to gain the trust of a single man: Richard Kuklinski. Any stress that might have been relieved by the narrow focus was probably fleeting, given that Kuklinski, also known as “The Iceman,” is one of the most prolific hitmen of all time. 

You could be assured that this wasn’t a man who would have tears in his eyes if intuition told him to pull the trigger. Of course, a gunshot might have been kind, considering Kuklinski’s creativity, including spraying cyanide into his target’s faces with a spray bottle. Another of Kuklinski’s habits, the one that earned him his nickname: He would freeze bodies for months, in order to disguise when they were killed. This was the guy Polifrone needed to spend as much time as humanly possible with for 18 months, and, almost shockingly, he did so successfully. I have to think half his fellow agents had his name in their death pool.

1 Pat Morrison

With four unavoidably grim tales covered, why not follow group picture rules and end with a fun one? Pat Morrison was never an official undercover agent, but she was put undercover to break up a drug operation. The Hollywood-worthy twist is that Morrison was a 44-year-old grandmother of two with no police experience. She posed as a drug dealer and infiltrated a methamphetamine ring, partly to get justice for her daughters, both who had fallen prey to meth addiction. The members of this rign even, at one point, accused her of wearing a wire as a joke, after which I have to assume the pants she was wearing were thrown away forever.