This is the first of three stories as told by career criminals involved in organized crime who turned government witness to avoid certain death.

As a former street soldier for the Gambino crime family, Andrew DiDonato relays his story, as he explains that life as a Mob associate isn’t quite like what you see at the movies or on TV. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Andrew was no stranger to crime as a young boy. Andrew already had a neighborhood reputation at the age of sixteen for smalltime crimes and as someone to be reckoned with, when Nicholas “little Nicky” Corozzo, a capo in the Gambino crime family, approached him. During his life he was involved in auto theft, robberies, extortion, illegal gambling, embezzlement, and check scams. He thought it was an honorable life and that ‘money made the man’. He soon found out that: “This ain’t the Sopranos, where the blood is wiped off at the end of the day, and you go have drinks with your friends.” People cry real tears, and losing his good friend Albert at 18 was the beginning of the realization that “the life” wasn’t all honey and roses.

Organized crime looks down on any of their “family” being associated with drugs. If you get caught with drugs, they can put you away for a long time and they can lose control of you. But collecting money from the dealers was another story. When Andrew was told to bring in his drug dealers, he knew he was marked for death. Arrested after 14 months on the run from his “family”, his crew, and the Feds, Andrew decided to cooperate with the FBI, and testifying at John Gotti Jr.’s trial helped put away many figures in the criminal world. Andrew says: “I was a good, honorable soldier. I answered directly to the boss of the Gambino family. But it wasn’t what I thought it would be… Where’s the honor? Where’s the honor in protecting people who want to put you in the ground? It was blind faith and blind loyalty. The respect goes up the ladder, but not down. ‘The life’ destroys every fuckin’ thing it touches.” Andrew is part of the witness protection program, helping law enforcement understand the workings of other organized criminals, and talking to young people about avoiding gangs and “the life”. SLV brings you deep inside the secret lives of the cosa nostra, as Andrew DiDonato tells his real-life story of Surviving the Mob.

SLV: Is Andrew DiDonato your real name?
DIDONATO: Yes. I did change my name, but for my book and public appearances, I use my real name, not my new name. That’s a private matter.
SLV: So during normal life, you’re somebody else.
DIDONATO: Exactly.
SLV: How do you feel safe, with all this publicity, using your real name?
DIDONATO: I take a lot of precautions in everything that I do. As far as doing these public appearances, if I live in fear, then organized crime still controls me and I refuse to let that happen. I left that “life” for the soul purpose of changing my life and moving on. I do have a respect for the dangers, so I do what’s necessary. I’ve had a reputation for violence throughout my life and I’m no stranger to it, but I do have a responsibility to those around me to keep them safe from collateral damage, so to speak. One day, God forbid, if I were to be confronted with that, then that was in the cards for me and I’ll confront it when the time comes. I don’t try to poke anybody in the eye with what I’m doing. I’m just out there trying to help somebody else who might have been going down this road, who’s maybe in the crossroads of their life. I’m trying to let them see that there could be a positive change. The ending is never happy, because you lose a lot of who you used to be, and you can never get that back, but you can make a positive change.
SLV: What do you think made Nicholas Corozzo originally make contact with you? Had he heard something about you?
DIDONATO: Nicholas Corozzo ran that area while I was a teen growing up. I was friendly with Nicky’s two nephews and a lot of my friends were already answering to Nicky at that time. He started to hear my name from my friends and his nephews in conversations. I was invited to the Social Club one day and I’ll never forget it. I was about sixteen and Nicky told me: “I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about you and I know you’re really close to my nephews, and the guys around here really like you. I’ve been hearing what you’ve been doing and I want you to know that from now on, if you have any problems, or anything you need to get rid of from the crimes you’re committing, you’ve got a place to come now. If anybody in the street gives you a problem with anything you’re doing, you come and see me, and we’ll step forward and take care of it for you. You’ve got a friend here, but I want to remind you of one thing, these guys come and see me every week. This is like school and you don’t want to miss, ‘cause in school you’ll miss lessons, but the lessons in this life could be detrimental. Then if somebody needs you, you’re not being a good friend. So make sure you’re available as much as you can. You’ll see that all your friendships here will bear fruit.” From that moment on, I was involved with the Gambino crime family.
SLV: So he was recruiting you.
DIDONATO: He, in fact, recruited me from the day that I was doing crime. I was a young man. I was a risk-taker. I had a tendency for violence. I had a reputation in the neighborhood as being somebody to be reckoned with. The difference between us growing up and the other guys, was that we knew that to get anywhere in this life, you knew that you had to go far beyond where the other man would go to succeed. And that’s what we did, and that’s what made us strong. If we couldn’t do it with our fists, we’d go get a bat, if that didn’t do it, we’d get a gun and wait in the bushes at night and shoot you. It was always going that extra mile to get the point across to show that you were in control of your surroundings.
SLV: So because you had a propensity for violence, he decided to pick you?
DIDONATO: He knew that I was already doing criminal activity. He knew that I could be trusted. My friends were already in it, so I was just an added incentive, new to the fold, and I was ingratiated with his friendship and that friendship opened many doors for me from other organized crime guys throughout the Gambino crime family in all five boroughs. I met people from the Bronx, from Queens, from Manhattan, New Jersey, and all across the United States. Different friendships turned into more criminal activity, but my loyalty and every business transaction that I committed, had to be approved by Nicky Corozzo.
SLV: Tell me about your love life back in the day…did you boast to girls about what you did?
DIDONATO: We were heroes in the neighborhood.
SLV: Describe what you liked about the mob life. The money, the relationships, the power…?
DIDONATO: To be honest with you, I never set out to be an organized crime member as a kid. My uncle was a capo in the Genovese crime family. Uncle Paddy was the only man my father talked about with respect. My mom and dad were divorced when I was very young and I was hungry for my dad’s attention. I started doing these things, and I saw an outlet to be around my friends and also be respected by my father. I was trying to find that respect from my dad that he had for my uncle, but that took many years, because he had his own problems. I was going down a road that I didn’t realize what it was. I thought it was an honorable road, and I thought I was justified in my actions as a young man. The crime life indoctrinates you in your mind to believe it’s an honorable system and everything is respect. You follow protocol, and you feel like you’ve got the key to the city and everyone else is stupid. At the end of the day, as you go to prison, coming out and seeing how they treat other people, seeing how the life turns on friends of yours, you see that nobody is an exception. Everybody is capable of being a victim, even yourself. The guys you’ve been friendly with for twenty-some odd years, you realize that now those friendships mean nothing. Now you’re loyalty has to be to the Gambino family. No longer is your loyalty to one another, and that’s sad, because they want you to hurt your friend, and you now have no choice, because your loyalty is only to the Gambino family. That’s when you start to see “the life” and what it truly is. It’s debilitating and really horrible.
SLV: Did you feel an adrenaline rush when you committed these crimes?
DIDONATO: I felt I was justified in my actions, even though you know you’re doing wrong. When you’re doing something like violence or heavy duty criminal activity, like robbing, (I was involved in a bank robbery), yes, you do feel a little adrenaline rush. You also feel a sense of fear. Anybody that goes and does these activities and tells you that they don’t have a sense of fear inside them is lying to you. It’s a combination of emotions. It’s an adrenaline rush and fear of the repercussions of what could happen, so you do your job correctly. You don’t want any egg on the face of the “family”. You want to make sure that whatever responsibilities were delegated to you, that you do them appropriately, so at the end of the day, you’re not going to get questioned about what you did. You don’t want to wind up in a terrible scenario for what you did because you didn’t think or did the wrong thing. There’s a lot of peer pressure on you to make sure you do everything accurately.
SLV: You shot a man, point blank in the head, but didn’t kill him. Did you feel the adrenaline rush or were you just scared?
DIDONATO: I wouldn’t call that an adrenaline rush. At that time I was an up-and-coming soldier in the Gambino crime family and I was given a lot of responsibility. I was getting groomed to be formally inducted into the family, and that was my goal. When you do that, everything you do is under the microscope by your superiors. If you can’t take care of problems in your own back yard, it’s deemed as a weakness. So what happened when I was confronted on that street that day, he had pushed me to a point where I couldn’t allow that to happen. There was too much at stake for me. Had I not been involved in organized crime, maybe instead of shooting him the way that I did, I might have used my hands instead. I felt as though I had to deal with it at that severe level, in order to get my point across. I wanted to let anybody know who was watching, that what I’ve earned and what I’m working for is not going to be taken away from me, and there is no weakness on this end.
SLV: So there was a woman at the scene who was coming down the street. Her eyes met yours and that stopped you from shooting him the second time and killing him.
DIDONATO: I just happened to look up and saw her, and I realized at that point that I just wanted to get out of there, in case she started to come towards me and I didn’t know if she’d already reached out to the police or somebody.
SLV: Was it like a self-look in the mirror: “My God, what have I done?”
DIDONATO: Basically, it was just let me get out of here! Those self-looks in the mirror didn’t come until years later, when I realized that person did not deserve what I’d done, and I live with that every day.
SLV: Tell me about the man that came in the bar and shot your friend, Albert. Was he just high on drugs or was that just wanton violence?
DIDONATO: My friend, Albert was 18 years old. He went to a disco that night, and another crewmember had asked that he take this girl home. This girl met another guy who decided he wanted to take her home. Albert said he was obligated and a heated discussion turned into a fistfight. The shooter was a man named Todd. He was from a different crime family, and he always had a propensity for violence. When you incorporate that with drug use, of course, those people aren’t in control of their actions. They’re pretty much loose cannons. This particular guy was that type personality. Todd knew my friend Albert his whole life. He knew Albert would never kill him for no reason like he shot him. He knew that, but he had an axe to grind and he was trying to build a reputation for himself. The guy, who Albert was originally arguing with, was somebody who Todd was shaking down. What I mean by that was Todd, who shot my friend, was quote-unquote taking money from the person that was arguing with Albert. Todd felt that he was supposed to be his protector. When he did so, it was such a senseless act, now my friend had to die at 18 years old, for nothing more than an argument to take a woman home. It’s such a shame I even have to think about it. It was one of the saddest things in my life, without a doubt! That’s “the life”, and the sad part is that you’ve got this small community of people who are in the shadows and in the bleacher seats. They’re sitting there waiting for the reaction to this original act of violence to see if you’re going to step up to your business, or if you’re going to let it go. No matter what you believe, even though you don’t see it with the human eye, these people are all there taking into account what your actions are going to be. The streets measure weakness in an instant in any gang or organized crime setting, so we went out diligently every day from that first day after my friend lost his life. Someone else killed Todd a year later. I applauded that murder! I hate to sound cold-blooded, but here was a guy, hopped up on junk, that killed a neighborhood kid who he’d known for years, for no reason.
SLV: When you came out of the Coxsackie prison in upstate New York, you felt betrayed by your own Gambino family and you became a member of the Lucchese family. Didn’t you think that was extremely dangerous, switching your allegiances?
DIDONATO: I never became a member of the Lucchese crime family. I was always on record as a member of the Gambino crime family and that never changed. It’s like when you have high school friends that go to different colleges. You still remain friends, even though you’re at different schools. I got pulled into the Gambino family and my childhood friend, Robert, got pulled into the Lucchese family. You still have those friendships in play and organized crime families do business with each other constantly to keep the flow of money between the families and keep everybody happy.
SLV: So it’s not like two gangs against each other?
DIDONATO: No, no. It’s not like the Crips and the Bloods. It’s not like that. Every so often, that does happen, when there’s a power struggle between two mob families or over a big chunk of money or dispute, which does happen. But for the most part, most families know each other and deal with disputes on their own—they’re called “sit-downs”. The higher-ups take care of all that political stuff. It’s all about getting money. Remember, even though there are five families in New York, it’s still a very small community of men. Everybody knows each other. Everybody knows what each other is doing, and it’s us against the government.
SLV: What would have happened if you’d joined the Lucchese family?
DIDONATO: That never would have happened, because the bosses of the Lucchese family know you’re on record somewhere and they know they can’t pull you over. That’s not common. That’s not protocol. That might happen in street gangs, but it doesn’t happen in organized crime, unless there’s a formal sit-down about it, where they say listen: “This kid’s around us and you know, we’re doing some things with him and we want to get him straightened out, which means “made” or “getting inducted into the family”. That’s all TV stuff that doesn’t happen for real.
SLV: Your friend Robert, who was a member of the Lucchese family, was also murdered. You believed it was by your own crewmembers. Tell me about this time in your life, and the 14 months you were on the run after violating parole.
DIDONATO: I can honestly tell you it was probably the most stressful part of my life. At that time I had just lost two really close friends of mine to murder. I didn’t know who to trust. I knew I was marked for death just from certain warning signs that were happening within the ranks of my own family. I saw the signs on the wall to let me know that my life was in danger. The Lucchese family was also gunning for me because they held me responsible for my own friend’s (Robert’s) murder. I was called in to see my parole officer; not even thinking it was about Robert. When I got there, I realized someone had fingered me for the murder. I saw an opportunity and I fled. I was now on the run, a fugitive from justice. At that point I couldn’t trust my crew, the police, the FBI, or the Lucchese family. When you’re living on the run from law enforcement, and every day you’ve got to keep moving to stay one step ahead of them, and you still have to put money in your pocket and deal with your Mob friends and you know you can’t trust them at all… I guess you could understand the level of stress that I faced every day. Take your most stressful day and compound it by 1,000 and then compound it by 10,000—that’s what it was like.
SLV: Didn’t you think about leaving the state?
DIDONATO: Well, I did leave the state. I would travel the country, but I’d come back when I needed to earn. I had another faction of friends from the Gambino family that ingratiated me with their friendship and I was able to earn with them a little bit. I’d earn and then leave. If I was supposed to meet you at six at night, I wouldn’t meet you until seven at night. I was paranoid to the point that I didn’t want anybody to have my time down, my comings and goings. Being on the run, I had the luxury of canceling appointments and saying: “I can’t be there right now,” and the guys understood. That was my way of putting a safety buffer between me and them plotting to set me up in any way, shape, or form.
SLV: You were hunted by the Mob and by law enforcement. When they finally arrested you, describe what the FBI said to you, other than that you were going to be killed at that point, that made you decide to turn witness.
DIDONATO: I knew I was in a “kill or be killed” scenario. Although I’d been around a lot of violence in my life, I wasn’t a stranger to it. I knew that if it had to be done, I’d be willing to protect myself in that fashion if it had come to my doorstep; I was willing to pull that trigger. Basically the bottom line was that I knew that my problem wasn’t with the regular street guy, it was with the boss of the Gambino crime family. Once you’re up against the boss of your own family, there’s too many people who are looking to get in good graces with him. The odds are against you, and so you have too many people trying to set you up, only to get themselves up the ladder in the crime family. It’s so sad to see these guys, no matter how long you’ve been friends with them, are willing to give you up for their own personal gain. That’s another eye opener! It breaks your heart, because at that particular time in my life I was so loyal to the family and to the cause of what we were doing, that I would have given my life for these guys at any particular time. If their backs were to the wall, I’d have been there 24/7. Seeing that and knowing that, I was in a no-win situation. Yeah, I could go out in a blaze of glory, and then what? Be a ten-minute conversation in the bar that I was some crazy maniac. It doesn’t take a man to pull a trigger. I knew at that point that I needed to think for my personal self, something that I’d never done before. I had never thought of myself as an individual. I had always thought of myself as part of the “family”. How would it affect my “family”? How would it affect my crew? It was always that mindset. Now it was the first time I took a long, hard look at my life and realized the potential of what I could do. When I spoke to the FBI, when they did lock me up, he put it out there. My arresting officer told me straight out: “If you’re looking to change your life, it’s not going to be an easy road. It’s going to be hard, and all I can tell you is this: When it’s all over, your life will be your own again, and you can’t put a price on that. They’re looking to kill you. You know it and I know it, and I don’t have to give you the scenarios. You know you’re in a no-win situation. Nobody’s going to help you. Nobody’s going to reach out and try to protect you in any way, and you have too much information on the powers-to-be for them to let you live, and you know it.” And, that was the truth. What the powers-to-be did was they used the scenario that they didn’t believe I was kicking in enough money from my criminal activity. In reality, they had seen me as somebody that could hurt them by knowing too much. And I knew too much. I knew about certain crimes that could have put this gentleman (the boss) away forever. There’s an old saying in the streets and that is: “Two guys could keep a secret if one’s dead.” And another one that goes: “It’s always safer to send flowers.” That’s the mindset they had on me and they were just trying to rock me to sleep. I seen the warning signs and I seen things that were not the norm in organized crime activities, and I realized they were setting me up for murder. When I did get arrested, I saw it as my opportunity, but it was a really hard decision. You’ve got to remember, that I was indoctrinated as a very young child, to hate the person that I was going to become (a government witness). That was against protocol! When I realized that there was no more honor, what was I standing up for? Who was I protecting at this point? I’d already lost so many years of my life through incarceration and being on the run. I lost the first six years of my son’s life! Now I’m facing who knows how many more years. In my mind it gave me an opportunity to be a father to my son, be that son to my mother, so she wouldn’t have to have any more sleepless nights, and be there for my family. I grew up with the mindset that money cured everything. It’s not! Spending time with your family is what makes you a man! This was my opportunity. Ironically, I didn’t get any of that with my decision, because I still had to leave my family behind. Every day now in my life, I try to get a little bit back of who I was, and this will go on forever. This will go on because I lost so much of my past that each day I try to put a little piece of the puzzle back in place. People don’t realize that although I’m a government witness, although I’m alive, and I know I’m lucky to be alive, I should have been dead ten times over, but it wasn’t meant to be. Sometimes there’s a lot of sadness because of friends who died at an early age, and I do realize that could have been me. Now that I was given this chance, I try to make the best of it, because I know I was given this chance for a reason and I’m not going to let fate down. I’m going to do something positive with my life!
SLV: So you were really ready to hear what the FBI was going to say?
DIDONATO: A lot of times you talk to these FBI types and you can tell its just protocol, but I knew this gentleman was being sincere with me. I knew from his words, and that he wasn’t sugarcoating it. He let me know it was going to be a hard road to change my life. He was right. It was a long, hard road! It was a lonely road, I can tell you that. People need to realize that just because I cooperated with the government, doesn’t mean you don’t have to go to jail. I still had to do jail time. You don’t just get to walk away scot-free because you decided to cooperate with the government. Everybody thinks you just get a free ride. It doesn’t happen that way. When you finish your time, then you go into the witness program, and they move you out and about. You do your time and you pay for your crime. It’s up to the judge how much time you get, but at the end of the day, it’s still not just a clean slate because you brought them particular people. That’s where people get confused.
SLV: In the movie Goodfellows, it showed that Henry Hill was paying his debt to society by testifying, and then he went into the witness program.
DIDONATO: I paid a debt to society, and I helped the government put away many, many people. I helped the government put away the boss of the Gambino crime family, but I still had to pay for my particular crimes and my part in it. So I had to do a number of years in prison still, and then I got released into the second phase of the witness protection program, where they take you and move you and your family.
SLV: When you refer to the Gambino family boss, is that Nick Corozzo?
DIDONATO: In 1996 he was slated to take over as the boss. When he officially became the boss, the FBI came in and they arrested him within a week of taking over. He got an eight-year sentence. He came home in 2004. Through his attorneys, they had always denied anything to do with drugs, anything to do with the murdering of my friend. They were always trying to paint me as a liar, but the bottom line is that when the indictments came down in 2008, he was featured on America’s Most Wanted and then he went on the run. At this particular time, he was slated to be the boss again. A few months later, he turned himself in, and then he pleaded guilty to the double homicide of my two friends. It gave me a sigh of relief, and it gave me the credibility, ‘cause he took a plea of guilt to my information along with other information from other witnesses. Now, instead of calling me a liar, he showed himself as the liar that he was for all those years. It was a good experience because my friends could rest in peace now, and I was able to help bring this guy to justice and I didn’t have to worry about what he was planning for me as well. Now he has to pay for his actions. Like anything else, they took their best shot in marking me for the death and that’s how I beat organized crime…I beat them with the truth.
SLV: Truth is a powerful tool!
DIDONATO: The truth was the easiest job in the world. All I had to do was get up on the stand, or in his case, I didn’t have to, because he pleaded guilty to it, and tell the truth. The easiest thing in the world! I don’t know if you know this, but organized crime and the truth can’t live in the same room. Organized crime will just suffer. It’ll suffocate, because the whole mindset is a lie, everything is a lie. From the time you wake up in the morning, ‘til the time you go to sleep, all you do is plot, scheme and lie to everybody outside that Social Club—‘cause that’s what you have to do. It’s all about getting money. Everybody outside the doors of that Social Club is a potential victim.
SLV: Can you visit your family? Would they be in danger if you did?
DIDONATO: My wife and I were already separated when I was arrested. She chose to stay in the neighborhood because she was friends with other guys and their wives and she didn’t want me to turn state’s witness. I hope my son will pick up the book and learn about me. He only knows what people tell him from the neighborhood.
SLV: What would you like your son, or anyone, to take away, after reading your book or watching your video, Surviving the Mob?
DIDONATO: I want people to know that there is no happy ending in being part of organized crime. “The life” destroys every fuckin’ thing it touches. I survived it, but I can never get those years in prison back. I can never get back the years of not being with my son, my family, and my mother. People say money makes a man, but being there with your son and spending time with him is what makes a man. SLV

Issue 59 featuring: Jessie Andrews, Cassia Riley & Lauren WK