Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero

Ruggiero spent twenty-six years as a soldier in the Bonanno family and never rose out of it. What he is remembered for is vouching for a jewel thief called Donnie Brasco, who was an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He was a Manhattan man, a gambler who lost more than he won, and by the middle of the 1970s he was in the position the record shows a great many soldiers occupying: earning enough to stay useful, never enough to matter.

Vouching

An outsider does not simply appear inside a crew. Somebody has to bring him in and say what he is, and that man carries the consequence if he is wrong.

Ruggiero brought in Brasco. He taught him what to say, corrected his manners, explained what could and could not be done, and complained to him continuously about his own standing. For six years the FBI's window into a New York family was substantially a soldier's running commentary on his own career.

What it cost him

When the Bureau ended the operation in July 1981 and told the family what Brasco had been, the man who had vouched for him was in immediate danger.

Ruggiero was arrested before the family reached him, which is very probably why he lived. He was convicted of racketeering, served roughly eleven years, was released in poor health and died of cancer in 1994.

Dominick Napolitano, the capo above him who had also accepted Brasco, was not arrested first.