Subject file
Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano
Known as Sonny Black
Napolitano was a Bonanno capo who ran a crew out of a Brooklyn social club, took an interest in a man introduced to him as a jewel thief, and was killed for it.
He was competent and he was rising. During the family's internal fighting he came out on the side that won, and by 1981 he held one of the stronger crews in an organisation that had spent fifteen years tearing itself apart.
Proposing Brasco
Napolitano thought highly enough of Donnie Brasco to move him up.
He gave him responsibility, sent him to Florida on the family's business, and put him forward for membership. The requirement attached to that proposal was a killing — the standard condition, and the point at which an undercover agent's position becomes untenable.
An agent can take part in a great deal. He cannot commit a murder, and he cannot be inducted into the organisation he is investigating.
Both were now in front of Pistone at once, and that is why the Bureau ended the operation in July 1981 rather than later. There was no version of continuing that did not require one or the other.
August 1981
On 26 July 1981 two FBI agents visited Napolitano and told him what Brasco was.
He kept the appointment he was given three weeks later. On 17 August 1981 he left his jewellery and his keys with a bartender and went to a meeting in Brooklyn, and he did not come back. His body was found on Staten Island a year later, and the hands had been removed.
Napolitano had made the introduction that Ruggiero had made before him, one level higher. He was the man responsible in the family's own terms, and the family applied its own terms.
Where to see him
- Donnie Brasco 1997 · Dramatized
Sources
- Joseph D. Pistone — Donnie Brasco (1987)
- United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York records (1982–1986)
- New York City Police Department records (1982)
- Selwyn Raab — Five Families (2005)
Stories
- Six Years as Donnie Brasco An FBI agent spent six years inside the Bonanno family as a jewel thief. The operation ended because the family tried to make him a member, and the men who had vouched for him paid for it.