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one in the chamber.”
    After learning from Frankie Hydell that Pappa had intended to kill him, Tommy figured he’d better set that one right forever. As a result during Pappa’s trial the judge had Tommy thrown out of the courtroom. Pappa’s defense attorney had caught him mouthing silently, “I know what you did and if you beat the case I’m gonna kill you.” Eventually Pappa was convicted of five murders and received two life sentences plus sixty-five years. He was twenty-one years old and he was never going home again.
    So at their very first meeting Frankie Hydell may have saved Tommy Dades’s life. That made a pretty strong foundation on which to build a relationship. As the months passed Frankie turned out to be a very productive informant. He was involved with a mob crew that was in the marijuana business, bringing in four-hundred-pound crates from Mexico through Arizona. They would put sheets of the laundry freshener Bounce in each crate to blunt the scent so the drug dogs couldn’t detect it. Frankie told them about each shipment. The information Frankie provided resulted in the arrest and conviction of five major players.
    The whole key to working successfully with a confidential informant is maintaining secrecy. Paid informants literally sign contracts under fictitious names; their real names are known only to their law enforcement contact. Tommy and Frankie had a good thing going and both of them knew it. While they only met face-to-face three times, they spoke several times a week. Then one night the situation changed. Frankie was told by the head of his mob crew to go up to the Bronx, supposedly to meet with people who were shipping stolen cars out of the country. It turned out that the real reason for the meeting was to confront him. One of the other members of the gang had gotten word from somewhere that Frankie was cooperating with the Feds. They assumed he was talking about the union guy’s killing, which put them all in jeopardy. Frankie managed to laugh his way out of the situation, but as soon as possible he met with Tommy and Matt. “They think I’m working with you guys,” he said.
    This information, it turned out, had come from someone in the Brooklyn DA’s office. In order to flip Frankie Hydell, to make the convenience store shakedown disappear if he agreed to cooperate, Tommy and Matt needed the DA’s cooperation. Notes were scribbled on sheets of paper; folders had been flying all over the office. Anybody could have known about it. Later, Joe Ponzi, chief of the DA’s investigative force, had conducted an extensive internal operation to try to identify the leak. He’d dumped phones, set up a sting; he tried everything possible. Joe Ponzi was a friend of both Tommy Dades and Mike Vecchione. This leak was an itch he was desperate to scratch, but he was never able to discover its source.
    In fact, where it came from didn’t matter; the damage was done. Hydellwas compromised. Tommy and Matt decided to shut down the operation, telling him, “You got no choice. You’re gonna have to go full boat now. Witness protection, the whole thing.”
    If Hydell realized he was in a real bad jam, he didn’t show it. “Ah, don’t worry about it,” Frankie told them, “I blew ’em off. The whole thing’s bullshit. Everything’s cool.”
    Tommy did worry about it. Several years earlier the mob had found out about another CI he was working with and they had killed him. Just as in this case, there’d been a leak in the system that had never been found. So Dades knew the consequences if Hydell was wrong. He tried again to talk him in, but Frankie continued to refuse, insisting he had the whole problem covered.
    It turned out he was wrong. It wasn’t his fault, but he was wrong. More mistakes got made. The big one occurred after Frankie informed his handlers that the crew was planning a bank robbery in New Jersey. The cops decided to grab the crew during the robbery, confiscate the evidence,