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and then release them without any explanation. That bust would serve to corroborate Hydell’s information, as well as make the rest of the gang very confused and very nervous.
    The U.S. Attorney’s office will allow registered CIs to participate in certain crimes if it is deemed absolutely necessary to continue an operation. But in this situation there was a chance that an innocent person could get hurt, which would be a public relations disaster, so Hydell was ordered to stay away. Tormey told him, “You know you can’t go, right?”
    He knew. “Don’t worry ’bout it, I got it covered.”
    Five guys planned the heist; four guys went. Probably because it was taking place in Jersey, Matt Tormey’s FBI supervisor would not let the NYPD cover it. Instead the assignment was given to a bureau surveillance unit, which was simply going to film it as evidence. The night of the robbery the unit staked out the bank for more than five hours, then decided the job must have been postponed or canceled. But instead of just packing their cameras and walking away, they notified the Jersey state police. They sent a teletype that included all the information about the robbery, adding the fact that this information had come from an informant. When the crew finally showed up to pull the job, the state police grabbed them. Nobody got hurt.
    The problem was that an inexperienced officer gave a copy of that teletype to the defense attorney representing the crew. It wasn’t done intentionally; it was just a simple, and deadly, mistake. The teletype didn’t identify Frankie by name. It read, “An FBI confidential informant indicated…” But five guys planned the job, and four guys went. Combined with the previous information from the DA’s office, it was obvious that Frankie was working with the Feds.
    Tommy, Matt, and Mike sat down with Frankie in the safehouse and laid it out for him. “We begged him,” Tommy remembers. “We did everything we could to convince him to get out of there. ‘This is really bad,’ Matt told him. But we couldn’t force him off the street. We couldn’t force him to become a witness. There was nothing we could do. Frankie had a mouth; he figured he could talk his way out of it.”
    He couldn’t. One night in April 1998 Frankie went to a strip joint on Staten Island, a place named Scarlett’s, with his best friend, John Mattera. When they walked out of the place four men were sitting in a car waiting for him. The shooter put three bullets into him from just about point-blank range. Frankie Hydell was probably dead before he hit the ground. Tommy learned later that this was an up-the-ladder sanction. People from the social club on Thirteenth Avenue had gone to the bosses in the family and told them they had a piece of paper from the DA’s office that proved Frankie was a rat. Then they exaggerated, claiming they’d caught him with an FBI check, proof that he was working for the government. That was impossible; the bureau doesn’t pay informants by check. But based on that evidence permission had been granted to kill Hydell.
    As Tommy recalls, “We were devastated. You get to know these guys, care about them. It wasn’t just that we lost an informant; this was a person we liked and cared about. And the family had already been through so much with the brother, who had disappeared into the air. This was just too much.” Professionally, if you can’t protect your informants you’re out of the business. And personally, each of them liked Hydell. He had a sort of roguish charm. And once he’d made the decision to cooperate, he’d shown as much dedication to providing information as he had in the past to running scams. If he had continued, been a little luckier, he might have even had a shot at a legitimate future. Stranger things have happened.
    The morning after the shooting Tommy, Matt, Mike Galletta, a deputy inspector, and a lieutenant drove out to meet the Staten Island detectives who’d caught