Donnie, as a wiseguy you can lie, you can cheat, you can steal, you can kill people legitimately. You can do any goddamn thing you want and nobody can say anything about it. Who wouldn’t want to be a wiseguy?
Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero
Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero
In the words of that Polynesian pundit from South Pacific, Bloody Mary, “If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?” Increasingly, high achievers in sports, business and the arts are attributing at least part of their success to their ability to visualize their goal and how to achieve it.
As a soldier in the Bonanno crime family, Ruggiero achieved success in a number of ways, including bookmaking, extortion and loan sharking. Experience had given him the ability to visualize the different challenges that life might send his way, such as a stick up, a screw up or a line up.
Aristotle once said the soul never thinks without a picture. In Mr. Ruggiero’s case, his soul had a picture of a life well spent scamming, cheating and stealing the pot of gold at the end of someone else’s rainbow.
Unfortunately for Lefty, however, his powers of visualization did not include the ability to see that the mook he knew as Donnie Brasco was really FBI agent Joe Pistone working undercover. That Johnny Depp must really be some actor.
Wiseguy Wisdom is a guide to personal growth based on books, movies and government tapes.
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