19

DONNIE BRASCO

Special Agent Keith J. Mularski of the FBI's Cyber Division was
distraught, and it wasn't just because the Steelers were having a medi-
ocre season after the previous February's sensational victory in the
Super Bowl. As a season ticket holder at Heinz Field, the Steelers'
home stadium, Mularski had always acknowledged that football was
not a matter of life and death – it was more important than that. But
for once his problems were even more serious than football.

For months and months he had been working as a cyber Donnie
Brasco, immersing himself in the Web's ever-expanding pool of crim-
inality. True, his life was never in danger the way that Agent Joe Pistone's
had been when he assumed the identity of Brasco in the lairs of New
York's toughest mafia families. But it had taken Mularski a hell of a
lot of work securing his bosses' agreement for the unprecedented
operation to go undercover in cyberspace. It was expensive to mount
and contained the great danger of being denounced as entrapment. So
FBI chiefs were scrutinising his every move for signs of a slip-up.
What had just happened was no slip-up, though. It was a head-on
collision.

The timing was atrocious. He had come a long way without his
cover being blown. He was on the verge of enlisting the help of several
foreign law-enforcement agencies to assist in his long-term strategy of
executing a spectacular series of busts around the world. He had created
and then nurtured a character, chosen a name and back story, and this
figment had become real for many global cyber thieves in a remarkably