1st Edition
Covert Operations Unveiling Organized Crime Using Operation Donnie Brasco to Understand the Complex Trauma of Deep Cover
New York Police Department "cop doc" Dr. Dan Rudofossi delves into what it meant to live as a deep-cover operative through narratives with Joe Pistone, the FBI agent who spent six years living as Donnie Brasco as a member of the Bonanno crime family. When Operation Donnie Brasco abruptly closed, it was the longest and most successful infiltration of a Mafia family. Dr. Rudofossi underscores Pistone’s genius to survive daily challenges of infiltration by using innovations in the ecological niches of Mafia violence. Donnie Brasco’s "mental toughness," resilience, and ingenuity are understood through Rudofossi’s signature Eco-Ethological Existential Analysis. Mapping out why and how trauma shaped functional dissociation as unconscious adaptation, the author’s experience as a police psychologist—that is, a "cop doc"—helps decode the bigger picture of conflict, resolution, and compromise in the disparate worlds of policing and organized crime. This unique look at the costs and successes of tracking, infiltrating, arresting, and convicting those involved in organized crime is a groundbreaking read for law enforcement personnel, criminal justice, homeland security, law students, police psychologists, as well as anyone fascinated by the world of organized crime.
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Special Agent, F.B.I. Ret. Joseph Dominick Pistone
Preface by 1St Grade, Detective, NYPD, Tommy Dades
Introduction
Chapter 1: Toward Understanding Process, Ingenuity and Stealth-Under Deep Cover.
Chapter 2: Integrity and Autonomy – Basics of Becoming Donnie Brasco
Chapter 3: Patronizing --Police, Mafia, and Family: Eco-Ethological Triangulation
Chapter 4: Boundaries in Mafia Culture: Totem and Taboos
Chapter 5: Active Analysis and Adaptive Functional Dissociation: Intuitive Ingenuity.
Chapter 6: Dialogue, Insight and Discovery – A Canopy of Shadows and Hues
Chapter 7: Disenfranchised Losses & Complex PTSD: Eco-Ethological Existential Analysis
Epilogue
Biography
Dr. Daniel M. Rudofossi, as licensed psychologist and police sergeant (NYPD Ret.), is an active police surgeon for Amtrak Police—FOP NY. Dr. Rudofossi’s guides range from assessing and treating complex PTSD to terrorism’s impact, to working with mentally ill persons on the street. Dr. Rudofossi’s extensive experience as a professor and clinician segues into his professional forums on police and public safety complex PTSD, grief, and dissociative disorders, as his integrative therapeutic approach—the Eco-Ethological Existential Analytic Method—is gaining acceptance by universities, police departments, and clinicians. He is the only cop doc to open the vista he forged with FBI Special Agent Joe D. Pistone, which you have in your hands.
"July 27,1981 – the FBI ended its six-year undercover operation against the American Mafia. The primary Undercover Agent was me, Special Agent Joseph D. Pistone. Seventeen trials in Federal Courts throughout the United States of America followed, with the results of the investigation: the beginning of the downfall of the American Mafia.
"For six years of my life, I spent each year as an Undercover Special Agent of Hoover’s Federal Bureau of investigation. To the Mafia I was Donnie Brasco: to my peers, FBI Special Agent Pistone. After many hours and interviews speaking with Doctor Dan Rudofossi, I must say that he captured my thoughts, feelings and ‘mind-set’ perfectly. I can relate to Dr. Rudofossi as a Cop and Cop Doc: For me, our work on exploring my experience and mind-set through existential analysis is key to how and why I adapted my mental toughness and resilience using an Eco-Ethological Existential Analysis. My deepest appreciation for all you do to help our Brothers and Sisters in Blue as our True Blue Cop Doc Dan Rudofossi!"
Special Agent Joseph D Pistone FBI"Covert Operations Unveiling Organized Crime: Using Operation Donnie Brasco to Understand the Complex Trauma of Deep Cover is an eye opener. The thing for me, as a first-grade detective, is it's not during the rush of the ring side fight, but it's when the boxing stops that all hell is let loose. It is in the prison of our `mind-set' that gets many of us deep covers under and down for the count. Dr. Rudofossi has educated us to `addiction to trauma' when the ceiling falls in on you and crushes your soul. That `quantum psychic moment of trauma', as he calls it, is set in the ecological niche where the motivation of survival rides high in the saddle. Working on understanding this complexity, for me, is brought to life in the chapters that follow as Special Agent Pistone and Cop Dr. Rudofossi chart out their own Ecological-Ethological Existential Analysis. Unfreezing being stuck as the ability to help us who are traumatized with a difference made in some victim, witness, survivor and even as he boldly shares, some unique Wiseguy's life - redemption is possible."
Former Boxer and AM/Pro Boxing Coach Ret. NYPD First Grade Detective Tommy Dades. Author of bestselling ‘Friends of the Family: The inside story of the Mafia Cops Case’.
