Big Frankie made nice with the guys, real nice. And he was a good fit with the Genovese crime family, earning their trust by an illegal cigarettes scam, just the way they liked it: lucrative and no one gets hurt.
But by yesterday 73 members of New York's biggest organised crime syndicate and their associates had discovered that there is another side to the trucker who was welcome at their weddings and birthday parties.
Sure, Frankie was a regular at weekly meetings in Patsy's place in Little Italy: Pasquale's Rigoletto ("another stellar dining option . . . whose pasta dishes, particularly the linguine frutti di mare, are local gold standards," according to New York magazine).
There he sat in on planning meetings conducted by those on the outside operating on behalf of the man on the inside: Vincent "the Chin" Gigante, the 73-year-old head of the family who feigned insanity by mumbling his way through Greenwich Village in pyjamas and bathrobe until he was sentenced to 12 years in 1997 for racketeering.
But Frankie (32) had a life outside "the life", as a detective in the New York police department, and his 30 months under cover was central to the charges laid against the mobsters, among them the men known as Pete the Jeweller, Mikey Hands, Baby Carmine and Juan Margherita.
They are accused of crimes ranging from gun trafficking to demanding protection money from delicatessens, which brought in $14 million in the past three years. They also tried, but failed, to steal $6 million in payroll money from the New York Times. "He was very well taken in by the bad guys," said Mr Barry Mawn, the FBI assistant director for New York.
"These charges are the result of another highly successful infiltration of the Genovese family by the organised crime taskforce, this time by an undercover police detective who I commend for having risked his safety on almost a daily basis. We have once again been able to look at the mob from both the inside as well as the outside." Big Frankie was responsible for "perhaps the most significant and successful undercover operation in law enforcement history".
All the time the was posing as the owner of a trucking company and taking part in insurance frauds and fencing stolen jewellery and alcohol, he was recording conversations between the mobsters.
But he got into character so convincingly that he became almost too well known to crime family members on Staten Island, which has New York's highest concentration of Italian Americans. To avoid blowing his cover, the unmarried detective moved from the home he shared there with his parents to another in New Jersey.
Having fallen in with a former police officer who was now associated with the family, he finally got to know Pasquale "Patsy" Parrello, who worked from his restaurant in the Bronx and is one of the capos being held on racketeering charges. Mr Parrello was said to be so security conscious that he wore a device to detect recording equipment. Big Frankie's exploits mirror those of "Donnie Brasco", the FBI agent who masqueraded as a fence for the mob in New York in the 1970s and helped to cripple the Bonannos, another of the five main New York crime families.