You’re used to seeing 14-year NBA veteran Bob Delaney on the court with Shaq or the Mailman. But long before his officiating career ever took off, Delaney spent more than two years living under an assumed identity. In a matter of months, he went from New Jersey State Trooper to corrupt businessman in bed with the Mob.
Bob Delaney quit the police force in 1975. He resigned; turned in his badge. The rumors were he’d gone bad. Beat some people up. Got in trouble. His dad had been a captain on the job. That’s why Internal Affairs never investigated, they said.
For two and a half years Delaney disappeared. He packed his bags in the police barracks where on-duty troopers lived and left one night. Just 24 years old, he turned his back on his buddies, the guys he’d joined the force with and with whom he worked day in and day out. His parents saw him once every two months or so, for an hour or two. Total disassociation. Where did Delaney go? And why did he go there?
“I was an associate for organized crime,” he says. “I was an earner for them.”
Looking at the well-groomed, athletic referee now, it’s tough to imagine him 25 years ago as a doughy criminal with long hair and a Fu-Manchu moustache, but that’s exactly the part Delaney played back then, only he was doing it as an undercover cop.
Into the Shadows
“They told me originally it would be a six-month job,” he says. “But it ended up being two and a half years.” As part of his undercover duty, Delaney had to formally resign from the force; only his superiors knew the real story. Then Delaney began the process of assuming a new identity.
“You go to the Bureau of Vital Statistics,” Delaney explains. “Birth records and death records are not cross indexed. So you go to the death records and find someone with the same first name, same ethnic-sounding last name and same approximate date of birth. Then you go to the birth records and buy a copy of the birth certificate for two dollars.” Using the phony birth certificate, the state police set up Delaney with a driver’s license, bank cards, credit cards, anything to identify him in his new identity.
“I had to leave behind Robert Delaney, police officer,” says Delaney, “and surface again as Robert Covert. Catchy name for an undercover guy, huh?”
Dubbed Project Alpha, the operation was a joint venture between the New Jersey State Police and the FBI. The idea was to gather intelligence on how organized crime infiltrates legitimate businesses. Delaney’s assignment was among the first undercover operations in the country to delve into that. “We wanted to see how that infiltration takes place from day one,” says Delaney. “How do they romance you? How do you become part of this whole criminal organization? So we started a small trucking company.”
The company, Mid-Atlantic Air Sea Transport, had only one truck and one van — not enough cash flow to draw any criminal interest. After six months, they upgraded. The result was Alamo Trucking in Jersey City, housed in a three-story office building laced with hidden cameras.
Additional help came in the form of Pat Kelly, a consigliere (counselor) in the DiNorscio crime family in New Jersey, a branch of the larger Bruno family in Philadelphia. “The DiNorscio’s were away in prison so Pat was running the family business on the street,” says Delaney. “He got jacked up by the FBI and they told him he can either go away for a long time or he can come work for our side. So he becomes an informant; suddenly we had credibility.”
Delaney’s story was that his parents were killed in an auto accident and he scored big on the settlement. That’s how he got into the trucking business. With Kelly on their side introducing them to criminal contacts and navigating them through the puts and takes of the trucking business, Alamo soon became a large company with 45 trucks — but more critically, it became tied to the Mob.
“Pat gets us a contact with the Bruno crime family and our story is that I’m with him,” says Delaney. “But New York and New Jersey were controlled by the Genovese crime family, so if we’re going to be in their yard, we have to pay a tax.”
Eventually, Mob payoffs, kickbacks and personal favors ate up 25 percent of Alamo’s profits.
Head Games
The good guys were gathering the needed intelligence and Project Alpha was succeeding, but the job was taking its toll on Delaney.
“I was the Irish Catholic Democrat kid who grew up in a household where you never cursed in front of women,” he says. “You knew what was right and wrong. But after about a year and a half of living in the street, my moral outlook started to change. I would tell my sergeant, ‘Hey, he’s not a bad guy; he’s only doing stolen goods.’ To me, that guy stealing stuff isn’t a bad guy anymore because I was hanging around people who were breaking legs. Your whole system starts to change. Your language changes. It became like, ‘Hey, pass the f_ _ _ _ _ _ peas.’ And it was normal. I had to talk hard, shock you, be aggressive — show everyone I was a tough guy.
“You can’t think like a cop. You have to think like a Mob guy. All that’s on the street is about making money — whether it’s dealing guns, dealing dope, whatever. It’s bullsh_ _ that organized crime is so concerned about tradition and kids and family and all that. It’s the dope that makes the money. It’s comical the myths that we put around organized crime. We make movies about it. We write stories about it. The truth is they’re bums, they’re criminals, they’re bad people.”
Delaney’s act was a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day performance. He carried around wads of cash to pick up tabs at the various Italian restaurants and clubs he and his new “friends” frequented, places like Angelina’s, the Grotto and Santa Lucia Villa. He wore three-piece suits and drove around in a Lincoln Continental. He’d go to meetings, shake hands, kiss cheeks, but then later he’d have to pull over and throw up or race to a gas station because of diarrhea. He put on 45 pounds. “Nervous eating, inactivity, it was all part of it,” says Delaney. “You don’t exercise. They don’t have Mob time workouts.”
In 1977, Delaney’s superiors pulled the plug on Project Alpha. They had gathered a massive amount of information but they recognized that Delaney’s mental health was suffering; he was going through an identity crisis.
“They knew they had a problem with me when I went to Florida with two organized crime figures without telling anyone,” Delaney recalls. “I felt comfortable with those guys. They’re not going to hurt me — exactly what Bobby Covert would think. It’s very hard for me to understand how I did some of the things that I did. I just became so immersed in my role as Bobby Covert that it became reality to me. What became fantasy was Bob Delaney, as strange as that sounds. I was concerned about how much the trucking company was making. I wanted to know what trucks were rolling, where we were making money.”
That summer, arrests were made. The FBI coordinated the effort in different states, but raids in New Jersey resulted in 29 arrests stemming from Project Alpha.
“I remember standing there with my hands behind my back,” Delaney recalls. “And this guy Ronnie, a guy I hung around with who was being arrested, says to me, ‘Bobby, what did they pinch you for?’ And an officer says, ‘He’s with us.’ I suddenly realized he thought I was handcuffed. I dropped my hands and the look that went between Ronnie and me … I can’t describe it. It wasn’t anger. It was more a sense of disappointment, a sense of hurt and a lot of emotion. He just looked at me and said, ‘Bobby, how could you do this to me? I’m your friend.’
“You want to talk about feeling like the lowest form of man? You’ve been taught your whole life you don’t tell on your friends. Now what you’re asking me to do is ingratiate myself, become part of somebody’s life, know their wives, know their kids, know everything about them. I felt like the biggest bum in the world. I’m charged with the responsibility of arresting people who commit crimes. Very basic. In uniform it’s very simple. You’re a bad guy; I’m the good guy. It’s identifiable. Undercover they ask you to become somebody you’re not, to go behind the lines. They ask you to become friends with somebody, and then they ask you to break that bond by telling on your friends. It takes a toll on you.”
That wasn’t the only toll it took. Delaney’s two and half years as Bobby Covert are still with him today. “It changes you as a person. You go from this happy-go-lucky 25-year-old to being thrown into a subculture where the reality is people get bullets in their heads.”
After Delaney surfaced, that reality hit home for him like a punch in the face when his superiors informed him there was a contract out on his life. “They came up with information that there was a hit on me,” Delaney recalls with a rueful smile. “That makes for a lovely day when they pull you in the office and they say that.” For a three-week period, Delaney had round-the-clock police supervision while the force investigated the threat. Nothing ever came of it, but Delaney still never stops looking over his shoulder.
“You’re always leery,” he says. “I won’t go into the security end of it, but even today when I go to New York and New Jersey, the New Jersey State Police aren’t far from me. I mean, there are guys from back then who are still around.”
Back to Life, Back to Reality
“When you go undercover, even your fellow police officers, the guys that you came up with, nobody knows about it,” says Delaney. “The story was that I was bounced out of the state troopers. It was like a resurrection when I came out from being undercover.”
Resurrected but not revitalized, Delaney was still dealing with the demons of the past two and a half years. “When I came back out and I gained that weight, I decided I had do something to get back into my life,” he says. “Not only work out, I had to start refereeing again, get back to something that gives me time away from law enforcement, gives me something that diverts me from this negative world that I’m part of.”
Delaney started officiating intramural basketball while in college and was working JV high school games before he went undercover. “I was living in a world where people kill each other, bad stuff, and to walk back into a high school gym and see people cheerleading and see families, it was very refreshing to me,” he says. “That’s what you want to see in life. Cops see the negative. It’s nice to go back and see the positive things, and then it reinforces why you’re doing your job. The reason I’m doing my job is to make sure these people are OK. And to be out on that floor again and doing that was fun.”
In 1981, Delaney was called to testify before the U.S. Congress at Senator Sam Nunn’s investigative subcommittee on waterfront corruption. He was 29 years old. One of the members on that committee was FBI agent Lou Freeh, who had worked with Delaney on Project Alpha and who is now the director of the FBI. Freeh was working on another undercover case involving FBI agent Joe Pistone, who spent six years undercover and whose story was told in the 1996 film Donnie Brasco starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. Freeh suggested Delaney and Pistone get together.
“Joe surfaced in ’83,” says Delaney. “We’re from the same hometown (Patterson, N.J.) and I knew of him and I knew his background. Lou put me together with him immediately when he came out because Lou knew what I had gone through. We had such a mutual experience that we had to share with each other what we were going through and what our feelings were, and I could help him and he could help me.”
The friendship helped both men, but Delaney was still left with a void. After spending the better part of three years testifying in various organized crime cases, Delaney was looking for another challenge. He found it as a hostage negotiator.
“Thank God that assignment came around,” says Delaney. “Because I didn’t know what I could have done in law enforcement to top what I’d done. I had to do something completely different.”
From Law Enforcement to the NBA
Delaney spent his last five years on the force heading up a hostage negotiation team. Meanwhile, his officiating career was heating up. He was working high school varsity and some semi-pro basketball when he caught the eye of NBA referee Dick Bavetta, who was a supervisor in an East Coast league at the time. “Dick was instrumental in mentoring me and getting me into professional ball,” says Delaney. “He contacted (then-NBA supervisor of officials) Darell Garretson about me and Darell came to watch me work.”
Garretson got Delaney into the Continental Basketball Association in 1983. “I made up my mind when I went in that I was going in to try to get to the NBA,” says Delaney. “I figured if an NBA job was offered, I’d vest my pension with the state police and take it.”
Delaney got his shot, working preseason NBA games in 1986-87. In 1987, he was hired to the NBA staff full-time.
His law enforcement days may be behind him, but Delaney, 49, still teaches undercover operations at the FBI training academy and at the New Jersey State Police Academy.
Two years ago, Delaney, now the father of two girls and living in Sarasota, Fla., returned for the first time in more than 20 years to Alamo Trucking’s old office building in Jersey City. “It seemed like somebody else’s life,” he says reflectively. “The memories are all closed up and it’s a ghost town building now. I guess like anything else it seemed bigger back then. It seemed nicer. It seemed like there was so much more to it than when you’re looking at an empty building. But it didn’t evoke any real emotions. That was just part of my life and not something that I’d ever want to do again.
“Am I glad I did it? In retrospect, I don’t even know if I am. It helped develop who I am today. But had I known all of the emotions that I had to go through to get to this point, I don’t know if I would have done it. But it’s an experience that I’ve had that’s opened a lot of doors for me — to be able to testify before Congress, to be able to be given the opportunity to be street savvy without having to be a criminal. It’s an experience most people don’t get.”
