The Trump Organization's court-ordered monitor — dubbed a white-collar “Javert” for flagging financial errors — has a new ally with a movie billboard name: Donnie Brasco.
Retired FBI agent Joe Pistone — whose undercover infiltration of the Bonanno mob family inspired the Johnny Depp movie — threw his support Wednesday behind former federal judge Barbara Jones.
“She doesn’t try to bend the facts, or go around the facts,” Pistone told the Daily Beast. “She calls it as it is."
Pistone’s support comes as Jones, appointed by Judge Arthur Engoron to monitor former President Donald Trump’s eponymous company amid a $370 million civil fraud case, faces accusations she twisted the financial facts for her own benefit.
While Trump attorney Clifford Robert compared Jones to the “Les Miserables” inspector whose warped sense of justice sees him persecute the novel’s hero for decades, but Pistone said Wednesday Jones plays it straight.
“She prepped me for all my cases in New York and she is straight, honest, direct,” Pistone said. “She was always straight down the line.”
Jones and Pistone worked together when she was a prosecutor and he was preparing to take his famous undercover case to trial, the former FBI agent told the Daily Beast.
While some prosecutors might have coached him to protect the government officials he worked with during his investigation, Jones told Pistone to stick to the facts, he reportedly said.
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“We were going against the Mob…there was a lot hanging on it.” Pistone told the Daily Beast. “If what I had to say was detrimental to the government, it was okay with her.”
Jones success in the case, securing four convictions against five defendants, also earned her praise and a hefty promotion from another unexpected supporter, the Beast reports: Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani, then a U.S. Attorney, appointed Jones to head the Organized Crime Strike Force, a position he noted at the time was rarely held by a woman.
“She gets everyone’s respect,” Giuliani reportedly said at the time, “because she can do all the things they do.”
