__"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."

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."
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