Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Nicholas Pileggi

  He was very different from the guys he hung around with. He was a taming influence. He used to be able to get them to do normal things. When we first took the apartment near The Suite, for instance, the furniture store wouldn’t deliver my stuff immediately, so Henry got Jimmy and Tommy and a truck, and they all went to the store in Hempstead on a Saturday and picked up the stuff themselves.

  They were like big, noisy kids. That’s what they reminded me of. Always laughing. Always looking to have fun. Especially Jimmy. I knew him as “Burkey” back then. I never heard anybody call him “Jimmy the Gent.” He was the biggest kid of them all. He loved water fights. At Robert’s Lounge or The Suite he would rig up pails of water, and when someone walked in the door, he’d dump the buckets all over their heads. Robert’s was incredible. It was like a clubhouse for high school kids, except they had a terrazzo floor in part of the basement and a huge barbecue in the backyard. There were cherubs and sconces all over the walls. Tommy had an apartment on the second floor. Paul loved to cook, and everyone was always trying this or trying that and complaining that he put in too much salt or not enough garlic.

  Henry and I went out for a long time, and I felt I had become a part of his life and close to his friends and their families. I understood he had the children. I knew it was hard for him to leave. But I loved being with him so much, it was worth it to me. I went from week to week and month to month, and there was always the thought that maybe this time he would stay and not go back.

  The holidays were the worst. Christmas. New Year’s. They were awful. I was always alone. Waiting for him to get out of his house and meet me for half a date. He was always late, and lots of times he never came. He’d make sneak phone calls, and that just made me madder. A couple of times he’d send me away just before the holidays. He’d book me on a plane to Vegas or the Caribbean and say he’d meet me on Christmas Day or right after he took care of his kids. I’d go with some of the other girls. I’d go with Tommy’s sister, who was also seeing a married guy. When he wouldn’t show up I’d get so mad that I’d stay an extra week and run his bill sky-high.

  But meanwhile I was usually with him and with his friends and we were all very close. After a while everything began to feel almost normal.

  KAREN: I first began to suspect that Henry might have been fooling around just before he was sent to Riker’s Island on an earlier cigarette case. I knew, because I was just pregnant with Ruth, and I felt that something was wrong. I suppose there had already been a million clues, but under the circumstances, who was looking? I had to get hit with it in the face before I wanted to look. During that summer a girlfriend of mine called and said she and her husband were driving past The Suite when they saw us in the doorway next to the restaurant. She said she was going to stop, but her husband said that he thought we were having a real fight, and so they just kept on going. I didn’t say anything to my friend, but I knew I was never in any doorway fighting with my husband. I knew it had to be somebody else.

  And then there were the couple of times when I’d call The Suite and ask for Henry without saying who I was. Once or twice whoever answered the phone said, “I’ll get him, Lin,” or “Hold on, Lin.” Lin? Who’s Lin?

  Every time I brought this up to Henry it would create a fight. He’d get angry and start yelling that I was a witch, and sometimes he’d just walk out and I wouldn’t hear from him for a day or two. It was very frustrating. I would yell and accuse him, and he’d act like he couldn’t hear me and just go about the house packing his bag. He said I was making stuff up and that he had enough headaches without me driving him crazy. But he never denied anything, he just got mad.

  That’s why I made us move back from Island Park to Queens.

  After the Nassau DA raided the pizzeria and arrested Raymond Montemurro in a roundup, I spotted two men in a car taking pictures of me and the kids. That was all the excuse I needed. That night I told Henry about the photographers. I said that Nassau was too hot. He agreed. Within weeks we were living just three miles from The Suite in a three-bedroom apartment with a terrace in Rego Park.

  The Suite was Henry’s office, and I began to drop in there for an hour or so every couple of days. I said I wanted to keep an eye on the books, but I was keeping an eye on everything. There were lots of people hanging around the place all the time. There was one girl, Linda, who worked in the bridal shop nearby, and she’d come in for lunch and stay. She was such a sad sack that I never put two and two together. I never picked her. I remember the first time I saw her was at a Halloween party in a friend’s apartment. I was there with Henry, and she was pretending to be with the host’s brother. Again she was crying her eyes out. She followed me into the bathroom at the party, and I told her if anybody was giving her this much trouble, she should leave him. She was still crying. I was so dumb I gave her a Kleenex.

  But she kept right on mooning around The Suite. Lots of nights when Henry and I were going out, she’d be at the bar crying in her drink. I just thought she was a drunk. Little did I know that she was crying because Henry was going home with me.

  One day the Chinese chef finally straightened me out. I had called the place looking for Henry, and again somebody called me “Lin.” This time I went tearing over there. I must have been hysterical. I had Judy with me, and I was as big as a house with Ruth. And I was mad. I went right to the kitchen and I grabbed the poor chef. He hardly spoke English. I wanted to know who Lin was. He kept saying there wasn’t any Lin. “No Lin, no Lin!” he kept saying. “Linda is Lin! Linda is Lin!”

  I was a wild woman. I got her address from the kitchen, because they used to send food around to her apartment. She never cooked or cleaned. I snatched up the baby and went to her building. She buzzed me in from downstairs, not knowing who I was, but when I got to her apartment and told her we had to talk, she pretended she wasn’t home. She wouldn’t open her door. I rang her bell. She still wouldn’t open. I rang her bell continuously for two hours, and she kept on hiding.

  LINDA: I’ve got a crazy person screaming at the door. She was hysterical. She thought Henry was in my apartment. She kept yelling that she could hear him going out the fire escape. I didn’t even have a fire escape. She was desperate to keep him, and she was driving him crazy.

  She knew something was up. That’s why she started hanging around all the time, but Henry and I still got away. Once, just before she tried to break down my door, Henry took me to Nassau, in the Bahamas. He wanted to sneak Paulie out of the country for a long weekend just before the old guy had to go to jail for a while.

  Henry got Paulie and his wife phony papers, and we had a great time. Paulie was so nervous away from his own world that he wouldn’t leave us for a second. He’s got so much money, but he’s never been anywhere or done anything. Paulie lived through Henry.

  We went to the casino on Paradise Island and Paulie and Henry had a credit line. We caught Billy Daniels at LaConcha and became his guests. We spent the night looking for a hooker for him.

  When we got back, customs decided to go through my luggage and clothes with a full search. Paulie and Henry were on the floor in hysterics.

  I think Karen heard about all this and that’s why she was hanging around and why she decided to make her move. She was losing him. He was taking me and not her away with Paulie. She was desperate, and she could ring my bell until her finger turned blue.

  HENRY: That night I got home late. Everything looked normal. The baby was in bed. I was a little loaded and tired. Karen was doing some stuff around the house. I got in bed and collapsed. I must have been half asleep when I felt this pressure on my arms and shoulders. I was groggy and smashed and I opened my eyes just a bit and saw that Karen was straddling me in the bed. She had a thirty-eight aimed right between my eyes. I always kept a loaded gun in the bedroom closet and I knew it worked. I could see the bullets in the cylinder. She was shaking and panting. She pulled back the hammer on the gun. She had me pinned. I sobered up immediately. She was screaming about Linda a
nd Lin and the restaurant and the chef, and I can feel she’s getting hysterical.

  I started talking. I thought maybe somehow she was in some control of herself. She hadn’t said a word when I got home. She’d kept it all in until now. I thought maybe she was just being slick. So I started talking to her, and after a while I managed to move her hand very gently and got the gun away. Now I was mad. I was so mad I belted her. I didn’t need this bullshit. I had to worry about getting shot by wiseguys; I didn’t have to worry about getting shot by my wife. I told her I’d be back when she calmed down. I packed a bag and moved in with Linda for a couple of weeks. It was the first of a dozen times over the next few years when I moved out, and there were a couple of times when Karen moved out on me.

  KAREN: That first night when I got the gun I was really mad. I felt used. At first I thought, Oh, boy, am I going to scare him! But once I had the gun in my hand my palm began to sweat. I felt so powerful it was frightening. The gun was heavy. I’d never held a gun that heavy before, but once I had it I began to feel that I could use it. I felt that I could have killed him. I put it between his eyes. I called his name softly. Like I was waking him up from a nap. He opened his eyes, slowly. Then I cocked the gun. I pulled back the hammer. I wanted him to know how desperate I had become. But still I couldn’t hurt him. How could I hurt him? I couldn’t even bring myself to leave him.

  The truth was no matter how bad I felt, I was still very, very attracted to him. He could be incredible. He had a side that was so nice you wanted to bottle it. He was sweet, considerate, sincere, soft. He had no sharp edges. He wasn’t like the other guys around him. He was young, and I was just attracted. My sisters used to say I was obsessed with him, because whenever he and I split up for a few days or even a couple of weeks, I never talked about anything else. Also, whenever we got back together after a brief separation, he always swore it was forever. No more Linda! I wanted to believe him. I think he wanted to believe it.

  I suppose if I wrote down the pros and cons of the marriage, lots of people might think I was nuts to stay with him, but I guess we all have our own needs, and they’re not added up in the columns. He and I were always excited by each other, even later, after the kids and all those years together. We turned each other on. Sometimes in the middle of a real brawl we’d look at each other and laugh, and the war was over.

  I would listen to my friends talk about their marriages, and I knew that for all my troubles, I still had a better deal than they did. When I looked at him I knew I had him, because I saw how jealous he got. Once he threatened to burn down some guy’s business just because the guy was making a play for me. I loved to watch him get mad.

  But still, when I first found out what was going on, it was very tough. I was married to him. I had Judy and the baby to worry about. What am I supposed to do? Throw him away? Throw away somebody I was attracted to and who was a very good provider? He wasn’t like most of his friends, who made their wives beg for a five-dollar bill. I always had money. He never counted money with me. If there was anything I wanted, I got it, and it made him happy. Why should I kick him out? Why should I lose him just because he was fooling around? Why should I give him up to someone else? Never! If I was going to kick anybody, it was the person who was trying to take him away from me. Why should she win?

  And besides, the minute I started checking her out with the other wives, I heard that every time he was with her he was drunk. I heard that he was abusive and made her wait in the car all night like a dope while he played cards with the guys. The way I began to see it, she was getting the worst side of him and I was getting the best.

  HENRY: I’d be with Karen and the kids most of the time, but when Karen would start screaming or driving me nuts, I’d go over to Linda’s. I’d be there for a few days, and I’d go back to Karen. This madness went on even when I was in jail. I remember on Riker’s Island, Karen tore into the visitors’ lounge screaming like a gorilla. She was crazy. It turned out one of the rat stool pigeon hacks had showed her Linda’s name on my visitors’ list. Karen made me take Linda’s name off the list or she wouldn’t vouch for my strong family ties and healthy homelife when she was interviewed by the social workers and parole officers about my getting an early release. It meant a couple of months to me on the street, so I told the warden to take Linda’s name off the list.

  KAREN: When he was on Riker’s I visited him as often as possible, and that place was really a pigsty. The guards treated the wives awful. Visitors had to drive to a parking area near the island and then take a prison bus over a guarded bridge to one of the trailers, where they were picked up and taken to the various buildings for their visits. I was so big I could hardly get in and out of the buses, but the other women had to take lots of abuse and a lot of pawing from the guards. It was really disgusting, but what could the women do? They couldn’t yell at the guards, because they’d never get their visits, and they didn’t want to tell their husbands or boyfriends, because that would only make things worse. And all of this for visits that only lasted twenty minutes, and you had to talk over a telephone through a filthy glass partition nobody ever cleaned. Also, you couldn’t visit whenever you wanted. I had to go on Saturdays, then I couldn’t go again until the following Sunday, and then I had to wait until Saturday again.

  I was working with the lawyer to get him out as early as possible. For instance, there was a rule that you got ten days off a month for good behavior. That would have taken one third off his sixty-day term. I went right to the fines-and-release window, and they told me the rule had just been changed to only five days off. I had a fit. I went to our lawyer and got the papers that showed Henry had been committed under the old rules. I wrote letters to the commissioner. I wrote letters to the Board of Corrections. I wrote to everybody. I got our lawyer to write. I fought it and I won. They decided to give Henry twenty days off his term instead of ten.

  But even with the twenty days off, he still couldn’t get out until December 28, and I had made myself the promise that I’d get him home for Christmas. I just had it in my head. That’s one of the things that kept me going. I went back to the window at Riker’s. I said that since the twenty-eighth was a Sunday, and I knew they let people out before the weekend, Henry would normally be released on Friday, the twenty-sixth. They agreed, but they said it still came up one day after Christmas. I remember the guy said, “I can’t get the day from the air.” Then I asked, “What about the two days when he was arrested?” I had learned that they can count arrest time toward incarceration time. Henry hadn’t been under arrest for two days, but the guards just looked at each other. I was making a lot of work. That’s when one of them went to check something and left the visitor’s book right there at the desk. That’s when I saw her name on his list. I was so furious by the time the guard came back with the approval, I couldn’t hear him. I went wild, because here I was knocking myself out trying to get him home for Christmas and he’s got his girlfriend visiting him on my visiting day. I just wanted to kill him. I was so mad when I saw him that all I did was yell at him. I didn’t even tell him that he was getting out early. Let him suffer.

  HENRY: After Karen made me take Linda off the list I had Linda pissed at me. Linda was so mad that the first day I was back on the street she caught up with me at The Suite. We had a real fight. She took off a seven-carat black opal ring I had bought her and threw it at me so hard she split the stone. Then she slapped me right in front of everybody in the joint. I grabbed her by the throat and pushed her right out the door. We’re on the street, and she’s still yelling. She was wearing a white mink stole I had given her. She went to the curb and took off the mink and shoved it right down the sewer. Then I belted her. She quieted down and looked hurt. Now I felt shitty. I felt so bad for what I did that I got a busboy to fish the stole out of the sewer, and I took her home and we made up. After a couple of nights with Linda, Karen called Paulie and Jimmy, and they came by and said it was time for me to go home.

  My life was a consta
nt battle, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave either one. I couldn’t leave Linda and I couldn’t leave Karen. I felt like I needed them both.

  Twelve

  It always struck Henry as grossly unfair that after a lifetime of major crimes and petty punishments his longest stretch—a ten-year sentence in a federal penitentiary—came about because he got into a barroom brawl with a man whose sister was a typist for the FBI. It was as if he had suddenly hit the Superfecta of bad luck. He had been caught in a barroom brawl, and they had literally made a federal case out of it.

  It had started as a lark, a spur-of-the-moment trip to Florida with his pals Jimmy Burke and Casey Rosado, the president of Local 71 of the Waiters and Commissary Workers at Kennedy Airport. Casey wanted company—he was going down to Tampa to see his parents and pick up some gambling money that was owed him. Tommy DeSimone had been scheduled to go, but he had been arrested on a hijacking the night before, and he wasn’t going to get bailed out early enough to make the flight. So Jimmy asked Henry if he wanted to go.

  “Why not? A little vacation. The union had already paid for a first-class round-trip ticket, and the flight would get me away from battling with Karen and Linda for a couple of days. Time out. That’s the way I looked at it. I called Karen from The Suite and told her to pack me a bag. Jimmy and I picked it up on our way to the airport.