Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Nicholas Pileggi

  My mother seemed to accept Henry’s going to prison very calmly, but she could never figure out why I had to go visit him all the time. She thought I was crazy. She saw how much work was involved in preparing for my trips. She saw me buy all kinds of different foods, soaps, razor blades, shaving creams, cologne, and cigarettes. To her the trips didn’t make sense. But of course she didn’t know that I was helping Henry get stuff into the prison so he could make a few extra dollars.

  I was nervous as hell at the beginning, but Henry explained exactly how I should do it. He said everybody’s wife was bringing in supplies. I started bringing his special olive oil, imported dried sausages and salamis, cigarettes, and pints of brandy and Scotch, but I was soon bringing in small envelopes of pot, hash, cocaine, amphetamines, and Quaaludes. Henry arranged for suppliers to drop the stuff off at the house.

  To get past the prison check-in, I sewed food in sacks and strapped them to my body. The guards would search our bags and make us walk through the metal detectors, looking for knives and guns, but that’s all they did. As long as you didn’t wrap anything in aluminum foil, you could walk in with a grocery store under your coat. I used to wear a big poncho, and I had sandwiches and salami and stuff from my feet to my chin. I used to put pint bottles of brandy and Scotch in a pair of extra-large and extra-wide boots I bought just for getting past the gate. I got a giant-size forty-two-DD bra and a pair of leg girdles to carry the pot and pills. I used to walk into the visiting room as stiff as the Tin Man, but the guards didn’t mind. I’d go straight to the ladies’ room and take all the stuff off me and carry it out to one of the long tables where Henry and the girls would be waiting. We weren’t supposed to bring anything to eat from the outside into the visiting room, but every table had mounds of food that the wives had cooked at home. Once we got the stuff on the table inside, we were safe. The guards wouldn’t bother you. It was like a game. When I saw the setup I realized that I didn’t have to worry too much about getting caught, because, as Henry said, most of the visiting-room guards were already on the payroll. They each got fifty dollars a day on visiting days just to look the other way.

  Still, lots of wives were nervous. One woman was so terrified trying to get stuff inside that she actually shook. I had to make the delivery for her. She stayed outside with the kids and I made the delivery. I tucked her stuff inside my own stuff and walked through. She was practically in tears from fear that I’d get caught. When we got in I looked to see what she’d brought. I couldn’t believe it. A package of ginseng tea, a jar of shaving cream, and some after-shave lotion. For that she was trembling.

  I’d arrive at the prison around eight in the morning. I’d wake the girls at three, pack their dolls, blankets, pillows, and medicine, and then drive along turnpikes for about six hours. I tried to get to Lewisburg early so that after the long drive I’d at least get to spend a full ten-hour day with Henry before heading home. But no matter how early I arrived, dozens of wives and kids were already on line ahead of me. Visiting days were like big family picnics. The wives dressed up the kids and brought food and photo albums to show their husbands. There were also two prisoners who wandered around taking Polaroids—one had been an army spy for the Russians and the other a bank robber—and they got two dollars for the pictures.

  Finally, in December of 1976, after a little more than two years, Henry got assigned to the farm. It was a godsend. It was also easier to smuggle in larger amounts of stuff. Since he worked on the farm from before dawn until late at night, he was pretty free to move around outside the wall with almost no supervision. He used to say he was going out to check the fence, and he’d meet me around the back end of the farm. That’s when I started to load up duffel bags with extra food, whiskey, and dope. One of the other wives, whose husband was in with Henry, would drop me off with the two duffel bags along the narrow dirt road. It had to be pitch black outside, because one of the guards lived nearby and he used to look out his window with binoculars.

  The first time I was dropped off I was really nervous. I was alone in the middle of this dark farm road. I waited in the blackness for about five minutes, but it seemed like hours. I couldn’t see a thing. Then all of a sudden I felt this hand grip my arm. I think I jumped to the stars. It was Henry. He was dressed all in black. He grabbed the duffel bags and handed one of them to another guy. Then he grabbed my hand and we took off into the woods. He had a bottle of wine and a blanket. It was scary. I was very jumpy, but I soon calmed down. I hadn’t made love with him in two and a half years.

  When Henry first got to Lewisburg he was very angry with Karen. She would show up on visiting days with the kids and grouse about money. She harped on the fact that a lot of the guys weren’t paying the money they still owed in bar bills at The Suite. She complained that his friends pleaded poverty and drove around in new cars and meanwhile she had to clip poodles at night. As far as Henry was concerned, Karen just couldn’t understand that when a wiseguy went away he stopped earning. It was a fact. All bets and all debts were off. No matter what it said in the movies, a wiseguy’s friends, former partners, debtors, and ex-victims whined, lied, cheated, and hid rather than pay money owed to a man behind bars, much less to his wife. If you wanted to survive prison you had to learn how to earn money on the inside.

  For two years Henry made between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars a month selling booze and marijuana Karen had smuggled inside. When Henry finally landed his job on the Lewisburg farm, his smuggling operation (which had grown to include a number of guards as well as Karen) expanded greatly. Now he could meet Karen and her duffel bags of whiskey and dope along the farm road about once or twice a month. Not that this meant that Henry suddenly began to accumulate great wealth. Prisoners like Henry do not keep the money they make behind the walls. Almost all of Henry’s profits were simply passed on to Karen and to the guards and prison officials who allowed him to operate. In return for the bribes, Henry was protected from the usual perils encountered behind the wall and was also permitted to maintain his relatively comfortable and unfettered prison life.

  Henry had few complaints about the way he was treated. He was not confined behind the wall, he had the dormitory roommates of his choice, his meals were well above prison fare, he had the unlimited use of the farm manager’s office and telephone, and in the spring and summer he had so little supervision that he could take Karen for picnics in the woods. Once he and Karen both caught poison ivy. Sometimes, when Henry was able to sneak away for a while, they would run off for a few hours to a nearby Holiday Inn. But Henry was still in a maximum-security prison, and it looked as if he was destined to stay there for at least another two and a half years, or until June of 1978, when he would finally become eligible for parole.

  Henry had been on the farm exactly eight months when he first realized he might be able to get out of Lewisburg legitimately. In August of 1977 Henry heard that G. Gordon Liddy, the jailed Watergate conspirator, who was being held about fifteen miles down the road at the minimum-security Allenwood Correctional Facility, had organized a food strike. It was only a rumor at first; Henry learned about it from the drivers who delivered milk from the Lewisburg farm to Allenwood. It seemed that Liddy had managed to get sixty of Allenwood’s white-collar criminals and corrupt politicians to follow his lead. Henry also heard that after a few days of this nonsense the Bureau of Prisons decided to transfer Liddy and his sixty food resisters.

  “As soon as I heard about the possible transfers I started scheming right away. I knew if they were going to move sixty people out of Allenwood, there were going to be sixty empty bunks at Allen-wood. At all costs I wanted one of those bunks. For me the difference between doing time in a place like Lewisburg—where I really didn’t have it too bad—and Allenwood would be like not being in jail at all. I got Karen and told her to start calling up her contacts in the Bureau of Prisons immediately. I told her, ‘Don’t write, call!’ I told her to call Mickey Burke and have Mickey try and get Jimmy, who was then in Atla
nta, into Allenwood too. If we could get into Allenwood, it was the next best thing to being home. It was the country club of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. No walls. No cells. It was supposed to be like a summer camp for naughty grown-ups. There were tennis courts, a gym, jogging tracks, a nine-hole golf course, and, best of all, extremely liberal and enlightened rehabilitation programs.

  “Just as I suspected, about a week after the food strike began, the Bureau of Prisons decided it had had enough of Mr. Liddy and his bullshit. They loaded up six buses with all the guys who didn’t want to eat—G. Gordon Liddy number one—and they sent forty of them over to Lewisburg and twenty of the dumb bastards to Atlanta, where the Muslims and the Aryan Brotherhood were stabbing each other over the doughnuts.

  “Within days the warden’s office began moving guys out of Lewisburg and sending them to Allenwood, but my name wasn’t on the list. When I asked my people in the warden’s office, some of them said I couldn’t get on the list because my folder was labeled ‘Organized Crime.’ Others said it was because I had injured my wrist in a softball game and Allenwood didn’t want to accept injury cases. It was maddening. I felt like I’d set the whole thing up and they were transferring all these people and not me. Karen must have called Washington twenty times. No good.

  “Finally I went to see the secretary to my counselor. She took pity on me. I had always been nice to her, even though she was awful-looking. She used to watch me play tennis. I’d joke around with her. I’d cook things and bring them over. I brought her flowers.

  “Now I was desperate. I was begging. She knew what I wanted, and I think my years of kindnesses paid off. One day, after the warden had gone home, while they were transferring the last batch of bodies to Allenwood, I went to make another pitch at getting transferred. She looked real sad. ‘Please don’t say anything,’ she said, and then she took one poor bastard off the list and put another poor bastard on. Me.

  “I couldn’t believe it. In a couple of days I was in Allenwood. It was a different world. It was like moving into a motel. There were five large dormitories, with about a hundred guys in each, and everyone had his own little private cubicle. The administration building, the dining room, and the visiting rooms were at the foot of the hill, and except for a roll call twice a day—once when we got up for breakfast at seven o’clock and another time about four-thirty in the afternoon—everything was on the honor system. By the time I was there a week I was going downtown to the hospital to check on my injured wrist by myself. No guards. No spying. No nothing.

  “The place was filled with a nice class of people. Guys ran their businesses from the dorms. We had phone rooms next to the television rooms in each dorm, and you’d see guys on the phone all day and night doing deals. We had four stock swindlers whose wives would show up for visits just about every day. Allenwood had unlimited visits, and some of these guys stayed in the visiting rooms from nine in the morning until nine at night. The stockbrokers’ wives used to arrive in limousines with maids who would cook a whole filet of beef right there in the kitchen. On weekends people showed up with their kids and nannies, and there was even a day-care center in the prison where kids could play and rest.

  “There were about forty Jewish guys in the joint when I arrived. They had just gotten the right from the Bureau of Prisons in Washington to have a separate kosher kitchen. I immediately volunteered to work in the kosher kitchen. I wanted to establish right away that I was a religious person so that I could get religious furloughs that would entitle me to seven days at home every three months.

  “I soon figured out how to get home even more often. I got Karen to contact a rabbi we knew, who then wrote letters to the Allenwood authorities asking that I be permitted to leave the facility for three-day religious instruction weekends once a month. Prison officials were always terrified of requests from the clergy. That’s how we got two kitchens in Allenwood and that’s how the black prisoners got their special Muslim diets and Islamic prayer days.

  “Once I got my religious instruction weekends approved, there was a local rabbi who arranged everything. He was slick. He had been working with Allenwood inmates for a couple of years, and you got the kind of instruction you paid for. There were about a dozen guys at Allenwood who were in his program, and he actually took them to a local motel meeting room where they received religious instructions and relaxed. I knew that he could do better for a price. Within a couple of weeks I had it set up so he used to pick me up in a 98 Olds early Friday afternoon, and we’d drive like hell to Atlantic City, where I’d meet Karen and some of the crew and spend the weekend gambling and partying. The guy took a grand for the weekends and I had to pick up the tab for his room and meals. He was so anxious to please that after a couple of trips I got Jimmy included on the Jewish religious weekends. I hadn’t seen too much of Jimmy after he got to Allenwood because he had been assigned to one of the other dormitories and he was on the grounds-keeping crew. But I did get him in on the religious weekends, and come Friday, when we started to take off for Atlantic City, it was like old times.

  “I also joined the local Junior Chamber of Commerce because they took us out on five-day rehabilitation furloughs every month. And they had ‘Toastmaster Weekends’ one Sunday a month, where we’d be signed up at a local motel and listen to lectures about starting out in business again. Most of these JCs were well-meaning and legit, but a few of them weren’t, and it didn’t take me long to find out who was willing to take a hundred dollars a day to look the other way. Pretty soon I was signed up for everything. One month I managed to string together so many furloughs, days off, and religious holidays that the joint wound up owing me a day.

  “Also, if I had to get out to pick up some pills or pot, I could always pay one of the guards fifty dollars and he would take me out of the place after his tour and the four-thirty count and then bring me back when he returned to work before the seven o’clock morning count. Nobody questioned the practice. The guard didn’t have to sign any papers. It was just a way that some of them made a few extra bucks, and nobody was going to blow the whistle. I would usually arrange for Karen to have a room in one of the motels nearby. I liked the ones with indoor swimming pools.

  “On the longer, five-day furloughs I just went home. Why not? Karen or one of the crew would meet me at whatever motel the Junior Chamber was having its seminars, and my guy would just wave me good-bye. I’d be home in a few hours. After a while I was getting home so often that there were lots of people in the neighborhood who thought I was out of jail a year ahead of time.”

  On July 12, 1978, Henry Hill was granted an early parole for being a model prisoner. According to the report of the Bureau of Prisons, he had been the ideal inmate. He had availed himself of the prison’s self-improvement and educational programs. He had maintained a clear-conduct record throughout his entire incarceration. He had adjusted well to rehabilitation and had entered into community-service and religious programs created to assist inmates. He had been courteous and cooperative during interviews with prison personnel, social workers, and psychologists. He appeared self-confident and mature. He had strong family ties and, upon release, he had been guaranteed a $225-a-week job as an office manager for a Long Island company near his home.

  Of course the prison officials had no way of knowing how expertly Henry had manipulated and misused their system. Nor did they know that his new job was essentially a no-show affair that had been arranged for him by Paul Vario. Henry’s prospective employer, Philip Basile, was a mob-controlled rock promoter and Long Island disco owner who had once hired Henry to burn some buildings. To the Bureau of Prisons, however, Henry Hill’s file read like a testimonial for the modern penological approach to rehabilitation. When he signed out of Allenwood for the last time, the Bureau of Prisons noted that his prognosis was good and that it was very unlikely he would ever return to prison again.

  Fifteen

  Henry Hill walked out of Allenwood on July 12, 1978. He was wearing a five-year-old Brioni suit,
he had seventy-eight dollars in his pocket, and he drove home in a six-year-old car, a four-door Buick sedan. Karen and the children had been living in a cramped, shabby, two-bedroom ground floor apartment in a run-down section of Valley Stream. Henry’s lawyers, prison guards, and weekend furloughs had swallowed up almost all of his money, but he told Karen to start looking for a house. He had prospects.

  In anticipation of his release, Henry had discussed dozens of potential money-making schemes during his weekend furloughs home. That, in fact, was one of the main reasons that furloughs were so important: They helped Henry to feel he was on the way back into action even before he was out of prison. After four years behind bars Henry had no intention of going straight. He couldn’t even conceive of going straight. He needed to make money. For Henry it was a simple matter of getting out and getting over.

  Within twenty-four hours of his release Henry flew to Pittsburgh (in violation of his parole) to pick up fifteen thousand dollars, his share of the marijuana partnership he had started in Lewisburg with Paul Mazzei. Henry planned to use the money as a down payment for a house. Unfortunately, when he got to Pittsburgh he found that Mazzei had just bought a garage full of high-grade Colombian grass and had only two thousand dollars in cash. Henry couldn’t wait for Mazzei to raise the money; he had an appointment in New York the next day with his parole officer, and he had promised his daughter Ruth that he would take her to FAO Schwarz on her eleventh birthday and buy her the biggest doll in the store. Henry borrowed Mazzei’s largest suitcase, filled it with bricks of marijuana, and headed back to New York.

  Henry had been in prison and away from the street so long that he was uncertain about the procedures for examining luggage before boarding planes. Rather than chance the airlines he went back on an all-night Greyhound bus. It took over twelve hours and made dozens of stops, and he had to get off the bus at every stop and guard the luggage compartment to make sure nobody walked off with his suitcase. Henry wasn’t sure where he could unload the grass. He had never sold or even smoked grass before he went to prison. He could not use sources within his own crew, because Paul Vario had outlawed any kind of drug dealing among his men.