Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Nicholas Pileggi

  Then Paulie looked at me. He said that he was going to have to turn his back on Henry. He reached in his pocket and gave me three thousand dollars. He just put it in my hand and covered my hand with his for a second. He didn’t even count it. When he turned away I could see that he was crying.

  MCDONALD: Henry Hill’s arrest was the first real break we’d had in the Lufthansa case in over a year. Ever since Lou Werner’s conviction the case had stagnated. Most of the witnesses and participants had either been murdered or disappeared. For instance, on the same night we convicted Lou Werner, Joe Manri and Frenchy McMahon were murdered. A month later Paolo LiCastri’s body turned up on top of a smoldering garbage heap in a lot off Flatlands Avenue, Brooklyn. Then Louis Cafora and his new wife, Joanna, disappeared. They were last seen happily driving away from some relative’s house in Queens in a new Cadillac Fat Louis had bought his bride.

  Henry was one of the crew’s only survivors, and he was finally caught in a position where he might be persuaded to talk. He was facing twenty-five years to life on the Nassau County narcotics conspiracy. His girlfriend and even his wife could also be tied into the drug conspiracy, and life could be made very unpleasant for them. He knew this. He also knew that we could send him back to prison to serve out the last four years on the extortion case for violating his parole and that there was a very good chance that he was going to be killed by his best friends.

  Henry was too vulnerable. He was facing too much time for a guy like Jimmy to take any chances with him. We suspected that Jimmy was just biding his time for the most opportune moment. We had very good information from informants that Henry was the next on the hit parade. Paul Vario had pretty much turned his back on him, which meant whatever happened happened.

  If there was ever a time to flip him against his old crew it was at that moment. From the first day Henry was held in the Nassau jail on the drug charges, we had federal agents talking to him about turning. Jimmy Fox, his parole officer, kept warning him about the danger of going back on the street. Steven Carbone and Tom Sweeney, the FBI men who had stayed with the Lufthansa case, showed him pictures of the bodies.

  Also, Henry wasn’t totally against working out some kind of a deal. On the first morning after his arrest he had asked his parole officer whether there was some kind of an arrangement that could be made. He said that he knew about Lufthansa and would be willing to tell us something, as long as he didn’t have to testify or surface as an informant. He told his parole officer that he could be our “man on the street.”

  That was not what we had in mind, so we kept up the pressure and he kept on dangling the bait. It was a game of feeling each other out, except that we knew and he knew that he really had no place to go. The pressure on him was intensified every time the agents showed up at the jail to talk to him. The word inside spreads quickly when someone is repeatedly interviewed by the police or feds. The supposition is that the prisoner must be talking. Otherwise why would the agents come back day after day?

  As far as we were concerned, it was just a matter of time. We considered him important enough so that we went back to talk with him even though he screamed in front of the other prisoners and guards that he wouldn’t talk to us and that we were trying to get him killed. The minute the door closed he changed his attitude completely. He wasn’t telling us anything yet, but he wasn’t screaming either, and he’d give us a tidbit here and there about nonrelated matters.

  Also, when we issued a writ and had him brought from the Nassau jail to the Strike Force offices, he was the one who suggested that we do the same thing with Bobby Germaine, so that it wouldn’t look like he was the only defendant being questioned. I thought we were doing very well considering the kind of wiseguy we had snared, and that’s why I went through the roof when I found out that after three weeks in jail, where we’d had complete access to him, he had somehow managed to bail himself out and had disappeared.

  HENRY: My scheme was to play them along until I got my own head clear, got my bail reduced, and got back on the street. I knew I was vulnerable. I knew that you were vulnerable when you were worth more dead than alive. It was that simple. But I still couldn’t really believe it, and I didn’t really know what I was going to do. Sometimes I thought I’d just get some money and go on the lam for a while. Then I thought I might get my head clear and straighten it all out with Paulie. I kept thinking that if I watched my step, if I kept the thought of my getting whacked in the middle of my mind, I might have a chance of surviving.

  In my case I knew that getting caught in the drug thing really put me in the box. Paulie had put the taboo on drugs. It was outlawed. None of us were supposed to be in drugs. It wasn’t that Paulie wanted to take some moral position. That wasn’t it. What Paulie didn’t want to have happen is what happened to one of his best friends, Carmine Tramunti, who went away for fifteen years just because he nodded hello to Fat Gigi Inglese in a restaurant. The jury decided to believe the prosecutor that Tramunti was nodding his agreement to a drug deal. That was it. Bang. Fifteen years at the age of fifty-seven. The guy never got out. Just at a time in his life when he was going to enjoy, when it was supposed to begin to pay off, he gets sent away forever and then dies in the can. Paulie was not going to let that happen to him. He’d kill you first.

  So I knew that arrest on the drug charge made me vulnerable. Maybe too vulnerable to live. There wouldn’t have been any hard feelings. I was just facing too much time. The crew also knew I was snorting a lot of coke and eating ludes. Jimmy once said my brain had turned to candy. I wasn’t the only guy in the crew taking drugs. Sepe and Stabile had bigger noses than mine. But I was the one who was caught and I was the one who they felt might make a deal.

  The fact that I had never made a deal before, the fact that I had always been stand-up, the fact that I had done two years in Nassau and four years in Lewisburg standing on my head and never gave up a mouse counted for nothing. What you did yesterday doesn’t count. It’s what you’re doing today and could do tomorrow that counts. From where my friends stood, from where Jimmy was standing, I was a liability. I was no longer safe. I didn’t need pictures.

  In fact, I knew it was going to be Jimmy even before the feds played me the tape of Sepe and Stabile talking about getting rid of me. I could hear them. Sepe sounded anxious to get it over with. He said that I was no good, that I was a junkie. But Jimmy was calm. He told them not to worry about it. And that was all I heard.

  Sitting in my cell, I knew I was up for grabs. In the old days Jimmy would have torn Sepe’s heart out for even suggesting that I get whacked. That was the main reason why I stayed inside. I had to sort it all out. And every day I was inside, Jimmy or Mickey called my wife and asked when I was getting out, and every day that she could, Karen came to the jail and told me everything they said.

  If you’re a part of a crew, nobody ever tells you that they’re going to kill you. It doesn’t happen that way. There aren’t any great arguments or finger-biting curses like in Mafia movies. Your murderers come with smiles. They come as friends, people who have cared deeply about you all your life, and they always come at a time when you are at your weakest and most in need of their help and support.

  But still I wasn’t sure. I grew up with Jimmy. He brought me along. Paulie and Tuddy put me in his hands. He was supposed to watch out for me, and he did. He was the best teacher a guy could want. It was Jimmy who got me into cigarette bootlegging and hi-jackings. We buried bodies. We did Air France and Lufthansa. We got sentenced to ten years for putting the arm on the guy in Florida. He was at the hospital when Karen had the kids, and we went to birthday parties and holidays at each other’s houses. We did it all, and now maybe he’s going to kill me. Two weeks before my arrest I got so paranoid and stoned that Karen got me to go see a shrink. It was nuts. I couldn’t tell him anything, but she insisted. I talked to him in general terms. I told him that I was trying to get away from drug people. I said I was afraid I was going to be killed. He told me to get a phone
machine.

  If I was going to survive, I was going to have to turn on everything I knew. The decision was almost made for me. In jail I didn’t think so much about whether or not to turn as I did about exactly how I could manage to do it and still get out of jail long enough to collect the money and dope I had out on the street. I had about $18,000 in heroin stashed in the house that the cops hadn’t found. I had $20,000 owed to me by Mazzei. I’d probably have to kiss that goodbye. I had about $40,000 in loan-shark money out on the street. I wanted to recoup some of that. There was money owed me by fences on some of the jewel robberies and I had money owed me from some gun deals. Added up, there was enough to risk my neck before getting arrested by the cops or killed by my friends. It was going to have to be a con, a hustle, just like everything else.

  So every day when the feds would come to my cell to ask about Lufthansa or some murder, I would curse at them and yell that they should go away. Once I even refused to leave my cell. There were two FBI men downstairs waiting to take me to McDonald’s office. “Fuck you and McDonald,” I yelled. I kept yelling they’d have to carry me out. Finally four prison hacks came to my cell and said if I didn’t go quietly I’d go unconsciously. Without overdoing anything, I put up enough of a racket most of the time to at least give the other prisoners the impression that I wasn’t cooperating.

  It was a scary time. There were guys from Jimmy’s crew, like John Savino, who were on work-release, and they’d leave every morning with all the news about who was cooperating and who was not. I was being as cautious as I could—I hadn’t told anybody anything yet, but I remember shaking myself to sleep with fear every night I stayed in jail. I was afraid Jimmy would find out what I was planning and have me killed right there in my cell.

  McDonald used to say that I was safe as long as I stayed in jail. I had to laugh at him. I told him that if Jimmy wanted to whack me out, he could walk right in the front door, borrow a gun from one of the guards, blow me away in my cell, and walk out without being stopped.

  I had to figure that Paulie and Jimmy would know everything that went on in the jail, and if they knew I was going to McDonald’s office every day, they’d know I was talking or at least thinking about talking. So I told McDonald that every time I was brought over to his office, he had to bring Germaine over too. This gave me the chance to scream and yell at Richie Oddo, my lawyer, that I was being harassed, that he was a shitty lawyer. To calm me down, Oddo used to say they were harassing Germaine too. Then I’d yell some more that I didn’t care what they were doing with Bobby, I wanted to be left alone.

  I wanted all of my screaming and yelling about being harassed to get back to Jimmy and Paulie. Then, as soon as Oddo would leave, I’d spend the rest of the afternoon in McDonald’s office drinking coffee and listening to them try to con me. During those sessions I never said I’d help and I never said I wouldn’t. I just kept them hanging, but I knew they knew that I would eventually have to cooperate. They knew I had nowhere to go.

  And still, the idea of trusting myself to the feds was almost as scary as having to face Jimmy. It wasn’t that the feds were crooked and would sell me out. It was that they were so dumb. They were always making mistakes. In my own drug case, for instance, I knew that the informant was Bobby Germaine’s son, because the cops had accidentally left his name in the court papers. They were always fucking up like that, and I didn’t want them fucking up with my life.

  On May 16, after eighteen days in jail, I felt the time was right to make my move. I had Karen and my mother-in-law come to the jail at one o’clock Saturday morning with ten thousand dollars in cash bail. I knew the agents and my parole officer would be off for the weekend. I would have a couple of days to pick up some cash and also a couple of days to see whether the feds were right, whether Jimmy was really planning to kill me. Scared as I was of Jimmy, it was still hard for me to accept.

  I knew that Jimmy had Mickey calling Karen twice a day from the first day I got pinched. They wanted to know if I was okay. Did I need anything? When was I coming home? The same kinds of questions they would have asked any other time I got pinched, except now everything was suspect. I was feeling paranoid, but I also knew that sometimes you were either paranoid or dead.

  I remember walking out of the jail and getting into the car very quickly. I had this feeling I was going to get killed right outside the jail. I didn’t feel safe until I got home. That’s when Karen told me she’d flushed the junk. Eighteen thousand dollars she flushed. How could she do that? Why did I give her the signal? she asked. I hadn’t given her the signal to flush it, just to hide it if the cops came back to search with dogs. She started screaming and crying. I started screaming and yelling at her. We screamed until we were hoarse. I slept with a gun all night.

  When Mickey called on Saturday morning to find out how things were, Karen said they were fine, I was home. Mickey almost dropped the phone. She wanted to know why Karen hadn’t told her. They could have helped with the bail money. That was exactly why I hadn’t told anyone. That’s why I had Karen’s mother show up with cash. That’s why I had my bedroll all tucked up and was ready to check out immediately. I didn’t want any guard calling up on me. I didn’t want to be greeted by anybody other than Karen and her mother when I walked out of the jail.

  Mickey said Jimmy wanted to meet me as soon as I woke up. I had told Karen to say there was a lot of heat all around and that we were going to go to a bar mitzvah that night and that I’d meet Jimmy Sunday morning. I wanted to use Saturday to raise money and I also wanted to see if I could detect any signs of trouble.

  Sunday morning I met Jimmy at the Sherwood Diner, on Rockaway Boulevard. It was a crowded place where we were known. I got there about fifteen minutes early and I saw that Jimmy was already there. He had taken the booth at the end of the restaurant, where he could see everyone who came into the place and anyone who pulled into the parking lot. He wanted to see if I had been tailed.

  He hadn’t touched his honeydew melon or coffee. In the old days Jimmy would have eaten the melon, three or four eggs, sausages, home fries, some crullers, toasted English muffins, and smeared lots of catsup all over everything. Jimmy loved catsup. He put it on everything, even his steaks. Jimmy was also fidgeting around. He was jumpy. He had started wearing glasses, and he was taking them off and putting them on.

  I felt drained, and nothing had helped—not the shower, not the fresh shirt Karen had ironed, not the cologne. Nothing could get the smell of the jail and fear out of my nose. Jimmy stood up. He was smiling. He opened his arms to give me a bear hug. My court papers were all over the table. Jimmy had gotten them from the lawyers. When I sat down with him, it almost felt like it was the old days.

  On the surface, of course, everything was supposed to be fine. We were supposed to be discussing my drug case, just like the dozens of other cases of mine we had discussed together, but this time I knew that the thing we were really discussing was me. I knew I was hot. I was dangerous. I knew that I could give Jimmy up and cut myself a deal with the government. I could give up Lufthansa and I could give up Paulie. I could put Jimmy and Paulie behind bars for the rest of their lives. And I knew Jimmy knew it.

  None of this was said, of course. In fact, almost nothing was ever really said. Even if the feds had somehow wired our table, and then played back the tape, they wouldn’t have been able to make much sense out of our conversation. It was in half words. Shrugs. We talked about this guy and the other guy and the guy from over here and the guy from over there and the guy with the hair and the guy from downtown. At the end of the conversation I would know what we talked about and Jimmy would know what we talked about, but nobody else would know.

  Jimmy had been through the papers, and he said that there had been a rat in the case. I knew he meant Bobby Germaine’s kid, but I tried to slough it off. I said that they hadn’t found any drugs on me or in my house. I kept saying that they didn’t have a strong case, but I could see Jimmy was very nervous anyway.

 
He wanted to know about all the people I had working for me. He wanted to know whether Robin and Judy and the rest of the people arrested knew about him. I told him they knew nothing, but I could see he didn’t believe me. He wanted to know if I had talked to Paulie yet. I said no.

  Jimmy was trying to look confident. He said he had some ideas about my case. I could see what he was doing. As long as I thought he was trying to help me, he knew that I’d stay close. Then, when he felt the time was right, when I was no longer dangerous to hit, he would whack me. Jimmy was biding time to make sure he could kill me without getting Paulie upset and putting his own neck on the line.

  As long as Jimmy thought I didn’t know what he had planned, I had a chance of copping time on the street and scooping up some money. I had to pretend to Jimmy I didn’t know what he might have had planned, and he had to pretend that he had nothing but my best interests at heart.

  Then he said that he wanted me to go down to Florida in a few days. He said there was some money to be made. He said he had to meet me again soon about the case. He said we should meet on Wednesday in a bar owned by Charlie the Jap, on Queens Boulevard, in Sunnyside.

  I’d never heard of the place. I’ve been operating with Jimmy for twenty-five years. We’ve been in a thousand bars together in Queens, and we’ve spent six years in the can together, and suddenly he wants to meet me in a bar I’ve never seen before.

  I nod yeah, sure, but I already know there’s no way in the world I’m going into that bar. As soon as breakfast is over, I drive past the place. I’m not waiting till Wednesday.