Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Nicholas Pileggi

  Henry’s confrontations with his old pals on the witness stand left him unmoved. Neither Jimmy Burke’s threatening glares nor the sight of the seventy-year-old Paul Vario seemed to disturb him. Vario, Burke, Mazzei, Basile, the basketball players—everyone Henry had committed crimes with became bargaining chips he used to buy his own freedom. He initiated the investigation into the mob’s “strangle-hold” on Kennedy Airport’s cargo business, along with Strike Force prosecutor Douglas Behm, that resulted in yet another indictment of Paul Vario, as well as indictments of Frank “Frankie the Wop” Manzo and other Lucchese family powers. He gave McDonald and his men as many cases as he could, and he sent away his old pals. It was effortless. He ate a mushroom-and-sausage pizza and drank Tab before taking the stand against Vario, and he negotiated a ten-thousand-dollar magazine article with Sports Illustrated before testifying about the Boston College point-shaving scheme that got twenty-six-year-old Rich Kuhn ten years in a federal prison. When Jimmy Burke was convicted of murder, Henry was almost gleeful. In the final showdown with Jimmy, Henry had survived, and he had used the government to pull the trigger.

  Of course, no matter how Henry tried to rationalize what he had done, his survival depended upon his capacity for betrayal. He willingly turned on the world he knew and the men with whom he had been raised with the same nonchalance he had used in setting up a bookie joint or slipping a tail. For Henry Hill giving up the life was hard, but giving up his friends was easy.

  In the end there were no pyrotechnics, no fiery blasts of Cagney gangster glory. Henry was not going out through a hole in the top of the world. He was going to survive any way he could. In fact, out of the entire crew Henry alone managed to survive.

  Today Henry Hill and his wife live somewhere in America. As of this writing he has a successful business and lives in a $150,000 two-story neocolonial house in an area with such a low crime rate that garden-shed burglaries get headlines in the weekly press. His children go to private schools. He and Karen have their own cars, and she has embarked on a small business of her own. He has a Keogh plan. One of his few complaints is that he cannot get good Italian food in the area where he has been assigned to live by the witness program. A few days after his arrival there he went to a local “Italian-style” restaurant and found the marinara sauce without garlic, the linguini replaced by egg noodles, and slices of packaged white bread in plastic baskets on the tables.

  But because of his continuing work with Ed McDonald and the Strike Force prosecutors, Henry gets fifteen hundred dollars a month as a government employee, travels to New York eight or nine times a year with all expenses paid, and has food from Little Italy sent in to him at the courts where he testifies and the hotels where he stays. He is always accompanied to New York by armed marshals to make sure he doesn’t get murdered or mugged. In fact, Henry is so carefully guarded and his new identity is so vigorously protected by the U.S. Marshal Service that even the Internal Revenue had to whistle when they tried to dun the old Henry Hill for his back taxes. Thanks to the government for which he works, Henry Hill has turned out to be the ultimate wiseguy.

  Afterword

  Prosecutors say the most dangerous time for witnesses is the period during which they are being debriefed and testifying. Since Henry Hill’s testimony lasted over five years and resulted in at least fifty convictions, there was lots of time and there were lots of defendants who wanted Henry Hill dead.

  “Some of them thought I was staying in touch with my old girlfriends,” Hill said. “They had private investigators check the girls’ phone numbers. They’ve got connections to people in the phone company and credit card companies. They can find anybody. Their lawyers bribed court clerks to tell them when and where I was testifying. The feds knew all this and drove me in different cars every day with a different driver, tinted windows, vans, a car in front and a car behind just so nobody could get between us.”

  It is still incredible to many of the prosecutors and agents who worked on the Henry Hill case that today, thirty years after he decided to flip, and twenty-five years after this book’s publication, Henry Hill turns out to be the last wiseguy in his crew still standing. His mentor, James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke, who failed to kill Hill on the ruse trip to Florida, was ultimately convicted of a murder on Hill’s testimony and died in prison in 1996 at sixty-five. Hill’s surrogate father and Lucchese crime family capo, Paul Vario, was convicted on Hill’s testimony and died in a federal prison in Texas in 1988 at seventy-four. Other members of the gang, whose freedom depended upon their getting rid of Henry, wound up either in prison, convicted on Hill’s testimony, or killed in routine occupational hazards that had nothing to do with Henry Hill.

  For instance, in 1985, Anthony Stabile, forty-four, the lethal Burke hit man, who the federal marshals were particularly concerned about, wound up getting killed in an unrelated drug dispute. Stabile was shot twice in the head, stuffed in the trunk of his new Cadillac Coupe de Ville and set on fire in Ozone Park, Queens. Angelo Sepe, forty-three, another member of the Vario crew looking to get Hill, wound up getting shot and killed himself on July 18, 1984. Sepe was killed in the basement of his apartment in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, after threatening to kill a member of Sammy “The Bull” Gravano’s crew. The hitmen, using silencers, first killed Sepe in the entryway of his apartment and then killed his girlfriend, Joanna Lombardo, who was asleep in the bedroom, to erase even the possibility of a witness.

  Since 1980, when Henry Hill, Karen, and their two children entered the witness-protection program, the threats have been serious enough for the government to move them at least a dozen times. One night, the Hills had to leave their house so quickly that when Hill’s son’s girlfriend came to pick him up for school in the morning, she found an empty house and no forwarding address. The feds warned Hill’s son about not contacting the girl under any circumstances.

  While in the witness-protection program, Hill was addicted to alcohol, speed, and cocaine. He was arrested on drug related charges several times. When temporarily in jail he used his assumed names until the feds got him out. The local cops who arrested him usually had no idea who he was. In 1989, Hill and Karen divorced after twenty-five years of marriage, with Karen receiving custody of the children. Hill was finally removed from the witness program in 1996 upon the death of Jimmy Burke. He continued to have problems with the law (for drunk driving arrests) until 2006, when the actor Ray Liotta, who played Henry Hill in Goodfellas, convinced him to enter a serious rehabilitation program. After many earlier attempts, Hill says, it worked.

  “After thirty years on the lam,” Hill says, “now I feel safe enough to travel under my own name, appear on radio and television shows promoting my books, and go to restaurants and malls with my kids and grandchildren. I’m just like everybody else, almost.”

  —Nicholas Pileggi

  May 2011

  Index

  A

  Abbandando, Frank “Dasher,” 31

  Air France heist, 96–104

  aborted stick up in, 97

  Hill’s spending spree after, 104

  inside information in, 96–102

  newspaper stories on, 103

  storeroom key acquired for, 96–102

  success of, 103

  time chosen for, 101–02

  and tribute payments to mob chiefs, 103–04

  airline ticket racket, 82–109

  Al and Evelyn’s (delicatessen), 19, 20

  Allegro, Joey, 82, 89, 120

  Allenwood Correctional Facility, 155, 165–71

  drug dealing at, 168–69

  food strike at, 165

  Hill’s early parole from, 169–71

  Hill’s transfer to, 165–69

  inmates in, 167–68

  religious furloughs from, 168

  Aloi, Sebastian “Buster,” 103, 128

  Aloi, Vinnie, 128

  in Lewisburg, 151, 153

  Amelia, Skinny Bobby, 82

  Apalachin, N.Y., meeting at (1957)
, 20, 36

  Aqueduct Raceway, 30

  Arico, William: 268

  Hill’s testimony and, 256

  in Lewisburg, 153, 156

  robberies committed by, 173

  Army, U.S., 36–40

  Hill incarcerated in, 39

  Hill’s enlistment in, 27

  Hill’s illegal operations in, 39

  Hill’s love for, 39

  Hill’s visit home from, 39

  arson jobs, 25, 52

  Asaro, Jerry, 44,

  Karen Hill’s dealings with, 160

  Asaro, Vincent, 44, 119

  Atlas, Ralph, 99

  Auburn (prison), 85

  Azores, 41–44

  fight with German chef at, 44

  front man at, 43

  Hill hired by, 41

  Lucchese’s nightly visits to, 41, 42

  B

  Bamboo, Sonny (Angelo McConnanch), 90–91

  Bamboo Lounge, 90–91

  bankers, stolen securities and, 91

  bank forgery, 85

  bank loans, 53

  Barberra, Eddy, 35

  Barbieri, Janet, 203, 205

  Barron, Hope, 201

  Barzie, Tino (Dante Barzottini), 82

  Basile, Philip, 169–70, 173

  Hill’s testimony against, 256

  basketball point-shaving scheme, see Boston College basketball point-shaving scheme

  Bassey, Shirley, 61

  Batts, Billy, 115–18, 196

  Beans, Vinne, 47

  Beansie (counterfeiter), 17

  Behm, Douglas, 257

  Belmont Raceway, 30

  Benny Field’s, 15

  Berman, Otto “Abbadabba,” 30

  Bernstein, Jerry D., 256

  Bilello, Larry, 24

  Bivona, Theresa, 35–36

  Bobby’s (restaurant), 105

  Bonanno crime family, 3, 44

  bookmaking operations, 104–07

  apartments rented for, 106

  Hill arrested for, 106–07

  and point-shaving in basketball games, 1, 174, 179, 191

  police corruption and, 105–07

  straighten-up day in, 105

  Bosch, Albert H., 92

  Boston College basketball point-shaving scheme,

  bookies lined up for, 175

  Burke’s and Vario’s approval of, 174–75

  failure of, 179

  McDonald and, 255–56

  players lined up for, 174–78

  test games in, 176–78

  Branco’s Bar, 35

  bricklayer’s local union:

  Hill given membership card for, 22

  Hill’s employment in, 40–41, 66, 67, 75

  Bridal Land, 127–28

  Broder, William, 221

  Brown, Tommy, see Lucchese,

  Gaetano “Three Fingers Brown”

  Brownsville–East New York, N.Y., 29–36

  ethnic population of, 29

  famous mobsters of, 2, 30–31

  as perfect place for mob, 29–31

  police relations with mobsters in, 32

  street crime in, 34–36

  Vario gang members in, 31

  wiseguy mentality in, 32–33

  wiseguys protected in, 33–36

  Bruno’s (restaurant), 31

  Buchalter, Louis “Lepke,” 30

  Bureau of Prisons, U.S., 146

  Community Treatment Center of, 182

  Hill’s prison farm assignment and, 154–55

  Hill’s “rehabilitation” and, 169

  Liddy’s food strike and, 165

  reduced sentences and, 147

  Burke, Frank James, 21, 113

  Lufthansa heist and, 185

  Burke, James “Jimmy the Gent,” 2, 20–22, 31, 82–92, 97, 108, 121–23, 197–98

  in Allenwood, 165, 168

  in basketball point-shaving scheme, 174, 179

  Batts murder and, 116–18

  best friend killed by, 114

  as big tipper, 21

  childhood of, 84–85

  cigarette smuggling business of, 46–47, 72, 75, 76, 114

  Colombo and Lucchese families’ negotiations over, 84

  Eaton Murder and, 207, 257

  Edwards murder and, 194–195

  FBI surveillance of, 200–01

  Florida vacation of, 139–43

  gambling habits of, 55

  generosity of, 21, 83

  guns bought by, 173, 212–13

  at halfway house, 182

  Hill’s drug arrest and, 233–34, 238–39

  and Hill’s fight with Linda’s boss, 128

  Hill’s testimony against, 257–58

  increasing craziness of, 213

  Kennedy Airport operations of, 82–83, 86–92, 96–99

  Krugman’s haranguing of, 193, 195

  in Lufthansa heist, 182–85, 190–97, 200–02, 203, 209, 213

  marriage of, 78, 83

  mob life entered by, 85

  police on payroll of, 82

  prison sentences served by, 83, 148, 165–66, 258

  as small-time entrepreneur, 31

  sons of, 21, 113, 161

  Spider’s murder and, 119

  stealing loved by, 85–86

  at Varios’ card games, 21

  violent reputation of, 22, 83

  water fights loved by, 130

  wife’s ex-boyfriend killed by, 83–84

  Burke, Jesse James, 21, 161

  Burke, Mickey, 72, 76, 78, 114

  Hill’s drug arrest and, 233

  marriage of, 83

  Burns, Petey, 35

  “busting out joints,” 53

  C

  Cafora, Fat Louie, 184, 190

  Capone, Al, 30

  Capo Trucking Company, 47

  card and dice games, 11, 19–21, 109

  in army, 37

  Burke’s attendance at, 20–21

  run by professionals, 20

  Carmen (wiseguy’s wife), 70

  cars, stolen, 48

  Cerami, Dominick, 85

  checks, fraudulent, 85

  Chicago, Ill., South Side in, 34

  Christmas trees, phony, 18

  Ciaccio, John, 140, 142

  cigarettes, hijacking of, 120–22

  cigarette smuggling business:

  Hill arrested for, 72–75

  Hill’s first involvement in, 46–47

  Karen Hill’s views on, 72,

  and murder of Burke’s best friend, 114

  trucks needed for, 47

  Cobb, Ernie, 177

  college sports, betting on, 55

  point-shaving and, 174–79, 191, 255

  Colombia Restaurant, 140

  Colombo crime family, 128

  Burke’s services for, 84

  tribute paid to, 103–04

  Confidential Investigating Unit, 106

  construction work: falsified payrolls in, 22

  Vario’s connections to, 10–11 see also bricklayers local union

  Cooperman, Robin 172, 212, 216–17, 223, 226

  drug traces in dirty dishes of, 229

  Copa, 61

  Corcione, Alex, 108, 116

  Corcione, Mickey, 108

  Costello, Frank, 30

  counterfeit money, 17–18, 48

  credit-card fraud, 18–19, 45–46, 48, 82, 108

  company connections and, 45

  Henry’s first arrest for, 26–27

  “under the limit” buyers in, 46

  D

  Daniels, Billy, 133

  Davis, Sammy, Jr., 62

  Delenhauser, Louis “Cop-out Louie,” 27

  DePasquale, Steve, 49

  DeSimone, Angela, 71

  DeSimone, Helene, 68

  DeSimone, Tommy, 32, 71, 82, 104, 108, 130–31, 139, 173

  in Air France heist, 99, 102

  Batts murdered by, 115–19, 196

  in cigarette smuggling business, 47–48

  Frankie
Burke’s first hit and, 113

  at halfway house, 182

  Hill’s partnership with, 47–48, 73

  in Kennedy Airport hijackings, 87, 89, 120–23

  in Lufthansa heist, 184, 190, 192–193, 195, 200

  murder of, 196–197, 206–07

  prison sentence of, 148

  Remo murdered by, 114

  Spider murdered by, 114

  Diamond, Stanley, 82, 89, 121–23, 148

  dice games, see card and dice games

  Dillon, Dennis, 224

  Dio, Johnny, 86, 88

  prison sentence of, 147, 150–53, 157

  Don Pepe’s Vesuvio Restaurant, 120,

  Doyle, Jimmy, 153

  drug dealing: in Allenwood, 168–69

  Burke’s involvement in, 196

  code terms in, 225–26

  crew used in, 172

  Hill arrested for, 1–2, 211–18

  Hill’s drug use and, 211

  informants in, 219–21

  Karen Hill’s role, 152, 162–63, 164, 215–17 232–35, 247

  in Lewisburg, 156–57 162–63, 221

  Mazzei as partner in, 156, 171–72, 217, 227–28

  Vario’s opposition to, 172, 234, 237

  wiretaps in, 222–23, 224, 225–26 see also Hill, Henry, narcotics case against

  E

  Easter, as big-money holiday, 17

  Eaton, Richard, 207

  Edwards, Parnell Steven “Stacks,” 46, 88

  in Lufthansa heist, 184

  murder of, 206

  Eirich, Rudi, 186–87

  electronic bugging devices, 200–01, 222–23, 225

  Empire Room, 61

  Euclid Avenue Taxicab and Limousine Service, 5–15

  ambience of, 5–6, 8

  competition of, 24–26

  as gathering place for hoods, 8

  Hill hired by, 6, 10–11

  Hill’s childhood fascination with, 5–6, 9, 11–12

  Hill’s income from, 13–15