Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

by Nicholas Pileggi

  Karen had begun a letter-writing campaign to the Bureau of Prisons in Washington about getting Henry assigned to the prison farm. She would write to top bureau officials, knowing that they would pass the letters down through the bureaucracy. She knew that if she wrote directly to the Lewisburg officials her letters could be disregarded. But if Lewisburg received letters about Henry Hill from the main office in Washington, D.C., the local prison officials had no way of knowing whether Henry's case might not be of more than casual interest to the brass. Every time Karen got a congressman to write the Bureau of Prisons, the bureau would forward the letter to Lewisburg, where Henry's case manager was notified about the congressional inquiry. It was never clear whether the congressional letters were routine responses to constituent requests or whether Henry had some special relationship with a politician. It wasn't that the prison officials felt compelled to do anything extra-legal as a result of the political interest in Hill, but they were certainly not going to ignore Hill's rights as a prisoner.

  Karen also got businessmen, lawyers, clergymen, and members of the family to write follow-up letters to both the congressmen and the prison on Henry's behalf. She made phone calls to follow up on her letters. She was unrelenting. She kept files of her correspondence and tracked friendly bureaucrats through the system, continuing her correspondence with them even after they had been promoted or transferred. In the end the combination of the wholesale transfers that followed the riot, an excellent prison record, and Karen's letter-writing campaign got Henry assigned to the farm.

  To be assigned to the farm was hike not being in prison at all. The farm was a two-hundred-acre working dairy that supplied milk to the prison. The men assigned there had extraordinary freedom. Henry, for instance, would leave the dorm every morning at five and either walk to the farm or drive one of the tractors or trucks to it. Then Henry and three other prisoners would book up about sixty-five cows to a milking and pasteurizing tank and fill five-gallon plastic containers with the milk and ship it into the prison. They also supplied the Allenwood Correctional Facility, a minimum-security federal jail for white-collar criminals, about fifteen miles away. After seven or eight in the morning Henry was free until four in the afternoon, when the milking process began again. He usually got back to the dorm only to sleep.

  "The first day I walked into the dairy and saw the guy who ran the place sitting at a table with a scratch sheet I knew I was home. The guy-his name was Sauer-was a junkie gambler. He was getting divorced from his wife, and he went to the track every night. I gave him money to bet for me. I pretended I thought he was a great handicapper, but he couldn't pick his nose. It was a way of slipping him the money so he got to depend upon my cash when he went to the track. Pretty soon I had him bringing me back Big Macs, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dunkin' Donuts, bottles of booze. It used to cost me between two and three hundred a week, but it was worth it. I had a gofer.

  "I knew I could make lots of money. There was so little supervision on the farm, I could smuggle anything into the place. I had the job of checking the fence, which meant I had the wire clippers and tractor and rode around the perimeter of the farm to make sure the cows hadn't crashed through anywhere. I could be gone three or four hours a day. After my first day I called Karen from the dairy phone. That was Wednesday night. That Saturday night I met Karen in the fields behind the pasture, and we made love for the first time in two and a half years. She brought a blanket and a duffel bag full of booze, Italian salami, sausages, special vinegar peppers-the kinds of things that were hard to find in the middle of Pennsylvania. I got it all behind the wall by putting it in a plastic liner that went inside the five-gallon milk containers we delivered to the prison kitchen, where we had other guys unpacking.

  "Within a week I had people bringing up pills and pot. I had a Colombian named Mono the Monkey, who lived in Jackson Heights, bringing in pot in compacted cylinders. I buried milk containers out in the woods and began to store the stuff. I had cases of booze out there. I had a pistol. I even had Karen bring up some pot in the duffel bags when my supplies were low. When I hit the farm I was in business.

  "But I was also working eighteen hours a day. If there was calving, I'd get up at four in the morning. I'd be there late at night if the pipes or tubes needed cleaning. I was the hardest-working, best farmhand the dairy ever had. Even the guards gave me that.

  "In the meantime I went into partnership on the marijuana and pills with Paul Mazzei, a Pittsburgh kid who was inside because of selling pot. He had good local sources, and I got the stuff inside the wall. Bill Arico, one of the Long Island crew, was also at Lewisburg, on a bank robbery, and he did most of the selling. In fact, in no time at all Arico was the biggest dope supplier in the joint. Bill sold about a pound of pot a week. He'd sell five hundred to a thousand dollars' worth of grass a week. There were other guys selling pills and acid. Lots of guys did their time on acid. The prison was a marketplace. The gates would open up and it was a businessman's dream.

  "I used to bring the cocaine in myself. I didn't trust anybody with coke. I put the pot into handballs I used to split in half and retape. Before tossing the balls over the wall onto the handball court I'd call the clerk at the hospital, who was a dope fiend, and he would alert my distributors to start congregating around the handball court. The pot was so compacted that I used to get a pound or two of stuff over the wall in just a few handballs.

  "The only problem was with the bosses. Paulie had gone home by now, but Johnny Dio was still there, and he didn't want any of the crew playing around with dope. He didn't give a damn about dope on moral grounds. He just didn't want any heat. But I needed the money. If Johnny gave me money to support myself and my family, fine. But Johnny didn't give up anything. If I was going to pay my way through the can, I had to earn my own money, and selling dope was the best way around. Still, I had to do it pretty much on the sly. Even so, there was an explosion. One of my distributors used to store his stuff in a safe in the priest's office, and he got caught.

  Johnny Dio used to use the place as his office-making calls to his lawyers and pals-and now it was off limits. He went nuts. I had to get Paulie to talk to his son on the outside before we could convince him not to have me killed. Paulie wanted to know if I was selling dope. I lied. Of course not, I told him. Paulie believed me. Why shouldn't he believe me? Until I started selling stuff in Lewisburg I didn't even know how to roll a joint."

  Fourteen

  For almost two years Karen visited Henry in jail once a week. By the third year, however, she cut down to once or twice a month. Henry was assigned to the far less onerous farm detail, and the children found the arduous journey-six hours' drive each way-unbearable. Judy had begun to suffer from severe stomach cramps whenever they visited the prison, and for a long time neither Karen nor her doctor could trace the cause of her pain. It was only after two years, when Judy was eleven years old, that she finally confessed she found the toilet in the prison visiting area so filthy that she was unable to use it during the interminable ten- and twelve-hour visits. Ruth, who was nine at the time, remembers long stretches of unrelieved boredom while her parents and their friends talked and ate at long picnic tables in a large, bare, cold room. Karen brought small toys, coloring books, and crayons for the children, but there was little else for them to do. The prison had no facilities for children, although dozens of youngsters showed up on weekends to see their fathers. Judy and Ruth were so desperate for diversion after the first couple of hours that Karen would let them feed a roll of quarters into the line of overpriced commissary vending machines-despite the fact that cash was a problem.

  * * *

  Karen: When Henry first went away, the money just dried up. It was impossible. I worked part-time as a dental technician. I learned how to clip and groom dogs, mostly because that was the kind of work I could do at home and keep an eye on the kids. The money owed to us by most of Henry's friends from The Suite never got paid. Most of those guys didn't have two nickels to rub togethe
r until they made a score, and then it would be gone before we got to see any of it. There was one bookmaker who made a fortune working out of The Suite. Henry had done everything for the guy. He had a wife and kids in Florida and ten girl friends in New York. A friend of mine suggested that maybe he should kick in some money for me and the kids now that Henry was away. His suggestion was that I go sit in a precinct house with the kids until the cops got me on welfare.

  That's the mentality of those people. I sold some of the fixtures we stole from The Suite to Jerry Asaro, a regular big shot. He was a friend of Henry's and a member of the Bonanno crew. I'm still waiting for the money. He took the fixtures and never paid me a cent. I've read about how these guys take care of each other when they're in jail, but I've never seen it in life. If they don't have to help you, they won't. As much as I felt we were a part of the family-and we were- there was no money coming in. After a while Henry had to make money inside. It must have cost him nearly $500 a week just to live inside the prison. He needed money to pay off the guards and for special food and privileges. He sent me the monthly $673 Veterans Administration check he got for going to school, and later I'd get some money from him after he started smuggling and selling stuff behind the wall, but they were hard dollars and we were both taking chances.

  For the first couple of years I had an apartment with the kids in Valley Stream, but we were always at my parents' house. We usually ate dinner there, and Henry used to call me long-distance every night and talk to the girls. The girls knew he was in jail. But at first all we told them was that he had done something against the law. I said that he hadn't hurt anybody, but he had been unlucky and had gotten caught. They were only about eight and nine at the tune, so I told them he had gotten caught playing cards. They knew you weren't supposed to play cards.

  Even later, when they got older, the girls never thought of their father or any of his friends as gangsters. They weren't told anything. They just seemed to accept what their father and his friends were doing. I don't know exactly what they knew as kids, but I know they didn't think of Uncle Jimmy or Uncle Paulie as racketeers. They saw Jimmy and Paulie like generous uncles. They only saw them at happy tunes anyway-at parties or weddings or birthdays-and they always arrived with lots of presents.

  They did know that their father and his friends gambled and that gambling was against the law. They also knew that there were things in the house that had been stolen, but as far as they were concerned, everybody they knew had things in their houses that were stolen.

  Still, they knew their father was doing things that were wrong. Henry never talked about what he was doing as though he was proud. He never boasted about what he did the way Jimmy talked in front of his kids. I remember one day Ruth came home from

  Jimmy's, where she had been watching television with Jesse, Jimmy's youngest son. She said that Jesse-who Jimmy named after Jesse James, for God's sake-used to cheer the crooks and curse the cops on television. Ruth couldn't get over it. At least my kids weren't being raised to root for robbers.

  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 Lewis-burg 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. I
t 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.