Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

by Nicholas Pileggi

  The police said they had learned that Eaton had just returned from a trip to Florida, where he was supposed to have laundered huge amounts of money. On one of the Sepe tapes, amid static and rock music, Sepe was heard to complain that someone was trying to cheat him while counting the money. There was also some discussion about a trip to Florida and money. McDonald had FBI men and city cops retrace Eaton's steps and even opened the safe deposit box in which they were told Eaton had placed millions of dollars. The box was empty.

  About this time a Long Island housewife named Fran Krugman reported that her husband Marty had disappeared. She told the local police that she had last heard from him on January 6, when he called to say that he wouldn't be home for a while. By the time McDonald found out that Marty Krugman had been the man to whom Frank Menna had sent Lou Werner, it was too late. McDonald would have given anything to find out about the men to whom Marty Krugman had passed on Werner's plan. Frank Menna had told McDonald that all he had done was transmit Werner's request to his bookmaker boss, Krugman. Menna said that Krugman took over from there. Krugman was one of the only links McDonald knew of directly connected to the robbery. Krugman had been an airport bookmaker, and he had also been known to be under the mob's protection. He had been associated with the Burke crew and had been seen frequenting Robert's Lounge. As it worked out, Krugman disappeared just before McDonald and the FBI had started to look for him. By then he was presumed dead.

  Two weeks later, on February 10, Theresa Ferrara, a stunning, twenty-seven-year-old beautician, got an emergency call from a friend and ran out of her beauty shop in Bellmore, Long Island, to meet someone in a nearby diner. Ferrara had apparently been concerned enough about the meeting to have asked her nineteen-year-old niece, Maria Sanacore, to come looking for her at the diner if she had not returned in fifteen minutes. Ferrara left her bag, keys, and coat behind. "I have a chance to make ten thousand dollars," she told her cousin as she raced out of the door. She was never seen again.

  The Nassau police began a routine missing-persons investigation. They discovered that Ferrara had recently moved to a thousand-dollar-a-month apartment; when the rental agent gave them her previous address, it turned out that she and Tommy DeSimone had lived in the same two-family house in Ozone Park. On May 18 a female torso was found in the waters off Barnegat Inlet, near Toms River, New Jersey. An autopsy was performed at the Toms River Community Hospital, where comparison X-rays were used to positively identify the body as that of Theresa Ferrara.

  By the time Lou Werner went to trial in April, five possible witnesses had either been murdered or had disappeared, and McDonald had assigned round-the-clock protection to all of the survivors he planned to use in court. Gruenewald testified that he and Werner had concocted the plan together and that Werner had recruited the robbers behind his back. The barroom rowdy whom Gruenewald had first approached to do the robbery testified that Gruenewald had gone over the plans and told him that he would have to get the information about bypassing the alarms from Lou Werner. Even Janet Barbieri, Werner's girl friend, wound up reluctantly testifying that Werner had boasted to her that he had been responsible for the robbery.

  On May 16, after a ten-day trial, Lou Werner was found guilty of helping to plan and carry out the Lufthansa robbery. He was the only person charged with the robbery and was facing twenty-five years' imprisonment. If there was any possibility of finally getting Lou Werner to talk, it was now. Werner had refused to talk in order to take his chances at trial. If he had been acquitted he would have gone free and would have been able to keep whatever money he had earned from the robbery. But Werner was convicted, and unless he wanted to spend the next twenty-five years in prison, he was going to have to cooperate.

  Although McDonald did not know it at the time, Werner had met with only one member of Jimmy Burke's gang-Joe Buddha Manri. Manri had been sent by Jimmy to check out Werner's plan and had huddled over it in the parking lot of the Kennedy Airport Diner. Manri had left eighty-five thousand dollars in two packages at the airport motel for Werner. Had Werner chosen to cooperate, he could have implicated Manri, and only Manri.

  The afternoon he was convicted, Lou Werner was taken back to the federal prison to await sentencing. He was held on the third floor, the detention area reserved for prisoners whose lives were in danger or who had decided to talk. Jimmy Burke, who had finally been picked up on April 13 for parole violation, was being held in the same prison. He was visited after the trial by one of his lawyers, who said that Werner had been convicted, was facing heavy time, and was in protective custody.

  Later that night a radio car from the 63rd Precinct in Brooklyn found the bodies of Joseph "Joe Buddha" Manri, forty-seven, of Ozone Park, and Robert "Frenchy" McMahon, forty-two, of Wantagh, Long Island, slumped in the front seat of a two-door 1973 blue Buick parked at the corner of Schenectady Avenue and Avenue M, in the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn. Each man had been killed with a single shot from a.44 caliber gun in the back of the head. Now Manri was dead and Lou Werner's only possible ticket out of jail was gone.

  Nineteen

  "On the day I finally got arrested my friends and family were driving me crazy. I was working such long hours that I was snorting about a gram of coke a day just to keep all the insanity together. My partner, Bobby Germaine, and I were getting our stuff from Charlie the Jap, who's been a junk guy all his life, and we were going crazy trying to keep it a secret from Paulie Vario. Paulie had been yelling about me getting involved with junk ever since I got out of the can, but meanwhile he's not coming up with too much for me to live on.

  "Jimmy Burke was laying low ever since Lufthansa, and I couldn't earn like before with him. Anyway, I'm getting too old for sticking up trucks. Bill Arico had been caught on a jewelry heist, and I had been supporting his wife, Joan, and his two kids until he was able to escape from Riker's with a jeweler's saw I got for Joan to give him. Two of the Boston College basketball players I was paying screwed up on another game and there was hell to pay.

  "Meanwhile the FBI had been to the house looking for some guns. They had a warrant and they were gentlemen. They waited until the kids went to school. They went through everything, but I had managed to get most of the pieces out just the week before. There was one.9 millimeter pistol in the bedroom bureau, and Karen knew enough to ask if she could get dressed. They said okay, and she went upstairs and shoved the gun into her panties. Later she complained because the thing was so goddamn cold.

  "On top of all this there's my girl friend Robin. The truth is I should have gotten rid of Robin, but she was working with me on the dope. I used her place to store and cut the stuff. She sold a little too, but mostly she was her own best customer. And every time I went over there she wanted to have a talk about the relationship.

  "I was under so much pressure that the day I got pinched almost came as a relief. I must have left the house about seven in the morning. I was going to pick up my brother Michael at New York Hospital. He was being treated for his spina bifida. On the way to the hospital I planned to drop by Jimmy's house. Jimmy had ordered some guns from a guy I had been doing business with in a Connecticut armory. The guy had dropped off Jimmy's guns at my house the night before. Jimmy had some thirty-two-caliber silencers, and he wanted guns to go along with his silencers. Here's Jimmy, heat all over him from Lufthansa, on parole, just like me, and he's looking to buy guns for himself. Bobby Germaine wanted some guns too. He said he'd take whatever Jimmy didn't take. Germaine, you must understand, was on the lam in six different jurisdictions, was pretending to be a freelance writer-he even had a typewriter all set up with paper-and already had an arsenal of guns and shotguns stashed all over his place. He didn't need those guns any more than Jimmy did, but those are the kinds of gun nuts I'm dealing with at the time.

  "I figured I'd stop off at Jimmy's house, drop off the guns, then drive into the city and pick up my brother at the hospital and drive him back to my house. I threw the guns in the trunk of the car, and I heard this helicop
ter. I looked up and saw it. It was hovering right over my head and it was red. You notice a red helicopter over your house at seven o'clock Sunday morning. I got in the car and drove toward Jimmy's house in Howard Beach. For a while I noticed that the copter seemed to be following me, but by the time I got near his house on Cross Bay Boulevard it was gone.

  "Jimmy was already awake. He was waiting in the doorway like a kid at Christmas. He came out, and he started to look at the guns before we got into his foyer. I reminded him about the heat. I told him about the helicopter. He looked at me like I was nuts. There he was taking guns out on the sidewalk and looking at me like I'm nuts. But I saw that he was impatient. He wanted to see the guns. When we got into the foyer he ripped open the paper bag, took one look at the guns and screamed, 'Fuck! These are no good! My silencers won't fit these things. I don't want these things.' All of a sudden I knew he didn't want to pay me for the guns. All of a sudden I knew I was stuck a few hundred. I'd bought the damn things for him. He had wanted them, not me. And now I was stuck. I didn't say anything.

  "I'd known Jimmy for over twenty years, but I had never seen him crazier than he had been since Lufthansa. Ever since the stickup he had been getting progressively worse, and I knew better than to argue with him in the morning. I knew that at least eight of the guys who'd done the Lufthansa job were dead, and I knew the only reason they were gone was because they'd started bothering Jimmy about the money. Jimmy had gone crazy with the money. And sometimes I think even he knew it. I remember we were driving around one day on this or that, and he's sort of half talking, and he blurts out that sometimes he thinks that the money is cursed. That's the word he used-'cursed.'

  "The way Jimmy saw it, Marty, or Stacks, or Frenchy McMahon, or Joe Buddha, or whoever wanted his share of the Lufthansa money was taking the dough out of Jimmy's pocket. That was Jimmy's money. Anyone trying to take some of that money made Jimmy feel like they were trying to rob him. For Jimmy, if it was a matter of giving a guy a quarter of a million bucks or two behind the ear, it was no contest. It was a time when you didn't argue with Jimmy. You never knew what he'd do. So I just repacked the guns in the ripped bag and turned around and left. He was so disappointed and pissed he didn't even say goodbye.

  "Now 1 was on the way to the hospital. I still had the guns in the trunk of the car, and I was late for picking up my brother. I must have been doing eighty miles an hour. I looked up from the Long Island Expressway and I saw the helicopter. I couldn't believe it'd picked me up again. I was driving along and looking for the plane, and as I sailed over the rise before heading toward the Midtown Tunnel entrance I saw a pile of cars stacked up every which way on the road. It's curb to curb, and I couldn't stop. I had a helicopter on my head, a trunk full of guns, and I was sailing along into a twenty-car pileup.

  "I started to stand on the brakes. I pulled the emergency. And I still wasn't stopping. I cut the wheel into the curb and began scraping my way to a halt. I could smell the burning. I began to slow down and finally stopped just inches from the pileup. I was shaking. Finally they cleared the mess away, and when I got to the hospital, my brother's doctor took one look at me and wanted me to get in bed. I explained that I had almost gotten into an accident and that I had been partying all night, and he took mercy and gave me ten milligrams of Valium. I put my brother in the car and we headed home. My plan was to drop off my brother at the house and pick up Karen. Michael was having dinner with us.

  "On our way back to my house I looked out the car window, and what do I see but the red helicopter. I watched it for a while and then I asked my brother, 'Is that helicopter following us?' He looked at me as though I'm on acid. But there it was, hanging in the air. As we drove toward the house the helicopter stayed with us, but even then my brother didn't seem to think that much about it. If it's anybody, I thought, it's got to be the feds. The treasury guys must still be looking for the guns. It has to be the feds. Only the feds have money to burn on helicopters.

  "I was cooking dinner that night. I had to start braising the beef, pork butt, and veal shanks for the ragu tomato sauce. It's Michael's favorite. I was making ziti with meat gravy, and I'm planning to roast some peppers over the flames, and I was putting on some string beans with olive oil and garlic, and I had got some beautiful milk-white veal cutlets, cut just right, that I was going to fry up before dinner as an appetizer.

  "Karen and I were going over to Bobby Germaine's to give him the guns Jimmy didn't want and to pick up some money he had for me. I also had to get some heroin from him so that Judy Wicks, one of my couriers, would be able to fly out to Pittsburgh later that night with a half a kilo. Judy, who was a friend of the family, was already at my house when my brother and I got there. She looked like a Kansas preacher's daughter. That, of course, was what made her such a good courier. Skinny, dirty-blond hair, dumb pink-and-blue hat and crummy Dacron clothes out of the Sears catalogue. Sometimes, with heavy loads, she'd borrow a baby for the trip. She looked so pathetic that the only people who ever stopped her were Travelers Aid social workers looking to stir up business. Judy was going to hang around the house until I got back with the stuff. Then, after we had all had dinner, I was going to drive her to the airport for her flight to Pittsburgh.

  "I was home for about an hour. I braised the meat. I squeezed the tomatoes through the colander-I don't like the seeds. I kept looking out the window. The helicopter was gone. I waited a while and listened for the noise. It seemed to have stopped. I asked Michael to watch the sauce, and Karen and I started for Germaine's. We were halfway there when I noticed the red helicopter again. But now it was really close. I could almost see the guy sticking his head out the window. I didn't want to take the copter to Germaine's hideout. And I sure didn't like driving around with Jimmy's guns in the trunk of the car. Karen and I weren't very far from my mother's, so I decided to drop by for a minute. Karen didn't ask any questions. I knew there was some overhead cover in my mother's carport, so I could unload the guns without being seen from above. When we got to my mother's house I took the guns out of the trunk and put them in her garbage cans. I sent Karen inside to tell her not to touch anything outside the house or around the garbage cans, no matter what. The minute I got rid of the guns I felt better. So I decided to shake the helicopter and go over to Germaine's and get the money and dope.

  "I told Karen, 'Let's go shopping.' We drove to a giant shopping mall, parked the car, and went inside.

  I was ready to spend a couple of hours walking around. Also, I wanted to call Bobby Germaine and tell him about the heat. I went to a phone booth in the mall and called him. I told him I wasn't coming with the guns. I said, 'I'm being followed, for Chrissake. I've had a helicopter following me all day.' He said I was crazy, I was paranoid. By four o'clock, when we left the shopping mall, the helicopter was gone. It must have run out of gas. Karen and I got in the car and drove back to my mother's. Still no helicopter. I looked for a land tail. Nothing.

  "I got the guns from my mother's garbage. I told Karen we were going to Bobby Germaine's but we were taking the long way. She started to drive and drive and drive. We went from town to town. Up streets. Into cul de sacs. We made U-turns. We speeded up and then suddenly pulled over to the curb and stopped. Went through lights. The whole bit. I was checking cars and watching license plates from the rear seat. Nothing.

  "Finally we got to Germaine's. He had the garden apartment in a house in Commack. When I got there I began to feel better. 'You see? Didn't I tell you you're paranoid?' Germaine said. We all laughed. I snorted some more coke, and soon it got me back together. Then Germaine gave me the package of heroin I was going to give to Judy.

  "Now I've got to get home to get the package ready to give to Judy for the trip. I also had to get over to my girl friend Robin's house and give the package a whack with some quinine. I hadn't seen Robin in a few days, and I knew she was going to want me to hang around longer than I wanted to. I had the cooking to finish, and I had to get Judy ready for her trip, and I knew Rob
in was going to get on my ass. It was going to be awful. The phone rang. It was Robin. Germaine gave me a signal so Karen didn't know who was calling. Robin wanted to know when I'd be getting to her place. I said in about an hour. Could I stay for dinner? We'll talk about it later, I said. Now I know it's not going to be awful, it's going to be worse than awful. Then I called Judy at my house. I wanted her to know I had the stuff and that she would be making the trip to Pittsburgh. I said, 'You know what you've got to do?' She says, 'Yeah.' Judy had to make plane reservations to go to Pittsburgh that night with the dope. I said, 'You know where to go?' 'Yeah, yeah,' she said. 'You know who to call?' I asked her. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' she said.

  "Then I told her to leave my house and go to a phone booth and make all the calls. She made a noise like I was some kind of idiot picking on her about things she already knew. 'Just make sure you leave the house,' I said. 'Don't use the house phone,' I said. So I hung up and what did she do? She used the phone in my house. She used the phone to make the reservations for Pittsburgh and to call Paul Mazzei and tell him when she'll be arriving. Now the cops know everything. They know that a package is leaving from my house for the airport, and they even have the time and the flight number. I'm a pig on the way to slaughter and I don't know it.

  "As soon as I got back home I started cooking. I had a few hours until Judy's flight, and I had told my brother to keep an eye on the ragu. All day long the guy had been watching helicopters and tomato sauce. I asked Judy if she had called from the outside. There had been enough heat around for me not to trust my phones at all. If she had told me the truth I might have changed everything. I could have canceled the trip. I could have hidden the junk. But instead she got real annoyed at my question. 'Of course,' she said with a humph. I left everything at my house, with Karen in charge, and I drove over to Robin's with the dope. I wanted to mix it once and get back to the meat gravy, but now Robin was pissed. She wanted a conversation about why we're not seeing enough of each other. We started arguing and she's screaming, and I'm mixing heroin, and she's slamming things, and I got out of the house minutes before she started throwing things.