Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

by Nicholas Pileggi

  But my family, and mostly my mother, had always been telling me what to do. All my life her nudging had driven me crazy. She was one of those smothering people. She did it out of love, but she smothered you anyway. My mother is one of those people who has got to be in control of everything twenty-four hours a day. I had this little notion in the back of my mind that maybe if we had a new life and new names and new everything it wouldn't be too bad. I would be really independent for the first time in my life. If Henry and I were to go away and get new names and new identities, I'd be able to breathe and take over my own life.

  I thought a lot of things might change. There'd be no more Jimmys and no more drugs and no more Robins. Our lives would have to be different. Henry would live normally for the first time in his life. He'd be home at night. We would have regular friends. It could be like wiping everything clean.

  * * *

  On May 27, 1980, Henry Hill signed an agreement with the United States Department of Justice Organized Crime Strike Force (Eastern District of New York) that read:

  ____________________

  This will serve to confirm the agreement reached between Henry Hill and the Organized Crime Strike Force for the Eastern District of New York.

  This office is conducting an investigation of possible illegal activities on the part of James Burke, Angelo Sepe and others in connection with the theft of several million dollars in cash and jewelry from the Lufthansa Cargo Building at John F. Kennedy Airport. You have agreed to inform officials of the Department of Justice of everything you know concerning the above-mentioned crimes and any other criminal activity in which James Burke and Angelo Sepe have participated. In addition, you have agreed to testify, if called, before all federal grand and petit juries hearing these matters.

  It is understood that no information or testimony given by you (both before and after the making of this agreement), or evidence derived from information or testimony given by you will be used against you in any criminal proceeding other than as indicated below. As you know, at the present time, you are under investigation for your involvement in the robbery at the Lufthansa Cargo Building. It is understood that this office will forgo any prosecution of you which could arise out of this matter in light of your cooperation in these matters. In the event that any other law enforcement authorities contemplate prosecuting you in connection with your involvement in the Lufthansa robbery we will recommend they not do so. In addition, it is understood that this office will forgo any federal prosecution of you which could arise out of a narcotics investigation presently being conducted by the Nassau County District Attorney's Office and in connection with which you were arrested.

  It is understood that in the event that you are prosecuted by any other law enforcement authorities in connection with any violation of the law, this office will bring to the attention of the prosecuting authorities the cooperation which you furnished in connection with this agreement.

  It is further understood that this office will seek to place you in the Federal Witness Protection Program along with your wife and children and any other associates who become in need of protection as a result of your cooperation with this office.

  This understanding is predicated upon your complete cooperation with the Government including the immediate, full and truthful disclosure of all information in your possession which is relevant to these matters. This agreement will not prevent the Government from prosecuting you for perjury should it be discovered that you have given false testimony in connection with these matters. In addition, in the event that you do not fully comply with all the other terms of this understanding (immediate, full and truthful disclosure, testimony, etc.), this agreement will be nullified. Should this occur, the Government will be free to prosecute you with regard to any and all violations of the federal criminal law in which you may have participated, and to use against you any and all statements made by you and testimony you have given prior and subsequent to the date of this agreement.

  ____________________

  Henry: The hardest thing for me was leaving the life I was running away from. Even at the end, with all the threats I was getting and all the time I was facing behind the wall, I still loved the life.

  We walked in a room and the place stopped. Everyone knew who we were, and we were treated like movie stars with muscle. We had it all and it was all free. Truckloads of swag. Fur coats, televisions, clothes-all for the asking. We used Jimmy's hijack drops like department stores. Our wives, mothers, kids, everybody rode along. I had paper bags filled with jewelry stashed in the kitchen and a sugar bowl full of coke next to the bed. Anything I wanted was only a phone call away. Free rented cars under phony names and the keys to a dozen hideout apartments we shared. I would bet thirty and forty grand over a weekend and then either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies. It didn't matter. When I was broke I just went out and robbed some more.

  We ran everything. We paid the lawyers. We paid the cops. Everybody had their hands out. We walked out laughing. We had the best of everything. In Vegas and Atlantic City somebody always knew someone. People would come over and offer us shows, dinners, suites.

  And now all that is over, and that's the hardest part. Today everything is very different. No more action. I have to wait around like everyone else. I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a shnook.

  Epilogue

  When Henry Hill joined the Federal Witness Program he became one of forty-four hundred other accused criminals who chose to testify against their former associates and disappear rather than stand trial. As far as Henry Hill was concerned, entering the Justice Department's $25-million-a-year program was the only option he had.

  Ed McDonald soon realized that Henry Hill had casually committed so many crimes himself that he sometimes failed to recognize that he had even done so. One day, for example, while being asked about the Lufthansa robbery, Henry said he had been in Boston. It was the third or fourth time he had mentioned Boston, so McDonald finally asked what Henry was doing there. Henry answered matter-of-factly that he had been bribing Boston College basketball players in a point-shaving scheme at the time and had had to keep everyone in line. "I played for the Boston College freshman team," said McDonald. "I had been to a few of the games Henry had fixed. It was my school. I almost went across the table at him, but then I realized that to guys like Hill it was just a part of doing business. To Henry shaving points on college basketball wasn't even illegal. He had never even thought to mention it. I came to realize Henry didn't have too much school spirit. He had never rooted for anything outside of a point spread in his life."

  It is safe to say that the Federal Witness Program got its money's worth out of Henry Hill. He took the stand and testified with such detached authenticity- he barely looked at the defendants against whom he appeared-that juries came back with one conviction after another. His testimony helped get Paul Mazzei seven years on drug charges, and his testimony in the basketball point-shaving case, which McDonald insisted upon prosecuting himself, got the twenty-six-year-old Rick Kuhn ten years, the stiffest sentence ever received by a college player convicted of fixing basketball scores. Hill's cofixer Tony Perla was sentenced to ten years and Perla's brother Rocco to four. Rich Perry, one of the mob bookies known as "the fixer," pleaded guilty to a gambling conspiracy when he realized Henry would testify against him, and got away with a one-year sentence. Henry helped federal marshals track down and recapture Bill Arico, the suspected international hit man. Philip Basile, the Long Island disco owner, was sentenced to five years' probation and a $250,000 fine for arranging the no-show job Hill used to get early parole.

  Henry even went on tour. Surrounded by marshals and accompanied by Jerry D. Bernstein, the Strike Force prosecutor who got the Basile conviction, he went to testify in Phoenix, Arizona, in connection with the alleged organized-crime links of a major liquor wholesaler that had been about to become the largest wine and liquor distributor in the state.
On the eve of Henry's taking the stand, however, the company withdrew its application for licensing and agreed to withdraw from doing further business in the state.

  On February 6, 1984, Henry took the stand against Paul Vario. Vario was being tried for having assisted Henry to gain early release from Allenwood by helping him get his no-show job. After a three-day trial, Paul Vario was found guilty of conspiring to commit fraud. On April 3, 1984, he was sentenced to four years and fined ten thousand dollars. After his appeals were exhausted, Vario entered a federal prison in Springfield, Missouri.

  Later that year Henry took the stand against Jimmy Burke in connection with the murder of Richie Eaton. Henry testified that Jimmy had told him he killed Eaton over a $250,000 cocaine deal. When pressed on the matter by Burke's attorney, Henry stared directly at Jimmy and said that when he had asked Jimmy about Eaton, Jimmy said, "Don't worry about him anymore, I whacked the fucking swindler out." On February 19, 1985, Jimmy Burke was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for the murder of Richie Eaton.

  Henry was never able to help McDonald crack Lufthansa-the case that essentially had gotten Henry into the witness program in the first place. By the time McDonald had Henry as a witness on Lufthansa, the people who could trace the robbery back to Jimmy were all dead. Except for Henry and Jimmy, there was no one left. Stacks Edwards, Marty Krugman, Richie Eaton, Tommy DeSimone, Terry Ferrara, Joe Manri, Frenchy McMahon, Paolo LiCastri, Louie and Joanna Cafora, Anthony Stabile, and even Angelo Sepe and his new girl friend, nineteen-year-old Joanne Lombardo. And during Henry's first year in the program, Germaine's twenty-year-old son, Robert junior, was shot and killed on a Queens rooftop.

  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 "stranglehold" 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.

  Nicholas Pileggi

  ***

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