Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (12 page)

In 1966, at the age of twenty-three, Henry Hill went on his first hijacking. It was not a true hijacking in that the trucks were parked in a garage rather than traveling along the road when they were robbed, but it was a first-class grade-B felony nevertheless. Jimmy Burke invited Henry along on the heist. Jimmy had found out about three cargo trucks filled with home appliances that were being stored over the weekend in one of the freight garages just outside the airport. He also had a buyer, a friend of Tuddy Vario’s, who was going to pay five thousand dollars per truck.

As always, Jimmy had great inside information. The garage had very little security, and on Friday nights there was only one elderly watchman on duty. His job was mostly to prevent vandalism by youngsters. On the night of the robbery Henry had no difficulty getting the watchman to open the gate. He simply told the man that he had left his paycheck in one of the trucks. The moment the gate swung open, Henry poked his finger in the man’s back. He then tied the watchman to a chair in a nearby shack. Jimmy knew exactly where the keys were kept and the trucks parked. Within minutes Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy DeSimone were driving the trucks through the industrial roads of Canarsie on their way to Flatlands Avenue, where Tuddy and the fence were waiting. It was simple and sweet. It was the easiest five grand Henry had ever earned. Within an hour he and Jimmy and Tommy were on their way to Vegas for the weekend. Earlier that day Jimmy had made reservations for the three of them in phony names.

“Most of the loads hijacked were sold before they were even robbed. They were hijacks to order. We knew what we wanted and we knew where it was going before the job was done. We used to get two or three jobs a week. Sometimes we’d get two a day if we wanted money bad. We’d get up in the morning and go to Robert’s, a bar that Jimmy used to own on Lefferts Boulevard, in South Ozone Park. Robert’s was perfect. There were three card tables, a casino craps table, and enough bookmakers and loan sharks to cover all the action in town. There were barmaids who drank Sambuca in the morning. There was ‘Stacks’ Edwards, a black credit-card booster who wanted to join the ‘May-fia. ’ He played a blues guitar on weekends. It was a hangout for truck drivers, freight handlers, cargo dispatchers, and backfield airport workers who loved the action and could drop their Friday paycheck before Saturday morning. But a tip on good cargo loads could make up for a lot of paychecks and buy back a lot of IOUs. Robert’s was also convenient. It was next to the Van Wyck Expressway and just minutes from the Kennedy cargo area, Aqueduct Race Track, Paulie Vario’s new office in a trailer on Flatlands Avenue at the Bargain Auto Junkyard, and the Queens County courts, where we got our postponements.

“The customers were often legitimate retailers looking for swag. There was also a whole army of fences, who bought our loads and then sold pieces of the loads to guys who had stores or sold the swag off the backs of their trucks or at factory gates or to a whole list of customers who usually retailed the swag themselves to their relatives or to the people they worked with. We were a major industry.

“Lots of our jobs were called ‘give-ups’ -38 opposed to stickups--which meant the driver was in on it with us. For instance, you own the driver who leaves the airport with a $200,000 load of silk. An average score, but nice. Somewhere along the road he stops for coffee and accidentally leaves the keys in the ignition. When he finishes his coffee he discovers that the truck is gone, and he immediately reports the robbery to the police. The ‘give-up’ guys were the ones we always had to get Johnny Dio to protect when their bosses tried to fire them.

“The guys with the guns who did the actual hijackings usually got a fixed rate. They’d get a couple of grand just for sticking a gun in the driver’s face, whether it was a good score or lousy, whether the truck was full or empty. They were like hired guys. They didn’t share in the loot. In fact, even Jimmy, who hired most of the guys who did the stickups, didn’t share in the ultimate sale of the loot. We would usually sell pieces of the load to different buyers, wholesalers and distributors and discount-store owners, who knew the market and had the outlets where they could get near a retail price.

“On an average hijacking we’d know the truck number, what it was carrying, who was driving it, where it was going, and how to circumvent the security devices, like triple lock alarms and sirens. We usually tailed the driver until he stopped for a light. We’d make sure that he wasn’t being followed by backup security. We used two cars, one in front and one behind. At the light one of the guys--usually Tommy, Joey Allegro, or Stanley Diamond-would stick a gun in the driver’s face and put him in the car while other guys drove the truck to the drop. Tommy always carried his gun in a brown paper bag. Walking down the street, he looked like he was bringing you a sandwich instead of a thirty-eight.

“The first thing Jimmy would do with the driver was to take his driver’s license or pretend to copy his name and address. He’d make a big thing about how we knew where he lived and how we’d get him if he was too helpful in identifying us to the cops. Then, after scaring the shit out of the guy, he’d smile, tell him to relax, and then slip the fifty-dollar bill into the guy’s wallet. There was never one driver who made it to court to testify against him. There are quite a few dead ones who tried

“An average hijacking, including unloading the truck, usually took a few hours. Jimmy always had the unloading drop lined up in advance. It was usually in a legitimate warehouse or trucking company. The guy in charge of the warehouse could pretend afterward he didn’t know what was going on. Jimmy would just come in with some stuff to unload. He paid the warehouse operators fifteen hundred dollars a drop, and sometimes we had to store the stuff there overnight. Some warehouse owners were getting five grand a week from us. That’s a lot of money. We had our unloaders, who got about a hundred a day. They were local guys we knew and trusted and they worked like dogs. When the truck was empty we’d abandon it and tell the guy babysitting the driver to let him go. The drivers were usually dropped off somewhere along the Connecticut Turnpike.

“I got into hijacking because I had the customers looking for the merchandise. I was a good salesman. Early on, Jimmy told me that I should start using some of the same people who were buying my cigarettes to buy some of the swag. But I was already looking out for big buyers. I had a drugstore wholesaler who had discount stores all over Long Island. He’d take almost everything I had. Razor blades. Perfume. Cosmetics. I had a guy in the Schick razor blade factory in Connecticut who smuggled cartons of blades out for me to resell at twenty percent below the wholesale price. When that was going well, I’d make between seven hundred and a grand a week just on blades. I had a furrier who would buy truckloads of pelts top dollar. Mink. Beaver. Fox. I had Vinnie Romano, who was a union boss down at the Fulton Fish Market, who would buy all the frozen shrimp and lobster I could supply, and we could always supply the bars and restaurants with hijacked liquor at better than half the price.

It was overwhelming. None of us had ever seen opportunities for such money before. The stuff was coming in on a daily basis. Sometimes I’d go to Jimmy’s house and it looked like a department store. We had the basement of Robert’s so loaded down with stuff that there was hardly enough room to play cards. Freight foremen and cargo workers used to bring the stuff to us on a daily basis, but still we felt that we had to go out and snatch the trucks ourselves. Waiting for the loads to come to us wasn’t cooking on all bummers.

“And why not? Hijackings were so public that we used to fence the stuff right out in the open. One of the places I used to go with Jimmy and Paulie was the Bamboo Lounge, a high-class rug joint on Rockaway Parkway, right near the airport. It was owned by Sonny Bamboo, but his mother watched the register. A little old lady, she was at that register from morning till night. Sonny Bamboo’s real name was Angelo McConnach, and he was Paulie’s brother-in-law. The joint was set up to look like a movie nightclub, with zebra-striped banquettes and barstools and potted palm trees sticking up all around the place. No matter when you walked in the place it was always the middle of the night. Sonny Bamboo’s was practically a supermarket for airport swag. It was so well protected by politicians and the cops that nobody even bothered to pretend it was anything but what it was. It was like a commodities exchange for stolen goods. Outside there were big cars double-parked and inside guys were screaming and drinking and yelling about what they wanted to buy or what they needed to have stolen. Fences from all over the city used to show up in the morning. Charlie Flip ran most of the business and he used to buy and sell dozens of ‘igloos,’ or metal shipping crates, of swag. There were insurance adjusters, truckers, union delegates, wholesalers, discount-store owners, everybody who wanted to make a buck on a good deal.

“It was like an open market. There was a long list of items in demand, and you could get premiums if you grabbed the right cargo. That was another reason for going out and snatching a truck instead of waiting for some cargo guy to steal it for you. Clothing, seafood, fabrics, and cigarettes topped the list. Then came coffee, records and tapes, liquor, televisions and radios, kitchen appliances, meat, shoes, toys, jewelry and watches, on and on, all the way down to empty trucks. When stolen securities got big, we used to have Wall Street types all over the place buying up bearer bonds. They would send them overseas, where the banks didn’t know they were stolen, and then they’d use the hot bonds as collateral on loans in this country. Once the stolen bonds were accepted as collateral, nobody ever checked their serial numbers again. We’re talking about millions of dollars in collateral forever. We got robbed on those jobs. At that time we didn’t have any idea about collateralizing foreign loans. The bankers took us to the cleaners. We got pennies for the dollar. ”

During the 1960s and early 1970s hijacking was big business. Almost no one went to jail. The airlines were happy to underestimate their losses and pick up the insurance money rather than assume the cost, delays, and inconvenience of additional security. The truckers said they were powerless to fight the union, and the union insisted that the airlines were responsible because they refused to spend enough money to safeguard the drivers. To make matters more complicated, the legislators of the state of New York had never gotten around to codifying the crime of hijacking. When caught, hijackers had to be charged with other crimes, such as kidnapping, robbery, the possession of a gun, or possession of stolen property. And few of these charges ever seemed to stick.

According to a 1960s Joint New York State Legislative Committee on Crime study, at least 99. 5 percent of hijacking arrests resulted either in the charges being dismissed or in the defendants receiving small fines or probation. During one year covered by the report the committee traced 6,400 arrests for criminal possession of stolen property and found there were only 904 indictments, 225 convictions, and as few as 30 state prison commitments. A committee case study of eight defendants arrested at the time for the possession of more than $100,000 worth of stolen women’s clothing noted that each defendant was fined $2,500 and placed on probation by New York Supreme Court Judge Albert H. Bosch. The men were all part of the Robert’s Lounge crew working for Jimmy Burke and Paul Vario. During the next five years, while the eight men were still on probation. they were arrested an additional seventeen times on a variety of charges, including robbery, possession of stolen property, and burglary. But even then, and despite the fact that probation officers recommended that hearings for violation of probation be initiated, Judge Bosch continued the men on probation. He later said that he could not make a final decision concerning the violation of probation until the guilt or innocence of the defendants had been determined.

Eventually Henry was questioned by police so many times and became so familiar with the process and its loopholes that he no longer worried about getting caught. Of course he tried not to get caught. It was not profitable to get caught. You had to pay the lawyers and the bondsmen, and you had to payoff cops and witnesses and sometimes even the prosecutors and judges. But when he was caught, Henry was not particularly concerned about the addition of yet another charge to those already pending against him. What really worried him was whether his lawyer was adept enough to cluster the court appearances in such a way as to minimize the number of days Henry had to take time away from business and appear in court. Going to court and facing accusers and cops was not the harrowing experience it might be for others; for Henry and for most of his friends it was rather like going to school as kids. Occasionally they were forced to attend, but the experience left little or no impression. More time would be spent figuring out where to eat lunch than was spent on the issues before the court.

“There was no reason to worry. During the pretrial months and years you just kept throwing money at your lawyer to keep you outside long enough for you or him or one of his friends to fix the case. That’s all there was to it. You stayed outside and made as much money as you could so that you had the green to pay your way out. I’ve never been on a case where somebody wasn’t fixed. It’s just business. Usually the lawyer has the kinds of contacts that can keep you free on bail as long as you want. They can keep you from running across some hard-nosed judge who sends you inside or rushes the case along. Then you’ve got the private detectives who work for the lawyers. They are usually ex-cops, and lots of times you know them from the days when you paid them off on the streets. They have good contacts with cops, and arrangements can be worked out so that testimony or evidence is changed just a little bit, only enough to make a tiny hole through which your lawyer can help you escape. Then even if none of this works and you’ve got to go to trial, you always try to reach the jury.

“Everybody reaches the jury. It’s business and it’s easy. During the jury selection, for instance, your lawyer can find out anything he wants to know about a juror-where he works, lives, family status. That sort of personal stuff. The ‘where he works’ is what interested me mostly. Where a guy works means his job, and that always means the unions, and that’s the easiest place to make the reach. The whole crew and the lawyers and the private detectives and everyone you know are all going through the list. I know this guy. I know that guy. I know the union boss here. I know the shop steward. I know the delegate. I know a guy who works with this guy’s brother over there. Little by little you get closer and closer to the guy, until you go to someone you can trust who can go to someone he can trust, and you make the deal. No big deal. It was business. All you really wanted was to hurry it up so you could get back to the airport and steal some more. ”