Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (17 page)

As we talked, even Paulie saw that Linda had no idea who we were. And, more important, she didn’t care. By now Paulie was looking to go home. He was bored. Before we left I told Linda that I was a CP A. She believed me for weeks. She believed that I was a CP A and that Paulie was a fat, old, crazy fuck.

After that I started seeing Linda almost every day. She was fun. Whenever I would show up, she was happy. There were no strings attached. I was living a crazy life and she went right along with me. No bullshit. No hassle. By now Karen was used to my not getting home some nights, and Linda and I were having a great time. Three or four nights a week we’re out. She begins screwing up at work. She’s not getting to the store until after eleven in the morning. She’s having a ball, but Paul Stewart, her boss, started to get pissed. One day he yelled at her, so I went over to straighten him out. I just abused him a little. I didn’t want to hurt him or anything. But the next time I call her, instead of putting her on the phone, Stewart hangs up. I called back. He hangs up again. That was it. Now I’m hot. I grabbed Jimmy, who was at the bar, and said, “Let’s go!” This time I was going to do more than just threaten him a little bit. I wanted to loosen his head. When he saw us coming he started to run, but we got him in the back of the store and slapped him around a little bit. “Hang up on me, you fuck?” And I started to tie the telephone cord around his neck. He’s begging and yelling and the customers are screaming to let him go.

Next thing I know there’s a beef. We had a sitdown with the guy’s partner, Vinnie Aloi, and Vinnie’s father, Buster. I had Paulie at the table, and Jimmy was my witness. Buster started right out kissing me. The old man had loved Jimmy and me ever since we gave him a sixty-thousand share out of Air France. Buster started right away begging me not to kill the guy. He said the guy fronted for his son. I could see Vinnie Aloi sitting there hating me. The old man said Vinnie got a paycheck out of the place and had his cars registered there.

Big-shot me, I pretended I was thinking about it--like I had any intention of doing anything to the guy. I didn’t care, it was already out of my system. But I played it out, and I agreed, for Buster’s sake, that I wouldn’t kill the rat bastard. Next thing I know, Stewart comes out of the kitchen. They had him waiting in there during the sit-down. He’s shaking, and right away he apologizes to me in front of everybody. He started begging and crying. He swore that he didn’t know who I was with and that he’d do anything he could to make up for the insult.

Now Linda doesn’t even have to go to work. We started seeing more of each other. Pretty soon I was living two lives. I set Linda up in an apartment around the comer from The Suite. I’d get home three or four nights a week, and I’d usually take Karen out to a show or club on Saturday night too. Karen always looked forward to Saturday nights. The rest of the week she was usually busy with the kids and I did my bouncing with the crew and took Linda along. Everybody got to know her. Linda became a part of my life

LINDA: I first met Henry when Peter Vario started to see my roommate, Veralynn. Henry and I met, and we just hit it off. We both liked to laugh and to enjoy ourselves. He was a very sweet guy. He was kind. I could see the way he did things for people without taking credit and without even letting them know what he did.

I think I was his escape, and that wasn’t so terrible. He was always under tremendous pressure. He and Karen were always fighting. They couldn’t say two words to each other without a war. Every time he had a fight with her he’d come over to see me. Once she threw away all their car keys, and he got on a bike and had to peddle four miles to my place. Karen was a very strong, demanding person. She put a lot of pressure on him. When they got married, for instance, she had him convert. He was twenty or twenty-one at the time, and she made him get circumcised. It was horrible. He was walking around with a diaper for a month.

He was very different from the guys he hung around with. He was a taming influence. He used to be able to get them to do normal things. When we first took the apartment near The Suite, for instance, the furniture store wouldn’t deliver my stuff immediately, so Henry got Jimmy and Tommy and a truck, and they all went to the store in Hempstead on a Saturday and picked up the stuff themselves.

They were like big, noisy kids. That’s what they reminded me of. Always laughing. Always looking to have fun. Especially Jimmy. I knew him as “Burkey” back then. I never heard anybody call him “Jimmy the Gent. ” He was the biggest kid of them all. He loved water fights. At Robert’s Lounge or The Suite he would rig up pails of water, and when someone walked in the door, he’d dump the buckets all over their heads. Robert’s was incredible. It was like a clubhouse for high school kids, except they had a terrazzo floor in part of the basement and a huge barbecue in the backyard. There were cherubs and sconces all over the walls. Tommy had an apartment on the second floor. Paul loved to cook, and everyone was always trying this or trying that and complaining that he put in too much salt or not enough garlic.

Henry and I went out for a long time, and I felt I had become a part of his life and close to his friends and their families. I understood he had the children. I knew it was hard for him to leave. But I loved being with him so much, it was worth it to me. I went from week to week and month to month, and there was always the thought that maybe this time he would stay and not go back.

The holidays were the worst. Christmas. New Year’s. They were awful. I was always alone. Waiting for him to get out of his house and meet me for half a date. He was always late, and lots of times he never came. He’d make sneak phone calls, and that just made me madder. A couple of times he’d send me away just before the holidays. He’d book me on a plane to Vegas or the Caribbean and say he’d meet me on Christmas Day or right after he took care of his kids. I’d go with some of the other girls. I’d go with Tommy’s sister, who was also seeing a married guy. When he wouldn’t show up I’d get so mad that I’d stay an extra week and run his bill sky-high.

But meanwhile I was usually with him and with his friends and we were all very close. After a while everything began to feel almost normal.

KAREN: I first began to suspect that Henry might have been fooling around just before he was sent to Riker’s Island on an earlier cigarette case. I knew, because I was just pregnant with Ruth, and I felt that something was wrong. I suppose there had already been a million clues, but under the circumstances, who was looking? I had to get hit with it in the face before I wanted to look. During that summer a girl friend of mine called and said she and her husband were driving past The Suite when they saw us in the doorway next to the restaurant. She said she was going to stop, but her husband said that he thought we were having a real fight, and so they just kept on going. I didn’t say anything to my friend, but I knew I was never in any doorway fighting with my husband. I knew it had to be somebody else.

And then there were the couple of times when I’d call The Suite and ask for Henry without saying who I was. Once or twice whoever answered the phone said, “I’ll get him, Lin,” or “Hold on, Lin. ” Lin? Who’s Lin?

Every time I brought this up to Henry it would create a fight. He’d get angry and start yelling that I was a witch, and sometimes he’d just walk out and I wouldn’t hear from him for a day or two. It was very frustrating. I would yell and accuse him, and he’d act like he couldn’t hear me and just go about the house packing his bag. He said I was making stuff up and that he had enough headaches without me driving him crazy. But he never denied anything, he just got mad.

That’s why I made us move back from Island Park to Queens. After the Nassau DA raided the pizzeria and arrested Raymond Montemurro in a roundup, I spotted two men in a car taking pictures of me and the kids. That was all the excuse I needed. That night I told Henry about the photographers. I said that Nassau was too hot. He agreed. Within weeks we were living just three miles from The Suite in a three-bedroom apartment with a terrace in Rego Park.

The Suite was Henry’s office, and I began to drop in there for an hour or so every couple of days. I said I wanted to keep an eye on the books, but I was keeping an eye on everything. There were lots of people hanging around the place all the time. There was one girl, Linda, who worked in the bridal shop nearby, and she’d come in for lunch and stay. She was such a sad sack that I never put two and two together. I never picked her. I remember the first time I saw her was at a Halloween party in a friend’s apartment. I was there with Henry, and she was pretending to be with the host’s brother. Again she was crying her eyes out. She followed me into the bathroom at the party, and I told her if anybody was giving her this much trouble, she should leave him. She was still crying. I was so dumb I gave her a Kleenex.

But she kept right on mooning around The Suite. Lots of nights when Henry and I were going out, she’d be at the bar crying in her drink. I just thought she was a drunk. Little did I know that she was crying because Henry was going home with me.

One day the Chinese chef finally straightened me out. I had called the place looking for Henry, and again somebody called me “Lin. ” This time I went tearing over there. I must have been hysterical. I had Judy with me, and I was as big as a house with Ruth. And I was mad. I went right to the kitchen and I grabbed the poor chef. He hardly spoke English. I wanted to know who Lin was. He kept saying there wasn’t any Lin. “No Lin, no Lin!” he kept saying. “Linda is Lin! Linda is Lin!”

I was a wild woman. I got her address from the kitchen, because they used to send food around to her apartment. She never cooked or cleaned. I snatched up the baby and went to her building. She buzzed me in from downstairs, not knowing who I was, but when I got to her apartment and told her we had to talk, she pretended she wasn’t home. She wouldn’t open her door. I rang her bell. She still wouldn’t open. I rang her bell continuously for two hours, and she kept on hiding.

LINDA: I’ve got a crazy person screaming at the door. She was hysterical. She thought Henry was in my apartment. She kept yelling that she could hear him going out the fire escape. I didn’t even have a fire escape. She was desperate to keep him, and she was driving him crazy.

She knew something was up. That’s why she started hanging around all the time, but Henry and I still got away. Once, just before she tried to break down my door, Henry took me to Nassau, in the Bahamas. He wanted to sneak Paulie out of the country for a long weekend just before the old guy had to go to jail for a while.

Henry got Paulie and his wife phony papers, and we had a great time. Paulie was so nervous away from his own world that he wouldn’t leave us for a second. He’s got so much money, but he’s never been anywhere or done anything. Paulie lived through Henry.

We went to the casino on Paradise Island and Paulie and Henry had a credit line. We caught Billy Daniels at LaConcha and became his guests. We spent the night looking for a hooker for him.

When we got back, customs decided to go through my luggage and clothes with a full search. Paulie and Henry were on the floor in hysterics.

I think Karen heard about all this and that’s why she was hanging around and why she decided to make her move. She was losing him. He was taking me and not her away with Paulie. She was desperate, and she could ring my bell until her finger turned blue.

HENRY: That night I got home late. Everything looked normal. The baby was in bed. I was a little loaded and tired. Karen was doing some stuff around the house. I got in bed and collapsed. I must have been half asleep when I felt this pressure on my arms and shoulders. I was groggy and smashed and I opened my eyes just a bit and saw that Karen was straddling me in the bed. She had a thirty-eight aimed right between my eyes. I always kept a loaded gun in the bedroom closet and I knew it worked. I could see the bullets in the cylinder. She was shaking and panting. She pulled back the hammer on the gun. She had me pinned. I sobered up immediately. She was screaming about Linda and Lin and the restaurant and the chef, and I can feel she’s getting hysterical.

I started talking. I thought maybe somehow she was in some control of herself. She hadn’t said a word when I got home. She’d kept it all in until now. I thought maybe she was just being slick. So I started talking to her, and after a while I managed to move her hand very gently and got the gun away. Now I was mad. I was so mad I belted her. I didn’t need this bullshit. I had to worry about getting shot by wiseguys; I didn’t have to worry about getting shot by my wife. I told her I’d be back when she calmed down. I packed a bag and moved in with Linda for a couple of weeks. It was the first of a dozen times over the next few years when I moved out, and there were a couple of times when Karen moved out on me.

KAREN: That first night when I got the gun I was really mad. I felt used. At first I thought, Oh, boy, am I going to scare him! But once I had the gun in my hand my palm began to sweat. I felt so powerful it was frightening. The gun was heavy. I’d never held a gun that heavy before, but once I had it I began to feel that I could use it. I felt that I could have killed him. I put it between his eyes. I called his name softly. Like I was waking him up from a nap. He opened his eyes, slowly. Then I cocked the gun. I pulled back the hammer. I wanted him to know how desperate I had become. But still I couldn’t hurt him. How could I hurt him? I couldn’t even bring myself to leave him.

The truth was no matter how bad I felt, I was still very, very attracted to him. He could be incredible. He had a side that was so nice you wanted to bottle it. He was sweet, considerate, sincere, soft. He had no sharp edges. He wasn’t like the other guys around him. He was young, and I was just attracted. My sisters used to say I was obsessed with him, because whenever he and I split up for a few days or even a couple of weeks, I never talked about anything else. Also, whenever we got back together after a brief separation, he always swore it was forever. No more Linda! I wanted to believe him. I think he wanted to believe it.