Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (3 page)

“After I got my first few bucks and the nerve to go shopping without my mother, I went to Benny Field’s on Pitkin Avenue. That’s where the wiseguys bought their clothes. I came out wearing a dark-blue pinstriped, double-breasted suit with lapels so sharp you could get arrested just for flashing them. I was a kid. I was so proud. When I got home my mother took one look at me and screamed, ‘You look just like a gangster!’ I felt even better. ”

At thirteen, Henry had worked a year at the cabstand. He was a handsome youngster with a bright, open face and a dazzling smile. His thick black hair was combed straight back. His dark-brown eyes were so sharp and bright that they glittered with excitement. He was slick. He had learned how to duck under his father’s angry swats, and he was a master at slipping away from the racetrack security guards, who insisted he was too young to hang around the clubhouse, especially on school days. From a distance he almost looked like a miniature of the men he so admired. He wore an approximation of their clothes, he tried to use their street-corner hand gestures, he ate their kind of
scungilli
and squid dishes though they made him retch, and he used to sip containers of boiling, bitter black coffee even though it tasted awful and burned his lips so badly he wanted to cry. He was a cardboard wiseguy, a youngster dressed up for the mob. But he was also learning about that world, and there were no adolescent aspiring samurai or teenage Buddhist monks who took their indoctrination and apprenticeship more seriously.

Two

“I WAS AROUND the stand from morning till night, and I was learning more and more every day. By the time I was thirteen I was collecting numbers and selling fireworks. I used to get the cab drivers to buy sixpacks of beer for me, and then I’d sell them at a markup to the kids in the school yard. I was acting like a mini-fence for some of the neighborhood’s juvenile burglars. I’d front them the money and then sell the radio, portable, or box of sweaters they glommed to one of the guys around the cabstand.

“Before big-money holidays like Easter and Mother’s Day, instead of going to school I’d go. cashing’ with Johnny Mazzolla. Johnny, who lived across the street from the cabstand, was a junkie horseplayer, and every once in a while he would take me out and we’d go cashing counterfeit twenties he picked up from Beansie the counterfeiter in Ozone Park for ten cents on the dollar. We’ d go from store to store, neighborhood to neighborhood, and Johnny would wait in the car and I’d run in and buy something for a buck or two with the fake twenty. Johnny taught me how to soften up the counterfeit bills with cold coffee and cigarette ashes the night before and leave them out to dry. He taught me to pretend I was in a hurry when I went up to the cashier. He also told me never to carry more than one bill on me at a time. That way, if you get caught, you can pretend that somebody passed it off on you. He was right. It worked. I was caught a couple of times, but I could always cry my way out. I was just a kid. I’d start to yell and cry and say I had to tell my mother what happened. That she’d beat me up for losing the money. Then I’d run out of the store fast as I could and we’d be off for another neighborhood. We’d usually get a couple of days in a neighborhood-until the twenties started showing up in the local banks and they’d alert the stores. Then the cashiers would have a list of the fake bills’ serial numbers tacked up right next to the register, and we’d have to change neighborhoods. At the end of a day’s cashing we’d have so many two-dollar purchases of doughnuts and cigarettes and razor blades and soap piled up in the back of the car we couldn’t see out the rear window.

“At Christmas, Tuddy taught me how to drill holes in the trunks of junk Christmas trees he’d get for nothing, and then I’d stuff the holes with loose branches. I’d stuff so many branches into those holes that even those miserable spindly trees looked full. Then we’d sell them for premium prices, usually at night and mostly around the Euclid Avenue subway stop. It took a day or two before the branches came loose and began to fall apart. The trees would collapse even faster once they were weighed down with decorations.

“We were always scheming. Everything was a scheme. Tuddy got me a job unloading deliveries at a high-class Italian food store just so I could toss the store’s most expensive items through the windows of Tuddy’s cabs, which he had parked strategically nearby. It wasn’t that Tuddy or Lenny or Paul needed the stuff-the imported olive oil, prosciutto, or tuna fish. The Varios had more than enough money to buy the store a hundred times over. It was just that stuff that was stolen always tasted better than anything bought. I remember years later, when I was doing pretty well in the stolen credit-card business, Paulie was always asking me for stolen credit cards whenever he and his wife, Phyllis, were going out for the night. Paulie called stolen cards ‘Muldoons,’ and he always said that liquor tastes better on a Muldoon. The fact that a guy like Paul Vario, a
capo
in the Lucchese crime family, would even consider going out on a social occasion with his wife and run the risk of getting caught using a stolen card might surprise some people. But if you knew wiseguys you would know right away that the best part of the night for Paulie came from the fact that he was getting over on somebody. It wasn’t the music or the floor show or the food--and he loved food-or even that he was going out with Phyllis, who he adored. The real thrill of the night for Paulie, his biggest pleasure, was that he was robbing someone and getting away with it.

“After I was at the cabstand about six months I began helping the Varios with the card and dice games they ran. I would spend the days with Bruno Facciolo assembling the crap game tables, which were just like the ones they have in Vegas. I spent my nights steering the high rollers from various pickup spots in the neighborhood, such as the candy store under the Liberty Avenue el or Al and Evelyn’s delicatessen on Pitkin Avenue, to the apartments and storefronts where we were having games that night. A couple of times we had the games in the basement of my own school, Junior High School 149, on Euclid Avenue. Babe Vario bought the school custodian. I kept an eye out for cops, especially the plainclothesmen from the division or headquarters, who used to shake down the games in those days. I didn’t have to worry too much about the local cops. They were already on the payroll. It got so that I could always make a plainclothesman. They usually had their shirts outside their pants to cover their guns and handcuffs. They used the same dirty black Plymouths all the time. We even had their plate numbers. They had a way of walking through a block or driving a car that just said, ‘Don’t fuck with me, I’m a cop!’ I had radar for them. I knew.

“Those games were fabulous. There were usually between thirty and forty guys playing. We had rich garment-center guys. Businessmen. Restaurant owners. Bookmakers. Union guys. Doctors. Dentists. This was long before it was so easy to fly out to Vegas or drive down to Atlantic City for the night. There was also just about every wiseguy in the city coming to the games. The games themselves were actually run by professionals, but the Varios handled the money. They kept the books and the cashbox. The guys who ran the game got a flat fee or a percentage depending on the deal they cut. The people who ran the games for Paulie were the same kind of professionals who would run games in casinos or carnivals. The card games had professional dealers and the crap games had boxmen and stickmen, just like regular casinos. There were doormen-usually guys from the cabstand-who checked out everyone who got in the game, and there were loan sharks who worked for Paulie who picked up some of the action. Every pot was cut five or six percent for the house, and there was a bartender who kept the drinks coming.

“I used to make coffee and sandwich runs to AI and Evelyn’s delicatessen until I realized I could make a lot more money if I made the sandwiches myself. It was a lot of work, but I made a few more bucks. I had only been doing that a couple of weeks when Al and Evelyn caught me on the street. They took me into the store. They wanted to talk to me, they said. Business was bad, they said. Since I started making sandwiches they had lost lots of the card game business. They had a deal. If J went back to buying the sandwiches from them, they’d cut me in for five cents on every card game dollar I spent. It sounded great, but I didn’t jump at the opportunity. I wanted to savor it. I was being treated like an adult. ’Awright,’ Al says, with Evelyn frowning at him, ‘seven cents on the dollar!’ ‘Good,’ I said, but I was feeling great. It was my first kickback and I was still only thirteen.

“It was a glorious time. Wiseguys were all over the place. It was 1956, just before Apalachin, before the wiseguys began having all the trouble and Crazy Joey Gallo decided to take on his boss, Joe Profaci, in an all-out war. It was when I met the world. It was when I first met Jimmy Burke. He used to come to the card games. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five at the time, but he was already a legend. He’d walk in the door and everybody who worked in the joint would go wild. He’d give the doorman a hundred just for opening the door. He shoved hundreds in the pockets of the guys who ran the games. The bartender got a hundred just for keeping the ice cubes cold. I mean, the guy was a sport. He started out giving me five bucks every time I got him a sandwich or a beer. Two beers, two five-dollar bills. Win or lose, the guy had money on the table and people got their tips. After a while, when he got to know me a little bit and he got to know that I was with Paul and the Varios, he started to give me twenty-dollar tips when I brought him his sandwich. He was sawbucking me to death. Twenty here. Twenty there. He wasn’t like anyone else I had ever met. The Varios and most of the Italian guys were all pretty cheap. They’d go for a buck once in a while, but they resented it. They hated losing the green. Jimmy was from another world. He was a one-man parade. He was also one of the city’s biggest hijackers. He loved to steal. I mean, he enjoyed it. He loved to unload the hijacked trucks himself until the sweat was pouring down his face. He must have knocked over hundreds of trucks a year, most of them coming and going from the airports. Most hijackers take the truck driver’s license as a warning. The driver knows that you know where he lives, and if he cooperates too much with the cops or the insurance company he’s in trouble. Jimmy got his nickname ‘Jimmy the Gent’ because he used to take the driver’s license, just like everybody else, except Jimmy used to stuff a fifty-dollar bill into the guy’s wallet before taking off. I can’t tell you how many friends he made out at the airport because of that. People loved him. Drivers used to tip off his people about rich loads. At one point things got so bad the cops had to assign a whole army to try to stop him, but it didn’t work. It turned out that Jimmy made the cops his partners. Jimmy could corrupt a saint. He said bribing cops was like feeding elephants at the zoo. ‘ All you need is peanuts. ’

“Jimmy was the kind of guy who cheered for the crooks in movies. He named his two sons Frank James Burke and Jesse James Burke. He was a big guy, and he knew how to handle himself. He looked like a fighter. He had a broken nose and he had a lot of hands. If there was just the littlest amount of trouble, he’d be all over you in a second. He’d grab a guy’s tie and slam his chin into the table before the guy knew he was in a war. If the guy was lucky, Jimmy would let him live. Jimmy had a reputation for being wild. He’d whack you. There was no question-Jimmy could plant you just as fast as shake your hand. It didn’t matter to him. At dinner he could be the nicest guy in the world, but then he could blow you away for dessert. He was very scary and he scared some very scary fellows. Nobody really knew where they stood with him, but he was also smarter than most of the guys he was around. He was a great earner. Jimmy always brought in money for Paulie and the crew, and that, in the end, is why his craziness was tolerated. ”

On Henry’s fourteenth birthday Tuddy and Lenny Vario presented Henry with a card in the bricklayers’ local. Even then, in 1957, a job in the construction workers’ union paid well ($190 a week) and entitled its members to extensive health care and other fringe benefits, such as paid vacations and sick leave. It was a union card for which most of the hardworking men in the neighborhood would have paid dearly-if they had ever had enough money to buy anything. Henry was given the card so that he could be put on a building contractor’s payroll as a no-show and his salary divided among the Varios. He was also given the card to facilitate the pickup of the daily policy bets and loan-shark payments from local construction sites. For months, instead of going to school, Henry made pickups at various construction projects and then brought everything back to the basement of the Presto Pizzeria, where the accounts were assembled.

“I was doing very nicely. I liked going to the construction jobs. Everybody knew who I was. They all knew I was with Paul. Sometimes, because I was a member of the union, they let me wet down all the new brick with a fire hose. I loved doing that. It was fun. I liked to watch the way the brick changed color. Then one day I got home from the pizza joint and my father was waiting for me with his belt in one hand and a letter in the other. The letter was from the school’s truant officer. It said that I hadn’t been to school in months. Here I was lying to my folks that I was going every day. I even used to take my books like I was legit, and then I’d leave them at the cabstand. Meanwhile I’m telling Tuddy that my classes have already let out for the summer and everything was okay with my parents. Part of my situation in those days was that I was juggling everybody in the air at once.

“I got such a beating from my father that night that the next day Tuddy and the guys wanted to know what had happened to me. I told them. I even said that I was afraid I’d have to give up my bricklayer’s job. Tuddy told me not to worry, and he motions a couple of the guys from the cabstand and me to go for a ride. We’re driving around, and I can’t figure out what’s happening. Finally Tuddy pulls the car over. He pointed to the mailman delivering mail across the street. ‘Is that your mailman?’ he asked. I nodded yes. Then, out of the blue, the two guys got out of the car and snatched the mailman. I couldn’t believe it. In broad daylight. Tuddy and some of the guys go out and kidnap my mailman. The guy was crammed in the back of the car and he was turning gray. I was ashamed to look at him. Nobody said anything. Finally we all got back to the pizzeria and Tuddy asked him if he knew who I was. Me. The guy nodded his head yes. Tuddy asked him if he knew where I lived. The guy nodded yes again. Then Tuddy said from now on all mail from the school gets delivered to the pizza parlor, and if the guy ever again delivers another letter from the school to my house, Tuddy’s going to shove him in the pizza oven feet first.