Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (5 page)

Henry Hill, Jimmy Burke, Tommy DeSimone, Anthony Stabile, Tommy Stabile, Fat Andy, Frankie the Wop, Freddy No Nose, Eddie Finelli, Pete the Killer, Mike Franzese, Nicky Blanda, Bobby the Dentist (so named because he always knocked teeth out when he punched anyone), Angelo Ruggierio, Clyde Brooks, Danny Rizzo, Angelo Sepe, Alex and Michael Corcione, Bruno Facciolo, and the rest of Paul Vario’s sidewalk soldiers lived without restraints. They had always been outlaws. They were the kids from the neighborhood who were always in trouble. As youngsters they were the ones invariably identified as toughs by the police and brought into the precinct for routine beatings whenever some neighborhood store burglary or assault moved the station house cops into action.

As they grew older, most of the arbitrary beatings by cops stopped, but there was rarely a time in their lives when they were not under some kind of police scrutiny. They were always under suspicion, arrest, or indictment for one crime or another. Henry and his pals had been reporting to probation and parole officers since their teens. They had been arrested and questioned so often for so many crimes that there was very little fear or mystery about the inside of a precinct squad room. They were at ease with the process. They, better than many lawyers, knew just how far the cops could go. They were intimately familiar with the legal distinctions between being questioned, booked, or arraigned. They knew about bail hearings and grand juries and indictments. If they were picked up as the result of a barroom brawl or a billion-dollar drug conspiracy, they often knew the cops who arrested them. They had the unlisted telephone numbers of their lawyers and bail bondsmen committed to memory. It was not unusual for one of the arresting cops to call their lawyers for them, knowing that such small kindnesses usually brought hundred-dollar bills as tips.

For Henry and his wiseguy friends the world was golden. Everything was covered. They lived in an environment awash in crime, and those who did not partake were simply viewed as prey. To live otherwise was foolish. Anyone who stood waiting his turn on the American pay line was beneath contempt. Those who did-who followed the rules, were stuck in low-paying jobs, worried about their bills, put tiny amounts away for rainy days, kept their place, and crossed off workdays on their kitchen calendars like prisoners awaiting their release--could only be considered fools. They were the timid, law-abiding, pension-plan creatures neutered by compliance and awaiting their turn to die. To wiseguys, “working guys” were already dead. Henry and his pals had long ago dismissed the idea of security and the relative tranquility that went with obeying the law. They exulted in the pleasures that came from breaking it. Life was lived without a safety net. They wanted money, they wanted power, and they were willing to do anything necessary to achieve their ends.

By birth, certainly, they were not prepared in any way to achieve their desires. They were not the smartest kids in the neighborhood. They were not born the richest. They weren’t even the toughest. In fact, they lacked almost all the necessary talents that might have helped them satisfy the appetites of their dreams, except one-their talent for violence. Violence was natural to them. It fueled them. Snapping a man’s arm, cracking his ribs with an inch-and-a-half-diameter lead pipe, slamming his fingers in the door of a car, or casually taking his life was entirely acceptable. It was routine. A familiar exercise. Their eagerness to attack and the fact that people were aware of their strutting brutality were the key to their power; the common knowledge that they would unquestionably take a life ironically gave them life. It distinguished them from everyone else. They would do it. They would put a gun in a victim’s mouth and watch his eyes while they pulled the trigger. If they were crossed, denied, offended, thwarted in any way, or even mildly annoyed, retribution was demanded, and violence was their answer.

In Brownsville-East New York wiseguys were more than accepted-they were protected. Even the legitimate members of the community-the merchants, teachers, phone repairmen, garbage collectors, bus depot dispatchers, housewives, and old-timers sunning themselves along the Conduit Drive-all seemed to keep an eye out to protect their local hoods. The majority of the residents, even those not directly related by birth or marriage to wiseguys, had certainly known the local rogues most of their lives. They had gone to school together. A great many of them shared friends. There was the nodding familiarity of neighborhood. In the area it was impossible to betray old friends, even those old friends who had grown up to be racketeers.

The extraordinary insularity of these old-world mob-controlled sections, whether Brownsville-East New York, the South Side in Chicago, or Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, unquestionably helped to nurture the mob. These were the neighborhoods where local wiseguys felt safe, where racketeers had become an integral part of the social fabric, where candy stores, funeral parlors, and groceries were often fronts for gambling operations, where loans could be made and bets placed, where residents made major purchases from the backs of trucks rather than from downtown department stores.

There were other marginal benefits bestowed upon those who were raised under the protective umbrella of the mob. Street muggings, burglaries, purse snatchings, and rapes were almost nonexistent in mob-controlled areas. Too many eyes were watching the street. The community’s natural suspicion was so great that anyone who did not belong in the area was immediately the focus of block-by-block and even house-by-house attention. The slightest change in the street’s daily rituals was enough to send a quiver of alarm through every mob club and hangout. An unfamiliar car appearing on a block, a panel truck filled with utility workers no one had ever seen before, sanitation men making pickups on the wrong day-these were precisely the kinds of signals that pressed silent neighborhood alarms.

“The whole neighborhood was always on alert. It was just natural. You were always looking. Up the block. Down the block. No matter how quiet it looked, nobody missed anybody. Late one night, right after my seventeenth birthday, I was helping in the pizzeria and dreaming about the paratroopers when I saw two of Paulie’s guys put down their coffee cups and walk toward the pizza counter window. I went over.

“Outside, Pitkin Avenue was almost empty. Theresa Bivona, who lived down the block, was walking home from the Euclid Avenue subway. There were three or four other subway people, all familiar, people we knew or at least had seen before, walking toward Blake or Glenmore avenues. And then there was this black kid in a sweat shirt and jeans who nobody had ever seen before.

“All of a sudden the kid’s got eyes all over him. He was walking very slow. He walked along the curb for a while looking in car windows. He pretended to be looking in store widows, even though the stores were closed. And the stores-a butcher shop and dry cleaner’s-didn’t have anything a kid like that would be interested in buying.

“Then the guy began to move down the block. I couldn’t tell if Theresa knew there was someone about fifty feet behind her. Across the street Branco’s Bar looked quiet, but I knew Petey Bums was watching. He used to sit on a stool leaning against the wall at the end of the bar and stare out the window until the joint closed at about two in the rooming. I knew guys were watching from Pete the Killer Abbanante’s club on the other side of Crescent Street. Frank Sorace, one of Paulie’s guys, who was later murdered, and Eddy Barberra, who’s now doing twenty years in Atlanta on a bank robbery, were seated in a car parked at the curb. I knew they were armed, because their job was to drive the big winners from Babe’s card games home so they didn’t get robbed.

“To the guy following Theresa the street must have looked empty, because he never looked around. He just started walking faster. He really began running toward Theresa when she started rummaging around for her keys. As soon as Theresa got inside, the guy was right behind her. It was very fast. He stuck out his hand and caught the door just before it slammed shut. That’s when Theresa and the guy disappeared.

“By the time I got to the building it was too late. The guy was supposed to have pulled a knife and was supposed to have been pressing it against Theresa’s face, but I never saw anything. All I could see was backs. There were at least three tons of wiseguys crammed in the hallways even before I got there. They had already bashed through the front door. There were so many of them that it looked as though the hallway and stairways were made of rubber. Theresa had squashed herself fiat against the mailboxes. All I could see was the top of the guy’s head and an arm of his sweat shirt. Then he was swept along with all the other bodies and arms and curses until he was carried up the stairs and out of sight.

“I backed up and went outside. Some of the guys were waiting there. I went across the street, turned around, and looked up. I could make out the small roof wall on the front of the building-it was made of brick-and then I saw the guy launched right over it into the air. He hung there for just a second, flailing arms like a broken helicopter, and then he came down hard and splattered all over the street. ”

Henry Hill went into the paratroopers just days after his seventeenth birthday on June 11, 1960, and it was a good time to be off the street. There was a lot of heat. The investigation started by the Apalachin meeting in November of 1957 had created a mess. After twenty-five years of saying there was no such thing as the Mafia, J. Edgar Hoover was now announcing that organized crime cost the public over $22 billion a year. The United States Senate had launched its own investigation into organized crime and its links to unions and business and had published the names of almost five thousand hoods nationwide, including members and hierarchy of the five New York City crime families. Henry saw a newspaper with a partial list of members of the Lucchese crime family, but he couldn’t find Paulie’s name.

Henry Hill turned out to love the army. He was stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He had never been away from the streets. He hadn’t even gone for a drive in the country. He didn’t know how to swim. He had never camped out, and he had never lit a fire that wasn’t a felony. Other youngsters in boot camp complained and groused; for Henry the army was like summer camp. There was almost nothing about it he didn’t love. He loved the rigors of boot training. He loved the food. He even loved jumping out of airplanes.

“I didn’t plan it, but I earned in the army. I got myself in charge of the kitchen detail, and I made a fortune selling excess food. The army overbought. It was a disgrace. They would always order two hundred and fifty meals for two hundred men. On weekends sixty guys would show up, and still they bought for two hundred and fifty. Somebody had to be taking care of somebody. Before I got there the kitchen guys were just throwing the extra food out. I couldn’t believe it. At the beginning I used to clip a pan of steaks, maybe thirty pounds, and take them to restaurants and hotels in Bennettsville and McColl, South Carolina. They loved it. Soon I was selling them everything. Eggs. Butter. Mayo. Catsup. Even the salt and pepper. On top of selling them the food, I used to drink free in those joints all night long.

“I had it all to myself. I couldn’t believe how lazy everybody around me was. Nobody did anything. I began loan-sharking. The guys used to get paid twice a month-the first and the fifteenth. They were always broke just before payday. I could get ten bucks for every five I lent if payday came after a weekend. Otherwise I got back nine for five. I started up a card game and some dice games and then I lent the losers money. The best part was on payday, when the guys would line up to get their money and I’d wait at the end of the line and get paid. It was beautiful. I didn’t have to chase after anybody.

“I kept in touch with Paulie and Tuddy. On a couple of occasions they even sent me money when I needed it. Once I got into a bar fight with some farmer and I got locked up. Paulie had to bail me out. I couldn’t ask my parents-they’d never understand. Paulie understood everything. After about six months, when I got the sergeant to phony up a double work shift for me in the kitchen, I drove eight and a half hours back to New York. It was great. The minute I drove up to the pizzeria I remembered how much I missed it. Everybody was hanging around. They treated me like a returning hero. They made fun of my uniform, my haircut. Tuddy said I was in a fairy army-we didn’t even have real bullets. I brought up lots of booze I got from the officers’ club and some bootleg mountain whiskey. It was amazing, I told them. I said I was going to come home more often with a load of nontaxed cigarettes, and also fireworks, which you could buy by the truckload on the streets. Paulie was smiling. It was like he was proud. Before I went back he said he was going to get me a present. He made a big thing out of the presentation. He didn’t usually do such things, so everybody showed up. He had a box all wrapped up and made me open it in front of an the guys. They were real quiet. I took off the paper, and inside was one of those wide-angle, rearview mirrors that truck drivers use to be able to see everybody coming up behind them. The mirror was about three feet long.

“‘Put it in the car,’ Paulie said. ‘It’ll help you make tails. ’ “

Four

IT WAS 1963 when Henry got back to the street. His trips to New York had become more frequent, especially after a new company commander changed the kitchen detail. Henry’s mess sergeant had been transferred, skipping out with nearly fifteen hundred dollars of Henry’s money. Then, with less than six months to go before his discharge, Henry got into a barroom brawl with three marines. He was drunk. He insisted upon calling them “jar heads” and ‘Jar ears. ” There were broken bottles and shattered mirrors an over the floor. Blood ran down the front of every khaki shirt and white apron in the place. When the McColl sheriff finally arrived. there was so much chaos that no one saw Henry stagger out of the bar and drive off in the sheriff’s car until it was too late. The company commander sent the Fort Bragg chaplain, who was accompanied by three Brooklyn-based MPs, an the way to Pitkin Avenue, Brooklyn, to bring Henry back. Thus Henry Hill spent the last two months of his military career in the Fort Bragg stockade. He lost his pay and benefits for the period. He was also stripped of his rank as a private first class. In Henry’s world. of course, getting out of a military stockade was almost as prestigious as getting out of a federal prison.