Текст книги "Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family"

Автор книги: Nicholas Pileggi

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

    But still, when I first found out what was going on, it was very tough. I was married to him. I had Judy and the baby to worry about. What am I supposed to do? Throw him away? Throw away somebody I was attracted to and who was a very good provider? He wasn't like most of his friends, who made their wives beg for a five-dollar bill. I always had money. He never counted money with me. If there was anything I wanted, I got it, and it made him happy. Why should I kick him out? Why should I lose him just because he was fooling around? Why should I give him up to someone else? Never! If I was going to kick anybody, it was the person who was trying to take him away from me. Why should she win?

    And besides, the minute I started checking her out with the other wives, I heard that every time he was with her he was drunk. I heard that he was abusive and made her wait in the car all night like a dope while he played cards with the guys. The way I began to see it, she was getting the worst side of him and I was getting the best.

*     *     *

    HENRY: I'd be with Karen and the kids most of the time, but when Karen would start screaming or driving me nuts, I'd go over to Linda's. I'd be there for a few days, and I'd go back to Karen. This madness went on even when I was in jail. I remember on Riker's Island, Karen tore into the visitors' lounge screaming like a gorilla. She was crazy. It turned out one of the rat stool pigeon hacks had showed her Linda's name on my visitors' list. Karen made me take Linda's name off the list or she wouldn't vouch for my strong family ties and healthy homelife when she was interviewed by the social workers and parole officers about my getting an early release. It meant a couple of months to me on the street, so I told the warden to take Linda's name off the list.

*     *     *

    KAREN: When he was on Riker's I visited him as often as possible, and that place was really a pigsty. The guards treated the wives awful. Visitors had to drive to a parking area near the island and then take a prison bus over a guarded bridge to one of the trailers, where they were picked up and taken to the various buildings for their visits. I was so big I could hardly get in and out of the buses, but the other women had to take lots of abuse and a lot of pawing from the guards. It was really disgusting, but what could the women do? They couldn't yell at the guards, because they'd never get their visits, and they didn't want to tell their husbands or boyfriends, because that would only make things worse. And all of this for visits that only lasted twenty minutes, and you had to talk over a telephone through a filthy glass partition nobody ever cleaned. Also, you couldn't visit whenever you wanted. I had to go on Saturdays, then I couldn't go again until the following Sunday, and then I had to wait until Saturday again.

    I was working with the lawyer to get him out as early as possible. For instance, there was a rule that you got ten days off a month for good behavior. That would have taken one third off his sixty– day term. I went right to the fines-and-release window, and they told me the rule had just been changed to only five days off. I had a fit. I went to our lawyer and got the papers that showed Henry had been committed under the old rules. I wrote letters to the commissioner. I wrote letters to the Board of Corrections. I wrote to everybody. I got our lawyer to write. I fought it and I won. They decided to give Henry twenty days off his term instead of ten.

    But even with the twenty days off, he still couldn't get out until December 28, and I had made myself the promise that I'd get him home for Christmas. I just had it in my head. That's one of the things that kept me going. I went back to the window at Riker's. I said that since the twenty-eighth was a Sunday, and I knew they let people out before the weekend, Henry would normally be released on Friday, the twenty-sixth. They agreed, but they said it still came up one day after Christmas. I remember the guy said, "I can't get the day from the air." Then I asked, "What about the two days when he was arrested?" I had learned that they can count arrest time toward incarceration time. Henry hadn't been under arrest for two days, but the guards just looked at each other. I was making a lot of work. That's when one of them went to check something and left the visitor's book right there at the desk. That's when I saw her name on his list. I was so furious by the time the guard came back with the approval, I couldn't hear him. I went wild, because here I was knocking myself out trying to get him home for Christmas and he's got his girl friend visiting him on my visiting day. I just wanted to kill him. I was so mad when I saw him that all I did was yell at him. I didn't even tell him that he was getting out early. Let him suffer.

*     *     *

    HENRY: After Karen made me take Linda off the list I had Linda pissed at me. Linda was so mad that the first day I was back on the street she caught up with me at The Suite. We had a real fight. She took off a seven-carat black opal ring I had bought her and threw it at me so hard she split the stone. Then she slapped me right in front of everybody in the joint. I grabbed her by the throat and pushed her right out the door. We're on the street, and she's still yelling. She was wearing a white mink stole I had given her. She went to the curb and took off the mink and shoved it right down the sewer. Then I belted her. She quieted down and looked hurt. Now I felt shitty. I felt so bad for what I did that I got a busboy to fish the stole out of the sewer, and I took her home and we made up. After a couple of nights with Linda, Karen called Paulie and Jimmy, and they came by and said it was time for me to go home.

    My life was a constant battle, but I couldn't bring myself to leave either one. I couldn't leave Linda and I couldn't leave Karen. I felt like I needed them both.

=TWELVE=

IT ALWAYS STRUCK HENRY as grossly unfair that after a lifetime of major crimes and petty punishments his longest stretch—a ten-year sentence in a federal penitentiary—came about because he got into a barroom brawl with a man whose sister was a typist for the FBI. It was as if he had suddenly hit the Superfecta of bad luck. He had been caught in a barroom brawl, and they had literally made a federal case out of it.

    It had started as a lark, a spur-of-the-moment trip to Florida with his pals Jimmy Burke and Casey Rosado, the president of Local 71 of the Waiters and Commissary Workers at Kennedy Airport. Casey wanted company—he was going down to Tampa to see his parents and pick up some gambling money that was owed him. Tommy DeSimone had been scheduled to go, but he had been arrested on a hijacking the night before, and he wasn't going to get bailed out early enough to make the flight. So Jimmy asked Henry if he wanted to go.

    "Why not? A little vacation. The union had already paid for a first-class round-trip ticket, and the flight would get me away from battling with Karen and Linda for a couple of days. Time out. That's the way I looked at it. I called Karen from The Suite and told her to pack me a bag. Jimmy and I picked it up on our way to the airport.

    "We got to Tampa late that night and were met by Casey's cousin in a car. We went straight to Casey's parents' house, where there was a lot of hugging and kissing. Finally we left our suitcases there and went to the Colombia Restaurant, in Ybor City, the old Cuban section of town, where Casey and his cousin turned out to be local celebrities. Everybody knew them.

    "We were just going to have a good time. At dinner Casey said that the guy who owed him the money was named John Ciaccio and that he owned the Temple Terrace Lounge, just outside Ybor City. Casey said he had a meeting with the guy later that night. Jimmy said he and I would tag along.

    "When we got to Ciaccio's place I saw that it was a pretty big, one-story, cement block lounge surrounded by a giant parking lot. There was a liquor store right next to it which was also owned by Ciaccio. I saw that the place was near an intersection. I made a note that if there was trouble we could drive away from the bar real fast and disappear on either of two four-lane highways.

    "Before we went inside, Casey's cousin came over to me and out of nowhere handed me a huge thirty-eight revolver. It was an antique. It was bound to explode if you tried to use it. I put it in my jacket and forgot about it. Casey and his cousin walked in first. After a minute Jimmy and I walked in. The room was very dark. It took a few seconds to see anything, but I could hear that the place was jumping. Casey was already talking to the guy near the bar, and when they walked over to a table, Jimmy and I sat down about four tables away.

    "Pretty soon Casey and the guy were yelling at each other in Spanish. We didn't know what they were yelling about. But all of a sudden the guy and Casey both jumped up. When they jumped up, we jumped up. I had the gun in my hand, and we walked over to their table. Jimmy grabbed the guy's tie and twisted it around until the guy's eyes bulged. Jimmy had his fist right under the guy's chin, pressing it into his throat. Jimmy said, 'Shut your mouth and walk out the door.'

    "I watched the room to see if anyone made a move. There must have been twenty-five people in the place, but nobody did anything. Later they were all witnesses at the trial, and the bartender, a retired New York cop, got our license plate when we pulled away. It turned out that Casey's cousin had rented the car for us in his own name. I still can't get over that.

    "Casey and his cousin were in the front, and Jimmy and I had the guy squeezed between us. The bum was screaming that he wouldn't give up any money. He was yelling that we would have to kill him before he paid. A real tough guy. I whacked him across the face with the gun a few times. I didn't really want to hurt him too bad. After about two blocks he changed his mind. He said he'd pay but he only owed half the money—the rest was owed by a doctor who had been in on the bet. All this negotiating was going on in Spanish. Casey's cousin said he knew the doctor and the guy was probably telling the truth. Casey said he didn't care who paid just as long as they paid him the money they owed.

    "I could see that all of these people knew each other very well. I felt like I was in the middle of some hotheaded family feud. Jimmy and I were the strangers. I decided to keep the gun just in case. We drove to a bar owned by Casey's cousin, but by now the guy was bleeding so badly that we had to pull his jacket up over his head when we walked him inside so that he wouldn't attract too much attention. We hustled him right into a small storage room in the rear of the bar, but there were still enough witnesses, including a couple of waitresses, who later testified against us in court. Casey called the doctor.

    "It took half the night, but they finally came up with the dough. We cleaned up the guy as best we could and turned him over to his brother. That was it. Case closed. No big deal. Jimmy and I spent the rest of the night and most of the weekend drinking rum and brandy with Casey and his cousin.

    "About a month after I got back I was driving down Lefferts Boulevard on my way to Robert's Lounge when I saw eight or twelve cars blocking the street. They were parked all over the sidewalk. I saw Jimmy Santos standing near the corner. 'Get out of here,' he said. 'Put on your radio.' I did what Santos said and I heard that the FBI was 'arresting union officials' and that 'Jimmy Burke and others are being sought.'

    "I still didn't know what was going on. I thought it might have had something to do with our having broken up an airport restaurant for Casey the night before. Until I knew more about what was happening I didn't want to go home. I didn't want to go to The Suite. I went to Linda's and watched the television news. That's the first I knew that they were talking about Florida. It was a big thing. They even interrupted shows with news flashes. I couldn't believe it. They said we were an organized-crime, interstate gambling ring. They made it sound like we were part of some big syndicate.

    "It didn't make any sense. For some crazy reason the feds had decided to play our little case up big. Jimmy and I met with Casey and all of our lawyers, and none of us could figure the damn thing out until just before the trial. That's when we found out that John Ciaccio, the guy we'd roughed up, had a sister who was a typist for the FBI. Nobody knew that was where she worked. Even her family just thought she had some ordinary job with the government.

    "She had apparently gone to see him on the night we beat him up, and she got hysterical. She was afraid her whole family was going to get beaten up and killed. She cried the whole weekend. Monday she went into work and burst into tears in the middle of the Tampa office of the FBI. She was surrounded by agents. Of course they asked her why she was crying and of course she gave it all up. Her brother. His friends. The bars. The bets. The doctor. And, naturally, us. The agents went wild. They had an organized-crime case in their own backyard.

    "We were first indicted by the state of Florida for kidnapping and attempted murder, but we beat that case because Casey took the stand and convinced the jury that Ciaccio was a liar. Casey was the only one of us whose record was clean enough so he could take the stand and not get picked apart by the prosecutor in the cross-examination.

    "But after we beat the state case, the feds came after us with an extortion indictment. Just before we were going to trial, Casey Rosado, the only one of us who could take the stand, dropped dead one morning while putting on his shoes. He was forty-six. His wife said he was sitting on the edge of the bed and just bent over to tie his laces and he never got up. He collapsed. A heart attack.

    "I almost had a heart attack myself when I heard what happened, because I knew with Casey gone our chances for beating the case were gone. And was I right. The trial, which took twelve days, was over on November 3, 1972. It took the jury six hours to bring in a verdict. Guilty. It was unanimous. The judge gave us ten years like he was giving away candy."

=THIRTEEN=

A TEN-YEAR SENTENCE—it was more time than Karen could conceive of. When she first heard about it, she planned to move in immediately with her parents. Then she planned to kill herself. Then she planned to kill Henry. Then she planned to divorce him. She worried about how she would support herself and the children. She awoke every morning to greater and greater anxiety. And yet she felt compelled to stay with him for the time being—from day to day, she used to tell herself, or until he was taken behind the wall and it was finally over.

    But Henry didn't go off to prison right away. In fact, as a result of the appeals his lawyers filed, almost two years elapsed between the time of his sentencing in Tampa and the day he finally surrendered in New York and actually began serving his ten-year term. In those twenty-one months Henry completed the time he owed Nassau County for his misdemeanor plea, opened a restaurant in Queens, and hustled as he had never hustled before. He was practically a one-man crime wave. He borrowed money from loan sharks which he never intended to pay back. He moved truckloads of swag at discount rates (below the usual 30 percent of wholesale), and reorganized his stolen-car gang for the chop shops, looking for spare parts.

    He traded stolen and counterfeit credit cards with his old pal from Robert's Lounge, Stacks Edwards. He started buying Sterno in bulk to keep up with the demand for his services as an arsonist. As the prison date drew near, he busted out The Suite, running up huge bills with creditors, selling off liquor and fixtures to other bar owners, even after the IRS had padlocked his door. One night, just before the end, Henry burglarized his own place so thoroughly that when the IRS agents went to auction, they found that every glass, dish, chair, Naugahyde banquette, bar-stool, lighting fixture, and ashtray had disappeared.

    "The day before I went in I took Linda to the top of the Empire State Building. It was the first time in my life I had ever gone up there. I told her that I was going away in the morning. She hadn't known exactly when I had to start my sentence. I told her that if I had half a million dollars I'd take her away with me to Brazil in a minute, but I didn't have half a million, and, anyway, I was a bum. I said that it was better if she went her own way. I told her it was time for her to move on. Don't waste any more time with me. It was the end. I kissed her goodbye. We were both crying, and I watched her go down in the elevator."

    Henry had been preparing for prison for almost two years. He was going to make his stay as soft as possible. After all, he had been hearing about prisons all his life, and now he sought out the experts. Mob lawyers, for instance, often employ ex-cons as paralegals, and many of these ex– jailhouse lawyers are encyclopedic on the subject of prison and the latest wrinkles in the Bureau of Prisons' rules and regulations. Henry found that of all the maximum-security prisons to which he could be sent, Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, was probably the best. It was close to New York, and that would make it easier for Karen, lawyers, and friends to visit. It had enough corrupt guards and key officials to make his stay reasonably bearable. And Lewisburg had a large population of organized-crime members inside at the time, including Paul Vario, who was doing two and a half years for income tax evasion, and Johnny Dio, who had been given a long stretch for the acid blinding of newspaper columnist Victor Riesel. In order to get to Lewisburg himself Henry paid an assignment officer at the West Street jail two hundred dollars.

    Henry also figured out how he could use the various special rehabilitation programs offered by the prison to shorten his sentence. For instance, prisoners got time subtracted from their sentences for everything from sweeping their cells to going to college. In fact, it seemed that prison authorities were so anxious to get rid of prisoners that nearly three quarters of all adults sentenced to correctional institutions were not inside but on parole, probation, furloughs, work-release, or out early. The Bureau of Prisons automatically deducted five days a month from every sentence as part of its mandatory "good time" provision. Since Henry had received a 10-year, or 120-month, sentence, he was automatically entitled to have 600 days, or 20 months, deducted from his original sentence; thus his original sentence really amounted to 8 years and 4 months. The bureau would also deduct 2 or 3 days a month from his sentence if he took on a work detail and another 120 days (one day off for every month he had been sentenced) if he attended classes offered in the prison.

    Henry would be eligible for parole after he had served one third of his sentence, which meant the parole board could free him after he had served 39 months, or a little more than 3 years. Since his file had been stamped "OC" (Organized Crime) in big red letters, it was unlikely that the parole board would free him at the first opportunity. But he learned that their rejection could be appealed to Washington and that a letter-writing campaign by his family, clergymen, and politicians could overturn the prison's decision. When Henry finally got on the bus for Lewisburg, he knew he would probably end up serving between 3 and 4 years.

    There was a going-away party for him the night before at Roger's Place, a Queens Boulevard restaurant Henry had started in order to help provide some income for Karen and the kids while he was gone. Paulie, Jimmy, Tommy DeSimone, Anthony Stabile, and Stanley Diamond were already doing time, but there were more than enough wiseguys around to fuel an all-night blast. By eight o'clock in the morning Henry had taken an exhausted Karen home, but he kept going. The crew– made up of only the guys now—moved to the bar at the Kew Motor Inn, and at ten o'clock, with only two hours of freedom remaining for Henry, they all left in a limousine, hired by his pals, for the trip to check in with the marshals. On the way to the jail Henry decided he wanted a drink at Maxwell's Plum. It would be his last drink on the street for a long time. At eleven o'clock Henry and his pals were at the bar at Maxwell's drinking Screaming Eagles—shot glasses of white Chartreuse dropped into large goblets of chilled champagne. Soon some women who were early for their own luncheon dates joined Henry's party. His noon check-in was toasted by all, and the party continued.

    By five o'clock in the afternoon Henry was being advised to run away. One of the women, a Wall Street analyst, insisted that Henry was too nice to go to prison. She had a place in Canada. He could stay there for a while. She could fly up on weekends. By five-thirty Karen called. She had been able to track him down by calling the wives of the men with whom he had been partying. Al Newman, the bondsman who had been carrying Henry on the fifty-thousand-dollar appeal bond, had received a call from the prison authorities threatening to revoke the bond. They were going to declare Henry a fugitive. Newman told Karen the insurance company would not cover the loss. Al would have had to get up the fifty thousand himself. He was desperate for Henry to turn himself in. Karen was frantic about having to support herself for the next few years, and now she was afraid she would also have the burden of paying off Henry's forfeited bond. When Henry hung up after speaking with her on the phone, he realized that everyone– with the possible exception of bis friends at the bar– wanted him to go to prison. He had one last Eagle, swallowed some Valiums, kissed everyone goodbye, and told the limo driver to take him to jail.

    The Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary is a massive walled city of twenty-two hundred inmates set amid the dark hills and abandoned coal mines of central Pennsylvania. It was raining the day Henry arrived and he could barely make out a huge, bleak castle with its Warner Brothers wall, mounted gun towers, and searchlights. Everything surrounding Lewisburg was cold, wet, and gray. From bis seat inside the dark-green prison bus Henry saw the great steel gates swing open. He and about a dozen other prisoners had been cuffed and shackled ever since they left New York. They had been told that there would be no food or toilet stops during the six-and-a-half-hour journey. There had been two armed guards seated behind locked metal cages—one in the front of the bus and the other in the rear—and upon arrival at Lewisburg they both began snarling orders about when and how Henry and the other prisoners were to leave the bus. Henry saw concrete, iron mesh, and steel bars everywhere. He watched a whole wall of steel, streaked with rain, slide sideways, and he heard it slam behind him with the finality of death. This was Henry's first time in a real prison. Until now all of his stints had been in jails—places such as Riker's Island and Nassau County, places where wiseguy inmates would spend a few casual months, usually on work-release. For Henry and his crew doing thirty or sixty days in a jail was little more than a temporary inconvenience. This was different. Prisons were forever.

    "The bus stopped at a cement building just inside the walls. The guards were all screaming and yelling that we were in prison and not at some country club. As soon as we got off the bus I saw at least five guards with machine guns, who watched us while some other guards removed our cuffs and leg shackles. I was wearing tan army fatigues I'd gotten at West Street when I signed myself in, and I was freezing. I remember looking down at the floor—it was wet red tile– and I could feel the damp come right up through the soles of my shoes. The guards walked us through a long cement tunnel toward the reception area, and it echoed and smelled like the basement of a stadium. The reception room turned out to be little more than a wider cement hallway, surrounded by thick wire mesh, with a long, narrow table where we handed over our papers and were given a thin mattress bedroll, one sheet, one blanket, one pillow, one pillow case, one towel, one washcloth, and a toothbrush.

    "When it was my turn to get the bedroll I looked up. Right there in the reception area, standing next to the guards, I saw Paulie. He was laughing. Next to Paulie I saw Johnny Dio, and next to Dio was Fat Andy Ruggierio. They're all laughing at me. All of a sudden the guards who had been screaming shut up like mice. Paulie and Johnny came around the table and started hugging me. The guards acted like Paulie and Johnny were invisible. Paulie put his arm around me and walked me away from the table. 'You don't need that shit,' Fat Andy said. 'We got nice towels for you.' One of the guards looked up at Paulie and nodded toward my bundle. 'Pick it up,' Paulie said, and then he, Fat Andy, and Johnny Dio walked me to the Assignment and Orientation room, where they got me a single cell for my first couple of weeks.

    "After they checked me in, Paulie and Johnny walked me into the main reception room, and there were a dozen guys I knew waiting for me. They were clapping and laughing and yelling at me. It was a regular reception committee. All that was missing was the beer.

    "Right from the beginning you could see that life in the can was different for wiseguys. Everybody else was doing real time, all mixed together, living like pigs. Wiseguys lived alone. They were isolated from everyone else in the prison. They kept to themselves and paid the biggest and meanest black lifers a few bucks a week to keep everybody cool. The crew owned the joint, or they owned a lot of the guys who ran the joint. And even the hacks who wouldn't take money and couldn't be bribed would never snitch on the guys who did.

    "After two months of orientation I joined Paulie, Johnny Dio, and Joe Pine, who was a boss from Connecticut, in their honor dorm. A fifty-dollar connection got me in there as soon as Angelo Mele was released. Fifty dollars could get you any assignment in the joint. The dorm was a separate three-story building outside the wall, which looked more like a Holiday Inn than a prison. There were four guys to a room, and we had comfortable beds and private baths. There were two dozen rooms on each floor, and each one of them had mob guys living in them. It was like a wiseguy convention—the whole Gotti crew, Jimmy Doyle and his guys, "Ernie Boy" Abbamonte and "Joe Crow" Delvecchio, Vinnie Aloi, Frank Cotroni.

    "It was wild. There was wine and booze, and it was kept in bath-oil or after-shave jars. The hacks in the honor dorm were almost all on the take, and even though it was against the rules, we used to cook in our rooms. Looking back, I don't think Paulie went to the general mess five times in the two and a half years he was there. We had a stove and pots and pans and silverware stacked in the bathroom. We had glasses and an ice-water cooler where we kept the fresh meats and cheeses. When there was an inspection, we stored the stuff in the false ceiling, and once in a while, if it was confiscated, we'd just go to the kitchen and get new stuff.

    "We had the best food smuggled into our dorm from the kitchen. Steaks, veal cutlets, shrimp, red snapper. Whatever the hacks could buy, we ate. It cost me two, three hundred a week. Guys like Paulie spent five hundred to a thousand bucks a week. Scotch cost thirty dollars a pint. The hacks used to bring it inside the walls in their lunch pails. We never ran out of booze, because we had six hacks bringing it in six days a week. Depending upon what you wanted and how much you were willing to spend, life could be almost bearable. Paulie put me in charge of the cash. We always had two or three thousand stashed in the room. When the funds were running low I'd tell him, and the next thing I knew some guys would come up for a visit with the green. For the first year or so Karen would come up every weekend with the kids. She used to smuggle in food and wine, just like some of the other guys' wives, and we'd pull the tables in the visiting room together and make a party. You weren't allowed to bring anything into the prison, but once you were in the visiting area you could eat and drink anything, just as long as you drank the booze out of coffee cups.

    "Our days were spent on work details, going to rehabilitation programs and school, assembling for meals, and recreation. Almost everybody had a job, since it got you time off and it counted a lot with the parole board. Even so, there were guys who just wouldn't work. They usually had so much time or were such bad parole risks that they knew they'd max out no matter how hard they worked. Those guys would just sit in their cells and pull their time. Johnny Dio never did anything. He spent all his time in the priest's office or meeting with his lawyers. Dio was doing so much time for having Victor Riesel bunded that he was never going out on a program or parole. He spent all his time trying to overturn the conviction. He didn't have a prayer. Most of the other wise-guys had jobs. Even Paulie had a job. He used to change the music tapes on the public-address system that was piped into the place. He didn't actually do it himself. He had somebody do it for him, but he got the credit for the job. What Paulie really did all day was make stoves. He was a genius at making stoves. Since you weren't supposed to cook in the dorms, Paulie had the hot-plate elements smuggled in. He got the steel box from the machine shop, and he wired and insulated the whole thing. If you were okay, Paulie made you a stove. Guys were proud to cook on his stoves.