Текст книги "Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family"

Автор книги: Nicholas Pileggi

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

=THREE=

WHEN HENRY HILL WAS BORN on June 11, 1943, Brownsville-East New York was a six– square-mile working-class area with some light industry and modest one– and two-family houses. It stretched from a row of parklike cemeteries in the north to the saltwater marshes and garbage landfills of Canarsie and Jamaica Bay in the south. In the early 1920s electric trolleys and the Liberty Avenue elevated line had turned the neighborhood into a haven for tens of thousands of Italian-American immigrants and Eastern European Jews who wanted to escape the tenement squalor of Mulberry Street and the Lower East Side in Manhattan. The low, flat, sun-filled streets offered only the smallest houses and tiniest backyards, but the first– and second-generation Italians and Jews who fiercely wanted to own those houses worked nights in the sweatshops and factories spotted throughout the area after they had finished their daytime jobs.

    In addition to the thousands of hardworking new arrivals, the area also attracted Jewish hoods, Black Hand extortionists, Camorra kidnappers, and wily Mafiosi. In many ways Brownsville-East New York was a perfect place for the mob. There was even a historical ambience. At the turn of the century the New York Tribune described the section as a haven for highwaymen and cutthroats and said that it had always been a "nurturing ground for radical movements and rebels." With Prohibition, the area's proximity to the overland liquor routes from Long Island and the countless coves for barge landings along Jamaica Bay made it a hijacker's dream and a smuggler's paradise. Here were assembled the nation's first multiethnic alliances of mobsters that would later set the precedent for organized crime in America. The small nonunion garment factories that dotted the area became ripe for shakedowns and payoffs, and the activities at Belmont, Jamaica, and Aqueduct raceways nearby only added to the mob's interest in the area. In the 1940s, when the 5,000-acre Idlewild Golf Course began its transformation into an airport employing 30,000 people, moving millions of passengers and billions of dollars' worth of cargo, what is now Kennedy Airport became one of the single largest sources of revenue for the local hoods.

    Brownsville-East New York was the kind of neighborhood that cheered successful mobsters the way West Point cheered victorious generals. It had been the birthplace of Murder Incorporated; Midnight Rose's candy store on the corner of Livonia and Saratoga avenues, where Murder Inc.'s hit men used to wait for their assignments, was considered a historic landmark during Henry's youth. Johnny Torrio and Al Capone grew up there before going west and taking machine guns with them. The local heroes of Henry's childhood were such men as Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, who joined forces with Meyer Lansky to create Las Vegas; Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, whose well-muscled cutters' union controlled the garment industry; Frank Costello, a boss with so much political clout that judges called to thank him for their appointments; Otto "Abbadabba" Herman, the mathematical genius and policy-game fixer, who devised a system for rigging the results of the parimutuel tote board at the track so that only the least-played numbers could win; Vito Genovese, the stylish racketeer who had two hundred limousines, including eighty filled with floral pieces, at his first wife's funeral in 1931 and was identified in The New York Times story as "a wealthy young restaurant owner and importer"; Gaetano "Three Fingers Brown" Lucchese, who headed the mob family of which the Varies were a part; and of course the legendary members of Murder Incorporated: the ever dapper Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss, who was proudest of the way he could ice-pick his victims through the ear in movie houses without drawing any attention; Frank "Dasher" Abbandando, who only a year before Henry's birth went to the chair with a Cagney sneer; and the 300-pound Vito "Socko" Gurino, a massive hit man with a neck the size of a water main, who for target practice used to shoot the heads off chickens running around his backyard.

    It was understood on the street that Paul Vario ran one of the city's toughest and most violent gangs. In Brownsville-East New York the body counts were always high, and in the 1960s and 1970s the Vario thugs did most of the strong-arm work for the rest of the Lucchese crime family. There were always some heads to bash on picket lines, businessmen to be squeezed into making their loan-shark payments, independents to be straightened out over territorial lines, potential witnesses to be murdered, and stool pigeons to be buried. And there were always young cabstand tough guys such as Bruno Facciolo, Frank Manzo, and Joey Russo who were ready to go out and break a few heads whenever Paul gave the order, and such young shooters as Jimmy Burke, Anthony Stabile, and Tommy DeSimone who were happy to take on the most violent assignments. But they did this work on the side; almost all of these wiseguys were employed, to some degree, in one kind of business or another. They were small-time entrepreneurs. They ran two-rig trucking firms. They owned restaurants. For example, Jimmy Burke was a hijacker, but he also had a partnership in several nonunion storefront clothing sweatshops in Queens. Bruno Facciolo owned Bruno's, a ten-table Italian restaurant in the neighborhood, and prided himself on his meat sauce. Frank Manzo, who was called "Frankie the Wop," owned the Villa Capra restaurant in Cedarhurst and had been active in the carpenter's union until his first felony conviction. And Joey Russo, a solidly built youngster, was a cab driver and construction worker.

    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 Burns 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 morning. 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 dissappeared.

    "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 flat 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 all 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 all 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, all 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.

    "When I got out of the army, Paulie's son Lenny was about sixteen, but he looked five years older. He was a big kid, like his father. He had the neck and shoulders of a lineman. He was also Paulie's favorite. Paulie liked him much more than his two older sons, Paul junior and Peter. Lenny Vario was smart. Paulie was doing six months for contempt at the time I got out of the army and Lenny just gravitated toward me. He was working in the pizza joint, but he was also always fighting with his uncles and his brothers. With Paulie away, his uncles and his brothers wanted to play the boss, but Lenny, even as a kid, used to tell them to go fuck themselves. And every time Paulie heard that Lenny had told everybody off, he loved the kid even more. Paulie would do anything for that kid. Paulie felt that Lenny would go far. Lenny had the nerve to take over a crew. He could run a whole family. Paulie saw great things in Lenny's future.

    "So right after the army, with his father away, Lenny became my partner. Wherever I went, he went. I was about four years older than he was, but we were inseparable. Twenty-four hours a day. His brothers, who were also my close friends, were happy I was taking their kid brother off their hands. Still, I needed a job. I didn't want to go back to running errands and doing stuff around the cabstand for Tuddy and the crew. And Lenny became my ticket. Nobody said it that way, but Paulie knew I could watch out for Lenny, and so whatever Lenny got, I got. The next thing I knew, Paulie got Lenny a job as a union bricklayer paying $135 a week. Lenny's sixteen years old at the most, and Paulie got him a man's job. But Lenny says he won't go without me. So now I got a job as a union bricklayer paying $135 a week. I'm just about twenty. Paulie, remember, is in jail during all this, but he can still get us the kinds of jobs that grown-ups from the neighborhood couldn't get.

    "Later I found out that Paulie made Bobby Scola, the president of the bricklayers' union, put the muscle on some builders to put us on their payrolls. Bobby then made us union apprentices and gave us cards in the union. I had drifted away from my father during the army years, but he was very happy about my bricklayer's job. He loved union construction work. Everyone he knew was in construction. Lots of the people from the neighborhood worked in construction. It was what people did. But I wasn't expecting to lay brick for the rest of my life.

    "Looking back, I can see what a pair of miserable little kids Lenny and I were, but at the time what we were doing seemed so natural. We thumbed our noses at the job and at Bobby Scola. Fuck him. We were with Paulie. We didn't do any work. We didn't even show up regular enough to pick up our own paychecks. We had guys we knew who were really working on the job bring our money to the cabstand or to Frankie the Wop's Villa Capra restaurant, in Cedarhurst, where we hung out. We'd cash the checks, and by Monday we'd blown the money partying or buying clothes or gambling. We didn't even pay our union dues. Why should we? Finally Bobby Scola begged Paulie to get us off his back. He said we were creating a problem. He said there was heat on the job and the builders were getting worried.

    "Paulie relented. At first I thought he felt sorry for Bobby Scola and that was why he took us off his hands, but I soon realized differently. Overnight, instead of working as bricklayers, Paulie had us working at the Azores, a very fancy white stucco restaurant next door to the Lido Beach Hotel, in the Rockaways, about an hour from midtown. In those days it was a prime summer eating place for rich businessmen and union guys, mostly from the garment center and construction industry. One phone call from Paulie and Lenny has a job as a service bartender—he isn't even old enough to be in the bar, forget work there—and they got me a tuxedo and made me the maitre d' hotel, a twenty– year-old kid who didn't know the difference between anything.

    "In those days the Azores was owned, off the record, by Thomas Lucchese, the boss of the whole family. He used to come in there every night before going home, and that's why Paulie got Lenny the job. It wasn't because he felt sorry for Bobby Scola and his union problems. He wanted Lenny to get to know the boss. And Lucchese had to love us. I mean he got treated beautifully. He walked in the door and his drink was being made. His cocktail glass was polished so hard that a couple of times it broke as Lenny was shining it. The place at the bar where Lucchese liked to stand was always kept empty and it was glossed dry. We didn't care if there were two hundred people in the joint; everybody waited. Very few people hi the place knew who he was, but that didn't matter. We knew. He was the boss. In the newspapers he was called Gaetano Lucchese, 'Three Fingers Brown,' but nobody called him that. On the street he was known as Tommy Brown. He was in his sixties then, and he always came in alone. His driver used to wait outside.

    "Tommy Brown was the boss of the whole garment center. He controlled the airports. Johnny Dio, who ran most of the union shakedowns at Kennedy and LaGuardia, worked for him. He owned the town. He had district leaders, He made judges. His son was appointed to West Point by the East Harlem congressman Vito Marcantonio, and his daughter graduated from Vassar. Later she married Carlo Gambino's son. Hundreds of million-dollar cloak-and-suiters would drive all the way out to the Azores just because they hoped he might be there so they could kiss his ass. It gave them a chance to nod or say hello. And when these big-money guys saw that I talked to him direct, they would start kissing my ass. They would become real cozy. They'd smile and give me their cards and say if I ever needed anything in ladies' coats or handbags or toppers or better dresses, all I had to do was call. Then they'd stick me with a brand-new twenty or even a fifty that was folded so sharp it felt like it would make my palms bleed. That's who Tommy Brown was. Without trying, he could make the city's greediest rag-trade sharks give money to strangers.

    "We first went to work in the Azores in the middle of May. We had an apartment across the street. For a while we lived in Paulie's house in Island Park, about fifteen minutes away, but our own place was more fun. The Azores was ours. The place closed at ten o'clock, and there was a swimming pool at night. We had our friends come in and eat and drink for nothing. It was like our own private club. It was my first taste of the good life. I never had so many shrimp cocktails. After work we went from one night spot to another. I got to see how the rich people lived. I saw the Five Towns crowd from Lawrence and Cedarhurst, mostly all of them wealthy businessmen and professional guys who had lots of cash, wives who looked like Monique Van Vooren, and houses the size of hotels spread out along the south shore, with powerboats as big as my own house tied up in their backyards, which was the goddamn Atlantic Ocean.

    "The Azores' owner of record, the guy who ran the place, was named Tommy Morton. Guys like Morton were front men for the wiseguys, who couldn't have their names on the liquor licenses. Front men sometimes had some of their own money in these joints and essentially had the wiseguys for silent partners. Morton, for instance, was a friend of Paulie's. He knew lots of people. He must have fronted for lots of wiseguys. But he also had to pay back a certain amount every week to his partners, and they didn't care whether business was good or bad. That's the way it is with a wiseguy partner. He gets his money, no matter what. You got no business? Fuck you, pay me. You had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. The place got hit by lightning and World War Three started in the lounge? Fuck you, pay me.

    "In other words, Tommy Morton only began to see a dollar after he had paid the wiseguys and they'd gotten theirs off the top. That's one of the reasons why Morton hated Lenny and me so much. First, he didn't need a couple of wise-ass kids tike us ruining his business. He had to pay us two hundred a week apiece, and for that he could have hired a real maitre d' and bartender. Also, we were stealing him blind. Everything we stole or gave away came out of his pocket. I know that we used to drive him nuts, but he couldn't do a thing about it.

    "But by the end of the summer we were bored. It was around Labor Day weekend. A tough weekend. We decided to take off. Lenny and I hadn't seen Lucchese for about a month. Everybody was on vacation except us. But we knew our future was secure. Lucchese had said that he had something for us in the garment center after the summer.

    "Unfortunately, Tommy Morton had this old German chef. If possible, that guy hated us more than Tommy did. He kept feeding us rice and chicken every night as though we were regular employees. He must have sensed or been told how much Morton hated us, so he was going to twist the screws. Finally, on the Thursday afternoon before the long Labor Day weekend, we were late getting to work. The chef started screaming and yelling at us the minute we walked in the door. He's yelling at us in the dining room. There were people standing around. Early dinner customers. I went nuts. I felt like he was insulting me. The miserable fuck. I couldn't stand it. I ran right at the guy and grabbed him by the neck. Lenny comes over and we picked the guy up by his arms and legs. We carried him into the kitchen and began to shove him into the oven. It must have been about 450 degrees. We couldn't really get him inside, but he wasn't so sure. He screamed and jumped and wriggled until we let him fall out of our grip. The second he hit the floor he was flying. He ran clear out of the joint. He just kept on going, and he never came back. Then Lenny and I walked out and never went back either.