Текст книги "Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family"

Автор книги: Nicholas Pileggi

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

=NINE=

AS HENRY HAD HOPED, the theft was not discovered until Monday afternoon. The Daily News story Tuesday said that the money had vanished into "thin air" and that "FBI agents swarmed over Air France cargo building 86 at Kennedy, questioning the employees, searching the area and examining the manifests and bills of lading." The New York Times story said: "A thorough search of the building and the cinder block locker where the money was placed failed to turn up the parcels. A work crew of about 20 men as well as an around-the-clock private guard were on duty at the building."

    By the time Air France realized its $480,000 was missing, Henry and his pals had already given away $120,000 of it as "tribute" to the mob chiefs who considered Kennedy Airport their turf. They gave $60,000 to Sebastian "Buster" Aloi, the fifty-seven-year-old capo who ran the airport for the Colombo crime family, and the other $60,000 to their own capo, Paul Vario.

    "We took care of Buster because it was insurance. It kept everybody happy. We gave Paulie a piece because he was our boss. That's the way it's set up. He protected us. If there was a beef against us by another crew—and there were always beefs against us– Paulie took care of it. He went to the sit-downs and took our part. The rest of the money we pooled. I could have taken my end and gone home, but what was I going to do with it? Put it in the closet? Jimmy kept it in a couple of bookmakers' safes, and if I needed a few bucks I'd take it out, and he'd keep tabs. It was like having a bank account.

    "We wanted to spend some money on ourselves. I wanted a new car and some clothes. Karen needed things for the new apartment and the kids. To justify any new spending, the three of us, Jimmy, Tommy, and I, took a trip to Vegas, dropped about twenty grand, and came back bragging that we had won. Everybody knew we went to Vegas a lot and that Jimmy was the kind of guy who would belly up to the craps table and play until his ankles swole. But even then we didn't overdo anything. I put a down payment on a new 'sixty-seven gold Buick Riviera with a black top and financed the rest, using my brother's name. Tommy did the same, except he bought a beige Cadillac with a black top.

    "Our first business proposition came about two weeks after the robbery when Paulie came up to us at the backstretch at Aqueduct and said if we joined him in a deal we could buy a fifty-percent interest in Milty Wekar's bookmaking operation. He had Wekar right there with him in the car. Wekar needed some money. He had been betting heavy on something he had and got burned. It was a great opportunity. Wekar had high rollers and bookmakers for customers. He had garment-center executives, Wall Street brokers, doctors and dentists and lawyers. And he had the guys who took their action. He never took bets for less than five hundred or a thousand dollars a shot, and most of the customers would bet six or seven games at once. Vario said he'd put in fifty thousand if we put in the same. Jimmy and Tommy looked at me and we all agreed. Right there at the track. We didn't need any lawyers. We shook hands and I was in the bookmaking business. I was twenty-four.

    "It was an education. Milty was a bookmaker's bookmaker. Most of our action came from bookmakers, not individual bettors. Milty put me on the payroll for five hundred a week and expenses. I used to sit between the two clerks who took the action and I tabbed the bets. I had a yellow legal pad and on it I had all the day's action. I had baseball, football, basketball, the pros, colleges, the tracks, every kind of action going. And I also had the odds on the sheet, and as the bets came in I'd mark a line for every thousand bet, and then I'd draw a line through whenever five thousand was bet. Milty would look at the sheets and adjust the odds. He'd move the odds up or down depending upon whether he wanted action or not. If Milty had a problem and wanted to lay off some of the bets, he had a line to guys in Florida, St. Louis, Vegas, California. Just about anywhere.

    "I also helped Milty on Tuesday, the straighten-up day. That's when all the bookmakers and high– line bettors in the city had to straighten up whatever they owed each other for the week. We'd usually straighten up in a garment-center restaurant called Bobby's. On Mondays we'd make up the payout sheet. There were our expenses, like my salary and stuff. There were 'pays' for the winners. There was 'ice'—about seven hundred dollars a week—for the cops. There was 'juice' for when we had a bad week and had to go to the loan sharks for a little extra money ourselves.

    "But usually we didn't have to do anything like that. We would just call Paulie, and Paulie would give us twenty-five or thirty grand with no interest. After all, he was a partner. If we couldn't get Paulie and wanted to put off paying for a couple of days, Milty had a great trick. He kept five or six one-thousand-dollar bills around, and he'd give them to me to flash on the winners. Since none of our clients wanted to get paid in thousand-dollar bills, we could always put off paying them for a couple of days. The big bills were just too much trouble for wiseguy bookmakers to cash. Milty must have used those same bills for years.

    "We had a great operation. Milty had five different rooms all over the city where we took the action. We had most of the police on the pad. Milty paid off the Borough Command and the Division. Every once in a while we'd have to stand still for an arrest, usually by the police commissioner's Confidential Investigating Unit, but it was a misdemeanor, and all that meant was a fifty-dollar fine. Nobody ever went to jail for bookmaking. Still, we couldn't figure out how the cops always knew where we were. Milty was constantly changing apartments. Sometimes we'd move a couple of tunes a week, but they always knew our new locations.

    "We finally figured it out. Milty had this old guy who used to go around and rent our rooms. That's all the guy ever did. Milty gave him three hundred a week to find the apartments, put down deposits, sign the leases, get the gas and electric lines opened up, and get the phones installed. The guy used to come in on the Long Island Railroad, get off, and take buses and subways as far as he could until he found apartments to rent. Somehow the cops got a line on the guy, and they used to tail him from one apartment to another until they had a list of our places. Then, when they saw one of our cars parked outside, they'd crash through.

    "After about four months I took my first pinch for running a wire room. It was in August of 1967, and the cops who broke in said we were doing two million dollars' worth of business a week. I only wish. We'd gotten word from the cops we'd paid off that we were going to get busted. We were due. They just went through the motions. It was done right. No cuffs or anything. After we were booked we took the cops for dinner on Mulberry Street before we went to night court for the arraignment. Al Newman, our bondsman, was already in court when we got there. I grabbed a cab home. The cops dropped Milty off. The next day we were back in action at a different apartment. We had taken a pinch and now we were okay for a while. John Sutler, my lawyer, bounced the case around the courts for a year until I finally pleaded guilty. I got fined a hundred dollars and went home. It was a joke. The city was spending millions of dollars for plainclothes cops to catch bookmakers, but it was obvious that the whole thing was set up so the cops could shake us down. The cops didn't want to put us out of business any more than they wanted to shoot the golden goose.

    "It was at this time that another business opportunity arose. There was a terrific supper club and restaurant called The Suite on Queens Boulevard, near Forest Hills. Its owner, Joey Rossano, was a horse-player and gambler. The guy needed money. We made a deal that I'd take over the place but he'd keep his name on the papers. I paid him some money and I took over his loan-shark debts. I knew some of the guys he owed, and they weren't very strong. They didn't have the weight. So I knew I wouldn't have to pay. I just strong-armed them out of the money—and who could they go to? If you were with Paulie and our crew, you could tell most of the city's half-assed wiseguys to get lost. I made them eat the debts.

    "Also, Karen loved the idea of getting a legitimate joint. Our first daughter, Judy, was two and a half and Ruth was about six months old, and Karen had been insisting I keep an eye out for a good business opportunity. She knew about the cigarettes and swag and she knew about Air France. She knew I had some money, and she wanted me to invest it right. The bookmaking business wasn't her idea of a good deal. She knew I had taken the pinch, and she knew I used to gamble away most of the money I made right there in our own office. We all did. We'd get some good action from a trainer or owner on a certain horse and we'd add a few grand of our own money on top of the bet. When you do that as a bookmaker, it's only a matter of time. Show me a bookmaker who bets and I'll show you a guy owned by the sharks.

    "Before I thought about taking over The Suite I talked it over with Paulie. He liked the idea. He liked it so much that he ordered the place off limits for the crew. He said we had to keep the place clean. He didn't want to turn it into a joint like Robert's.

    "I was in the place every day, morning till night. Karen would bring the kids in and help with the books. All the books. The books for the SLA and IRS and the real books. I got a decent cook in the place, and I got Casey Rosado, who headed the bartenders' and waiters' union at the airport, to send in some of his spies to tell me how much I was getting robbed by my bartenders. The Suite was a big enough place so that I had six bartenders, three of them on at all times. When I got the word from Casey, I fired all of them. Casey said the bartenders were stealing a thousand dollars a night out of the joint, in addition to a hundred a night in tips they were taking home, plus the hundred and a half I was paying them.

    "We were doing real well for a couple of months, then, one by one, the guys started to show up. First Jimmy came by to see the place. He brought Mickey and a plant with a good-luck banner on it. Tommy DeSimone came by for a toast. Angelo Sepe came. Marty Krugman, a bookmaker I knew who had a wig shop just two blocks away, began hanging around the bar. Alex and Mikey Corcione started showing up, and so did Anthony and Tommy Stabile, until Tommy went away for a holdup. Little Vic Orena, a lieutenant in the Colombo crime family, became a regular. Even Paulie and the Varies began hanging around."

    Within six months The Suite had turned into a gathering place for Henry and his friends. It became an obligatory last stop. The revelers would arrive after midnight, long after they had stuffed their twenties and fifties into the pockets of every bartender, captain, and hatcheck girl in town. As a result, when they got to Henry's place they ate and drank on the tab. Henry once looked at his books and saw that his best friends were drinking him broke. Of course most of the debts were paid off eventually, but payment too often arrived in the form of swag—hijacked liquor, crates of freshly stolen shrimp, phony credit cards, and stolen traveler's checks.

    While The Suite never replaced Robert's as the hijacking headquarters, it did begin to function as a bazaar for dirtier deals, con games, and hustles. Henry was soon selling dozens of transatlantic airline tickets run off by crooked travel agents. He steered big bettors to a crooked crap game run by the Varios out of a brand-new apartment house just off Queens Boulevard. Henry would sometimes take the suckers into the apartment himself and pretend to lose five or six thousand alongside his dupes. The next day, of course, Henry got his "lost" money back, plus 10 percent of the suckers' losses.

    Also, just having a restaurant and club, with its access to the legitimate credit available in the normal business world, gave Henry endless opportunity for making even more money. He began "banging out" freshly stolen credit cards. The Suite was one of the first places that Stacks Edwards and the other plastic wholesalers went with a newly stolen card. Knowing the card had not yet been reported stolen, Henry would immediately use it to run up hundreds of dollars in phony restaurant bills.

    "Instead of making my life simpler, The Suite made it crazier. I had to be there all the time, but I also had to keep an eye on my investment with Milty. I had a million things in the air. I was making it every way I could. And Karen, who was now at home with the kids most of the time, was getting more and more pissed. I had rented a house in Island Park to be closer to Paulie, and, with the kids, she needed somebody to help her around the house. But I was nervous about having some stranger walking around the house. I always had money stashed around the place. Sometimes I had swag stacked up the wall. I also had guns around the place. You'll find that most wiseguy wives do their own housework, no matter how rich they are, because strangers can't be trusted to keep their mouths shut. But Karen wouldn't let up, and finally I asked around The Suite if anyone knew anybody who could be trusted. I didn't want to go to an agency cold.

    "Eddy Rigaud, the Haitian who used to buy stolen cars from me, said he had the solution to my problems. He said his family had done it for other friends. They had the right connections in the mountains, where they would buy young girls from their families. The girls were then shipped to Canada on a tourist visa, and their new owners would go to Montreal and pick them up. He said it usually cost thousands of dollars, but he could do it for me at cost. All I needed was the six hundred bucks for the girl's father and I had a slave.

    "I remember going home and telling Karen, and she looked at me as though I was nuts, but she didn't say no. I gave Eddy the money, and just before Christmas of 1967 he said that the girl was on her way. He gave me her name and the hotel in Montreal where she would be staying, but when I got to the place and went to her room I almost died. When the slave opened the door, she turned out to be over six feet tall and weighed two-fifty minimum. My knees went. She was bigger than Paul Vario. She was so scary that on the plane back to New York I pretended I didn't know her. When I got home I made her wait outside until I could warn Karen. We couldn't keep her. She made the kids cry. She only stayed a day or two, until I could get Eddy to take her back.

    "In addition to this, Karen started getting obscene phone calls. She had been getting them in early December, and we had had the number changed. It was unlisted. Still the calls kept coming. She'd call me at The Suite and tell me about them and I'd go crazy. I told Jimmy about them, and we tried to figure if it was anyone in the crew. It made me suspicious of everybody, except Karen couldn't get his voice. We taped him a couple of times and I couldn't pick him up either. So I decided that the next tune he called, Karen should play up a little bit and ask him to meet her someplace. If Karen could act interested enough, maybe the guy was nutty enough to show up. I couldn't wait.

    "It was the first week in January when Karen called me at The Suite and says she just talked to the guy and said her husband wasn't home and he should come to the apartment in about an hour. I was home in a second, and we turned out all the lights, except one. I crouched down near the front windows and watched. I had a revolver hi my jacket. I swear I was going to whack the guy right there.

    "I waited for over an hour. It was snowing outside. I asked Karen if she thought he'd show. She said she did. I kept looking. Then I realized that there was one car that was driving slowly past the apartment for the second time. I waited. Sonofabitch if it didn't cruise by again. Real slow. This time I spot the driver. He's a man and he's all alone. He's looking right at our door. He wants to make sure everything's calm. I can't wait to make him calm. He drove around the corner, but I knew he was coming back.

    "Instead of taking a chance and losing him I decided to wait for him to pass on the street. I crouched behind a parked car. Karen was watching from the window. The kids were asleep. It's snowing all over my face. And then I see the guy come around the corner again. I couldn't wait. This time he really slows down in front of our house. I can see his face. He rolls down the window and he's squinting at the house numbers.

    "Just as he comes to a full stop I slide up alongside his open window and I put the gun in his face. I'm feeling crazy. 'You want something? You looking for something?' I'm screaming and cursing at the top of my lungs. The guy goes to move and I smash him across the face. He's out the door of the car and I'm chasing him. I get him down and start smashing his face with the gun. I don't want to stop. People are screaming. They know me from the neighborhood. I know I'm going to get pinched, but I don't care.

    "When I hear the sirens I get away from the bum, and I ditch the gun under the front bumper of a parked car. There's usually a little shelf under the bumper where you can hide things. The cops arrive, and it turned out I beat up the wrong guy. He wasn't the mad caller at all. He was some gay guy looking for his friend's house. Before they took him to the hospital he kept yelling that I had a gun. That didn't help. The cops started looking for the gun in the snow where we had scuffled, and some cop who knew about bumpers found it. I was arrested for assault and possession of a loaded revolver and had to spend the rest of the night at the precinct until Al Newman got me out on bail.

    "The phone calls finally stopped when I figured out how the sonofabitch kept getting our number every time we changed it. I went outside the house and looked at it from every angle and realized that with a pair of binoculars you could read the number right off the wall phone we had hanging in the kitchen. We changed the number again and left the number blank. We never got another call. I should have done that the first time instead of getting pinched for assaulting the wrong guy. It was dumb, but that was the way we did things. Whack 'em first and worry about them later."

=TEN=

"FOR MOST OF THE GUYS the killings were just accepted. They were a part of every day. They were routine. I remember how proud Tommy DeSimone was when he brought Jimmy's kid, Frankie, on his first hit. Frankie Burke was just a timid little kid. Jimmy used to complain that the kid wet his bed all the time and that Jimmy had to beat the shit out of him almost every night. Jimmy even sent him to some military school to toughen him up. Frankie must have been sixteen or seventeen when Tommy took him on the hit, and Tommy said the kid held up great. Jimmy walked around real proud. You'd have thought the kid had won a medal.

    "Murder was the only way everybody stayed in line. It was the ultimate weapon. Nobody was immune. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everyone knew the rules, but still people got out of line and people kept getting whacked. Johnny Mazzolla, the guy I used to go cashing counterfeit twenties with when I was a kid, his own son was killed because the kid wouldn't stop holding up local card games and bookmakers. The kid was warned a hundred times. They warned the father to keep the kid under wraps. They told him if the kid had to stick up bookmakers, he should go stick up foreign bookmakers. It was only because of Johnny that they let the kid live until he was nineteen. But the kid apparently couldn't believe he would ever get killed. The dead ones never did. He couldn't believe it until the end when he got two, close range, in the heart. That was out of respect for his father. They left the kid's face clean so there could be an open casket at the funeral.

    "Jimmy once killed his best friend, Remo, because he found out that Remo set up one of his cigarette loads for a pinch. They were so close. They went on vacations together with their wives. But when one of Remo's small loads got busted, he told the cops about a trailer truckload Jimmy was putting together. Jimmy got suspicious when Remo invested only five thousand dollars in the two-hundred-thousand-dollar load. Remo usually took a third or fifty percent of the shipment. When Jimmy asked him why he wasn't going in on this load, Remo said he didn't need that much. Of course, when the truck got stopped and Jimmy's whole shipment was confiscated, the fact that Remo had somehow not invested in that particular shipment got Jimmy curious enough to ask some of his friends in the Queens DA's office. They confirmed Jimmy's suspicion that Remo had ratted the load out in return for his freedom.

    "Remo was dead within a week. He didn't have a clue what was coming to him. Jimmy could look at you and smile and you'd think you were sitting with your best friend in the world. Meanwhile he's got your grave dug. In fact, the very week Jimmy killed him, Remo had given Jimmy and Mickey a round-trip ticket to Florida as an anniversary present.

    "I remember the night. We were all playing cards in Robert's when Jimmy said to Remo, 'Let's take a ride.' He motioned to Tommy and another guy to come along. Remo got in the front seat and Tommy and Jimmy got in the rear. When they got to a quiet area, Tommy used a piano wire. Remo put up some fight. He kicked and swung and shit all over himself before he died. They buried him in the backyard at Robert's, under a layer of cement right next to the boccie court. From then on, every time they played, Jimmy and Tommy used to say, 'Hi, Remo, how ya doing?'

    "It didn't take anything for these guys to kill you. They liked it. They would sit around drinking booze and talk about their favorite hits. They enjoyed talking about them. They liked to relive the moment while repeating how miserable the guy was. He was always the worst sonofabitch they knew. He was always a rat bastard, and most of the time it wasn't even business. Guys would get into arguments with each other and before you knew it one of them was dead. They were shooting each other all the time. Shooting people was a normal thing for them. It was no big deal. You didn't have to do anything. You just had to be there.

    "One night, right after my arrest for assaulting the wrong guy, we were having a party hi Robert's for Billy Batts. Billy had just gotten out of prison after six years. We usually gave a guy a party when he got out. Food. Booze. Hookers. It's a good time. Billy was a made guy. He was with Johnny Gotti from near Fulton Street and he was hooked up with the Gambinos. We're all bombed. Jimmy. Tommy. Me. Billy turned around and he saw Tommy, who he knew from before he went away. Tommy was only about twenty at the tune, so the last time Billy saw him Tommy was just a kid. Billy started to kid around. He asked Tommy if he still shined shoes. It was just a snide remark, but you couldn't kid around with Tommy. He was wired very tight. One of Tommy's brothers had ratted people out years ago, and he was always living that down. He always had to show he was tougher than anyone around. He always had to be special. He was the only guy in the crew that used to drink Crown Royal. It was a Canadian whiskey that wasn't imported back when he was a kid. Tommy had it smuggled in. He was the kind of guy who was being so tough he managed to find a bootleg hooch to drink thirty years after Prohibition.

    "I looked over at Tommy, and I could see he was fuming at the way Billy was talking. Tommy was going nuts, but he couldn't do or say anything. Billy was a made man. If Tommy so much as took a slap at Billy, Tommy was dead. Still, I knew he was pissed. We kept drinking and laughing, and just when I thought maybe it was all forgotten, Tommy leaned over to Jimmy and me and said, 'I'm gonna kill that fuck.' I joked back with him, but I saw he was serious.

    "A couple of weeks later Billy was drinking in The Suite. It was late. I was praying he'd go home when Tommy walked in. It didn't take long. Tommy immediately sent his girl friend home and he gave me and Jimmy a look. Right away Jimmy started getting real cozy with Billy Batts. He started buying Billy drinks. I could see he was setting Billy up for Tommy.

    "'Keep him here, I'm going for a bag,' Tommy whispered to me, and I knew he was going to kill Billy right in my own joint. He was going for a body bag—a plastic mattress cover—so Billy wouldn't bleed all over the place after he killed him. Tommy was back with the bag and a thirty– eight in twenty minutes. I was getting sick.

    "By now Jimmy has Billy Batts in the corner of the bar near the wall. They were drinking and Jimmy was telling him stories. Billy was having a great time. As it got late almost everybody went home. Only Alex Corcione, who was seated in back with his girl, was left in the place. The bartender left. Jimmy had his arm hanging real loose around Billy's shoulder when Tommy came over. Billy didn't even look up. Why should he? He was with friends. Fellow wise-guys. He had no idea that Tommy was going to kill him.

    "I was on the side of the bar when Tommy took the thirty-eight out of his pocket. Billy saw it in Tommy's hand. The second Billy saw what was happening, Jimmy tightened his arm around Billy's neck. 'Shine these fuckin' shoes,' Tommy yells and smashes the gun right into the side of Billy's head. Billy's eyes opened wide. Tommy smashed him again. Jimmy kept his grip. The blood began to come out of Billy's head. It looked black.

    "By now Alex Corcione saw what was going on and he started to come over. Jimmy glared at him. 'You want some?' Jimmy said. Jimmy was ready to drop Billy and go after Alex. I got between them as though I was going to belt Alex. But I just grabbed Alex by the shoulders and steered him toward the door. 'Get out of here,' I said, real quiet, so Jimmy can't hear. 'They've got a beef.' I maneuvered Alex and his girl out the door and they were gone. Alex was with our own crew, but Jimmy and Tommy were so hot right then they would have whacked Alex and his girl right there if he gave them trouble. I locked the front door, and when I turned back I saw that Billy's body was spread out on the floor. His head was a bloody mess. Tommy had opened the mattress cover. Jimmy told me to bring the car around back.

    "We had a problem. Billy Batts was untouchable. There has to be an okay before a made man can be killed. If the Gambino people ever found out that Tommy killed Billy, we were all dead. There was no place we could go. They could even have demanded that Paulie whack us himself. Tommy had done the worst possible thing he could have done, and we all knew it. Billy's body had to disappear. We couldn't leave it on the street. There would have been a war. With no body around, the Gotti crew would never know for sure.

    "Jimmy said we had to bury the body where it couldn't be found. He had a friend upstate with a dog kennel, where nobody would ever look. We put Billy in the trunk of the car, and we drove by Tommy's house to pick up a shovel. His mother was already up and made us come in for coffee. She wouldn't let us leave. We have to have breakfast—with a body parked outside.

    "Finally we left Tommy's and got on the Taconic. We'd been driving about an hour when I heard a funny noise. I'm in the back half asleep, with the shovel. Tommy was driving. Jimmy was asleep. I heard the noise again. It was like a thump. Jimmy woke up. The banging began again. It dawned on all of us at once. Billy Batts was alive. He was banging on the trunk. We were on our way to bury him and he wasn't even dead.

    "Now Tommy really got mad. He slammed on the brakes. He leaned over the seat and grabbed the shovel. Nobody said a word. We got out of the car and waited until there were no more headlights coming up behind us. Then Jimmy got on one side and I got on the other and Tommy opened the trunk. The second it sprang open Tommy smashed the sack with the shovel. Jimmy grabbed a tire iron and he started banging away at the sack. It only took a few seconds, and we got back in the car. When we got to the spot where we were going to bury Billy, the ground was so frozen we had to dig for an hour to get him down deep enough. Then we covered him with lime and drove back to New York.

    "But even then Billy was like a curse. About three months after we planted the guy, Jimmy came up to me at The Suite and said Tommy and I would have to dig up the body and bury it somewhere else. The guy who owned the kennel had just sold his property to a housing developer. He had been bragging to Jimmy about how much money he was going to make, but all Jimmy knew was that workmen might find the body. That night Tommy and I took my brand-new yellow Pontiac Catalina convertible and we dug Billy up. It was awful. We had put lime on the body to help it decompose, but it was only half gone. The smell was so bad I got sick. I started to throw up. All the time Tommy and I worked I was throwing up. We put the body in the trunk and took it to a junkyard we used in Jersey. Enough time had passed so nobody was going to think it was Billy.

    "I stayed sick for a week. I couldn't get away from the smell. Everything smelled like the body. The restaurant grease. The kids' candy. I couldn't stop smelling it. I threw away the clothes, even the shoes I wore that night, thinking they were the problem. I couldn't get the smell of it out of the trunk of my car. I ripped out all the upholstery and threw it away. I gave the car a real scrubbing. I tossed a bottle of Karen's perfume inside and closed the lid. But I couldn't get rid of the smell. It never went away. I finally had to junk the car. Jimmy and Tommy thought I was nuts. Tommy said if he could have smelled it he would have kept the car just to remind him about how he took care of that miserable bastard Billy Batts.