Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Nicholas Pileggi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That was it. No more letters from truant officers. No more letters from the school. In fact, no more letters from anybody. Finally, after a couple of weeks, my mother had to go down to the post office and complain.”

  Henry rarely bothered to go back to school again. It was no longer required. It wasn’t even relevant. There was something ludicrous about sitting through lessons in nineteenth-century American democracy when he was living in a world of eighteenth-century Sicilian thievery.

  “One night I was in the pizzeria and I heard a noise. I looked out the window and saw this guy running up Pitkin Avenue toward the store screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘I’ve been shot!’ He was the first person I ever saw who was shot. At first it looked like he was carrying a package of raw meat from the butcher’s all wrapped in white string, but when he got close I saw that it was his hand. He had put his hand up to stop the blast of a shotgun. Larry Bilello, the old guy who was the cook at the pizzeria and did twenty-five years for a cop killing, yelled at me to close the door. I did. I already knew that Paulie didn’t want anybody dying in the place. Instead of letting him in, I grabbed one of the chairs and took it out on the street so he could sit down and wait for the ambulance. I took off my apron and wrapped it around his hand to stop the blood. The guy was bleeding so bad that my apron was soaked with blood in a few seconds. I went inside and got some more aprons. By the time the ambulance came the guy was practically dead. When the excitement died down Larry Bilello was really pissed. He said I was a jerk. I was stupid. He said I wasted eight aprons on the guy and I remember feeling bad. I remember feeling that maybe he was right.

  “About this time a guy from the South opened a cabstand around the corner, on Glenmore Avenue. He called it the Rebel Cab Company. The guy was a real hick. He was from Alabama or Tennessee. He had been in the army, and just because he’d married a local girl, he thought all he had to do was open his place and compete with Tuddy. He lowered his prices. He worked around the clock. He set up special discounts to take people from the last subway and bus stops on Liberty Avenue to the far reaches of Howard Beach and the Rockaways. He either didn’t know how things worked or he was dumb. Tuddy had sent people to talk to the guy. They said he was stubborn. Tuddy went to talk to him. Tuddy told him that there wasn’t enough business for two companies. There probably was, but by now Tuddy just didn’t want the guy around. Finally one day after Tuddy has been banging things around the cabstand all day long, he tells me to meet him at the cabstand after midnight. I couldn’t believe it. I was really excited. For the whole day I couldn’t think of anything else. I knew he had something planned for the Rebel cabstand, but I didn’t know what it was.

  “When I got to the cabstand Tuddy was waiting for me. He had a five-gallon drum of gasoline in the back of his car. We drove around the neighborhood for a while until the lights were out in the offices of the Rebel Cab Company, on Glenmore Avenue. Then Tuddy gave me a hammer with a rag wrapped around its head. He nodded toward the curb. I walked up to the first of the Rebel cabs, squeezed my eyes, and swung. Glass flew all over me. I went to the next cab and did it again. Meanwhile Tuddy was wrinkling newspapers and pouring gasoline all over them. He’d soak the papers and shove them through the windows I had just smashed.

  “As soon as he finished, Tuddy took the empty can and started hopping like mad up the block. You’d never know Tuddy lost a leg, except when he had to run. He said it was dumb for both of us to be standing in the middle of the street with an empty gasoline can when the fires began. He gave me a fistful of matches and told me to wait until he signaled from the corner. When he finally waved, I lit the first match. Then I set the whole matchbook on fire, just like I’d been taught. I quickly threw it through the broken cab window in case the gas fumes flashed back. I went to the second cab and lit another matchbook, and then I did the third and then the fourth. It was while I was next to the fourth cab that I felt the first explosion. I could feel the heat and one explosion after another, except by then I was running so fast I never had a chance to look back. At the corner I could see Tuddy. He was reflected in the orange flames. He was waving the empty gasoline can like a track coach, as though I needed anyone to tell me to hurry.”

  Henry was sixteen years old when he was arrested for the first time. He and Paul’s son Lenny, who was fifteen, had been given a Texaco credit card by Tuddy and told to go to the gas station on Pennsylvania Avenue and Linden Boulevard to buy a couple of snow tires for Tuddy’s wife’s car.

  “Tuddy didn’t even check to see if the card was stolen. He just gave me the card and sent us to the gas station, where we were known. If I’d known it was a stolen card I still could have scored. If I’d known the card was hot I would have given it to the guy in the gas station and said, ‘Here, get yourself the fifty-dollar reward for returning it and give me half of it.’ Even if it was bad I would have earned on the card, except Tuddy wouldn’t have had any tires.

  “Instead, Lenny and I drive over to the place and buy the tires. The guy had to put them on the rims, so we paid for them on the card and drove around for about an hour. When we got back the cops were there. They were hiding around on the side. I walk in the place and two detectives jump out and say that I’m under arrest. Lenny took off. They cuffed me and took me to the Liberty Avenue station.

  “In the precinct they shoved me in the pens, and I was playing the wiseguy. ‘I’ll be out in an hour,’ I’m telling the cops. ‘I didn’t do nothing.’ Real George Raft. Tuddy and Lenny had always told me never to talk to the cops. Never tell them anything. At one point one of the cops said he wanted me to sign something. He had to be nuts. ‘I’m not signing anything,’ I tell him. Tuddy and
Lenny said all I had to give them was my name, and at first they didn’t believe my name was Henry Hill. I took a smack from one of the cops just because he wouldn’t believe a kid running around with the people I was running with could have a name like Hill.

  “In less than an hour Louis Delenhauser showed up at the precinct. ‘Cop-out Louie,’ the lawyer. Lenny had run back to the cab-stand and said I had been pinched on the credit card. That’s when they sent Louie. They took care of everything. After the precinct the cops took me down for the arraignment, and when the judge set five hundred dollars bail, the money was put right up and I was free. When I turned around to walk out of the court I could see all of the Varios were standing in the back of the room. Paulie wasn’t there because he was serving thirty days on a contempt hearing. But everybody else was smiling and laughing and started hugging me and kissing me and banging me on the back. It was like a graduation. Tuddy kept yelling, ‘You broke your cherry! You broke your cherry!’ It was a big deal. After we left the court Lenny and Big Lenny and Tuddy took me to Vincent’s Clam Bar in Little Italy for scungilli and wine. They made it like a party. Then, when we got back to the cabstand, everybody was waiting for me and we partied some more.

  “Two months later Cop-out Louie copped me out to an ‘attempted’ petty larceny and I got a six-month suspended sentence. Maybe I could have done better. Looking back, it sure was a dumb way to start a yellow sheet, but in those days it was no big thing having a suspended sentence on your record. And I felt so grateful they paid the lawyer, so that my mother and father didn’t ever have to find out.

  “But by now I’m getting nervous. My father is getting worse and worse. I had found a gun in his basement and had taken it across the street to show Tuddy, and then I put it back. A couple of times Tuddy said he wanted to borrow the gun for some friends of his. I didn’t want to lend it, but I didn’t want to say no to Tuddy. In the end I started to lend Tuddy the gun and get it back after a day or two. Then I’d wrap the gun up just exactly how I found it and put it back on the top shelf behind the pipes in the cellar. One day I went to get the gun for Tuddy, and I saw that it was missing. I knew that my father knew what I was doing. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he knew. It was like waiting for the electric chair.