My parents’ house had a big front door, and my mother, my father, and I were seated in a semicircle right behind it. “Where is he?” she asked. “Your father would never stay out this late without calling,” she said. My father was a saint. He never said a word. In the forty years they were married my father never stayed out all night. In fact, he rarely went out at all without telling my mother where he was going. He never once missed the train he was supposed to be on, and when he drove in to work he was never more than five or ten minutes late getting home. And then he’d spend half the night explaining how bad the traffic was and how he couldn’t get through.
She kept it up. He wasn’t Jewish—what did I expect? By four o’clock in the morning she started to scream that we were keeping my father up. Good thing he didn’t have to work in the morning. It just kept going on and on. I thought I was going to die.
It must have been six-thirty in the morning when I heard a car pull up. We were all still sitting in the living room. It was like a wake. I jumped up and looked out the window. It wasn’t his car, but I saw him in the backseat. I saw that Paulie’s son, Peter Vario, was driving and that one of Lenny Vario’s sons was in the car too. My mother had already opened the front door, and the minute he hit the sidewalk she confronted him. “Where were you? Where have you been? Why didn’t you call? We were all worried to death! A married man doesn’t stay out like this!” She was yelling at him so fast and so loud that I don’t think I said a word. I just stood there. I was nineteen and he was twenty-two, but we were such kids.
I remember he stopped, he looked at her, looked at me, and then, without a word, he got back in the car and drove away. My mother just stood there. He was gone. I started to cry. “Normal people don’t live this way,” she said.
HENRY: I was so smashed that night, all I remember is getting out of the car and seeing Karen’s mother standing on the porch screaming at me. So this is being married? I thought and sank back in the car. I went to Lenny’s to sleep. I was starting to realize that Karen and I were going to have to move. I waited until later in the day before calling Karen. I told her the truth. I had been at Lenny’s son Peter’s bachelor party. We’d taken Petey out drinking. We’d been drinking from early afternoon. We’d been to Jilly’s, the Golden Torch, Jackie Kannon’s Rat Fink Room. I didn’t tell her about the hookers on First Avenue, but I did tell her about going for a steam bath at two in the morning to sober up and still being too drunk to drive myself home.
We made a date for dinner. When I picked her up at the house she ran out the door before her mother knew I was there. Having her mother as a common enemy brought us together. It was like our first date.
KAREN: Some of the marriages were worse than others. Some were even good. Jimmy and Mickey Burke got on. So did Paul and Phyllis. But none of us knew what our husbands were doing. We weren’t married to nine-to-five guys. When Henry started making the trips for the cigarettes, for instance, I knew he’d be gone a couple of days at a time. I saw the way all the other men and their wives lived. I knew he wasn’t going to be home every night. Even when we were keeping company, I knew on Friday night he was going to hang out with the guys or play cards. Friday was always the card-playing night. Later I found out that it was also the girlfriend night. Everybody who had a girlfriend took her out on Friday night.
Nobody took his wife out on Friday night. The wives went out on Saturday night. That way there were no accidents of running into somebody’s wife when they were with their girlfriends. One Saturday Henry took me to the Copa. We were walking to our table when there was Patsy Fusco, big as a pig, sitting with his girlfriend. I really got upset. I knew his wife. She was a friend of mine. Was I supposed to keep my mouth shut? I didn’t want to be put in this spot. Then I saw that Henry was going to go over and say hello to Patsy. I couldn’t believe it. He was going to put me right in a box. I refused to go. I just stood there between the tables in the lounge and wouldn’t budge, at least not in Patsy’s direction. Henry was surprised, but he could see I was serious, so he just nodded to Patsy and we went to our own table. It was one of those minor things that reveal a lot. I think that for a split second Henry was going over to see Patsy because he forgot he was with me. He forgot it wasn’t Friday night.
Seven
Back in the early 1950s the Idlewild Golf Course in Queens was converted into a vast 5,000-acre airport. Within a few months the local hoods from East New York, South Ozone Park, Howard Beach, Maspeth, and the Rockaways knew every back road, open cargo bay, freight office, loading platform, and unguarded gate in the facility. The airport was a huge sprawling area, the equivalent in size of Manhattan Island from the Battery to Times Square. It came to employ more than 50,000 people, had parking facilities for over 10,000 cars, and had a payroll of over a half a billion dollars a year. Wiseguys who could barely read learned about bills of lading, shipping manifests, and invoices. They found that information about valuable cargo was available from a stack of over a hundred unguarded pigeonholes used by shipping brokers in the U.S. Customs Building, a chaotically run two-story structure with no security, located a mile from the main cargo terminals. There cargo brokers, runners, clerks, and customs officers dealt daily with the overabundance of paperwork required for international shipments. There were over forty brokers employing a couple of hundred runners, many of them part-time workers, so it was not difficult to slip orders from the shelves or copy information about valuable cargo, to pass on to whoever wanted it.
By the early sixties, when cargo worth $30 billion a year was passing through Kennedy Airport, the challenge of relieving airlines of their cargo and freight carriers of their trucks had become the principal pastime for scores of local wiseguys. Jimmy Burke was the king. Furs, diamonds, negotiable securities, even guns were routinely pilfered or hijacked from the airport by Burke and his crew.
Information was channeled to Jimmy from every corner of the airport. Cargo handlers in debt to loan sharks knew they could work off their obligations with a tip on a valuable cargo. One Eastern Airlines truck driver indebted to one of Jimmy’s bookies agreed to “accidentally drop” some mail pouches along the road leading from behind the plane loading area to the post office. The pouches turned out to contain $2 million in cash, money orders, and stocks. The airport was also an ideal place to use stolen credit cards to buy thousands of dollars’ worth of airline tickets, which could then either be cashed in for full reimbursement or sold at 50 percent discounts to willing customers. The customers were often legitimate businessmen and show business celebrities whose travel costs were high. Frank Sinatra Jr.’s manager, Tino Barzie, was one of the crew’s best customers. Barzie, whose real name is Dante Barzottini, bought more than fifty thousand dollars’ worth of tickets at half their face value and then used them to transport Sinatra and a group of eight persons accompanying him around the country. Barzie was eventually caught and convicted of the charges.
Incidents of larceny were a daily occurrence at the airport, and those imprudent enough to talk about what was going on were routinely murdered, usually just days after going to the police. Corrupt cops on Jimmy Burke’s payroll tipped him off about informants and potential witnesses. The bodies, sometimes as many as a dozen a year, were left strangled, trussed, and shot in the trunks of stolen cars abandoned in the long-term parking lots that surrounded the airport. With Henry Hill, Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, Skinny Bobby Amelia, Stanley Diamond, Joey Allegro, and Jimmy Santos, an ex-cop who did time for a stickup and decided to join the bad guys, Jimmy Burke raised robbing the airport to an art form.
Occasionally a criminal savant finds a particular field in which he excels and in which he delights. For Jimmy Burke it was hijacking. To watch Jimmy Burke tear through the cartons of a newly hijacked trailer was to watch a greedy child at Christmas. He would rip into the first few stolen crates until his passion to possess and touch each of the stolen items abated. Then he would peer inside the crates, pat their sides, sniff the air around them, lift them in
his arms, and begin to carry them off the trucks, even though he always hired neighborhood guys for the heavy lifting. When Jimmy was unloading a truck, there was almost a beatific contentedness glowing on his sweat-drenched face. Henry often thought that his friend Jimmy was never happier than when unloading a freshly hijacked truck.
In addition to his uncanny talent for making money, Jimmy Burke was also one of the most feared men in the city’s organized-crime establishment. He had a reputation for violence that dated back to his early years in prison, when he was rumored to have done killings there for mob chiefs who were in prison with him at the time. His explosive temper terrified some of the most terrifying men in the city, and the stories about him left even his friends a little chilled. He seemed to possess a bizarre combination of generosity and an enthusiasm for homicide. On one occasion Jimmy is said to have given the elderly, impoverished mother of a young hood five thousand dollars. The woman’s son was said to have owed his mother the money but had refused to pay her. Jimmy was apparently so incensed at this lack of regard for motherhood that he gave the woman the five thousand in the morning, claiming it was from her son, and then allegedly killed the woman’s son before dusk. In 1962, when Jimmy and Mickey decided to get married, he discovered that Mickey was being bothered by an old boyfriend, who was calling her on the phone, yelling at her on the street, and circling her house for hours in his car. On the day Jimmy and Mickey Burke were married the police found the remains of his wife’s old boyfriend. The body had been carefully cut into over a dozen pieces and tossed all over the inside of his car.
But it was Jimmy’s talent for making money that clearly won him a place in the hearts of the mob’s rulers. He was so extraordinary that, in an unprecedented move, the Colombo crime family in Brooklyn and the Lucchese family in Queens negotiated to share his services. The notion that two Italian-run crime families would even consider having a sit-down to negotiate the services of an Irishman only added to the Burke legend.
Still, none of his friends ever really knew very much about Jimmy Burke. In fact, even Jimmy didn’t know very much about himself. He never knew exactly when and where he was born, and he never knew either of his real parents. According to the records of the Manhattan Foundling Home, he was born July 5, 1931, to a woman named Conway. At the age of two he was designated a neglected child and entered into the Roman Catholic Church’s foster-care program. For the next eleven years he was moved in and out of dozens of foster homes, where, psychiatric social workers would later reveal, he had been beaten, sexually abused, pampered, lied to, ignored, screamed at, locked in closets, and treated kindly by so many different sets of temporary parents that he had great difficulty remembering more than a few of their names and faces.
In the summer of 1944, at the age of thirteen, Jimmy was riding in a car with his latest set of foster parents. When he began to act up in the rear seat, his foster father, a stern man with an explosive temper, turned around to slap him. The car suddenly went out of control, crashed, and killed the man instantly. Jimmy’s foster mother blamed him for her husband’s death and began to beat him regularly, but the Vanguard Childcare Agency refused to move Jimmy into another foster home. Jimmy began running away and getting into trouble. Two months after the accident Jimmy was arrested for juvenile delinquency. He was charged with being disorderly in a Queens playground. The charge was later dismissed, but the next year, at the age of fourteen, he was charged with burglarizing a house near his foster home and with taking twelve hundred dollars in cash. He was placed in the Mount Loretto Reformatory, a juvenile jail for incorrigible youngsters, on Staten Island. It was supposed to have the same isolating effect on young people as Alcatraz was alleged to have on noncompliant adults. In truth, serving time in Mount Loretto’s was almost a badge of honor among the youngsters with whom Jimmy Burke had begun to travel.
In September of 1949, after innumerable beatings and arrests at the hands of the police and after a number of stints in various juvenile jails, including Elmira, Jimmy was arrested for trying to pass three thousand dollars’ worth of fraudulent checks in a Queens bank. Because of his youth and innocent appearance Jimmy had been used as a “passer” by Dominick Cerami, a Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, hood who headed a gang of professional check cashers. In the squad room on the second floor of the 75th Precinct in Queens, detectives cuffed Jimmy’s hands behind his back and began punching him in the stomach in an effort to get him to implicate Cerami in the scheme. Jimmy took the beating and refused to talk. He was sentenced to five years in Auburn for bank forgery. He was eighteen. It was his first trip to an adult prison. The day he walked into Auburn, a huge stone prison with steel gates, set in a frozen stretch of upper New York State, Jimmy was greeted by over a dozen of the prison’s toughest inmates. They had been awaiting his arrival in the prison reception area. Two of the men approached Jimmy. They were friends of Dominick Cerami, and they were grateful for what he had done on Cerami’s behalf. They told him that if he had any problems in Auburn, he should come to them. Jimmy Burke had met the mob.
“The thing you’ve got to understand about Jimmy is that he loved to steal. He ate and breathed it. I think if you ever offered Jimmy a billion dollars not to steal, he’d turn you down and then try to figure out how to steal it from you. It was the only thing he enjoyed. It kept him alive. As a kid he stole his food. He rolled drunks. All those years he was really living on the streets until he’d get picked up and turned over to the foundling home. Then he’d go to another foster home or a reform school until he ran away again. He used to sleep in parked cars. He was a little kid. He had a couple of places to sleep and wash in the backstretch at Aqueduct. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two Jimmy had only been out of jail a total of eighty-six days. Jimmy’s childhood was spent either behind bars or on the lam and stealing. It got so that the bars didn’t bother him. They made no difference to him whatever. He didn’t even see the bars. He was invulnerable.
“By 1970 Jimmy owned hijacking at Kennedy Airport. Of course he had Paulie’s okay, but it was Jimmy who decided what and when shipments and trucks were worth taking. It was Jimmy who picked the crew for each job, Jimmy who lined up the fences and drops.
“You’ve got to understand, we grew up near the airport. We had friends, relatives, everybody we knew worked at the airport. To us, and especially to guys like Jimmy, the airport was better than Citibank. Whenever Jimmy needed money he went to the airport. We always knew what was coming in and what was being shipped out. It was like the neighborhood department store. Between boosting cargo and hijacking trucks, Kennedy Airport was an even bigger moneymaker than numbers. We had people working for the airlines, people with the Port Authority, we had clean-up crews and maintenance workers, security guards, the waiters and waitresses at the restaurants, and the drivers and dispatchers working for the air-cargo trucking companies. We owned the place.
“Sometimes a trucking company boss or some foreman would get suspicious that one of their employees was tipping us off and try to fire them. If that happened, we’d talk to Paulie, who would talk to Johnny Dio, who ran the unions, and the guy would always keep his job. The union would make a grievance out of it. They’d threaten a walkout. They’d threaten to close the trucker down. Pretty soon the truckers got the message and let the insurance companies pay.”
In 1966, at the age of twenty-three, Henry Hill went on his first hijacking. It was not a true hijacking in that the trucks were parked in a garage rather than traveling along the road when they were robbed, but it was a first-class grade-B felony nevertheless. Jimmy Burke invited Henry along on the heist. Jimmy had found out about three cargo trucks filled with home appliances that were being stored over the weekend in one of the freight garages just outside the airport. He also had a buyer, a friend of Tuddy Vario’s, who was going to pay five thousand dollars per truck.
As always, Jimmy had great inside information. The garage had very little security, and on Friday nights there was only one elderly watchman on duty.
His job was mostly to prevent vandalism by youngsters. On the night of the robbery Henry had no difficulty getting the watchman to open the gate. He simply told the man that he had left his paycheck in one of the trucks. The moment the gate swung open, Henry poked his finger in the man’s back. He then tied the watchman to a chair in a nearby shack. Jimmy knew exactly where the keys were kept and the trucks parked. Within minutes Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy DeSimone were driving the trucks through the industrial roads of Canarsie on their way to Flatlands Avenue, where Tuddy and the fence were waiting. It was simple and sweet. It was the easiest five grand Henry had ever earned. Within an hour he and Jimmy and Tommy were on their way to Vegas for the weekend. Earlier that day Jimmy had made reservations for the three of them in phony names.
“Most of the loads hijacked were sold before they were even robbed. They were hijacks to order. We knew what we wanted and we knew where it was going before the job was done. We used to get two or three jobs a week. Sometimes we’d get two a day if we wanted money bad. We’d get up in the morning and go to Robert’s, a bar that Jimmy used to own on Lefferts Boulevard, in South Ozone Park. Robert’s was perfect. There were three card tables, a casino craps table, and enough bookmakers and loan sharks to cover all the action in town. There were barmaids who drank Sambuca in the morning. There was ‘Stacks’ Edwards, a black credit-card booster who wanted to join the ‘May-fia.’ He played a blues guitar on weekends. It was a hangout for truck drivers, freight handlers, cargo dispatchers, and backfield airport workers who loved the action and could drop their Friday paycheck before Saturday morning. But a tip on good cargo loads could make up for a lot of paychecks and buy back a lot of IOUs. Robert’s was also convenient. It was next to the Van Wyck Expressway and just minutes from the Kennedy cargo area, Aqueduct Racetrack, Paulie Vario’s new office in a trailer on Flatlands Avenue at the Bargain Auto Junkyard, and the Queens County courts, where we got our postponements.
Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition Page 9
