Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “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 Varios 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 time 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 in 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 in 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 time, 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 girlfriend 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 wiseguys. 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 break-fast—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.