Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “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.

  “I don’t know how many people Tommy killed. I don’t even think Jimmy knew. Tommy was out of control. He’d begun carrying two guns. One night Tommy shot a kid named Spider in the foot just because the kid didn’t want to dance. It looked accidental, and Vinnie Asaro, who’s with the Bonanno crew, took Spider to a neighborhood doctor to get the kid fixed up. We let Spider sleep in Robert’s for a couple of weeks. He was walking around with his leg in bandages. But crazy Tommy kept making the kid dance. Tommy said he was using the kid for target practice.

  “One night we’re playing cards in the cellar—Tommy, Jimmy, me, Anthony Stabile, Angelo Sepe—when the Spider walks in. It’s three o’clock in the morning and we’re all smashed out of our minds. All of a sudden Tommy wants him to dance. ‘Do a dance,’ Tommy says. For some reason Spider tells Tommy to go fuck himself. Now we started getting on Tommy. Jimmy is joking and he says to Tommy, ‘You take that shit from this punk?’ We’re all egging Tommy on, joking with him. He’s getting mad, but he’s still playing cards. Then, before anyone has any idea what he’s going to do, he puts three shots into Spider’s chest. I didn’t even know where he had the gun, except for a second we’re all deaf. I can smell burn. Nobody says a word, but now I’m convinced Tommy is a total psychopath.

  “Finally Jimmy yelled at him, ‘All right, you dumb fuck, if you’re going to be a big fucking wiseguy, you dig the hole.’ That was it. Nothing else. Nobody said anything else. Jimmy just made Tommy dig the hole right there in the cellar, and all the while Tommy was grousing and pissed off that he had to dig the hole. He was like a kid who had been bad and had to clean the erasers after school.

  “Every day was some kind of war. Every day was another sit-down. Every time we went out bouncing, somebody got bombed and there was a war. Everybody was getting very hot all the time. One night Paulie, who was usually calm, came into Robert’s crazy mad. He wanted everybody. Call Jimmy. Call the cabstand. Get Brooksie from the junkyard. I thought it was a full-scale war. It turned out that he and Phyllis had gone to Don Pepe’s Vesuvio Restaurant, on Lefferts Boulevard, just a few blocks south of Robert’s. Don Pepe’s was a great restaurant, but the owner was a real pain. There were no menus, and he wouldn’t take reservations. Everybody waited on line, even Paulie.

  “It turned out that Paulie and Phyllis had waited on line for half an hour while a new maître d’ kept seating one doctor after another in front of Paulie. When Paulie complained, the guy finally gave him a table, but he was pissed at Paulie. When Paulie ordered some wine, the maître d’ came to pour and, maybe by accident, spilled it all over Phyllis. By now Paulie’s coming out of his skin. But when the maître d’ pulled out a dirty rag and started putting his hands all over Phyllis’ dress, Paulie turned over the table, and he started to slap the guy around. Paulie only managed to get one or two swings at the guy before he ran into the kitchen. When Paulie told him to come out, a half dozen waiters with heavy pans and knives blocked the kitchen door.

  “I never saw Paulie so angry. He said if the waiters wanted to protect their friend, then they were all going to get their heads broken. Within an hour we had two carloads of guys with baseball bats and pipes waiting outside Don Pepe’s. By eleven o’clock the waiters and kitchen help got off. The minute they saw us waiting for them they started to run. A few jumped in cars. We were chasing waiters and breaking heads all over Brooklyn that night.

  “It was so easy. Lump them up. Whack them out. Nobody ever thought, Why? What for? Nobody thought about business. The truth was the violence began to damage the business. The hijackings, for instance, had been going beautifully, but all of a sudden everyone began getting very loose with their hands. ‘Whack ’em!’ ‘Fuck ’em!’ That’s all they knew.

  “I didn’t usually go out on the actual hijackings. There was Tommy, Stanley, Joey Allegro, and other guys who enjoyed sticking a gun in a driver’s face. I usually dealt with the distribution of the stuff. I had the buyers. I lined up some of the deals. Sometimes, however, if we got shorthanded I’d go on the heist myself. On this occasion we had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar cigarette load. It was going to be easy. It was half a ‘give-up,’ which meant one of the two drivers was in on the deal.

  “We grabbed them right near their garage at the Elk Street warehouse. They were making the turn onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway when Tommy and Stanley jumped on the running boards, one on each side. They showed guns. Joey Allegro and I are in the backup car. Stanley made the driver who’s with us give up the dashboard code. Big trucks with valuable loads usually had a keyboard under the dash with three buttons. You need to know the code to start the engine, or even open and close the doors, or the truck’s burglar alarm would go off.

  “Tommy put the drivers in the car and got in with Joey, and I got in the truck with Stanley, and we headed for the drop, which was a legitimate truck warehouse near the General Post Office on West Thirty-sixth Street. Jimmy was waiting there with five unloaders. He had long rollers, and we started running the cigarette cartons out of the trailer and into other trucks. There were other trucks being unloaded at the same time, and of course none of the workmen knew we were unloading a hot truck. We were in the middle of the job when this big burly guy comes over and wants to see our union cards. We don’t have union cards, we’ve got guns.

  “He was a big, chesty guy and he didn’t know Jimmy and he didn’t give a fuck. He started a beef that Jimmy’s unloaders were not members of the union. He was going to close the whole place down. Jimmy tried to talk to him. No good. Jimmy tried to take care of him with a few bucks. No good. The guy wanted to see our union cards. He was a real pain, and Jimmy had another two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cigarettes lined up to be unloaded in the same place the next day.

  “By now we’ve got the truck pretty well cleaned out, except for twenty cases of Laredo roll-your-own cigarettes we left in the truck because nobody wanted them. Jimmy motioned to me and Stanley to move the truck out of there. Stanley, thank God, remembered the dashboard code to start the engine without the alarm going off, and within seconds we’re heading down Ninth Avenue toward the Lincoln Tunnel and New Jersey to dump the truck.

  “We hadn’t gone a couple of blocks before I noticed that people were waving at us. They were screaming at us. They’re pointing to the back of the truck. I stick my head out the window and I realize that Jimmy and the crew forgot to lock the back of the trailer and we’ve been dropping cartons of Laredo cigarettes along Ninth Avenue. It’s unbelievable. People were screaming at us and we were pretending not to hear them, but when we got to the next corner, parked right in front of us was a police radio car. That was it. I looked at Stanley and said, ‘Pull over and let’s close it.’ Stanley just looked at me, blank. I said, ‘If I don’t lock that rear door, we’re going to get stopped.’ But he looked really sad and said I couldn’t lock the back door because I couldn’t get out of the truck without triggering the alarm. He said he had been trying to remember the dashboard code for opening the doors, but he couldn’t. If I got out of the truck in the middle of Ninth Avenue all the alarms would go off.

  “I remember we just looked at each other for a minute, said ‘Fuck it,’ and wiggled out the truck windows. We must have looked pretty peculiar. As soon as we hit the pavement we took off. We made sure we weren’t followe
d and went back to the drop, where Jimmy’s really steaming because the union guy is still busting his chops. The guy was threatening Jimmy. He said there wouldn’t be another truck unloaded unless the workers were union. The guy was hopeless.

  “That night Jimmy sent Stanley Diamond and Tommy DeSimone to New Jersey, where the guy lived, to straighten him out. They were just going to rough him up a little bit. Just get him to mind his own business a little bit. Instead, Stanley and Tommy got so carried away with the ball buster that they killed the guy. They were so pissed that the guy wouldn’t listen to Jimmy, that he lived in the boondocks of Jersey, and that they had to go all the way out there just to talk to him, they got themselves so worked up that they just couldn’t keep from killing him.”

  Eleven

  In 1969, at the age of twenty-six, Henry was living in a rented house in Island Park, just two blocks from Paulie’s. He and Karen both had brand-new Buick Rivieras and closets bursting with new clothes. He had fifteen Brioni suits, for which he had paid one thousand dollars each, over thirty custom-made silk shirts, and two dozen pairs of alligator and lizard shoes dyed to match his suits and cashmere sports jackets. There were so many clothes that the two of them used to fight over hangers. There were bureau drawers jammed with bracelets, wafer-thin platinum and gold watches, sapphire rings, antique brooches, gold cuff links, and tangled webs of silver and gold chain necklaces.

  Karen had a maid for the house and four fur coats—“She went to the supermarket in mink”—and when she needed cash she used to separate her thumb and index finger to indicate whether she needed a half inch, an inch, or an inch and a half of money. The baby’s room was filled with the bounty of FAO Schwarz, and the knotty-pine basement overflowed with gifts—yacht-size prams, cashmere comforters, embroidered pillows, imported children’s clothes, sets of sterling silver spoons, and a zoo full of huge stuffed animals.

  Henry had it all—cash, cars, jewelry, clothes, and, after a while, even a girlfriend. For most wiseguys, having a steady girl was not unusual. Almost all of his friends had them. You didn’t leave a wife or abandon a family for one, but you did swank them around, rent them apartments, lease them cars, and feed them regularly with racks of swag clothes and paper bags of stolen jewelry. Having a steady girl was considered a sign of success, like a thoroughbred or a powerboat but better: a girlfriend was the ultimate luxury purchase.

  HENRY: I first met Linda by accident. It was late in 1969. I was getting ready to do a sixty-day bit on Riker’s Island for untaxed cigarettes. She and her girlfriend Veralynn were having dinner in Michael’s Steak Pub, in Rockville Centre, where I was having dinner with Peter Vario, Paulie’s son. All of a sudden Peter started a conversation with Veralynn, so I started talking to Linda. She and Veralynn worked in Queens and shared an apartment on Fulton Street, in Hempstead. After dinner we all went to Val Anthony’s, a little supper club on the north shore, where we had more drinks and danced. Linda was twenty at the time and she had just come back from California. She was all tan and blond. She was beautiful. We just hit it off right away. It was one of those nights when everything worked. Peter and Veralynn split, and Linda and I kept talking and dancing. When I drove her home we noticed Peter’s car. We drove around some more, and when we got back, Peter’s car was still there. By now Linda and I are into it pretty good, so we decided to spend the night together at a Holiday Inn. The next day when I drove her home, Peter’s car was still in the parking lot.

  A couple of days later Paulie comes by and he wants to know about the two girls we met. He said that Peter was acting dopey. Paulie said Peter hadn’t talked about anything but Veralynn for days. It was Veralynn this and Veralynn that, and Paulie said he was sick of it. Paulie wanted to meet this Veralynn. I knew there had to be more to all this than he was letting on, and the next Saturday afternoon, when we were driving over to the girls’ apartment, I learned why Paulie was so nervous.

  “They’re cops,” he said. “The two of them are fucking cops.” I was amazed. I said, “Paulie, are you crazy or what?” But he just kept repeating, “You’ll see. They’re the FBI. You’ll see.” I knew Paulie was under a lot of pressure from Nassau grand juries. He had just done thirty days for contempt. The juries were asking him about his numbers operation with Steve DePasquale, about a meeting at Frankie the Wop’s restaurant, and about who really owned his boat. Paulie was getting the feeling that the cops were all over the place. He actually set up a closed-circuit television camera outside the window of his Brooklyn apartment. He used to sit on the bed in his underwear for hours trying to spot G-men. “There’s one,” he’d say. “The guy behind the tree. Didja see him?” As far as I was concerned, Paulie was acting nuts.

  When we got to Linda’s and Veralynn’s apartment, Paulie was so certain they were cops he wouldn’t go upstairs in case the place was wired. He wanted Veralynn to come down. I made up some bullshit story about just dropping by to say hello over the building’s intercom. Linda said Veralynn was shopping, but she’d be right down. She came out smiling. She kissed me hello. She invited us up, but I said we were in a hurry. Paulie just grumbled. He was looking at the windows. He was looking for cops. Linda was perfect. She was smart. Charming. She wasn’t pissed that I hadn’t called her after our date. She wasn’t upset that we’d barged in on her unannounced. She was terrific. I could see there were no dues to pay with Linda.

  Meanwhile Paulie is whispering, “She’s FBI. She’s FBI.” He’s saying it under his breath so Linda can’t hear him. I got so tired of his craziness that I decided to bring the question out in the open. We’re all standing around Paulie’s Fleetwood Cadillac, and I asked Linda point-blank if she or Veralynn were cops. Paulie looked at me like I was out of my mind, but Linda broke up laughing. She said she worked in Bridal Land, on Queens Boulevard. It was perfect. It was like sticking a pin in Paulie’s balloon, because he knew the place. Bridal Land was owned by a half-assed wiseguy named Paul Stewart, who was mostly a front man for Vinnie Aloi, Buster Aloi’s son. Buster was a boss with the Colombo crew.

  As we talked, even Paulie saw that Linda had no idea who we were. And, more important, she didn’t care. By now Paulie was looking to go home. He was bored. Before we left I told Linda that I was a CPA. She believed me for weeks. She believed that I was a CPA and that Paulie was a fat, old, crazy fuck.

  After that I started seeing Linda almost every day. She was fun. Whenever I would show up, she was happy. There were no strings attached. I was living a crazy life and she went right along with me. No bullshit. No hassle. By now Karen was used to my not getting home some nights, and Linda and I were having a great time. Three or four nights a week we’re out. She begins screwing up at work. She’s not getting to the store until after eleven in the morning. She’s having a ball, but Paul Stewart, her boss, started to get pissed. One day he yelled at her, so I went over to straighten him out. I just abused him a little. I didn’t want to hurt him or anything. But the next time I call her, instead of putting her on the phone, Stewart hangs up. I called back. He hangs up again. That was it. Now I’m hot. I grabbed Jimmy, who was at the bar, and said, “Let’s go!” This time I was going to do more than just threaten him a little bit. I wanted to loosen his head. When he saw us coming he started to run, but we got him in the back of the store and slapped him around a little bit. “Hang up on me, you fuck?” And I started to tie the telephone cord around his neck. He’s begging and yelling and the customers are screaming to let him go.

  Next thing I know there’s a beef. We had a sit-down with the guy’s partner, Vinnie Aloi, and Vinnie’s father, Buster. I had Paulie at the table, and Jimmy was my witness. Buster started right out kissing me. The old man had loved Jimmy and me ever since we gave him a sixty-thousand share out of Air France. Buster started right away begging me not to kill the guy. He said the guy fronted for his son. I could see Vinnie Aloi sitting there hating me. The old man said Vinnie got a paycheck out of the place and had his cars registered there.

  Big-shot me, I
pretended I was thinking about it—like I had any intention of doing anything to the guy. I didn’t care, it was already out of my system. But I played it out, and I agreed, for Buster’s sake, that I wouldn’t kill the rat bastard. Next thing I know, Stewart comes out of the kitchen. They had him waiting in there during the sit-down. He’s shaking, and right away he apologizes to me in front of everybody. He started begging and crying. He swore that he didn’t know who I was with and that he’d do anything he could to make up for the insult.

  Now Linda doesn’t even have to go to work. We started seeing more of each other. Pretty soon I was living two lives. I set Linda up in an apartment around the corner from The Suite. I’d get home three or four nights a week, and I’d usually take Karen out to a show or club on Saturday night too. Karen always looked forward to Saturday nights. The rest of the week she was usually busy with the kids and I did my bouncing with the crew and took Linda along. Everybody got to know her. Linda became a part of my life.

  LINDA: I first met Henry when Peter Vario started to see my roommate, Veralynn. Henry and I met, and we just hit it off. We both liked to laugh and to enjoy ourselves. He was a very sweet guy. He was kind. I could see the way he did things for people without taking credit and without even letting them know what he did.

  I think I was his escape, and that wasn’t so terrible. He was always under tremendous pressure. He and Karen were always fighting. They couldn’t say two words to each other without a war. Every time he had a fight with her he’d come over to see me. Once she threw away all their car keys, and he got on a bike and had to pedal four miles to my place. Karen was a very strong, demanding person. She put a lot of pressure on him. When they got married, for instance, she had him convert. He was twenty or twenty-one at the time, and she made him get circumcised. It was horrible. He was walking around with a diaper for a month.