Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Nicholas Pileggi

  “Now I was on the way to the hospital. I still had the guns in the trunk of the car, and I was late for picking up my brother. I must have been doing eighty miles an hour. I looked up from the Long Island Expressway and I saw the helicopter. I couldn’t believe it’d picked me up again. I was driving along and looking for the plane, and as I sailed over the rise before heading toward the Midtown Tunnel entrance I saw a pile of cars stacked up every which way on the road. It’s curb to curb, and I couldn’t stop. I had a helicopter on my head, a trunk full of guns, and I was sailing along into a twenty-car pileup.

  “I started to stand on the brakes. I pulled the emergency. And I still wasn’t stopping. I cut the wheel into the curb and began scraping my way to a halt. I could smell the burning. I began to slow down and finally stopped just inches from the pileup. I was shaking. Finally they cleared the mess away, and when I got to the hospital, my brother’s doctor took one look at me and wanted me to get in bed. I explained that I had almost gotten into an accident and that I had been partying all night, and he took mercy and gave me ten milligrams of Valium. I put my brother in the car and we headed home. My plan was to drop off my brother at the house and pick up Karen. Michael was having dinner with us.

  “On our way back to my house I looked out the car window, and what do I see but the red helicopter. I watched it for a while and then I asked my brother, ‘Is that helicopter following us?’ He looked at me as though I’m on acid. But there it was, hanging in the air. As we drove toward the house the helicopter stayed with us, but even then my brother didn’t seem to think that much about it. If it’s anybody, I thought, it’s got to be the feds. The treasury guys must still be looking for the guns. It has to be the feds. Only the feds have money to burn on helicopters.

  “I was cooking dinner that night. I had to start braising the beef, pork butt, and veal shanks for the ragu tomato sauce. It’s Michael’s favorite. I was making ziti with meat gravy, and I’m planning to roast some peppers over the flames, and I was putting on some string beans with olive oil and garlic, and I had got some beautiful milk-white veal cutlets, cut just right, that I was going to fry up before dinner as an appetizer.

  “Karen and I were going over to Bobby Germaine’s to give him the guns Jimmy didn’t want and to pick up some money he had for me. I also had to get some heroin from him so that Judy Wicks, one of my couriers, would be able to fly out to Pittsburgh later that night with a half a kilo. Judy, who was a friend of the family, was already at my house when my brother and I got there. She looked like a Kansas preacher’s daughter. That, of course, was what made her such a good courier. Skinny, dirty-blond hair, dumb pink-and-blue hat and crummy Dacron clothes out of the Sears catalogue. Sometimes, with heavy loads, she’d borrow a baby for the trip. She looked so pathetic that the only people who ever stopped her were Travelers Aid social workers looking to stir up business. Judy was going to hang around the house until I got back with the stuff. Then, after we had all had dinner, I was going to drive her to the airport for her flight to Pittsburgh.

  “I was home for about an hour. I braised the meat. I squeezed the tomatoes through the colander—I don’t like the seeds. I kept looking out the window. The helicopter was gone. I waited a while and listened for the noise. It seemed to have stopped. I asked Michael to watch the sauce, and Karen and I started for Germaine’s. We were halfway there when I noticed the red helicopter again. But now it was really close. I could almost see the guy sticking his head out the window. I didn’t want to take the copter to Germaine’s hideout. And I sure didn’t like driving around with Jimmy’s guns in the trunk of the car. Karen and I weren’t very far from my mother’s, so I decided to drop by for a minute. Karen didn’t ask any questions. I knew there was some overhead cover in my mother’s carport, so I could unload the guns without being seen from above. When we got to my mother’s house I took the guns out of the trunk and put them in her garbage cans. I sent Karen inside to tell her not to touch anything outside the house or around the garbage cans, no matter what. The minute I got rid of the guns I felt better. So I decided to shake the helicopter and go over to Germaine’s and get the money and dope.

  “I told Karen, ‘Let’s go shopping.’ We drove to a giant shopping mall, parked the car, and went inside. I was ready to spend a couple of hours walking around. Also, I wanted to call Bobby Germaine and tell him about the heat. I went to a phone booth in the mall and called him. I told him I wasn’t coming with the guns. I said, ‘I’m being followed, for Chrissake. I’ve had a helicopter following me all day.’ He said I was crazy, I was paranoid. By four o’clock, when we left the shopping mall, the helicopter was gone. It must have run out of gas. Karen and I got in the car and drove back to my mother’s. Still no helicopter. I looked for a land tail. Nothing.

  “I got the guns from my mother’s garbage. I told Karen we were going to Bobby Germaine’s but we were taking the long way. She started to drive and drive and drive. We went from town to town. Up streets. Into cul-de-sacs. We made U-turns. We speeded up and then suddenly pulled over to the curb and stopped. Went through lights. The whole bit. I was checking cars and watching license plates from the rear seat. Nothing.

  “Finally we got to Germaine’s. He had the garden apartment in a house in Commack. When I got there I began to feel better. ‘You see? Didn’t I tell you you’re paranoid?’ Germaine said. We all laughed. I snorted some more coke, and soon it got me back together. Then Germaine gave me the package of heroin I was going to give to Judy.

  “Now I’ve got to get home to get the package ready to give to Judy for the trip. I also had to get over to my girlfriend Robin’s house and give the package a whack with some quinine. I hadn’t seen Robin in a few days, and I knew she was going to want me to hang around longer than I wanted to. I had the cooking to finish, and I had to get Judy ready for her trip, and I knew Robin was going to get on my ass. It was going to be awful. The phone rang. It was Robin. Germaine gave me a signal so Karen didn’t know who was calling. Robin wanted to know when I’d be getting to her place. I said in about an hour. Could I stay for dinner? We’ll talk about it later, I said. Now I know it’s not going to be awful, it’s going to be worse than awful. Then I called Judy at my house. I wanted her to know I had the stuff and that she would be making the trip to Pittsburgh. I said, ‘You know what you’ve got to do?’ She says, ‘Yeah.’ Judy had to make plane reservations to go to Pittsburgh that night with the dope. I said, ‘You know where to go?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said. ‘You know who to call?’ I asked her. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she said.

  “Then I told her to leave my house and go to a phone booth and make all the calls. She made a noise like I was some kind of idiot picking on her about things she already knew. ‘Just make sure you leave the house,’ I said. ‘Don’t use the house phone,’ I said. So I hung up and what did she do? She used the phone in my house. She used the phone to make the reservations for Pittsburgh and to call Paul Mazzei and tell him when she’ll be arriving. Now the cops know everything. They know that a package is leaving from my house for the airport, and they even have the time and the flight number. I’m a pig on the way to slaughter and I don’t know it.

  “As soon as I got back home I started cooking. I had a few hours until Judy’s flight, and I had told my brother to keep an eye on the ragu. All day long the guy had been watching helicopters and tomato sauce. I asked Judy if she had called from the outside. There had been enough heat around for me not to trust my phones at all. If she had told me the truth I might have changed everything. I could have canceled the trip. I could have hidden the junk. But instead she got real annoyed at my question. ‘Of course,’ she said with a humph. I left everything at my house, with Karen in charge, and I drove over to Robin’s with the dope. I wanted to mix it once and get back to the meat gravy, but now Robin was pissed. She wanted a conversation about why we’re not seeing enough of each other. We started arguing and she’s screaming, and I’m mixing heroin, and she’s slamming things, and I got out o
f the house minutes before she started throwing things.

  “By eight-thirty we had all finished eating. Judy had an eleven o’clock flight. At nine-thirty she said she had to go home. What for? I said. She said she wanted to go home to get her hat. I’d been carrying a pound of heroin around in my jacket all day and I wanted Judy to start taping it to her leg. No, she said, she had to go home to get her hat. I couldn’t believe it. I told her to forget it. I was exhausted. I didn’t need a trip to Rockaway just because she wanted her hat. She got mad. I mean, she’s insisting. It’s her lucky hat. She needs it. She’s afraid to fly without it. She always wears it. It was a blue-and-pink thing that sat on top of her head. It was the most Middle-Western, rube thing you ever saw. The point is, if she insisted, I had to drive her home for her damn hat.

  “When I got into the car I suddenly realized that I was still carrying half a kilo of heroin in my pocket. I remember saying to myself, ‘What do I have to drive around with this stuff for?’ So while the engine was still idling I got out of the car and went back inside the house and stuck the packages in a recessed light near the entry steps. I then got back in the car and started to drive Judy home. I wasn’t fifty feet out of the driveway when my car was blocked. There were cars all over the place. I thought maybe there’d been an accident in front of my house. Then I thought, It’s my turn to get whacked for Lufthansa. I saw this guy in a windbreaker who popped up alongside the car and jammed a gun against the side of my head. For a second I thought it was over. Then he screamed, ‘Make one move, motherfucker, and I’ll blow you away!’ That’s when I began to relax. That’s when I knew they were cops. Only cops talk that way. If it had been wiseguys, I wouldn’t have heard a thing. I would have been dead.”

  Twenty

  When Nassau County Narcotics Detective Daniel Mann first heard about Henry Hill, he had no idea Hill was going to be any different from the thirty or forty other suburban drug dealers he arrested every year. Even when some of the first intelligence reports, surveillances, and wiretap information began coming in, he was still doubtful. Danny Mann had been a cop too long to get himself excited before getting kissed.

  The Hill case had started just like all the others. There was an informant. In the Hill case it was a nineteen-year-old Commack, Long Island, youngster, who had been arrested for selling twelve hundred dollars’ worth of Quaaludes to Nassau County undercover cops on three different occasions. Undercovers always like to string together more than one or two sales before making their arrests. Multiple sales tend to solidify a case and give the prosecutor more clout at the inevitable plea-bargaining table. An airtight case also means those arrested are more likely to cooperate and be coaxed into giving up their friends and partners in return for leniency. In this case the youngster needed no coaxing. Within minutes of being brought to the Mineola precinct for booking he was looking for a deal. The kid—a beefy, long-haired, ex-high school lineman—had been arrested before. In fact, it turned out that he was already an informant, giving up the people from whom he was buying his drugs. He even had his C.I., or “confidential informant” number, and he suggested that Danny Mann check him out with Bruce Walter, his case agent, with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. In return for leniency, the young man said, he would be willing to work as an informant for Mann and the Nassau cops.

  Mann remembers looking at the kid and doubting that any bargain could be struck. What could the kid offer that would be worth his while? Danny Mann was not interested in pursuing druggie kids. No, no, the kid said. He could give up more than college kids. He knew about wiseguys. He could give up a wiseguy drug ring operating right under Mann’s nose. It was an organized-crime heroin and cocaine ring, and they were operating out of Rockville Centre and distributing drugs all over the country. The kid said he had even been invited to work as a courier by one of the bosses.

  Danny Mann left the room. He called his old pal Bruce Walter, the New York City police detective assigned to the youngster’s case in Brooklyn. Was the kid for real? “You got a winner,” Walters said. “Have fun.”

  The youngster was a small-time punk. He had quit high school before graduation and got most of his money as a chemistry salesman, selling pharmaceutical concoctions such as Quaaludes, amphetamines, LSD, and angel dust rather than heroin and cocaine. His father, an ex-con, was a fugitive in connection with a bank robbery and other cases. The young man lived at home with his mother, a part-time shopping-mall hair stylist.

  A deal was struck. If the youngster could really “give up” an organized-crime drug ring, the charges against him would be reduced, if not dropped, and his cooperation would be conveyed by both police and prosecutor to the sentencing judge. If he was helpful, in other words, he might be able to get a walk. The drug business, of course, is just filled with people like this youngster. There are literally thousands of them, all leaking bits of information about each other, the smart ones holding something back for a rainy day, all of them with confidential-informant numbers and case agents and prosecutors whom they keep apprised of everything going on in the street. In addition to youngsters and petty dealers, however, many of the biggest and most successful narcotics importers and distributors, some of them top organized-crime figures, are also confidential informants to one set of cops or another. The drug business is simply a business of informants. Partners, friends, brothers—there are no stand-up guys in the drug trade. It is a multibillion-dollar business in which it is understood that everyone is ratting out everyone else.

  While Detective Mann and William Broder, the Nassau County assistant district attorney, began taking notes, the youngster started giving them details about the ring. He said it was run by members of the Lucchese crime family and that it was connected with Paul Vario. The ring’s leader, as far as the informant knew, was Henry Hill, an ex-con whom he knew to be very closely associated with Paul Vario of the Lucchese family. Mann and Broder were impressed. They had not come across many people close to Paul Vario before, let alone any who might be able to implicate the elusive mob boss in anything as serious as drugs. Most of the people who could have done Paul Vario any damage wound up dead long before Mann or anyone else from law enforcement got around to seeing them.

  The youngster said he had known Hill for many years. He had visited Hill’s house numerous times and knew Hill’s wife and children. The youngster said he gained access to the house because he had relatives and friends who were very friendly with the Hills and so he had never really been considered a stranger. He insisted to Mann, however, that he would not talk about any of these relatives or friends, since they were not related to the case at hand. He said he knew the Hill operation had to be a large one because of the kinds of people with whom Hill was connected. Hill, he said, was close to Jimmy Burke, had been a part of the Kennedy Airport truck-hijacking gang, and had probably been in on the Lufthansa robbery.

  The youngster told Mann that the first time he knew that Hill was in the drug business was back in 1979. Hill had just been released from prison. The youngster said he had been doing some landscape work at Hill’s house, and while he was waiting for a friend, who was also a friend of Hill’s, to pick him up, Hill had suggested that he start earning extra money as a “mule,” or drug courier, for the operation. Hill had then taken him into the first-floor bedroom to show him the drugs. The bedroom could be entered only through an electronically operated door. Once inside, Hill showed him five kilos of cocaine, stored in a walk-in closet. He said that Hill took out one of the kilos so that he could examine it more carefully. Hill said he was handling eight kilos of cocaine a week and needed help in distributing the drugs. According to the youngster, Hill offered him five thousand dollars a trip for transporting cocaine to various spots around the country.

  Using the youngster’s information and an accompanying affidavit from the Brooklyn district attorney that verified the youngster’s reliability as an informant, Mann applied for a wiretap order to be signed by a Nassau County judge. In his affidavit to the
court Mann said he needed the wiretap authorization because the usual methods of investigation would not be successful in the Hill case. For instance, the informant, who knew Hill personally, was much too frightened to introduce an undercover agent into the operation because he feared for his life. Mann also said that preliminary surveillances of Hill revealed that he was extremely wary, rendering the usual surveillance techniques inadequate. Mann said that Hill would purposely drive more than sixty miles an hour along back streets, go through red lights, and make unauthorized U-turns routinely, just to see if he was possibly being followed. Hill was careful about whom he spoke to and never put himself in the position of being overheard in a restaurant or other public place. In fact, in public Hill often used the old prison trick to guard against lip-readers: he covered his mouth when he spoke. Mann was granted a thirty-day wiretap order authorizing him to monitor Hill’s telephone at 19 St. Marks Avenue, Rockville Centre, Long Island, and also a phone in a nearby basement apartment, where, according to the informant, most of the drugs were delivered, cut, and packaged. The basement apartment, at 250 Lakeview Avenue, also Rockville Centre, was occupied by Robin Cooperman.

  Tapes were made daily. Each reel ran twenty-four hundred feet. By the time Mann had finished his investigation of Henry and the drug operation, he had acquired thirty-five reels of tape. Each had been signed by the detectives who monitored the calls and sealed by the court. Mann had also set up his men across the street from Henry’s house for surveillance pictures. Mann used a small garage that belonged to a retired civil servant.

  It was not long before Mann and the rest of the men in the unit realized that they had inadvertently come across a thirty-seven-year-old ex-con whose life ran like a thread through much of the city’s organized-crime fabric. Henry Hill was providing Danny Mann and the squad with a fascinating once-in-a-lifetime peek into the day-today workings of a wiseguy. It wasn’t that Henry was a boss. And it had nothing to do with his lofty rank within a crime family or the easy viciousness with which hoods from Henry’s world are identified. Henry, in fact, was neither of high rank nor particularly vicious; he wasn’t even tough as far as the cops could determine. What distinguished Henry from most of the other wiseguys who were under surveillance was the fact that he seemed to have total access to all levels of the mob world.