Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

by Nicholas Pileggi

  Thirteen

  A ten-year sentence-it was more time than Karen could conceive of. When she first heard about it, she planned to move in immediately with her parents. Then she planned to kill herself. Then she planned to kill Henry. Then she planned to divorce him. She worried about how she would support herself and the children. She awoke every morning to greater and greater anxiety. And yet she felt compelled to stay with him for the time being-from day to day, she used to tell herself, or until he was taken behind the wall and it was finally over.

  But Henry didn't go off to prison right away. In fact, as a result of the appeals his lawyers filed, almost two years elapsed between the time of his sentencing in Tampa and the day he finally surrendered in New York and actually began serving his ten-year term. In those twenty-one months Henry completed the time he owed Nassau County for his misdemeanor plea, opened a restaurant in Queens, and hustled as he had never hustled before. He was practically a one-man crime wave. He borrowed money from loan sharks which he never intended to pay back. He moved truckloads of swag at discount rates (below the usual 30 percent of wholesale), and reorganized his stolen-car gang for the chop shops, looking for spare parts.

  He traded stolen and counterfeit credit cards with his old pal from Robert's Lounge, Stacks Edwards. He started buying Sterno in bulk to keep up with the demand for his services as an arsonist. As the prison date drew near, he busted out The Suite, running up huge bills with creditors, selling off liquor and fixtures to other bar owners, even after the IRS had padlocked his door. One night, just before the end, Henry burglarized his own place so thoroughly that when the IRS agents went to auction, they found that every glass, dish, chair, Naugahyde banquette, bar-stool, lighting fixture, and ashtray had disappeared.

  "The day before I went in I took Linda to the top of the Empire State Building. It was the first time in my life I had ever gone up there. I told her that I was going away in the morning. She hadn't known exactly when I had to start my sentence. I told her that if I had half a million dollars I'd take her away with me to Brazil in a minute, but I didn't have half a million, and, anyway, I was a bum. I said that it was better if she went her own way. I told her it was time for her to move on. Don't waste any more time with me. It was the end. I kissed her goodbye. We were both crying, and I watched her go down in the elevator."

  Henry had been preparing for prison for almost two years. He was going to make his stay as soft as possible. After all, he had been hearing about prisons all his life, and now he sought out the experts. Mob lawyers, for instance, often employ ex-cons as paralegals, and many of these ex-jailhouse lawyers are encyclopedic on the subject of prison and the latest wrinkles in the Bureau of Prisons' rules and regulations. Henry found that of all the maximum-security prisons to which he could be sent, Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, was probably the best. It was close to New York, and that would make it easier for Karen, lawyers, and friends to visit. It had enough corrupt guards and key officials to make his stay reasonably bearable. And Lewisburg had a large population of organized-crime members inside at the time, including Paul Vario, who was doing two and a half years for income tax evasion, and Johnny Dio, who had been given a long stretch for the acid blinding of newspaper columnist Victor Riesel. In order to get to Lewisburg himself Henry paid an assignment officer at the West Street jail two hundred dollars.

  Henry also figured out how he could use the various special rehabilitation programs offered by the prison to shorten his sentence. For instance, prisoners got time subtracted from their sentences for everything from sweeping their cells to going to college. In fact, it seemed that prison authorities were so anxious to get rid of prisoners that nearly three quarters of all adults sentenced to correctional institutions were not inside but on parole, probation, furloughs, work-release, or out early. The Bureau of Prisons automatically deducted five days a month from every sentence as part of its mandatory "good time" provision. Since Henry had received a 10-year, or 120-month, sentence, he was automatically entitled to have 600 days, or 20 months, deducted from his original sentence; thus his original sentence really amounted to 8 years and 4 months. The bureau would also deduct 2 or 3 days a month from his sentence if he took on a work detail and another 120 days (one day off for every month he had been sentenced) if he attended classes offered in the prison.

  Henry would be eligible for parole after he had served one third of his sentence, which meant the parole board could free him after he had served 39 months, or a little more than 3 years. Since his file had been stamped "OC" (Organized Crime) in big red letters, it was unlikely that the parole board would free him at the first opportunity. But he learned that their rejection could be appealed to Washington and that a letter-writing campaign by his family, clergymen, and politicians could overturn the prison's decision. When Henry finally got on the bus for Lewisburg, he knew he would probably end up serving between 3 and 4 years.

  There was a going-away party for him the night before at Roger's Place, a Queens Boulevard restaurant Henry had started in order to help provide some income for Karen and the kids while he was gone. Paulie, Jimmy, Tommy DeSimone, Anthony Stabile, and Stanley Diamond were already doing time, but there were more than enough wiseguys around to fuel an all-night blast. By eight o'clock in the morning Henry had taken an exhausted Karen home, but he kept going. The crew-made up of only the guys now-moved to the bar at the Kew Motor Inn, and at ten o'clock, with only two hours of freedom remaining for Henry, they all left in a limousine, hired by his pals, for the trip to check in with the marshals. On the way to the jail Henry decided he wanted a drink at Maxwell's Plum. It would be his last drink on the street for a long time. At eleven o'clock Henry and his pals were at the bar at Maxwell's drinking Screaming Eagles-shot glasses of white Chartreuse dropped into large goblets of chilled champagne. Soon some women who were early for their own luncheon dates joined Henry's party. His noon check-in was toasted by all, and the party continued.

  By five o'clock in the afternoon Henry was being advised to run away. One of the women, a Wall Street analyst, insisted that Henry was too nice to go to prison. She had a place in Canada. He could stay there for a while. She could fly up on weekends. By five-thirty Karen called. She had been able to track him down by calling the wives of the men with whom he had been partying. Al Newman, the bondsman who had been carrying Henry on the fifty-thousand-dollar appeal bond, had received a call from the prison authorities threatening to revoke the bond. They were going to declare Henry a fugitive. Newman told Karen the insurance company would not cover the loss. Al would have had to get up the fifty thousand himself. He was desperate for Henry to turn himself in. Karen was frantic about having to support herself for the next few years, and now she was afraid she would also have the burden of paying off Henry's forfeited bond. When Henry hung up after speaking with her on the phone, he realized that everyone- with the possible exception of bis friends at the bar- wanted him to go to prison. He had one last Eagle, swallowed some Valiums, kissed everyone goodbye, and told the limo driver to take him to jail.

  The Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary is a massive walled city of twenty-two hundred inmates set amid the dark hills and abandoned coal mines of central Pennsylvania. It was raining the day Henry arrived and he could barely make out a huge, bleak castle with its Warner Brothers wall, mounted gun towers, and searchlights. Everything surrounding Lewisburg was cold, wet, and gray. From bis seat inside the dark-green prison bus Henry saw the great steel gates swing open. He and about a dozen other prisoners had been cuffed and shackled ever since they left New York. They had been told that there would be no food or toilet stops during the six-and-a-half-hour journey. There had been two armed guards seated behind locked metal cages-one in the front of the bus and the other in the rear-and upon arrival at Lewisburg they both began snarling orders about when and how Henry and the other prisoners were to leave the bus. Henry saw concrete, iron mesh, and steel bars everywhere. He watched a whole wall of steel, streake
d with rain, slide sideways, and he heard it slam behind him with the finality of death. This was Henry's first time in a real prison. Until now all of his stints had been in jails-places such as Riker's Island and Nassau County, places where wiseguy inmates would spend a few casual months, usually on work-release. For Henry and his crew doing thirty or sixty days in a jail was little more than a temporary inconvenience. This was different. Prisons were forever.

  "The bus stopped at a cement building just inside the walls. The guards were all screaming and yelling that we were in prison and not at some country club. As soon as we got off the bus I saw at least five guards with machine guns, who watched us while some other guards removed our cuffs and leg shackles. I was wearing tan army fatigues I'd gotten at West Street when I signed myself in, and I was freezing. I remember looking down at the floor-it was wet red tile- and I could feel the damp come right up through the soles of my shoes. The guards walked us through a long cement tunnel toward the reception area, and it echoed and smelled like the basement of a stadium. The reception room turned out to be little more than a wider cement hallway, surrounded by thick wire mesh, with a long, narrow table where we handed over our papers and were given a thin mattress bedroll, one sheet, one blanket, one pillow, one pillow case, one towel, one washcloth, and a toothbrush.

  "When it was my turn to get the bedroll I looked up. Right there in the reception area, standing next to the guards, I saw Paulie. He was laughing. Next to Paulie I saw Johnny Dio, and next to Dio was Fat Andy Ruggierio. They're all laughing at me. All of a sudden the guards who had been screaming shut up like mice. Paulie and Johnny came around the table and started hugging me. The guards acted like Paulie and Johnny were invisible. Paulie put his arm around me and walked me away from the table. 'You don't need that shit,' Fat Andy said. 'We got nice towels for you.' One of the guards looked up at Paulie and nodded toward my bundle. 'Pick it up,' Paulie said, and then he, Fat Andy, and Johnny Dio walked me to the Assignment and Orientation room, where they got me a single cell for my first couple of weeks.

  "After they checked me in, Paulie and Johnny walked me into the main reception room, and there were a dozen guys I knew waiting for me. They were clapping and laughing and yelling at me. It was a regular reception committee. All that was missing was the beer.

  "Right from the beginning you could see that life in the can was different for wiseguys. Everybody else was doing real time, all mixed together, living like pigs. Wiseguys lived alone. They were isolated from everyone else in the prison. They kept to themselves and paid the biggest and meanest black lifers a few bucks a week to keep everybody cool. The crew owned the joint, or they owned a lot of the guys who ran the joint. And even the hacks who wouldn't take money and couldn't be bribed would never snitch on the guys who did.

  "After two months of orientation I joined Paulie, Johnny Dio, and Joe Pine, who was a boss from Connecticut, in their honor dorm. A fifty-dollar connection got me in there as soon as Angelo Mele was released. Fifty dollars could get you any assignment in the joint. The dorm was a separate three-story building outside the wall, which looked more like a Holiday Inn than a prison. There were four guys to a room, and we had comfortable beds and private baths. There were two dozen rooms on each floor, and each one of them had mob guys living in them. It was like a wiseguy convention-the whole Gotti crew, Jimmy Doyle and his guys, "Ernie Boy" Abbamonte and "Joe Crow" Delvecchio, Vinnie Aloi, Frank Cotroni.

  "It was wild. There was wine and booze, and it was kept in bath-oil or after-shave jars. The hacks in the honor dorm were almost all on the take, and even though it was against the rules, we used to cook in our rooms. Looking back, I don't think Paulie went to the general mess five times in the two and a half years he was there. We had a stove and pots and pans and silverware stacked in the bathroom. We had glasses and an ice-water cooler where we kept the fresh meats and cheeses. When there was an inspection, we stored the stuff in the false ceiling, and once in a while, if it was confiscated, we'd just go to the kitchen and get new stuff.

  "We had the best food smuggled into our dorm from the kitchen. Steaks, veal cutlets, shrimp, red snapper. Whatever the hacks could buy, we ate. It cost me two, three hundred a week. Guys like Paulie spent five hundred to a thousand bucks a week. Scotch cost thirty dollars a pint. The hacks used to bring it inside the walls in their lunch pails. We never ran out of booze, because we had six hacks bringing it in six days a week. Depending upon what you wanted and how much you were willing to spend, life could be almost bearable. Paulie put me in charge of the cash. We always had two or three thousand stashed in the room. When the funds were running low I'd tell him, and the next thing I knew some guys would come up for a visit with the green. For the first year or so Karen would come up every weekend with the kids. She used to smuggle in food and wine, just like some of the other guys' wives, and we'd pull the tables in the visiting room together and make a party. You weren't allowed to bring anything into the prison, but once you were in the visiting area you could eat and drink anything, just as long as you drank the booze out of coffee cups.

  "Our days were spent on work details, going to rehabilitation programs and school, assembling for meals, and recreation. Almost everybody had a job, since it got you time off and it counted a lot with the parole board. Even so, there were guys who just wouldn't work. They usually had so much time or were such bad parole risks that they knew they'd max out no matter how hard they worked. Those guys would just sit in their cells and pull their time. Johnny Dio never did anything. He spent all his time in the priest's office or meeting with his lawyers. Dio was doing so much time for having Victor Riesel bunded that he was never going out on a program or parole. He spent all his time trying to overturn the conviction. He didn't have a prayer. Most of the other wise-guys had jobs. Even Paulie had a job. He used to change the music tapes on the public-address system that was piped into the place. He didn't actually do it himself. He had somebody do it for him, but he got the credit for the job. What Paulie really did all day was make stoves. He was a genius at making stoves. Since you weren't supposed to cook in the dorms, Paulie had the hot-plate elements smuggled in. He got the steel box from the machine shop, and he wired and insulated the whole thing. If you were okay, Paulie made you a stove. Guys were proud to cook on his stoves.

  "Dinner was the big thing of the day. We'd sit around and drink, play cards, and brag, just like outside. We put on a big pot with water for the macaroni. We always had a pasta course first and then meat or fish. Paulie always did the prep work. He had a system for doing the garlic. He used a razor, and he sliced it so fine that it used to liquefy in the pan with a little oil. Vinnie Aloi was in charge of making the tomato sauce. I felt he put in too many onions, but it was a good sauce anyway. Johnny Dio liked to do the meat. We didn't have a grill, so Johnny did everything in pans. When he panfried steak you'd think the joint was on fire, but still the hacks never bothered us.

  "I enrolled to get a two-year associate degree hi restaurant and hotel management from Williamsport Community College. It was a great deal. Since I was a veteran, I got six hundred a month in veteran's benefits for going to school, and I had that money sent home to Karen. Some of the guys thought I was nuts, but they weren't vets and couldn't get the money. Also, Paulie and Johnny Dio used to push me to go to school. They wanted me to become an ophthalmologist. I don't know why, but that's what they wanted me to be.

  "I took sixty credits each semester, and I was hungry to learn. When I went inside I was only half literate. I had stopped going to school as a kid. In prison I learned how to read. After lock-in at nine o'clock, while everybody else bullshitted all night long, I used to read. I read two or three books a week. I stayed busy. If I wasn't in school, taking bets, or smuggling food, I was building and maintaining tennis courts in the recreational area. We had a beautiful red clay court and one cement court. Tennis got to be my game. I never played a sport before in my life. It was a tremendous outlet. Paulie and his old wiseguys used to play bocci
e near the wall, but the young guys like Paul Mazzei, Bill Arico, Jimmy Doyle, and some of the shooters from the East Harlem Purple Gang all started showing up in tennis whites. Even Johnny Dio got interested. He learned to play, except he always swung his racquet like an axe.

  "At the beginning Paulie took me around and introduced me to everyone. Within three months I started booking in jail. Hugh Addonizo, the former mayor of Newark, was one of my best customers. He was a sweetheart of a guy but a degenerate gambler. On Saturday he used to bet two packs of cigarettes a game, and he'd bet twenty games. If there were twenty-one games, he'd bet twenty-one. He bet college football on Saturday and the pros on Sunday.

  "After a while I was booking lots of guys and guards from the prison. I had Karen outside running around and straightening up for me. She was making the payouts or collecting. Guys would bet or buy things from me on the inside and have their wives or pals pay up on the outside. It was safer than keeping too much cash in the joint. If the cons didn't take it, the guards would. Since everybody knew who she was and who she was with, she had no problem making the collections. I was making a few dollars. It passed the time. It helped me to keep the guards happy."

  After two and a half years Henry got himself assigned to the prison farm, about a mile and a half outside the prison wall. Getting to the farm had been Henry's dream. A riot in the Lewisburg cellblocks, where there had been nine murders in three months, had created a very tense situation. Prisoners, including the wiseguys, had refused to leave their cells and go to work details. During the height of the riot the guards went to the honor dorm and marched all of the wiseguys into solitary, where they would be safe.