Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (20 page)

“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 pan-fried 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 in 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 boccie 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.

Karen had begun a letter-writing campaign to the Bureau of Prisons in Washington about getting Henry assigned to the prison farm. She would write to top bureau officials, knowing that they would pass the letters down through the bureaucracy. She knew that if she wrote directly to the Lewisburg officials her letters could be disregarded. But if Lewisburg received letters about Henry Hill from the main office in Washington, D. C. , the local prison officials had no way of knowing whether Henry’s case might not be of more than casual interest to the brass. Every time Karen got a congressman to write the Bureau of Prisons, the bureau would forward the letter to Lewisburg, where Henry’s case manager was notified about the congressional inquiry. It was never clear whether the congressional letters were routine responses to constituent requests or whether Henry had some special relationship with a politician. It wasn’t that the prison officials felt compelled to do anything extralegal as a result of the political interest in Hill, but they were certainly not going to ignore Hill’s rights as a prisoner.

Karen also got businessmen, lawyers, clergymen, and members of the family to write follow-up letters to both the congressmen and the prison on Henry’s behalf. She made phone calls to follow up on her letters. She was unrelenting. She kept files of her correspondence and tracked friendly bureaucrats through the system, continuing her correspondence with them even after they had been promoted or transferred. In the end the combination of the wholesale transfers that followed the riot, an excellent prison record, and Karen’s letter-writing campaign got Henry assigned to the farm.

To be assigned to the farm was like not being in prison at all. The farm was a two-hundred-acre working dairy that supplied milk to the prison. The men assigned there had extraordinary freedom. Henry, for instance, would leave the dorm every morning at five and either walk to the farm or drive one of the tractors or trucks to it. Then Henry and three other prisoners would hook up about sixty-five cows to a milking and pasteurizing tank and fill five-gallon plastic containers with the milk and ship it into the prison. They also supplied the Allenwood Correctional Facility, a minimum-security federal jail for white-collar criminals, about fifteen miles away. After seven or eight in the morning Henry was free until four in the afternoon, when the milking process began again. He usually got back to the dorm only to sleep.

“The first day I walked into the dairy and saw the guy who ran the place sitting at a table with a scratch sheet I knew I was home. The guy-his name was Sauer-was a junkie gambler. He was getting divorced from his wife, and he went to the track every night. I gave him money to bet for me. I pretended I thought he was a great handicapper, but he couldn’t pick his nose. It was a way of slipping him the money so he got to depend upon my cash when he went to the track. Pretty soon I had him bringing me back Big Macs, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dunkin’ Donuts, bottles of booze. It used to cost me between two and three hundred a week, but it was worth it. I had a gofer.

“I knew I could make lots of money. There was so little supervision on the farm, I could smuggle anything into the place. I had the job of checking the fence, which meant I had the wire clippers and tractor and rode around the perimeter of the farm to make sure the cows hadn’t crashed through anywhere. I could be gone three or four hours a day. After my first day I called Karen from the dairy phone. That was Wednesday night. That Saturday night I met Karen in the fields behind the pasture, and we made love for the first time in two and a half years. She brought a blanket and a duffel bag full of booze, Italian salami, sausages, special vinegar peppers-the kinds of things that were hard to find in the middle of Pennsylvania. I got it all behind the wall by putting it in a plastic liner that went inside the five-gallon milk containers we delivered to the prison kitchen, where we had other guys unpacking.

“Within a week I had people bringing up pills and pot. I had a Colombian named Mono the Monkey, who lived in Jackson Heights, bringing in pot in compacted cylinders. I buried milk containers out in the woods and began to store the stuff. I had cases of booze out there. I had a pistol. I even had Karen bring up some pot in the duffel bags when my supplies were low. When I hit the farm I was in business.

“But I was also working eighteen hours a day. If there was calving, I’d get up at four in the morning. I’d be there late at night if the pipes or tubes needed cleaning. I was the hardest-working, best farmhand the dairy ever had. Even the guards gave me that.

“In the meantime I went into partnership on the marijuana and pills with Paul Mazzei, a Pittsburgh kid who was inside because of selling pot. He had good local sources, and I got the stuff inside the wall. Bill Arico, one of the Long Island crew, was also at Lewisburg, on a bank robbery, and he did most of the selling. In fact, in no time at all Arico was the biggest dope supplier in the joint. Bill sold about a pound of pot a week. He’d sell five hundred to a thousand dollars’ worth of grass a week. There were other guys selling pills and acid. Lots of guys did their time on acid. The prison was a marketplace. The gates would open up and it was a businessman’s dream.

“I used to bring the cocaine in myself. I didn’t trust anybody with coke. I put the pot into handballs I used to split in half and retape. Before tossing the balls over the wall onto the handball court I’d call the clerk at the hospital, who was a dope fiend, and he would alert my distributors to start congregating around the handball court. The pot was so compacted that I used to get a pound or two of stuff over the wall in just a few handballs.

“The only problem was with the bosses. Paulie had gone home by now, but Johnny Dio was still there, and he didn’t want any of the crew playing around with dope. He didn’t give a damn about dope on moral grounds. He just didn’t want any heat. But I needed the money. If Johnny gave me money to support myself and my family, fine. But Johnny didn’t give up anything. If I was going to pay my way through the can, I had to earn my own money, and selling dope was the best way around. Still, I had to do it pretty much on the sly. Even so, there was an explosion. One of my distributors used to store his stuff in a safe in the priest’s office, and he got caught. Johnny Dio used to use the place as his office--making calls to his lawyers and pals--and now it was off limits. He went nuts. I had to get Paulie to talk to his son on the outside before we could convince him not to have me killed. Paulie wanted to know if I was selling dope. I lied. Of course not, I told him. Paulie believed me. Why shouldn’t he believe me? Until I started selling stuff in Lewisburg I didn’t even know how to roll a joint. ”

Fourteen

FOR ALMOST TWO YEARS Karen visited Henry in jail once a week.   By the third year, however, she cut down to once or twice a month.  Henry was assigned to the far less onerous farm detail, and the children found the arduous journey--six hours’ drive each way--unbearable.  Judy had begun to suffer from severe stomach cramps whenever they visited the prison, and for a long time neither Karen nor her doctor could trace the cause of her pain.  It was only after two years, when Judy was eleven years old, that she finally confessed she found the toilet in the prison visiting area so disgusting that she was unable to use it during the interminable ten- and twelve-hour visits.  Ruth, who was nine at the time, remembers long stretches of unrelieved boredom while her parents and their friends talked and ate at long picnic tables in a large, bare, cold room.  Karen brought small toys, coloring books, and crayons for the children, but there was little else for them to do.  The prison had no facilities for children, although dozens of youngsters showed up on weekends to see their fathers.  Judy and Ruth were so desperate for diversion after the first couple of hours that Karen would let them feed a roll of quarters into the line of overpriced commissary vending machines-despite the fact that cash was a problem.

KAREN: When Henry first went away, the money just dried up. It was impossible. I worked part-time as a dental technician. I learned how to clip and groom dogs, mostly because that was the kind of work I could do at home and keep an eye on the kids. The money owed to us by most of Henry’s friends from The Suite never got paid. Most of those guys didn’t have two nickels to rub together until they made a score, and then it would be gone before we got to see any of it. There was one bookmaker who made a fortune working out of The Suite. Henry had done everything for the guy. He had a wife and kids in Florida and ten girl friends in New York. A friend of mine suggested that maybe he should kick in some money for me and the kids now that Henry was away. His suggestion was that I go sit in a precinct house with the kids until the cops got me on welfare.

That’s the mentality of those people. I sold some of the fixtures we stole from The Suite to Jerry Asaro, a regular big shot. He was a friend of Henry’s and a member of the Bonanno crew. I’m still waiting for the money. He took the fixtures and never paid me a cent. I’ve read about how these guys take care of each other when they’re in jail, but I’ve never seen it in life. If they don’t have to help you, they won’t. As much as I felt we were a part of the family--and we were--there was no money coming in. After a while Henry had to make money inside. It must have cost him nearly $500 a week just to live inside the prison. He needed money to payoff the guards and for special food and privileges. He sent me the monthly $673 Veterans Administration check he got for going to school, and later I’d get some money from him after he started smuggling and selling stuff behind the wall, but they were hard dollars and we were both taking chances.

For the first couple of years I had an apartment with the kids in Valley Stream, but we were always at my parents’ house. We usually ate dinner there, and Henry used to call me long-distance every night and talk to the girls. The girls knew he was in jail. But at first all we told them was that he had done something against the law. I said that he hadn’t hurt anybody, but he had been unlucky and had gotten caught. They were only about eight and nine at the time, so I told them he had gotten caught playing cards. They knew you weren’t supposed to play cards.

Even later, when they got older, the girls never thought of their father or any of his friends as gangsters. They weren’t told anything. They just seemed to accept what their father and his friends were doing. I don’t know exactly what they knew as kids, but I know they didn’t think of Uncle Jimmy or Uncle Paulie as racketeers. They saw Jimmy and Paulie like generous uncles. They only saw them at happy times anyway-at parties or weddings or birthdays--and they always arrived with lots of presents.