Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family (14 page)

Nine

AS HENRY HAD HOPED, the theft was not discovered until Monday afternoon. The
Daily News
story Tuesday said that the money had vanished into “thin air” and that “FBI agents swarmed over Air France cargo building 86 at Kennedy, questioning the employees, searching the area and examining the manifests and bills of lading. ”
The New York Times
story said: “A thorough search of the building and the cinder block locker where the money was placed failed to turn up the parcels. A work crew of about 20 men as well as an around-the-clock private guard were on duty at the building. ”

By the time Air France realized its $480,000 was missing, Henry and his pals had already given away $120,000 of it as “tribute” to the mob chiefs who considered Kennedy Airport their turf. They gave $60,000 to Sebastian “Buster” Aloi, the fifty-seven-year-old
capo
who ran the airport for the Colombo crime family, and the other $60,000 to their own
capo,
Paul Vario.

“We took care of Buster because it was insurance. It kept everybody happy. We gave Paulie a piece because he was our boss. That’s the way it’s set up. He protected us. If there was a beef against us by another crew--and there were always beefs against us--Paulie took care of it. He went to the sit-downs and took our part. The rest of the money we pooled. I could have taken my end and gone home, but what was I going to do with it? Put it in the closet? Jimmy kept it in a couple of bookmakers’ safes, and if I needed a few bucks I’d take it out, and he’d keep tabs. It was like having a bank account.

“We wanted to spend some money on ourselves. I wanted a new car and some clothes. Karen needed things for the new apartment and the kids. To justify any new spending, the three of us, Jimmy, Tommy, and I, took a trip to Vegas, dropped about twenty grand, and came back bragging that we had won. Everybody knew we went to Vegas a lot and that Jimmy was the kind of guy who would belly up to the craps table and play until his ankles swole. But even then we didn’t overdo anything. I put a down payment on a new ‘sixty-seven gold Buick Riviera with a black top and financed the rest, using my brother’s name. Tommy did the same, except he bought a beige Cadillac with a black top.

“Our first business proposition came about two weeks after the robbery when Paulie came up to us at the backstretch at Aqueduct and said if we joined him in a deal we could buy a fifty-percent interest in Milty Wekar’s bookmaking operation. He had Wekar right there with him in the car. Wekar needed some money. He had been betting heavy on something he had and got burned. It was a great opportunity. Wekar had high rollers and bookmakers for customers. He had garment-center executives, Wall Street brokers, doctors and dentists and lawyers. And he had the guys who took their action. He never took bets for less than five hundred or a thousand dollars a shot, and most of the customers would bet six or seven games at once. Vario said he’d put in fifty thousand if we put in the same. Jimmy and Tommy looked. me and we all agreed. Right there at the track. We didn’t need any lawyers. We shook hands and I was in the bookmaking business. I was twenty-four.

“It was an education. Milty was a bookmaker’s bookmaker. Most of our action came from bookmakers, not individual bettors. Milty put me on the payroll for five hundred a week and expenses. I used to sit between the two clerks who took the action and I tabbed the bets. I had a yellow legal pad and on it I had all the day’s action. I had baseball, football, basketball, the pros, colleges, the tracks, every kind of action going. And I also had the odds on the sheet, and as the bets came in I’d mark a line for every thousand bet, and then I’d draw a line through whenever five thousand was bet. Milty would look at the sheets and adjust the odds. He’d move the odds up or down depending upon whether he wanted action or not. If Milty had a problem and wanted to lay off some of the bets, he had a line to guys in Florida, St. Louis, Vegas, California. Just about anywhere.

“I also helped Milty on Tuesday, the straighten-up day. That’s when all the bookmakers and highline bettors in the city had to straighten up whatever they owed each other for the week. We’d usually straighten up in a garment-center restaurant called Bobby’s. On Mondays we’d make up the payout sheet. There were our expenses, like my salary and stuff. There were ‘pays’ for the winners. There was ‘ice’--about seven hundred dollars a week--for the cops. There was ‘juice’ for when we had a bad week and had to go to the loan sharks for a little extra money ourselves.

“But usually we didn’t have to do anything like that. We would just call Paulie, and Paulie would give us twenty-five or thirty grand with no interest. After all, he was a partner. If we couldn’t get Paulie and wanted to put off paying for a couple of days, Milty had a great trick. He kept five or six one-thousand-dollar bills around, and he’d give them to me to flash on the winners. Since none of our clients wanted to get paid in thousand-dollar bills, we could always put off paying them for a couple of days. The big bills were just too much trouble for wiseguy bookmakers to cash. Milty must have used those same bills for years.

“We had a great operation. Milty had five different rooms all over the city where we took the action. We had most of the police on the pad. Milty paid off the Borough Command and the Division. Every once in a while we’d have to stand still for an arrest, usually by the police commissioner’s Confidential Investigating Unit, but it was a misdemeanor, and all that meant was a fifty-dollar fine. Nobody ever went to jail for bookmaking. Still, we couldn’t figure out how the cops always knew where we were. Milty was constantly changing apartments. Sometimes we’d move a couple of times a week, but they always knew our new locations.

“We finally figured it out. Milty had this old guy who used to go around and rent our rooms. That’s all the guy ever did. Milty gave him three hundred a week to find the apartments, put down deposits, sign the leases, get the gas and electric lines opened up, and get the phones installed. The guy used to come in on the Long Island Railroad, get off, and take buses and subways as far as he could until he found apartments to rent. Somehow the cops got a line on the guy, and they used to tail him from one apartment to another until they had a list of our places. Then, when they saw one of our cars parked outside, they’d crash through.

“After about four months I took my first pinch for running a wire room. It was in August of 1967, and the cops who broke in said we were doing two million dollars’ worth of business a week. I only wish. We’d gotten word from the cops we’d paid off that we were going to get busted. We were due. They just went through the motions. It was done right. No cuffs or anything. After we were booked we took the cops for dinner on Mulberry Street before we went to night court for the arraignment. Al Newman, our bondsman, was already in court when we got there. I grabbed a cab home. The cops dropped Milty off. The next day we were back in action at a different apartment. We had taken a pinch and now we were okay for a while. John Sutter, my lawyer, bounced the case around the courts for a year until I finally pleaded guilty. I got fined a hundred dollars and went home. It was a joke. The city was spending millions of dollars for plainclothes cops to catch bookmakers, but it was obvious that the whole thing was set up so the cops could shake us down. The cops didn’t want to put us out of business any more than they wanted to shoot the golden goose.

“It was at this time that another business opportunity arose. There was a terrific supper club and restaurant called The Suite on Queens Boulevard, near Forest Hills. Its owner, Joey Rossano, was a horseplayer and gambler. The guy needed money. We made a deal that I’d take over the place but he’d keep his name on the papers. I paid him some money and I took over his loan-shark debts. I knew some of the guys he owed, and they weren’t very strong. They didn’t have the weight. So I knew I wouldn’t have to pay. I just strong-armed them out of the money-and who could they go to? If you were with Paulie and our crew, you could tell most of the city’s half-assed wiseguys to get lost. I made them eat the debts.

“Also, Karen loved the idea of getting a legitimate joint. Our first daughter, Judy, was two and a half and Ruth was about six months old, and Karen had been insisting I keep an eye out for a good business opportunity. She knew about the cigarettes and swag and she knew about Air France. She knew I had some money, and she wanted me to invest it right. The bookmaking business wasn’t her idea of a good deal. She knew I had taken the pinch, and she knew I used to gamble away most of the money I made right there in our own office. We all did. We’d get some good action from a trainer or owner on a certain horse and we’d add a few grand of our own money on top of the bet. When you do that as a bookmaker, it’s only a matter of time. Show me a bookmaker who bets and 1’11 show you a guy owned by the sharks.

“Before I thought about taking over The Suite I talked it over with Paulie. He liked the idea. He liked it so much that he ordered the place off limits for the crew. He said we had to keep the place clean. He didn’t want to turn it into a joint like Robert’s.

“I was in the place every day, morning till night. Karen would bring the kids in and help with the books. All the books. The books for the SLA and IRS and the real books. I got a decent cook in the place, and I got Casey Rosado, who headed the bartenders’ and waiters’ union at the airport, to send in some of his spies to tell me how much I was getting robbed by my bartenders. The Suite was a big enough place so that I had six bartenders, three of them on at all times. When I got the word from Casey, I fired all of them. Casey said the bartenders were stealing a thousand dollars a night out of the joint, in addition to a hundred a night in tips they were taking home, plus the hundred and a half I was paying them.

“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.