Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

Ten

"For most of the guys the killings were just accepted. They were a part of every day. They were routine. I remember how proud Tommy DeSimone was when he brought Jimmy's kid, Frankie, on his first hit. Frankie Burke was just a timid little kid. Jimmy used to complain that the kid wet his bed all the time and that Jimmy had to beat the shit out of him almost every night. Jimmy even sent him to some military school to toughen him up. Frankie must have been sixteen or seventeen when Tommy took him on the hit, and Tommy said the kid held up great. Jimmy walked around real proud. You'd have thought the kid had won a medal.

"Murder was the only way everybody stayed in line. It was the ultimate weapon. Nobody was immune. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everyone knew the rules, but still people got out of line and people kept getting whacked. Johnny Mazzolla, the guy I used to go cashing counterfeit twenties with when I was a kid, his own son was killed because the kid wouldn't stop holding up local card games and bookmakers. The kid was warned a hundred times. They warned the father to keep the kid under wraps. They told him if the kid had to stick up bookmakers, he should go stick up foreign bookmakers. It was only because of Johnny that they let the kid live until he was nineteen. But the kid apparently couldn't believe he would ever get killed. The dead ones never did. He couldn't believe it until the end when he got two, close range, in the heart. That was out of respect for his father. They left the kid's face clean so there could be an open casket at the funeral.

"Jimmy once killed his best friend, Remo, because he found out that Remo set up one of his cigarette loads for a pinch. They were so close. They went on vacations together with their wives. But when one of Remo's small loads got busted, he told the cops about a trailer truckload Jimmy was putting together. Jimmy got suspicious when Remo invested only five thousand dollars in the two-hundred-thousand-dollar load. Remo usually took a third or fifty percent of the shipment. When Jimmy asked him why he wasn't going in on this load, Remo said he didn't need that much. Of course, when the truck got stopped and Jimmy's whole shipment was confiscated, the fact that Remo had somehow not invested in that particular shipment got Jimmy curious enough to ask some of his friends in the Queens DA's office. They confirmed Jimmy's suspicion that Remo had ratted the load out in return for his freedom.

"Remo was dead within a week. He didn't have a clue what was coming to him. Jimmy could look at you and smile and you'd think you were sitting with your best friend in the world. Meanwhile he's got your grave dug. In fact, the very week Jimmy killed him, Remo had given Jimmy and Mickey a round-trip ticket to Florida as an anniversary present.

"I remember the night. We were all playing cards in Robert's when Jimmy said to Remo, 'Let's take a ride.' He motioned to Tommy and another guy to come along. Remo got in the front seat and Tommy and Jimmy got in the rear. When they got to a quiet area, Tommy used a piano wire. Remo put up some fight. He kicked and swung and shit all over himself before he died. They buried him in the backyard at Robert's, under a layer of cement right next to the boccie court. From then on, every time they played, Jimmy and Tommy used to say, 'Hi, Remo, how ya doing?'

"It didn't take anything for these guys to kill you. They liked it. They would sit around drinking booze and talk about their favorite hits. They enjoyed talking about them. They liked to relive the moment while repeating how miserable the guy was. He was always the worst sonofabitch they knew. He was always a rat bastard, and most of the time it wasn't even business. Guys would get into arguments with each other and before you knew it one of them was dead. They were shooting each other all the time. Shooting people was a normal thing for them. It was no big deal. You didn't have to do anything. You just had to be there.

"One night, right after my arrest for assaulting the wrong guy, we were having a party hi Robert's for Billy Batts. Billy had just gotten out of prison after six years. We usually gave a guy a party when he got out. Food. Booze. Hookers. It's a good time. Billy was a made guy. He was with Johnny Gotti from near Fulton Street and he was hooked up with the Gambinos. We're all bombed. Jimmy. Tommy. Me. Billy turned around and he saw Tommy, who he knew from before he went away. Tommy was only about twenty at the tune, so the last time Billy saw him Tommy was just a kid. Billy started to kid around. He asked Tommy if he still shined shoes. It was just a snide remark, but you couldn't kid around with Tommy. He was wired very tight. One of Tommy's brothers had ratted people out years ago, and he was always living that down. He always had to show he was tougher than anyone around. He always had to be special. He was the only guy in the crew that used to drink Crown Royal. It was a Canadian whiskey that wasn't imported back when he was a kid. Tommy had it smuggled in. He was the kind of guy who was being so tough he managed to find a bootleg hooch to drink thirty years after Prohibition.

"I looked over at Tommy, and I could see he was fuming at the way Billy was talking. Tommy was going nuts, but he couldn't do or say anything. Billy was a made man. If Tommy so much as took a slap at Billy, Tommy was dead. Still, I knew he was pissed. We kept drinking and laughing, and just when I thought maybe it was all forgotten, Tommy leaned over to Jimmy and me and said, 'I'm gonna kill that fuck.' I joked back with him, but I saw he was serious.

"A couple of weeks later Billy was drinking in The Suite. It was late. I was praying he'd go home when Tommy walked in. It didn't take long. Tommy immediately sent his girl friend home and he gave me and Jimmy a look. Right away Jimmy started getting real cozy with Billy Batts. He started buying Billy drinks. I could see he was setting Billy up for Tommy.

"'Keep him here, I'm going for a bag,' Tommy whispered to me, and I knew he was going to kill Billy right in my own joint. He was going for a body bag-a plastic mattress cover-so Billy wouldn't bleed all over the place after he killed him. Tommy was back with the bag and a thirty-eight in twenty minutes. I was getting sick.

"By now Jimmy has Billy Batts in the corner of the bar near the wall. They were drinking and Jimmy was telling him stories. Billy was having a great time. As it got late almost everybody went home. Only Alex Corcione, who was seated in back with his girl, was left in the place. The bartender left. Jimmy had his arm hanging real loose around Billy's shoulder when Tommy came over. Billy didn't even look up. Why should he? He was with friends. Fellow wise-guys. He had no idea that Tommy was going to kill him.

"I was on the side of the bar when Tommy took the thirty-eight out of his pocket. Billy saw it in Tommy's hand. The second Billy saw what was happening, Jimmy tightened his arm around Billy's neck. 'Shine these fuckin' shoes,' Tommy yells and smashes the gun right into the side of Billy's head. Billy's eyes opened wide. Tommy smashed him again. Jimmy kept his grip. The blood began to come out of Billy's head. It looked black.

"By now Alex Corcione saw what was going on and he started to come over. Jimmy glared at him. 'You want some?' Jimmy said. Jimmy was ready to drop Billy and go after Alex. I got between them as though I was going to belt Alex. But I just grabbed Alex by the shoulders and steered him toward the door. 'Get out of here,' I said, real quiet, so Jimmy can't hear. 'They've got a beef.' I maneuvered Alex and his girl out the door and they were gone. Alex was with our own crew, but Jimmy and Tommy were so hot right then they would have whacked Alex and his girl right there if he gave them trouble. I locked the front door, and when I turned back I saw that Billy's body was spread out on the floor. His head was a bloody mess. Tommy had opened the mattress cover. Jimmy told me to bring the car around back.

"We had a problem. Billy Batts was untouchable. There has to be an okay before a made man can be killed. If the Gambino people ever found out that Tommy killed Billy, we were all dead. There was no place we could go. They could even have demanded that Paulie whack us himself. Tommy had done the worst possible thing he could have done, and we all knew it. Billy's body had to disappear. We couldn't leave it on the street. There would have been a war. With no body around, the Gotti crew would never know for sure.

"Jimmy said we had to bury the body where it couldn't be found. He had a friend upstate with a dog kennel, where nobody would ever look. We put Billy in the trunk of the car, and we drove by Tommy's house to pick up a shovel. His mother was already up and made us come in for coffee. She wouldn't let us leave. We have to have breakfast-with a body parked outside.

"Finally we left Tommy's and got on the Taconic. We'd been driving about an hour when I heard a funny noise. I'm in the back half asleep, with the shovel. Tommy was driving. Jimmy was asleep. I heard the noise again. It was like a thump. Jimmy woke up. The banging began again. It dawned on all of us at once. Billy Batts was alive. He was banging on the trunk. We were on our way to bury him and he wasn't even dead.

"Now Tommy really got mad. He slammed on the brakes. He leaned over the seat and grabbed the shovel. Nobody said a word. We got out of the car and waited until there were no more headlights coming up behind us. Then Jimmy got on one side and I got on the other and Tommy opened the trunk. The second it sprang open Tommy smashed the sack with the shovel. Jimmy grabbed a tire iron and he started banging away at the sack. It only took a few seconds, and we got back in the car. When we got to the spot where we were going to bury Billy, the ground was so frozen we had to dig for an hour to get him down deep enough. Then we covered him with lime and drove back to New York.

"But even then Billy was like a curse. About three months after we planted the guy, Jimmy came up to me at The Suite and said Tommy and I would have to dig up the body and bury it somewhere else. The guy who owned the kennel had just sold his property to a housing developer. He had been bragging to Jimmy about how much money he was going to make, but all Jimmy knew was that workmen might find the body. That night Tommy and I took my brand-new yellow Pontiac Catalina convertible and we dug Billy up. It was awful. We had put lime on the body to help it decompose, but it was only half gone. The smell was so bad I got sick. I started to throw up. All the time Tommy and I worked I was throwing up. We put the body in the trunk and took it to a junkyard we used in Jersey. Enough time had passed so nobody was going to think it was Billy.

"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 wise-guy, 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 maitre 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 maitre 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 maitre 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 followed 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 F A O 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 girl friend. 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 girl friend 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 girl friend 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 bis 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 hi 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 peddle 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.

He was very different from the guys he hung around with. He was a taming influence. He used to be able to get them to do normal things. When we first took the apartment near The Suite, for instance, the furniture store wouldn't deliver my stuff immediately, so Henry got Jimmy and Tommy and a truck, and they all went to the store in Hempstead on a Saturday and picked up the stuff themselves.

They were like big, noisy kids. That's what they reminded me of. Always laughing. Always looking to have fun. Especially Jimmy. I knew him as "Burkey" back then. I never heard anybody call him "Jimmy the Gent." He was the biggest kid of them all. He loved water fights. At Robert's Lounge or The Suite he would rig up pails of water, and when someone walked hi the door, he'd dump the buckets all over their heads. Robert's was incredible. It was like a clubhouse for high school kids, except they had a ter-razzo floor in part of the basement and a huge barbecue in the backyard. There were cherubs and sconces all over the walls. Tommy had an apartment on the second floor. Paul loved to cook, and everyone was always trying this or trying that and complaining that he put in too much salt or not enough garlic.

Henry and I went out for a long time, and I felt I had become a part of his life and close to his friends and their families. I understood he had the children. I knew it was hard for him to leave. But I loved being with him so much, it was worth it to me. I went from week to week and month to month, and there was always the thought that maybe this time he would stay and not go back.

The holidays were the worst. Christmas. New Year's. They were awful. I was always alone. Waiting for him to get out of his house and meet me for half a date. He was always late, and lots of tunes he never came. He'd make sneak phone calls, and that just made me madder. A couple of times he'd send me away just before the holidays. He'd book me on a plane to Vegas or the Caribbean and say he'd meet me on Christmas Day or right after he took care of his kids. I'd go with some of the other girls. I'd go with Tommy's sister, who was also seeing a married guy. When he wouldn't show up I'd get so mad that I'd stay an extra week and run his bill sky-high.

But meanwhile I was usually with him and with his friends and we were all very close. After a while everything began to feel almost normal.

karen: I first began to suspect that Henry might have been fooling around just before he was sent to Riker's Island on an earlier cigarette case. I knew, because I was just pregnant with Ruth, and I felt that something was wrong. I suppose there had already been a million clues, but under the circumstances, who was looking? I had to get hit with it in the face before I wanted to look. During that summer a girl friend of mine called and said she and her husband were driving past The Suite when they saw us in the doorway next to the restaurant. She said she was going to stop, but her husband said that he thought we were having a real fight, and so they just kept on going. I didn't say anything to my friend, but I knew I was never in any doorway fighting with my husband. I knew it had to be somebody else.

And then there were the couple of times when I'd call The Suite and ask for Henry without saying who I was. Once or twice whoever answered the phone said, "I'll get him, Lin," or "Hold on, Lin." Lin? Who's Lin?

Every time I brought this up to Henry it would create a fight. He'd get angry and start yelling that I was a witch, and sometimes he'd just walk out and I wouldn't hear from him for a day or two. It was very frustrating. I would yell and accuse him, and he'd act like he couldn't hear me and just go about the house packing his bag. He said I was making stuff up and that he had enough headaches without me driving nun crazy. But he never denied anything, he just got mad.

That's why I made us move back from Island Park to Queens. After the Nassau DA raided the pizzeria and arrested Raymond Montemurro in a roundup, I spotted two men in a car taking pictures of me and the kids. That was all the excuse I needed. That night I told Henry about the photographers. I said that Nassau was too hot. He agreed. Within weeks we were living just three miles from The Suite in a three-bedroom apartment with a terrace in Rego Park.

The Suite was Henry's office, and I began to drop in there for an hour or so every couple of days. I said I wanted to keep an eye on the books, but I was keeping an eye on everything. There were lots of people hanging around the place all the time. There was one girl, Linda, who worked in the bridal shop nearby, and she'd come in for lunch and stay. She was such a sad sack that I never put two and two together. I never picked her. I remember the first tune I saw her was at a Halloween party in a friend's apartment. I was there with Henry, and she was pretending to be with the host's brother. Again she was crying her eyes out. She followed me into the bathroom at the party, and I told her if anybody was giving her this much trouble, she should leave him. She was still crying. I was so dumb I gave her a Kleenex.

But she kept right on mooning around The Suite. Lots of nights when Henry and I were going out, she'd be at the bar crying in her drink. I just thought she was a drunk. Little did I know that she was crying because Henry was going home with me.

One day the Chinese chef finally straightened me out. I had called the place looking for Henry, and again somebody called me "Lin." This time I went tearing over there. I must have been hysterical. I had Judy with me, and I was as big as a house with Ruth. And I was mad. I went right to the kitchen and I grabbed the poor chef. He hardly spoke English. I wanted to know who Lin was. He kept saying there wasn't any Lin. "No Lin, no Lin!" he kept saying. "Linda is Lin! Linda is Lin!"

I was a wild woman. I got her address from the kitchen, because they used to send food around to her apartment. She never cooked or cleaned. I snatched up the baby and went to her building. She buzzed me in from downstairs, not knowing who I was, but when I got to her apartment and told her we had to talk, she pretended she wasn't home. She wouldn't open her door. I rang her bell. She still wouldn't open. I rang her bell continuously for two hours, and she kept on hiding.

linda: I've got a crazy person screaming at the door. She was hysterical. She thought Henry was in my apartment. She kept yelling that she could hear him going out the fire escape. I didn't even have a fire escape. She was desperate to keep him, and she was driving him crazy.

She knew something was up. That's why she started hanging around all the time, but Henry and I still got away. Once, just before she tried to break down my door, Henry took me to Nassau, in the Bahamas. He wanted to sneak Paulie out of the country for a long weekend just before the old guy had to go to jail for a while.

Henry got Paulie and his wife phony papers, and we had a great time. Paulie was so nervous away from his own world that he wouldn't leave us for a second. He's got so much money, but he's never been anywhere or done anything. Paulie lived through Henry.

We went to the casino on Paradise Island and Paulie and Henry had a credit line. We caught Billy Daniels at LaConcha and became his guests. We spent the night looking for a hooker for him.

When we got back, customs decided to go through my luggage and clothes with a full search. Paulie and Henry were on the floor in hysterics.

I think Karen heard about all this and that's why she was hanging around and why she decided to make her move. She was losing him. He was taking me and not her away with Paulie. She was desperate, and she could ring my bell until her finger turned blue.

henry: That night I got home late. Everything looked normal. The baby was in bed. I was a little loaded and tired. Karen was doing some stuff around the house. I got in bed and collapsed. I must have been half asleep when I felt this pressure on my arms and shoulders. I was groggy and smashed and I opened my eyes just a bit and saw that Karen was straddling me hi the bed. She had a thirty-eight aimed right between my eyes. I always kept a loaded gun in the bedroom closet and I knew it worked. I could see the bullets in the cylinder. She was shaking and panting. She pulled back the hammer on the gun. She had me pinned. I sobered up immediately. She was screaming about Linda and Lin and the restaurant and the chef, and I can feel she's getting hysterical.

I started talking. I thought maybe somehow she was in some control of herself. She hadn't said a word when I got home. She'd kept it all in until now. I thought maybe she was just being slick. So I started talking to her, and after a while I managed to move her hand very gently and got the gun away. Now I was mad. I was so mad I belted her. I didn't need this bullshit. I had to worry about getting shot by wiseguys; I didn't have to worry about getting shot by my wife. I told her I'd be back when she calmed down. I packed a bag and moved in with Linda for a couple of weeks. It was the first of a dozen times over the next few years when I moved out, and there were a couple of times when Karen moved out on me.

karen: That first night when I got the gun I was really mad. I felt used. At first I thought, Oh, boy, am I going to scare him! But once I had the gun in my hand my palm began to sweat. I felt so powerful it was frightening. The gun was heavy. I'd never held a gun that heavy before, but once I had it I began to feel that I could use it. I felt that I could have killed him. I put it between his eyes. I called his name softly. Like I was waking him up from a nap. He opened his eyes, slowly. Then I cocked the gun. I pulled back the hammer. I wanted him to know how desperate I had become. But still I couldn't hurt him. How could I hurt him? I couldn't even bring myself to leave him.

The truth was no matter how bad I felt, I was still very, very attracted to him. He could be incredible. He had a side that was so nice you wanted to bottle it. He was sweet, considerate, sincere, soft. He had no sharp edges. He wasn't like the other guys around him. He was young, and I was just attracted. My sisters used to say I was obsessed with him, because whenever he and I split up for a few days or even a couple of weeks, I never talked about anything else. Also, whenever we got back together after a brief separation, he always swore it was forever. No more Linda! I wanted to believe him. I think he wanted to believe it.

I suppose if I wrote down the pros and cons of the marriage, lots of people might think I was nuts to stay with him, but I guess we all have our own needs, and they're not added up in the columns. He and I were always excited by each other, even later, after the kids and all those years together. We turned each other on. Sometimes in the middle of a real brawl we'd look at each other and laugh, and the war was over.

I would listen to my friends talk about their marriages, and I knew that for all my troubles, I still had a better deal than they did. When I looked at him I knew I had him, because I saw how jealous he got. Once he threatened to burn down some guy's business just because the guy was making a play for me. I loved to watch him get mad.

But still, when I first found out what was going on, it was very tough. I was married to him. I had Judy and the baby to worry about. What am I supposed to do? Throw him away? Throw away somebody I was attracted to and who was a very good provider? He wasn't like most of his friends, who made their wives beg for a five-dollar bill. I always had money. He never counted money with me. If there was anything I wanted, I got it, and it made him happy. Why should I kick him out? Why should I lose him just because he was fooling around? Why should I give him up to someone else? Never! If I was going to kick anybody, it was the person who was trying to take him away from me. Why should she win?

And besides, the minute I started checking her out with the other wives, I heard that every time he was with her he was drunk. I heard that he was abusive and made her wait in the car all night like a dope while he played cards with the guys. The way I began to see it, she was getting the worst side of him and I was getting the best.

henry: I'd be with Karen and the kids most of the time, but when Karen would start screaming or driving me nuts, I'd go over to Linda's. I'd be there for a few days, and I'd go back to Karen. This madness went on even when I was in jail. I remember on Riker's Island, Karen tore into the visitors' lounge screaming like a gorilla. She was crazy. It turned out one of the rat stool pigeon hacks had showed her Linda's name on my visitors' list. Karen made me take Linda's name off the list or she wouldn't vouch for my strong family ties and healthy homelife when she was interviewed by the social workers and parole officers about my getting an early release. It meant a couple of months to me on the street, so I told the warden to take Linda's name off the list.

karen: When he was on Riker's I visited him as often as possible, and that place was really a pigsty. The guards treated the wives awful. Visitors had to drive to a parking area near the island and then take a prison bus over a guarded bridge to one of the trailers, where they were picked up and taken to the various buildings for their visits. I was so big I could hardly get in and out of the buses, but the other women had to take lots of abuse and a lot of pawing from the guards. It was really disgusting, but what could the women do? They couldn't yell at the guards, because they'd never get their visits, and they didn't want to tell their husbands or boyfriends, because that would only make things worse. And all of this for visits that only lasted twenty minutes, and you had to talk over a telephone through a filthy glass partition nobody ever cleaned. Also, you couldn't visit whenever you wanted. I had to go on Saturdays, then I couldn't go again until the following Sunday, and then I had to wait until Saturday again.

I was working with the lawyer to get him out as early as possible. For instance, there was a rule that you got ten days off a month for good behavior. That would have taken one third off his sixty-day term. I went right to the fines-and-release window, and they told me the rule had just been changed to only five days off. I had a fit. I went to our lawyer and got the papers that showed Henry had been committed under the old rules. I wrote letters to the commissioner. I wrote letters to the Board of Corrections. I wrote to everybody. I got our lawyer to write. I fought it and I won. They decided to give Henry twenty days off his term instead of ten.

But even with the twenty days off, he still couldn't get out until December 28, and I had made myself the promise that I'd get him home for Christmas. I just had it in my head. That's one of the things that kept me going. I went back to the window at Riker's. I said that since the twenty-eighth was a Sunday, and I knew they let people out before the weekend, Henry would normally be released on Friday, the twenty-sixth. They agreed, but they said it still came up one day after Christmas. I remember the guy said, "I can't get the day from the air." Then I asked, "What about the two days when he was arrested?" I had learned that they can count arrest time toward incarceration time. Henry hadn't been under arrest for two days, but the guards just looked at each other. I was making a lot of work. That's when one of them went to check something and left the visitor's book right there at the desk. That's when I saw her name on his list. I was so furious by the time the guard came back with the approval, I couldn't hear him. I went wild, because here I was knocking myself out trying to get him home for Christmas and he's got his girl friend visiting him on my visiting day. I just wanted to kill him. I was so mad when I saw him that all I did was yell at him. I didn't even tell him that he was getting out early. Let him suffer.

henry: After Karen made me take Linda off the list I had Linda pissed at me. Linda was so mad that the first day I was back on the street she caught up with me at The Suite. We had a real fight. She took off a seven-carat black opal ring I had bought her and threw it at me so hard she split the stone. Then she slapped me right in front of everybody in the joint. I grabbed her by the throat and pushed her right out the door. We're on the street, and she's still yelling. She was wearing a white mink stole I had given her. She went to the curb and took off the mink and shoved it right down the sewer. Then I belted her. She quieted down and looked hurt. Now I felt shitty. I felt so bad for what I did that I got a busboy to fish the stole out of the sewer, and I took her home and we made up. After a couple of nights with Linda, Karen called Paulie and Jimmy, and they came by and said it was time for me to go home.

My life was a constant battle, but I couldn't bring myself to leave either one. I couldn't leave Linda and I couldn't leave Karen. I felt like I needed them both.