Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

Six

It took a while before Karen figured out exactly what line of work her husband was in. She knew he was a knock-around guy. She knew that he could be tough. She had once watched him take on three men, who turned out to be football players from New Jersey, with a tire iron outside Jackie Kannon's Rat Fink Room in Manhattan. She knew that some of his friends had been to prison. And she knew that he sometimes carried a gun. But back in the early 1960s, before Mario Puzo's Godfather codified the life-style, before Joseph Valachi decided to sing, and before Senator John McClellan's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations listed the names and photographs of over five thousand organized-crime members, wiseguys were still a relatively unknown phenomenon to those outside their tiny world. Certainly Karen Freid Hill, from Lawrence, Long Island, had no reason to believe that she would wind up in the middle of a grade-B movie. All she knew was that her husband's main income came from his job as a bricklayer and low-level union official. There were mornings when she had even dropped him off at various jobs and watched him disappear into the construction site. He brought home $135 a week. They were paying off a bedroom suite at so much a week. He had a new car. But she also knew he had hit the number for a couple of thousand dollars just before they were married. His friends all had jobs. They were construction workers and truck drivers; they owned small restaurants, worked in the garment center or at the airport.

karen: Sometimes I think that if my mother hadn't fought it so much I might not have insisted upon being so blind. But she was so set on breaking us up that I was just as determined not to give in. I was going to be as stubborn as she was. I was not going to give him up. I wasn't going to prove her right. I wasn't going to let her win. I made excuses for him to her. And as I gave her those excuses, I found that I was giving them to myself. If he stayed out late, I always said he was with the boys. If he didn't call at a certain time, I'd tell my mother he'd called earlier. And after a while life just became normal. I know it sounds crazy, but it all happened so gradually, day by day, so that you're going along before you know you've changed.

I've talked to people since those days, and I guess I must have had a predisposition for that life in the first place. I know there are women who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. "A gun!" they would have yelled. "Eek! Who needs you? Get lost!" That's what a lot of girls, a lot of my own girl friends would have said the minute some guy put a gun in their hands. But I've got to admit the truth-it turned me on.

The first time it really dawned on me about how different his friends were from the way I was raised came when Helene, the wife of Bobby DeSimone, one of his friends, was having a hostess party. We had been married a few months, and I hadn't really seen that much of his friends and their wives without him before. Helene was selling copper-and-wood wall decorations. I had never known anyone who sold things to friends in her own house. Henry said he'd drop me off, spend some time with the guys, and pick me up later. Bobby and Helene's place was in Ozone Park. It wasn't the greatest. A couple of rooms up one flight. Everybody knew each other; I was the new girl in the group, and they were all very, very nice. They really made me feel at home, a part of the crowd. But then, when they started talking, I was shocked by what I heard. One woman, I remember, was talking about waiting three years for her husband, who was away in jail. I couldn't believe it. My God! Three years! I thought I could never wait that long.

It was the first time I had ever had a conversation where the women talked about jail. They made jail very real. They knew the good prisons and the bad ones. They never talked about what their husbands had done to get sent to jail. That just wasn't ever a part of the conversation. What they discussed was how the prosecutors and the cops lied. How people picked on their husbands. How their husbands had done something everybody was doing but had just had the bad luck to get caught. Then in the same breath they would discuss the bus rides up to see their husbands and what they wore on the long trips and how the kids acted up and how hard it was to make ends meet when their husbands were away.

And as they talked I began to look at them, and I saw that they looked bad. Some of them were even disheveled. I saw that they had bad skin. It was obvious that some of them didn't take care of themselves. I mean, they didn't look very good. A few of them had bad teeth. They had missing teeth. You would never see mouths like that where I grew up. Also, they weren't very well dressed. The stuff they wore was unfashionable and cheap. A lot of polyester and double-knit pants suits. And later, when I got to meet their kids, I was amazed at how much trouble the kids gave them. Their kids were always in trouble. They were always in fights. They wouldn't go to school. They'd disappear from home. The women would beat their kids blue with broom handles and leather belts, but the kids didn't pay any attention. The women all seemed to be on the edge of just making it. They were all very nervous and tense. Their younger kids looked dirty all the time. It was that thing some kids have of looking dirty even after their baths. That was the look.

If you listened, you never heard such woe. One of these hostess parties could have kept a soap opera going for years. The first night I was with them, most of the conversation was about their friend Carmen. Carmen wasn't there. Carmen was forty and her husband was away doing time. He was her third husband. She had three sons, one by each of her husbands, and the kids were a nightmare. To make ends meet Carmen was selling stolen credit cards and swag. Just a week before the party Carmen's oldest, a teenager, was in a card game with another kid and an argument began over a ten-dollar bet. Her son got mad, pulled a gun out of his pocket, and it went off. The other kid died, and Carmen's son was arrested. When Carmen's mother, the kid's grandmother, heard that her grandson had been arrested for murder, she dropped dead on the spot, leaving Carmen with a husband and son in jail and a mother in the funeral parlor.

By the time Henry picked me up I was dizzy. When we got home I told him I was upset. He was calm. He said very few people went to jail. He said there was nothing to worry about. He would talk about the money and how hundreds of his friends were doing things that might be against the law, but that they were all making money, and none of them were getting caught. Swag. Gambling. Cigarettes. Nobody went to jail for things like that. Also, he knew the right lawyers. The courts. The judges. The bail bondsmen. I wanted to believe him. He made it sound so easy, and I loved the idea of all that money.

Then one day you read a newspaper story about people you know, and you just can't put the names you're reading together with the people you know. Those I knew were not individuals you thought the papers would write about. I saw one story years ago in the Daily News about Frankie Manzo, Paulie's friend. The newspaper misspelled his name as Francesco Manza and said he was an organized-crime soldier. The Frankie Manzo I knew dressed and acted like a working man. He had the Villa Capra restaurant in Cedarhurst, and I had seen him carrying packages of groceries into the kitchen, moving cars from out front, wiping the crumbs off tables, and working day and night in his own kitchen.

To me none of these men looked like big shots. None of them had everything together. There was always something missing. I mean, if they had nice new cars and good clothes, then their houses were in poor areas or their wives looked hard. Tommy DeSimone always drove around in a brand-new car and wore expensive clothes, and he and Angela lived in a two-room tenement slum. I remember thinking, If these are the gangsters they write about in the newspapers, there must be something wrong. I knew Henry and his friends weren't angels, but if this was the Cosa Nostra, it sure didn't feel like it.

It was after Henry and I got married the second time that I really became a part of his world. We had an old-fashioned Italian wedding, except we had a Jewish ceremony and a rabbi. Four of the Vario brothers were there. So were their wives and their sons. It was the first time I was introduced to all of them at once. It was crazy. The five Vario brothers had at least two sons each, and for some unbelievable reason they'd each named two of their sons either Peter or Paul. There had to be a dozen Peters and Pauls at the wedding. Also, three of the Vario brothers were married to girls named Marie, and they all had daughters named Marie. By the time Henry finished introducing me to everyone I thought I was drunk.

Only Paul Vario wasn't at the wedding. I had seen that Paulie was like a father to Henry, much more than Henry's real father, who he rarely saw and almost never spoke to. Henry was with Paulie almost every day. When I asked where Paulie was, Henry just said he couldn't make it. Later I found out that he was serving sixty days for contempt after he'd refused to testify before a Nassau County grand jury looking into a Long Island bookmaking ring. I found out after a while that Paul and his sons Peter and Paul junior were always doing thirty or sixty days for contempt. It went with the territory. It didn't seem to bother them. They just accepted going to jail for a little while. They did their time at the Nassau County jail, where they were very well known and where they had so many people paid off that they eventually wound up getting indicted for bribing the whole jail. I remember that the warden and over a dozen guards were indicted. It was a real mess. It was all over the papers. But by then I knew what was going on. I knew it was not normal, not the way I had been raised, but it didn't seem wrong either. I was in the environment and I just went along.

I'd have to say that Henry's friends were all very hard workers and hustlers. Paulie had the flower store on Fulton Avenue and he had the auto junkyard on Flatlands Avenue. Tuddy Vario had the cabstand. Lenny had the restaurant. Everyone worked somewhere. Nobody loafed. If anything, everyone was always hustling all the time. I never saw people carrying guns. Later I found out that most of the time their wives were carrying them.

I knew Jimmy Burke was smuggling cigarettes, but even that didn't seem like a crime. It was more as if Jimmy was enterprising. He was hustling to make a few extra bucks carting cigarettes. Jimmy's wife Mickey, Phyllis Vario, everyone made it all look so natural. Anyone who wanted to make a few extra bucks had to go out and get it. You couldn't wait for a handout. That was the general attitude. The other women accepted hustling cigarettes, selling swag, and even hijacking as normal for any ambitious guy who wanted to make decent money. It was almost as though I should be proud that I had the kind of husband who was willing to go out and risk his neck to get us the little extras.

henry: Then I got arrested. It was a crazy bust. It shouldn't have happened, but none of them should ever happen. They are always more because of your own stupidity than any cop's smarts. There were about twenty of us in Jimmy Burke's basement shooting craps. We were waiting for Tommy DeSimone to arrive from Washington, D.C., with a truck-load of cigarettes. It was Thursday, the day we usually got our deliveries and loaded up our own cars and vans. Then on Fridays, between eleven-thirty and two o'clock in the afternoon, we made all our sales. During the morning I'd go to the construction jobs, and by noon or one o'clock in the afternoon I'd go to the sanitation depots and factories, and by two o'clock I'd have made my grand or fifteen hundred dollars for the day.

When Tommy finally got in, it turned out that he only had the big-brand stuff. He had the Chesterfields and Camels and Lucky Strikes, but he didn't have what we called the fill-ins, the less popular brands like Raleighs and L &Ms and Marlboros. Jimmy asked me to go down to Baltimore and pick up the fill-ins. He said if I left right away I could be there early enough to get a load the minute the places opened and be back in plenty of time to sell my stuff before noon. I had a lot of customers who wanted off-brands and I agreed. Lenny, who had been helping me load, wanted to come along. I had about six hundred bucks from the crap game. Jimmy threw me the keys to one of the cars he used and Lenny and I took off.

It was about midnight when we got to Baltimore. The cigarette places didn't open until six in the morning. I had been there before and I knew there were a bunch of strip joints along Baltimore Street. Lenny had never been to Baltimore. We started hitting the joints. We listened to a little jazz. Some B-girls in one place started hustling drinks out of us. We're buying them nine-dollar ginger ales and they're playing with our legs. By two or three in the morning we're pretty smashed. We must have gone for a hundred and fifty bucks with these same two girls. It was very obvious that they liked us. They said that their boss was watching, so they couldn't leave with us, but if we waited outside around back they'd meet us as soon as they got off. Lenny's all excited.

I'm all excited. We go around back and wait. We waited for an hour. Then two hours. And then we just looked at each other and laughed. We couldn't stop laughing. We'd gotten taken like chumps. We were two dumb gloms. So we drove over to the cigarette joints and waited for them to open.

The next thing I know somebody's waking us up at eight o'clock in the morning. We'd overslept. Now we were two hours late getting back for eleven. We loaded five hundred cartons in the car, and there wasn't enough room in the trunk. We had to take the rear seat out and leave it at the wholesaler's. We broke up three cartons evenly and placed a blanket on top of them to look like a rear seat. I started going. We're doing eighty, ninety miles an hour during some stretches. I felt if I could make up fifteen minutes here and ten minutes there I'd knock time off the trip.

We made it all the way to the turnpike Exit 14 in Jersey City. I had seen the speed trap and I jammed on my brakes. Too late. I saw one of the radio cars pull out toward us. When I jammed on the brakes the cigarettes in the rear seat were thrown all over the place. As the cop came closer, Lenny scrambled into the rear and tried to rearrange the blanket, but he couldn't manage too well. The cop wanted my license and registration. I told him the car belonged to a friend of mine. I kept looking for the registration to the car, but I couldn't find it. The cop was getting impatient and wanted to know my friend's name. I didn't know whose name the car was in, so I couldn't even tell him that. It was a brand-new 1965 Pontiac, and he couldn't believe that somebody would lend me the car and I wouldn't even know his name. I tried to stall, and finally I mentioned the guy whose name I thought it might be in, and I no sooner gave him the name than I found the registration, and of course it was in somebody else's name.

Now the guy was suspicious. He finally looked in the back of the car, and he saw cigarettes all over the place. He called for a backup car and they took us in. Now I had problems. I'm going to have the distinction of getting Paul Vario's favorite son his first pinch. I could hear the noise from here. I told the cops that I didn't even know Lenny. I said that I had picked him up on the road, that he was hitchhiking. No good. They brought the two of us in. Lenny knew what to do. He had been groomed. He kept his mouth shut except to give his name. He signed nothing and he asked no questions. I called Jimmy, and he got the lawyer and bondsmen.

By two o'clock in the afternoon we came before a local judge and were held in fifteen hundred bail each. Our lawyers and bail hadn't arrived, so they took us upstairs. We got our bed rolls and were put in with a lot of other guys. We had some cigarettes on us and we gave them to the guys and we just sat and waited. In an hour or so we heard a hack yell, "Hill and Vario! Bag and baggage!" We were free, but now I wasn't worried about the cigarettes. I was worried about Paulie. And I was worried about Karen.

karen: He called up and said he'd had a little trouble. It turned out he and Lenny were arrested for transporting untaxed cigarettes. It wasn't a big crime, but he was arrested. I still thought he was a bricklayer. Sure, I knew he was doing some things that weren't absolutely straight. I mean, some of my friends and relatives used to buy the cigarettes. Nobody complained, believe me. One time I remember Henry and his friends came up with some imported Italian knit shirts. They had crates of them. There were four different styles in twenty colors, and all of us were wearing Italian knits for a year and a half. It was a matter of all of Henry's friends being involved and all of their girl friends and wives and children being involved. There were so many of us, and we all tended to only hang out together. There were absolutely no outsiders. Nobody who wasn't involved was ever invited to go anywhere or be a part of anything. And because we were all a part of that life, soon the world began to seem normal. Birthday parties. Anniversaries. Vacations. We all went together and we were always the same crowd. There was Jimmy and Mickey and, later, their kids. There was Paul and Phyllis. There was Tuddy and Marie. Marty Krugman and Fran. We went to each other's houses. The women played cards. The men did their own thing.

But I was mortified by his arrest. I felt ashamed. I never mentioned it to my mother. But nobody else in the crowd seemed to care. The possibility of being arrested was something that existed for anyone who hustled. Our husbands weren't brain surgeons. They weren't bankers or stockbrokers. They were blue-collar guys, and the only way they could ever get extra money, real extra money, was to go out and hustle, and that meant cutting a few corners.

Mickey Burke and Phyllis and lots of the other women kept saying that it was a joke. That nothing was going to happen. That it was just business. Jimmy was taking care of everything. He had friends even in Jersey City. I would see. I would see how dopey I was worrying about such petty stuff. Instead of worrying I should be enjoying myself. Every time I asked Henry what was happening in his case he said Jimmy was handling it. Finally, one day-he must have been home a couple of hours-he asks if I renumbered the Jersey incident. "What happened?" I asked, all upset, like I'm Bette Davis sending her husband to the chair. "I got fined fifty bucks," he said. He was laughing.

Looking back, I was really pretty naive, but I also didn't want to think about what was going on too much. I didn't want my mother to be right. She had been on my back since we eloped. She felt Henry was bad for me, and when she realized I was a couple of months pregnant she had a fit. Morning, noon, and night I heard stories about how he drank too much, hung around with bad people, didn't come home until late, and wasn't a solid kind of man like my father. She didn't like the idea that I kept my job as a dental assistant after I got married. She insisted that Henry made me keep the job for the money. Day after day she was needling me, and day after day I was defending him against her. I would never give her the satisfaction that she was right, but she watched everything he did, and when he was gone she'd bring up the things she didn't like. He slept too late. He came home too late. He gambled. He drank.

We must have been married a little more than a month when one night he didn't come home at all. He had come home after midnight a few times, but this time it was well after midnight and he was still not home. There wasn't even a call. I was waiting upstairs in our apartment. My mother, who was like a shark smelling blood, began to circle. She had been downstairs in bed, but she had apparently been awake waiting to hear what time Henry got home. I'll bet she stayed awake every night waiting to see what time he got home. When it got to be one o'clock in the morning, she was on full alert. By two o'clock she knocked at my door. By three o'clock we're all in the living room waiting for Henry.

My parents' house had a big front door, and my mother, my father, and I were seated in a semicircle right behind it. "Where is he?" she asked. "Your father would never stay out this late without calling," she said. My father was a saint. He never said a word. In the forty years they were married my father never stayed out all night. In fact, he rarely went out at all without telling my mother where he was going. He never once missed the train he was supposed to be on, and when he drove in to work he was never more than five or ten minutes late getting home. And then he'd spend half the night explaining how bad the traffic was and how he couldn't get through.

She kept it up. He wasn't Jewish-what did I expect? By four o'clock in the morning she started to scream that we were keeping my father up. Good thing he didn't have to work in the morning. It just kept going on and on. I thought I was going to die.

It must have been six-thirty in the morning when I heard a car pull up. We were all still sitting in the living room. It was like a wake. I jumped up and looked out the window. It wasn't his car, but I saw him in the backseat. I saw that Paulie's son, Peter Vario, was driving and that one of Lenny Vario's sons was in the car too. My mother had already opened the front door, and the minute he hit the sidewalk she confronted him. "Where were you? Where have you been? Why didn't you call? We were all worried to death! A married man doesn't stay out like this!" She was yelling at him so fast and so loud that I don't think I said a word. I just stood there. I was nineteen and he was twenty-two, but we were such kids.

I remember he stopped, he looked at her, looked at me, and then, without a word, he got back in the car and drove away. My mother just stood there. He was gone. I started to cry. "Normal people don't live this way," she said.

henry: I was so smashed that night, all I remember is getting out of the car and seeing Karen's mother standing on the porch screaming at me. So this is being married? I thought and sank back in the car. I went to Lenny's to sleep. I was starting to realize that Karen and I were going to have to move. I waited until later in the day before calling Karen. I told her the truth. I had been at Lenny's son Peter's bachelor party. We'd taken Petey out drinking. We'd been drinking from early afternoon. We'd been to Jilly's, the Golden Torch, Jackie Kannon's Rat Fink Room. I didn't tell her about the hookers on First Avenue, but I did tell her about going for a steam bath at two in the morning to sober up and still being too drunk to drive myself home.

We made a date for dinner. When I picked her up at the house she ran out the door before her mother knew I was there. Having her mother as a common enemy brought us together. It was like our first date.

karen: Some of the marriages were worse than others. Some were even good. Jimmy and Mickey Burke got on. So did Paul and Phyllis. But none of us knew what our husbands were doing. We weren't married to nine-to-five guys. When Henry started making the trips for the cigarettes, for instance, I knew he'd be gone a couple of days at a time. I saw the way all the other men and their wives lived. I knew he wasn't going to be home every night. Even when we were keeping company, I knew on Friday night he was going to hang out with the guys or play cards. Friday was always the card-playing night.

Later I found out that it was also the girl friend night. Everybody who had a girl friend took her out on Friday night.

Nobody took his wife out on Friday night. The wives went out on Saturday night. That way there were no accidents of running into somebody's wife when they were with their girl friends. One Saturday Henry took me to the Copa. We were walking to our table when there was Patsy Fusco, big as a pig, sitting with his girl friend. I really got upset. I knew his wife. She was a friend of mine. Was I supposed to keep my mouth shut? I didn't want to be put in this spot. Then I saw that Henry was going to go over and say hello to Patsy. I couldn't believe it. He was going to put me right in a box. I refused to go. I just stood there between the tables in the lounge and wouldn't budge, at least not in Patsy's direction. Henry was surprised, but he could see I was serious, so he just nodded to Patsy and we went to our own table. It was one of those minor things that reveal a lot. I think that for a split second Henry was going over to see Patsy because he forgot he was with me. He forgot it wasn't Friday night.