Nicholas Pileggi - Wiseguy - Life in a Mafia Family

henry:By this time I'm getting tired of all this sneaking around. Three months I'm going out with Karen every day, and I can't go to her house when her grandmother's there, and her mother keeps telling us we're not meant for each other. My parents are doing the same kind of stuff. It was like we were alone against everybody. Then that business with the guy across the street happened, and I decided we ought to elope. If we were married, then everybody would have to deal with us. Finally, after a couple of false starts, we decided to drive down to Maryland and get married. Just do it. We needed a witness, so I got Lenny to come along. When we got to Maryland we started talking to some kids in a car next to ours waiting at a traffic light. They said there was a three-day wait in Maryland but that you could get married right away in North Carolina. So we went to Walden, North Carolina, instead. We got our physicals and blood tests and then we went right to the justice of the peace. By now our witness, Lenny, has passed out, sleeping in the backseat of the car, so the wife of the justice of the peace was our witness.

karen:Henry and I got back and told my parents. First they were stunned, but within half an hour they seemed to come around. We had done it; there was nothing they could do. They were not the kind of people to kick their children out of the house. And I wasn't the kind of young bride who knew what to do. I couldn't boil an egg. We were both kids. They suggested that we stay with them. My parents fixed the upstairs part of the house for us, and we started living at home. It would never have dawned on Henry to get a place of our own. In fact, he liked living in my house. He enjoyed my family. He liked my mother's cooking. He joked with her. He was very warm to her. I could see that he really enjoyed being a part of the family. And slowly my mother and father got to like him. They had three daughters, and now, in a funny way, they had finally gotten their son. He was very sincere about the religious problem and said that he would convert. He began taking religious instructions. He went to work every day. We all thought he was a bricklayer. He had a union card and everything. What did we know? It never occurred to me that it was strange that he had such nice smooth hands for a construction worker. By August, Henry had done so well with the religious instructions that we had a nice Jewish wedding. Even my grandmother was almost happy.

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.