Nicholas Pileggi - Wiseguy - Life in a Mafia Family

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.