Nicholas Pileggi: Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

"I was the luckiest kid in the world. People like my father couldn't understand, but I was part of something. I belonged. I was treated like I was a grown-up. I was living a fantasy. Wiseguys would pull up and toss me their keys and let me park their Caddies. I couldn't see over the steering wheel and I'm parking Caddies."

At twelve Henry Hill was making more money than he could spend. At first he would treat his classmates to galloping horse rides along the bridle paths of the Canarsie marshes. Sometimes he would pay for their day at Steeplechase Amusement Park, topping off the treat with a 260-foot parachute drop. In time, though, Henry grew bored with his schoolmates and tired of his own largesse. He soon learned that there were no heady rides on sweaty horses and no amusement parks he had ever seen that could match the adventures he encountered at the cabstand.

"My father was the kind of guy who worked hard his whole life and was never there for the payday. When I was a kid he used to say he was a 'subway-man,' and it made me want to cry. He helped organize the electrical workers' union, Local Three, and got flowers for his funeral. He worked on skyscrapers in Manhattan and housing projects in Queens, and we could never move out of our crummy three-bedroom house jammed with seven kids, one of them stuck in his bed with a bum spine. We had money to eat, but we never had extras. And every day I saw everyone else, not just the wiseguys, making a buck. My old man's life wasn't going to be my life. No matter how much he yelled at me, no matter how many beatings I took, I wouldn't listen to what he said. I don't think I even heard him. I was too busy learning about paydays. I was learning how to earn.

"And every day I was learning something. Every day I was making a dollar here and a dollar there. I'd listen to schemes and I watched guys score. It was natural. I was in the middle of the cabstand every day. Swag came in and out of that place all day long. There'd be a crate of stolen toasters to be fenced, hot cashmeres right off a truck, cartons of untaxed cigarettes hijacked off some cowboy truckers, who couldn't even complain to the cops. Pretty soon I was delivering policy slips to apartments and houses all over the neighborhood, where the Varies had guys with adding machines counting up the day's take. People used to rent a room in their apartment to the Varios for $150 a week and a free phone. It was a good deal. The wiseguys took only two or three hours in the late afternoon to add up the policy bets on the adding machine tape and circle all the winners. Lots of times the places Paulie and the numbers guys rented belonged to the parents of the kids I went to school with. At first they were surprised to see me coming in with a shopping bag full of slips. They thought I was coming to play with their kids. But pretty soon they knew who I was. They could see I was growing up different.

"After I got my first few bucks and the nerve to go shopping without my mother, I went to Benny Field's on Pitkin Avenue. That's where the wiseguys bought their clothes. I came out wearing a dark-blue pinstriped, double-breasted suit with lapels so sharp you could get arrested just for flashing them. I was a kid. I was so proud. When I got home my mother took one look at me and screamed, 'You look just like a gangster!' I felt even better."

At thirteen, Henry had worked a year at the cabstand. He was a handsome youngster with a bright, open face and a dazzling smile. His thick black hair was combed straight back. His dark-brown eyes were so sharp and bright that they glittered with excitement. He was slick. He had learned how to duck under his father's angry swats, and he was a master at slipping away from the racetrack security guards, who insisted he was too young to hang around the clubhouse, especially on school days. From a distance he almost looked like a miniature of the men he so admired. He wore an approximation of their clothes, he tried to use their street-corner hand gestures, he ate their kind of scungilli and squid dishes though they made him retch, and he used to sip containers of boiling, bitter black coffee even though it tasted awful and burned his lips so badly he wanted to cry. He was a cardboard wiseguy, a youngster dressed up for the mob. But he was also learning about that world, and there were no adolescent aspiring samurai or teenage Buddhist monks who took their indoctrination and apprenticeship more seriously.

"I was around the stand from morning till night, and I was learning more and more every day. By the time I was thirteen I was collecting numbers and selling fireworks. I used to get the cab drivers to buy six-packs of beer for me, and then I'd sell them at a markup to the kids in the school yard. I was acting like a mini-fence for some of the neighborhood's juvenile burglars. I'd front them the money and then sell the radio, portable, or box of sweaters they glommed to one of the guys around the cabstand.

"Before big-money holidays like Easter and Mother's Day, instead of going to school I'd go 'cashing' with Johnny Mazzolla. Johnny, who lived across the street from the cabstand, was a junkie horse-player, and every once in a while he would take me out and we'd go cashing counterfeit twenties he picked up from Beansie the counterfeiter in Ozone Park for ten cents on the dollar. We'd go from store to store, neighborhood to neighborhood, and Johnny would wait in the car and I'd run in and buy something for a buck or two with the fake twenty. Johnny taught me how to soften up the counterfeit bills with cold coffee and cigarette ashes the night before and leave them out to dry. He taught me to pretend I was in a hurry when I went up to the cashier. He also told me never to carry more than one bill on me at a time.

That way, if you get caught, you can pretend that somebody passed it off on you. He was right. It worked. I was caught a couple of times, but I could always cry my way out. I was just a kid. I'd start to yell and cry and say I had to tell my mother what happened. That she'd beat me up for losing the money. Then I'd run out of the store fast as I could and we'd be off for another neighborhood. We'd usually get a couple of days in a neighborhood-until the twenties started showing up in the local banks and they'd alert the stores. Then the cashiers would have a list of the fake bills' serial numbers tacked up right next to the register, and we'd have to change neighborhoods. At the end of a day's cashing we'd have so many two-dollar purchases of doughnuts and cigarettes and razor blades and soap piled up in the back of the car we couldn't see out the rear window.

"At Christmas, Tuddy taught me how to drill holes in the trunks of junk Christmas trees he'd get for nothing, and then I'd stuff the holes with loose branches. I'd stuff so many branches into those holes that even those miserable spindly trees looked full. Then we'd sell them for premium prices, usually at night and mostly around the Euclid Avenue subway stop. It took a day or two before the branches came loose and began to fall apart. The trees would collapse even faster once they were weighed down with decorations.

"We were always scheming. Everything was a scheme. Tuddy got me a job unloading deliveries at a high-class Italian food store just so I could toss the store's most expensive items through the windows of Tuddy's cabs, which he had parked strategically nearby. It wasn't that Tuddy or Lenny or Paul needed the stuff-the imported olive oil, prosciutto, or tuna fish. The Varies had more than enough money to buy the store a hundred times over. It was just that stuff that was stolen always tasted better than anything bought. I remember years later, when I was doing pretty well in the stolen credit-card business, Paulie was always asking me for stolen credit cards whenever he and his wife, Phyllis, were going out for the night. Paulie called stolen cards 'Muldoons,' and he always said that liquor tastes better on a Muldoon. The fact that a guy like Paul Vario, a capo in the Lucchese crime family, would even consider going out on a social occasion with his wife and run the risk of getting caught using a stolen card might surprise some people. But if you knew wiseguys you would know right away that the best part of the night for Paulie came from the fact that he was getting over on somebody. It wasn't the music or the floor show or the food-and he loved food-or even that he was going out with Phyllis, who he adored. The real thrill of the night for Paulie, bis biggest pleasure, was that he was robbing someone and getting away with it.