Nicholas Pileggi: Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

"After I was at the cabstand about six months I began helping the Varios with the card and dice games they ran. I would spend the days with Bruno Facciolo assembling the crap game tables, which were just like the ones they have in Vegas. I spent my nights steering the high rollers from various pickup spots in the neighborhood, such as the candy store under the Liberty Avenue el or Al and Evelyn's delicatessen on Pitkin Avenue, to the apartments and storefronts where we were having games that night. A couple of times we had the games in the basement of my own school, Junior High School 149, on Euclid Avenue. Babe Vario bought the school custodian. I kept an eye out for cops, especially the plainclothesmen from the division or headquarters, who used to shake down the games in those days. I didn't have to worry too much about the local cops. They were already on the payroll. It got so that I could always make a plainclothesman. They usually had their shirts outside their pants to cover their guns and handcuffs. They used the same dirty black Plymouths all the time. We even had their plate numbers. They had a way of walking through a block or driving a car that just said, 'Don't fuck with me, I'm a cop!' I had radar for them. I knew.

"Those games were fabulous. There were usually between thirty and forty guys playing. We had rich garment-center guys. Businessmen. Restaurant owners. Bookmakers. Union guys. Doctors. Dentists. This was long before it was so easy to fly out to Vegas or drive down to Atlantic City for the night. There was also just about every wiseguy in the city coming to the games. The games themselves were actually run by professionals, but the Varios handled the money. They kept the books and the cashbox. The guys who ran the game got a flat fee or a percentage depending on the deal they cut. The people who ran the games for Paulie were the same kind of professionals who would run games in casinos or carnivals. The card games had professional dealers and the crap games had boxmen and stickmen, just like regular casinos. There were doormen-usually guys from the cabstand-who checked out everyone who got in the game, and there were loan sharks who worked for Paulie who picked up some of the action. Every pot was cut five or six percent for the house, and there was a bartender who kept the drinks coming.

"I used to make coffee and sandwich runs to Al and Evelyn's delicatessen until I realized I could make a lot more money if I made the sandwiches myself. It was a lot of work, but I made a few more bucks. I had only been doing that a couple of weeks when Al and Evelyn caught me on the street. They took me into the store. They wanted to talk to me, they said. Business was bad, they said. Since I started making sandwiches they had lost lots of the card game business. They had a deal. If I went back to buying the sandwiches from them, they'd cut me in for five cents on every card game dollar I spent. It sounded great, but I didn't jump at the opportunity. I wanted to savor it. I was being treated like an adult. 'Awright,' Al says, with Evelyn frowning at him, 'seven cents on the dollar!' 'Good,' I said, but I was feeling great. It was my first kickback and I was still only thirteen.

"It was a glorious time. Wiseguys were all over the place. It was 1956, just before Apalachin, before the wiseguys began having all the trouble and Crazy Joey Gallo decided to take on his boss, Joe Profaci, in an all-out war. It was when I met the world. It was when I first met Jimmy Burke. He used to come to the card games. He couldn't have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five at the time, but he was already a legend. He'd walk in the door and everybody who worked in the joint would go wild. He'd give the doorman a hundred just for opening the door. He shoved hundreds in the pockets of the guys who ran the games. The bartender got a hundred just for keeping the ice cubes cold. I mean, the guy was a sport. He started out giving me five bucks every time I got him a sandwich or a beer. Two beers, two five-dollar bills. Win or lose, the guy had money on the table and people got their tips. After a while, when he got to know me a little bit and he got to know that I was with Paul and the Varios, he started to give me twenty-dollar tips when I brought him his sandwich. He was sawbucking me to death. Twenty here. Twenty there. He wasn't like anyone else I had ever met. The Varios and most of the Italian guys were all pretty cheap. They'd go for a buck once in a while, but they resented it. They hated losing the green. Jimmy was from another world. He was a one-man parade. He was also one of the city's biggest hijackers. He loved to steal. I mean, he enjoyed it. He loved to unload the hijacked trucks himself until the sweat was pouring down his face. He must have knocked over hundreds of trucks a year, most of them coming and going from the airports. Most hijackers take the truck driver's license as a warning. The driver knows that you know where he lives, and if he cooperates too much with the cops or the insurance company he's in trouble. Jimmy got his nickname 'Jimmy the Gent' because he used to take the driver's license, just like everybody else, except Jimmy used to stuff a fifty-dollar bill into the guy's wallet before taking off. I can't tell you how many friends he made out at the airport because of that. People loved him. Drivers used to tip off his people about rich loads. At one point things got so bad the cops had to assign a whole army to try to stop him, but it didn't work. It turned out that Jimmy made the cops his partners. Jimmy could corrupt a saint. He said bribing cops was like feeding elephants at the zoo. 'All you need is peanuts.'

"Jimmy was the kind of guy who cheered for the crooks in movies. He named his two sons Frank James Burke and Jesse James Burke. He was a big guy, and he knew how to handle himself. He looked like a fighter. He had a broken nose and he had a lot of hands. If there was just the littlest amount of trouble, he'd be all over you in a second. He'd grab a guy's tie and slam his chin into the table before the guy knew he was in a war. If the guy was lucky, Jimmy would let him live. Jimmy had a reputation for being wild. He'd whack you. There was no question-Jimmy could plant you just as fast as shake your hand. It didn't matter to him. At dinner he could be the nicest guy in the world, but then he could blow you away for dessert. He was very scary and he scared some very scary fellows. Nobody really knew where they stood with him, but he was also smarter than most of the guys he was around. He was a great earner. Jimmy always brought in money for Paulie and the crew, and that, in the end, is why his craziness was tolerated."

On Henry's fourteenth birthday Tuddy and Lenny Vario presented Henry with a card in the bricklayers' local. Even then, in 1957, a job in the construction workers' union paid well ($190 a week) and entitled its members to extensive health care and other fringe benefits, such as paid vacations and sick leave. It was a union card for which most of the hardworking men in the neighborhood would have paid dearly-if they had ever had enough money to buy anything. Henry was given the card so that he could be put on a building contractor's payroll as a no-show and his salary divided among the Varies. He was also given the card to facilitate the pickup of the daily policy bets and loan-shark payments from local construction sites. For months, instead of going to school, Henry made pickups at various construction projects and then brought everything back to the basement of the Presto Pizzeria, where the accounts were assembled.

"I was doing very nicely. I liked going to the construction jobs. Everybody knew who I was. They all knew I was with Paul. Sometimes, because I was a member of the union, they let me wet down all the new brick with a fire hose. I loved doing that. It was fun. I liked to watch the way the brick changed color.