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
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
