France cargo building 86 at Kennedy, questioning the employees, searching the area and examining the manifests and bills of lading.'
By the time Air France realized its $480,000 was missing, Henry and his pals had already given away $120,000 of it as 'tribute' to the mob chiefs who considered Kennedy Airport their turf. They gave $60,000 to Sebastian 'Buster' Aloi, the fifty-seven-year-old
'We took care of Buster because it was insurance. It kept everybody happy. We gave Paulie a piece because he was our boss. That's the way it's set up. He protected us. If there was a beef against us by another crew-and there were always beefs against us- Paulie took care of it. He went to the sit-downs and took our part. The rest of the money we pooled. I could have taken my end and gone home, but what was I going to do with it? Put it in the closet? Jimmy kept it in a couple of bookmakers' safes, and if I needed a few bucks I'd take it out, and he'd keep tabs. It was like having a bank account.
'We wanted to spend some money on ourselves. I wanted a new car and some clothes. Karen needed things for the new apartment and the kids. To justify any new spending, the three of us, Jimmy, Tommy, and I, took a trip to Vegas, dropped about twenty grand, and came back bragging that we had won. Everybody knew we went to Vegas a lot and that Jimmy was the kind of guy who would belly up to the craps table and play until his ankles swole. But even then we didn't overdo anything. I put a down payment on a new 'sixty-seven gold Buick Riviera with a black top and financed the rest, using my brother's name. Tommy did the same, except he bought a beige Cadillac with a black top.
'Our first business proposition came about two weeks after the robbery when Paulie came up to us at the backstretch at Aqueduct and said if we joined him in a deal we could buy a fifty-percent interest in Milty Wekar's bookmaking operation. He had Wekar right there with him in the car. Wekar needed some money. He had been betting heavy on something he had and got burned. It was a great opportunity. Wekar had high rollers and bookmakers for customers. He had garment-center executives, Wall Street brokers, doctors and dentists and lawyers. And he had the guys who took their action. He never took bets for less than five hundred or a thousand dollars a shot, and most of the customers would bet six or seven games at once. Vario said he'd put in fifty thousand if we put in the same. Jimmy and Tommy looked at me and we all agreed. Right there at the track. We didn't need any lawyers. We shook hands and I was in the bookmaking business. I was twenty-four.
'It was an education. Milty was a bookmaker's bookmaker. Most of our action came from bookmakers, not individual bettors. Milty put me on the payroll for five hundred a week and expenses. I used to sit between the two clerks who took the action and I tabbed the bets. I had a yellow legal pad and on it I had all the day's action. I had baseball, football, basketball, the pros, colleges, the tracks, every kind of action going. And I also had the odds on the sheet, and as the bets came in I'd mark a line for every thousand bet, and then I'd draw a line through whenever five thousand was bet. Milty would look at the sheets and adjust the odds. He'd move the odds up or down depending upon whether he wanted action or not. If Milty had a problem and wanted to lay off some of the bets, he had a line to guys in Florida, St. Louis, Vegas, California. Just about anywhere.
'I also helped Milty on Tuesday, the straighten-up day. That's when all the bookmakers and high-line bettors in the city had to straighten up whatever they owed each other for the week. We'd usually straighten up in a garment-center restaurant called Bobby's. On Mondays we'd make up the payout sheet. There were our expenses, like my salary and stuff. There were 'pays' for the winners. There was 'ice'-about seven hundred dollars a week-for the cops. There was 'juice' for when we had a bad week and had to go to the loan sharks for a little extra money ourselves.
'But usually we didn't have to do anything like that. We would just call Paulie, and Paulie would give us twenty-five or thirty grand with no interest. After all, he was a partner. If we couldn't get Paulie and wanted to put off paying for a couple of days, Milty had a great trick. He kept five or six one-thousand-dollar bills around, and he'd give them to me to flash on the winners. Since none of our clients wanted to get paid in thousand-dollar bills, we could always put off paying them for a couple of days. The big bills were just too much trouble for wiseguy bookmakers to cash. Milty must have used those same bills for years.
'We had a great operation. Milty had five different rooms all over the city where we took the action. We had most of the police on the pad. Milty paid off the Borough Command and the Division. Every once in a while we'd have to stand still for an arrest, usually by the police commissioner's Confidential Investigating Unit, but it was a misdemeanor, and all that meant was a fifty-dollar fine. Nobody ever went to jail for bookmaking. Still, we couldn't figure out how the cops always knew where we were. Milty was constantly changing apartments. Sometimes we'd move a couple of tunes a week, but they always knew our new locations.
'We finally figured it out. Milty had this old guy who used to go around and rent our rooms. That's all the guy ever did. Milty gave him three hundred a week to find the apartments, put down deposits, sign the leases, get the gas and electric lines opened up, and get the phones installed. The guy used to come in on the Long Island Railroad, get off, and take buses and subways as far as he could until he found apartments to rent. Somehow the cops got a line on the guy, and they used to tail him from one apartment to another until they had a list of our places. Then, when they saw one of our cars parked outside, they'd crash through.
'After about four months I took my first pinch for running a wire room. It was in August of 1967, and the cops who broke in said we were doing two million dollars' worth of business a week. I only wish. We'd gotten word from the cops we'd paid off that we were going to get busted. We were due. They just went through the motions. It was done right. No cuffs or anything. After we were booked we took the cops for dinner on Mulberry Street before we went to night court for the arraignment. Al Newman, our bondsman, was already in court when we got there. I grabbed a cab home. The cops dropped Milty off. The next day we were back in action at a different apartment. We had taken a pinch and now we were okay for a while. John Sutler, my lawyer, bounced the case around the courts for a year until I finally pleaded guilty. I got fined a hundred dollars and went home. It was a joke. The city was spending millions of dollars for plainclothes cops to catch bookmakers, but it was obvious that the whole thing was set up so the cops could shake us down. The cops didn't want to put us out of business any more than they wanted to shoot the golden goose.
'It was at this time that another business opportunity arose. There was a terrific supper club and restaurant called The Suite on Queens Boulevard, near Forest Hills. Its owner, Joey Rossano, was a horse-player and gambler. The guy needed money. We made a deal that I'd take over the place but he'd keep his name on the papers. I paid him some money and I took over his loan-shark debts. I knew some of the guys he owed, and they weren't very strong. They didn't have the weight. So I knew I wouldn't have to pay. I just strong-armed them out of the money- and who could they go to? If you were with Paulie and our crew, you could tell most of the city's half-assed wiseguys to get lost. I made them eat the debts.
'Also, Karen loved the idea of getting a legitimate joint. Our first daughter, Judy, was two and a half and Ruth was about six months old, and Karen had been insisting I keep an eye out for a good business opportunity. She knew about the cigarettes and swag and she knew about Air France. She knew I had some money, and she wanted me to invest it right. The bookmaking business wasn't her idea of a good deal. She knew I had taken the pinch, and she knew I used to gamble away most of the money I made right there in our own office. We all did. We'd get some good action from a trainer or owner on a certain horse and we'd add a few grand of our own money on top of the bet. When you do that as a bookmaker, it's only a matter of time. Show me a bookmaker who bets and I'll show you a guy owned by the sharks.
'Before I thought about taking over The Suite I talked it over with Paulie. He liked the idea. He liked it so much that he ordered the place off limits for the crew. He said we had to keep the place clean. He didn't want to turn it into a joint like Robert's.
'I was in the place every day, morning till night. Karen would bring the kids in and help with the books. All the books. The books for the SLA and IRS and the real books. I got a decent cook in the place, and I got Casey Rosado, who headed the bartenders' and waiters' union at the airport, to send in some of his spies to tell me how much I was getting robbed by my bartenders. The Suite was a big enough place so that I had six bartenders, three of them on at all times. When I got the word from Casey, I fired all of them. Casey said the bartenders were stealing a thousand dollars a night out of the joint, in addition to a hundred a night in tips they were taking home, plus the hundred and a half I was paying them.
'We were doing real well for a couple of months, then, one by one, the guys started to show up. First Jimmy
