stretch-a ten-year sentence in a federal penitentiary-came about because he got into a barroom brawl with a man whose sister was a typist for the FBI. It was as if he had suddenly hit the Superfecta of bad luck. He had been caught in a barroom brawl, and they had literally made a federal case out of it.
It had started as a lark, a spur-of-the-moment trip to Florida with his pals Jimmy Burke and Casey Rosado, the president of Local 71 of the Waiters and Commissary Workers at Kennedy Airport. Casey wanted company-he was going down to Tampa to see his parents and pick up some gambling money that was owed him. Tommy DeSimone had been scheduled to go, but he had been arrested on a hijacking the night before, and he wasn't going to get bailed out early enough to make the flight. So Jimmy asked Henry if he wanted to go.
'Why not? A little vacation. The union had already paid for a first-class round-trip ticket, and the flight would get me away from battling with Karen and Linda for a couple of days. Time out. That's the way I looked at it. I called Karen from The Suite and told her to pack me a bag. Jimmy and I picked it up on our way to the airport.
'We got to Tampa late that night and were met by Casey's cousin in a car. We went straight to Casey's parents' house, where there was a lot of hugging and kissing. Finally we left our suitcases there and went to the Colombia Restaurant, in Ybor City, the old Cuban section of town, where Casey and his cousin turned out to be local celebrities. Everybody knew them.
'We were just going to have a good time. At dinner Casey said that the guy who owed him the money was named John Ciaccio and that he owned the Temple Terrace Lounge, just outside Ybor City. Casey said he had a meeting with the guy later that night. Jimmy said he and I would tag along.
'When we got to Ciaccio's place I saw that it was a pretty big, one-story, cement block lounge surrounded by a giant parking lot. There was a liquor store right next to it which was also owned by Ciaccio. I saw that the place was near an intersection. I made a note that if there was trouble we could drive away from the bar real fast and disappear on either of two four-lane highways.
'Before we went inside, Casey's cousin came over to me and out of nowhere handed me a huge thirty-eight revolver. It was an antique. It was bound to explode if you tried to use it. I put it in my jacket and forgot about it. Casey and his cousin walked in first. After a minute Jimmy and I walked in. The room was very dark. It took a few seconds to see anything, but I could hear that the place was jumping. Casey was already talking to the guy near the bar, and when they walked over to a table, Jimmy and I sat down about four tables away.
'Pretty soon Casey and the guy were yelling at each other in Spanish. We didn't know what they were yelling about. But all of a sudden the guy and Casey both jumped up. When they jumped up, we jumped up. I had the gun in my hand, and we walked over to their table. Jimmy grabbed the guy's tie and twisted it around until the guy's eyes bulged. Jimmy had his fist right under the guy's chin, pressing it into his throat. Jimmy said, 'Shut your mouth and walk out the door.'
'I watched the room to see if anyone made a move. There must have been twenty-five people in the place, but nobody did anything. Later they were all witnesses at the trial, and the bartender, a retired New York cop, got our license plate when we pulled away. It turned out that Casey's cousin had rented the car for us in his own name. I still can't get over that.
'Casey and his cousin were in the front, and Jimmy and I had the guy squeezed between us. The bum was screaming that he wouldn't give up any money. He was yelling that we would have to kill him before he paid. A real tough guy. I whacked him across the face with the gun a few times. I didn't really want to hurt him too bad. After about two blocks he changed his mind. He said he'd pay but he only owed half the money-the rest was owed by a doctor who had been in on the bet. All this negotiating was going on in Spanish. Casey's cousin said he knew the doctor and the guy was probably telling the truth. Casey said he didn't care who paid just as long as they paid him the money they owed.
'I could see that all of these people knew each other very well. I felt like I was in the middle of some hotheaded family feud. Jimmy and I were the strangers. I decided to keep the gun just in case. We drove to a bar owned by Casey's cousin, but by now the guy was bleeding so badly that we had to pull his jacket up over his head when we walked him inside so that he wouldn't attract too much attention. We hustled him right into a small storage room in the rear of the bar, but there were still enough witnesses, including a couple of waitresses, who later testified against us in court. Casey called the doctor.
'It took half the night, but they finally came up with the dough. We cleaned up the guy as best we could and turned him over to his brother. That was it. Case closed. No big deal. Jimmy and I spent the rest of the night and most of the weekend drinking rum and brandy with Casey and his cousin.
'About a month after I got back I was driving down Lefferts Boulevard on my way to Robert's Lounge when I saw eight or twelve cars blocking the street. They were parked all over the sidewalk. I saw Jimmy Santos standing near the corner. 'Get out of here,' he said. 'Put on your radio.' I did what Santos said and I heard that the FBI was 'arresting union officials' and that 'Jimmy Burke and others are being sought.'
'I still didn't know what was going on. I thought it might have had something to do with our having broken up an airport restaurant for Casey the night before. Until I knew more about what was happening I didn't want to go home. I didn't want to go to The Suite. I went to Linda's and watched the television news. That's the first I knew that they were talking about Florida. It was a big thing. They even interrupted shows with news flashes. I couldn't believe it. They said we were an organized-crime, interstate gambling ring. They made it sound like we were part of some big syndicate.
'It didn't make any sense. For some crazy reason the feds had decided to play our little case up big. Jimmy and I met with Casey and all of our lawyers, and none of us could figure the damn thing out until just before the trial. That's when we found out that John Ciaccio, the guy we'd roughed up, had a sister who was a typist for the FBI. Nobody knew that was where she worked. Even her family just thought she had some ordinary job with the government.
'She had apparently gone to see him on the night we beat him up, and she got hysterical. She was afraid her whole family was going to get beaten up and killed. She cried the whole weekend. Monday she went into work and burst into tears in the middle of the Tampa office of the FBI. She was surrounded by agents. Of course they asked her why she was crying and of course she gave it all up. Her brother. His friends. The bars. The bets. The doctor. And, naturally, us. The agents went wild. They had an organized-crime case in their own backyard.
'We were first indicted by the state of Florida for kidnapping and attempted murder, but we beat that case because Casey took the stand and convinced the jury that Ciaccio was a liar. Casey was the only one of us whose record was clean enough so he could take the stand and not get picked apart by the prosecutor in the cross- examination.
'But after we beat the state case, the feds came after us with an extortion indictment. Just before we were going to trial, Casey Rosado, the only one of us who could take the stand, dropped dead one morning while putting on his shoes. He was forty-six. His wife said he was sitting on the edge of the bed and just bent over to tie his laces and he never got up. He collapsed. A heart attack.
'I almost had a heart attack myself when I heard what happened, because I knew with Casey gone our chances for beating the case were gone. And was I right. The trial, which took twelve days, was over on November 3, 1972. It took the jury six hours to bring in a verdict. Guilty. It was unanimous. The judge gave us ten years like he was giving away candy.'
Thirteen
A ten-year sentence-it was more time than Karen could conceive of. When she first heard about it, she planned to move in immediately with her parents. Then she planned to kill herself. Then she planned to kill Henry. Then she planned to divorce him. She worried about how she would support herself and the children. She awoke every morning to greater and greater anxiety. And yet she felt compelled to stay with him for the time being-from day to day, she used to tell herself, or until he was taken behind the wall and it was finally over.
But Henry didn't go off to prison right away. In fact, as a result of the appeals his lawyers filed, almost two years elapsed between the time of his sentencing in Tampa and the day he finally surrendered in New York and actually began serving his ten-year term. In those twenty-one months Henry completed the time he owed Nassau County for his misdemeanor plea, opened a restaurant in Queens, and hustled as he had never hustled before. He
