Twenty
When Nassau County narcotics detective Daniel Mann first heard about Henry Hill, he had no idea Hill was going to be any different from the thirty or forty other suburban drug dealers he arrested every year. Even when some of the first intelligence reports, surveillances, and wiretap information began coming in, he was still doubtful. Danny Mann had been a cop too long to get himself excited before getting kissed.
The Hill case had started just like all the others. There was an informant. In the Hill case it was a nineteen- year-old Commack, Long Island, youngster, who had been arrested for selling twelve hundred dollars' worth of Quaaludes to Nassau County undercover cops on three different occasions. Undercovers always like to string together more than one or two sales before making their arrests. Multiple sales tend to solidify a case and give the prosecutor more clout at the inevitable plea-bargaining table. An airtight case also means those arrested are more likely to cooperate and be coaxed into giving up their friends and partners in return for leniency. In this case the youngster needed no coaxing. Within minutes of being brought to the Mineola precinct for booking he was looking for a deal. The kid-a
Mann remembers looking at the kid and doubting that any bargain could be struck. What could the kid offer that would be worth his while? Danny Mann was not interested in pursuing druggie kids. No, no, the kid said. He could give up more than college kids. He knew about wiseguys. He could give up a wiseguy drug ring operating right under Mann's nose. It was an organized-crime heroin and cocaine ring, and they were operating out of Rockville Centre and distributing drugs all over the country. The kid said he had even been invited to work as a courier by one of the bosses.
Danny Mann left the room. He called his old pal Bruce Walter, the New York City police detective assigned to the youngster's case in Brooklyn. Was the kid for real? 'You got a winner,' Walters said. 'Have fun.'
The youngster was a small-time punk. He had quit high school before graduation and got most of his money as a chemistry salesman, selling pharmaceutical concoctions such as Quaaludes, amphetamines, LSD, and angel dust rather than heroin and cocaine. His father, an ex-con, was a fugitive in connection with a bank robbery and other cases. The young man lived at home with his mother, a part-time shopping-mall hair stylist.
A deal was struck. If the youngster could really 'give up' an organized-crime drug ring, the charges against him would be reduced, if not dropped, and his cooperation would be conveyed by both police and prosecutor to the sentencing judge. If he was helpful, in other words, he might be able to get a walk. The drug business, of course, is just filled with people like this youngster. There are literally thousands of them, all leaking bits of information about each other, the smart ones holding something back for a rainy day, all of them with confidential-informant numbers and case agents and prosecutors whom they keep apprised of everything going on in the street. In addition to youngsters and petty dealers, however, many of the biggest and most successful narcotics importers and distributors, some of them top organized-crime figures, are also confidential informants to one set of cops or another. The drug business is simply a business of informants. Partners, friends, brothers-there are no standup guys in the drug trade. It is a multibillion-dollar business in which it is understood that everyone is ratting out everyone else.
While Detective Mann and William Broder, the Nassau County assistant district attorney, began taking notes, the youngster started giving them details about the ring. He said it was run by members of the Lucchese crime family and that it was connected with Paul Vario. The ring's leader, as far as the informant knew, was Henry Hill, an ex-con whom he knew to be very closely associated with Paul Vario of the Lucchese family. Mann and Broder were impressed. They had not come across many people close to Paul Vario before, let alone any who might be able to implicate the elusive mob boss in anything as serious as drugs. Most of the people who could have done Paul Vario any damage wound up dead long before Mann or anyone else from law enforcement got around to seeing them.
The youngster said he had known Hill for many years. He had visited Hill's house numerous times and knew Hill's wife and children. The youngster said he gained access to the house because he had relatives and friends who were very friendly with the Hills and so he had never really been considered a stranger. He insisted to Mann, however, that he would not talk about any of these relatives or friends, since they were not related to the case at hand. He said he knew the Hill operation had to be a large one because of the kinds of people with whom Hill was connected. Hill, he said, was close to Jimmy Burke, had been a part of the Kennedy Airport truck-hijacking gang, and had probably been in on the Lufthansa robbery.
The youngster told Mann that the first time he knew that Hill was in the drug business was back in 1979. Hill had just been released from prison. The youngster said he had been doing some landscape work at Hill's house, and while he was waiting for a friend, who was also a friend of Hill's, to pick him up, Hill had suggested that he start earning extra money as a 'mule,' or drug courier, for the operation. Hill had then taken him into the first-floor bedroom to show him the drugs. The bedroom could be entered only through an electronically operated door. Once inside, Hill showed him five kilos of cocaine, stored in a walk-in closet. He said that Hill took out one of the kilos so that he could examine it more carefully. Hill said he was handling eight kilos of cocaine a week and needed help in distributing the drugs. According to the youngster, Hill offered him five thousand dollars a trip for transporting cocaine to various spots around the country.
Using the youngster's information and an accompanying affidavit from the Brooklyn district attorney that verified the youngster's reliability as an informant, Mann applied for a wiretap order to be signed by a Nassau County judge. In his affidavit to the court Mann said he needed the wiretap authorization because the usual methods of investigation would not be successful in the Hill case. For instance, the informant, who knew Hill personally, was much too frightened to introduce an undercover agent into the operation because he feared for his life. Mann also said that preliminary surveillances of Hill revealed that he was extremely wary, rendering the usual surveillance techniques inadequate. Mann said that Hill would purposely drive more than sixty miles an hour along back streets, go through red lights, and make unauthorized U-turns routinely, just to see if he was possibly being followed. Hill was careful to whom he spoke and never put himself in the position of being overheard in a restaurant or other public place. In fact, in public Hill often used the old prison trick to guard against lip readers: he covered his mouth when he spoke. Mann was granted a thirty-day wiretap order authorizing him to monitor Hill's telephone at 19 St. Marks Avenue, Rockville Centre, Long Island, and also a phone in a nearby basement apartment, where, according to the informant, most of the drugs were delivered, cut, and packaged. The basement apartment, at 250 Lakeview Avenue, also Rockville Centre, was occupied by Robin Cooperman.
Tapes were made daily. Each reel ran twenty-four hundred feet. By the time Mann had finished his investigation of Henry and the drug operation, he had acquired thirty-five reels of tape. Each had been signed by the detectives who monitored the calls and sealed by the court. Mann had also set up his men across the street from Henry's house for surveillance pictures. Mann used a small garage that belonged to a retired civil servant.
It was not long before Mann and the rest of the men in the unit realized that they had inadvertently come across a thirty-seven-year-old ex-con whose life ran like a thread through much of the city's organized-crime fabric. Henry Hill was providing Danny Mann and the squad with a fascinating once-in-a-lifetime peek into the day-to-day workings of a wiseguy. It wasn't that Henry was a boss. And it had nothing to do with his lofty rank within a crime family or the easy viciousness with which hoods from Henry's world are identified. Henry, in fact, was neither of high rank nor particularly vicious; he wasn't even tough as far as the cops could determine. What distinguished Henry from most of the other wiseguys who were under surveillance was the fact that he seemed to have total access to all levels of the mob world.
Most of the hoods the police had been able to watch over the years were relegated to one or perhaps two very narrowly delineated areas of mob business. Narcotics cops followed junk dealers, their suppliers, their couriers, and even a few distributors. Gambling-suppression squads kept tabs on bookmakers and policy bankers, who never seemed to talk to anyone who wasn't either another bookmaker or a customer. There were loan sharks, hijackers,
