Henry Hill went into the paratroopers just days after his seventeenth birthday on June 11, 1960, and it was a good time to be off the street. There was a lot of heat. The investigation started by the Apalachin meeting in November of 1957 had created a mess. After twenty-five years of saying there was no such thing as the Mafia, J. Edgar Hoover was now announcing that organized crime cost the public over $22 billion a year. The United States Senate had launched its own investigation into organized crime and its links to unions and business and had published the names of almost five thousand hoods nationwide, including members and hierarchy of the five New York City crime families. Henry saw a newspaper with a partial list of members of the Lucchese crime family, but he couldn't find Paulie's name.
Henry Hill turned out to love the army. He was stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He had never been away from the streets. He hadn't even gone for a drive in the country. He didn't know how to swim. He had never camped out, and he had never lit a fire that wasn't a felony. Other youngsters in boot camp complained and groused; for Henry the army was like summer camp. There was almost nothing about it he didn't love. He loved the rigors of boot training. He loved the food. He even loved jumping out of airplanes.
'I didn't plan it, but I earned in the army. I got myself in charge of the kitchen detail, and I made a fortune selling excess food. The army overbought. It was a disgrace. They would always order two hundred and fifty meals for two hundred men. On weekends sixty guys would show up, and still they bought for two hundred and fifty. Somebody had to be taking care of somebody. Before I got there the kitchen guys were just throwing the extra food out. I couldn't believe it. At the beginning I used to clip a pan of steaks, maybe thirty pounds, and take them to restaurants and hotels in Bennettsville and McColl, South Carolina. They loved it. Soon I was selling them everything. Eggs. Butter. Mayo. Catsup. Even the salt and pepper. On top of selling them the food, I used to drink free in those joints all night long.
'I had it all to myself. I couldn't believe how lazy everybody around me was. Nobody did anything. I began loan-sharking. The guys used to get paid twice a month-the first and the fifteenth. They were always broke just before payday. I could get ten bucks for every five I lent if payday came after a weekend. Otherwise I got back nine for five. I started up a card game and some dice games and then I lent the losers money. The best part was on payday, when the guys would line up to get their money and I'd wait at the end of the line and get paid. It was beautiful. I didn't have to chase after anybody.
'I kept in touch with Paulie and Tuddy. On a couple of occasions they even sent me money when I needed it. Once I got into a bar fight with some farmer and I got locked up. Paulie had to bail me out. I couldn't ask my parents-they'd never understand. Paulie understood everything. After about six months, when I got the sergeant to phony up a double work shift for me in the kitchen, I drove eight and a half hours back to New York. It was great. The minute I drove up to the pizzeria I remembered how much I missed it. Everybody was hanging around. They treated me like a returning hero. They made fun of my uniform, my haircut. Tuddy said I was in a fairy army-we didn't even have real bullets. I brought up lots of booze I got from the officers' club and some bootleg mountain whiskey. It was amazing, I told them. I said I was going to come home more often with a load of nontaxed cigarettes, and also fireworks, which you could buy by the truckload on the streets. Paulie was smiling. It was like he was proud. Before I went back he said he was going to get me a present. He made a big thing out of the presentation. He didn't usually do such things, so everybody showed up. He had a box all wrapped up and made me open it in front of all the guys. They were real quiet. I took off the paper, and inside was one of those wide-angle, rearview mirrors that truck drivers use to be able to see everybody coming up behind them. The mirror was about three feet long.
''Put it in the car,' Paulie said. 'It'll help you make tails.''
Four
It was 1963 when Henry got back to the street. His trips to New York had become more frequent, especially after a new company commander changed the kitchen detail. Henry's mess sergeant had been transferred, skipping out with nearly fifteen hundred dollars of Henry's money. Then, with less than six months to go before his discharge, Henry got into a barroom brawl with three marines. He was drunk. He insisted upon calling them 'jar heads' and 'jar ears.' There were broken bottles and shattered mirrors all over the floor. Blood ran down the front of every khaki shirt and white apron in the place. When the McColl sheriff finally arrived, there was so much chaos that no one saw Henry stagger out of the bar and drive off in the sheriff's car until it was too late. The company commander sent the Fort Bragg chaplain, who was accompanied by three Brooklyn-based MPs, all the way to Pitkin Avenue, Brooklyn, to bring Henry back. Thus Henry Hill spent the last two months of his military career in the Fort Bragg stockade. He lost his pay and benefits for the period. He was also stripped of his rank as a private first class. In Henry's world, of course, getting out of a military stockade was almost as prestigious as getting out of a federal prison.
'When I got out of the army, Paulie's son Lenny was about sixteen, but he looked five years older. He was a big kid, like his father. He had the neck and shoulders of a lineman. He was also Paulie's favorite. Paulie liked him much more than his two older sons, Paul junior and Peter. Lenny Vario was smart. Paulie was doing six months for contempt at the time I got out of the army and Lenny just gravitated toward me. He was working in the pizza joint, but he was also always fighting with his uncles and his brothers. With Paulie away, his uncles and his brothers wanted to play the boss, but Lenny, even as a kid, used to tell them to go fuck themselves. And every time Paulie heard that Lenny had told everybody off, he loved the kid even more. Paulie would do anything for that kid. Paulie felt that Lenny would go far. Lenny had the nerve to take over a crew. He could run a whole family. Paulie saw great things in Lenny's future.
'So right after the army, with his father away, Lenny became my partner. Wherever I went, he went. I was about four years older than he was, but we were inseparable. Twenty-four hours a day. His brothers, who were also my close friends, were happy I was taking their kid brother off their hands. Still, I needed a job. I didn't want to go back to running errands and doing stuff around the cabstand for Tuddy and the crew. And Lenny became my ticket. Nobody said it that way, but Paulie knew I could watch out for Lenny, and so whatever Lenny got, I got. The next thing I knew, Paulie got Lenny a job as a union bricklayer paying $135 a week. Lenny's sixteen years old at the most, and Paulie got him a man's job. But Lenny says he won't go without me. So now I got a job as a union bricklayer paying $135 a week. I'm just about twenty. Paulie, remember, is in jail during all this, but he can still get us the kinds of jobs that grown-ups from the neighborhood couldn't get.
'Later I found out that Paulie made Bobby Scola, the president of the bricklayers' union, put the muscle on some builders to put us on their payrolls. Bobby then made us union apprentices and gave us cards in the union. I had drifted away from my father during the army years, but he was very happy about my bricklayer's job. He loved union construction work. Everyone he knew was in construction. Lots of the people from the neighborhood worked in construction. It was what people did. But I wasn't expecting to lay brick for the rest of my life.
'Looking back, I can see what a pair of miserable little kids Lenny and I were, but at the time what we were doing seemed so natural. We thumbed our noses at the job and at Bobby Scola. Fuck him. We were with Paulie. We didn't do any work. We didn't even show up regular enough to pick up our own paychecks. We had guys we knew who were really working on the job bring our money to the cabstand or to Frankie the Wop's Villa Capra restaurant, in Cedarhurst, where we hung out. We'd cash the checks, and by Monday we'd blown the money partying or buying clothes or gambling. We didn't even pay our union dues. Why should we? Finally Bobby Scola begged Paulie to get us off his back. He said we were creating a problem. He said there was heat on the job and the builders were getting worried.
'Paulie relented. At first I thought he felt sorry for Bobby Scola and that was why he took us off his hands, but I soon realized differently. Overnight, instead of working as bricklayers, Paulie had us working at the Azores, a very fancy white stucco restaurant next door to the Lido Beach Hotel, in the Rockaways, about an hour from midtown. In those days it was a prime summer eating place for rich businessmen and union guys, mostly from the garment center and construction industry. One phone call from Paulie and Lenny has a job as a service bartender-he isn't even old enough to be in the bar, forget work there-and they got me a tuxedo and made me the maitre d' hotel, a twenty-year-old kid who didn't know the difference between anything.
