GoodFellas (20 page)

‘After two months of orientation I joined Paulie, Johnny Dio, and Joe Pine, who was a boss from Connecticut, in their honor dorm. A fifty-dollar connection got me in there as soon as Angelo Melé was released. Fifty dollars could get you any assignment in the joint. The dorm was a separate three-story building outside the wall, which looked more like a Holiday Inn than a prison. There were four guys to a room, and we had comfortable beds and private baths. There were two dozen rooms on each floor, and each one of them had mob guys living in them. It was like a wiseguy convention – the whole Gotti crew, Jimmy Doyle and his guys, “Ernie Boy” Abbamonte and “Joe Crow” Delvecchio, Vinnie Aloi, Frank Cotroni.

‘It was wild. There was wine and booze, and it was kept in bath-oil or after-shave jars. The hacks in the honor dorm were almost all on the take, and even though it was against the rules, we used to cook in our rooms. Looking back, I don't think Paulie went to the general mess five times in the two and a half years he was there. We had a stove and pots and pans and silverware stacked in the bathroom. We had glasses and an ice-water cooler where we kept the fresh meats and cheeses. When there was an inspection, we stored the stuff in the false ceiling, and once in a while, if it was confiscated, we'd just go to the kitchen and get new stuff.

‘We had the best food smuggled into our dorm from the kitchen. Steaks, veal cutlets, shrimp, red snapper. Whatever the hacks could buy, we ate. It cost me two, three hundred a week. Guys like Paulie spent five hundred to a thousand bucks a week. Scotch cost thirty dollars a pint. The hacks used to bring it inside the walls in their lunch pails. We never ran out of booze, because we had six hacks bringing it in six days a week. Depending upon what you wanted and how much you were willing to spend, life could be almost bearable. Paulie put me in charge of the cash. We always had two or three thousand stashed in the room. When the funds were running low I'd tell him, and the next thing I knew some guys would come up for a visit with the green. For the first year or so Karen would come up every weekend with the kids. She used to smuggle in food and wine, just like some of the other guys' wives, and we'd pull the tables in the visiting room together and make a party. You weren't allowed to bring anything into the prison, but once you were in the visiting area you could eat and drink anything, just as long as you drank the booze out of coffee cups.

‘Our days were spent on work details, going to rehabilitation programs and school, assembling for meals, and recreation. Almost everybody had a job, since it got you time off and it counted a lot with the parole board. Even so, there were guys who just wouldn't work. They usually had so much time or were such bad parole risks that they knew they'd max out no matter how hard they worked. Those guys would just sit in their cells and pull their
time. Johnny Dio never did anything. He spent all his time in the priest's office or meeting with his lawyers. Dio was doing so much time for having Victor Riesel blinded that he was never going out on a program or parole. He spent all his time trying to overturn the conviction. He didn't have a prayer. Most of the other wiseguys had jobs. Even Paulie had a job. He used to change the music tapes on the public-address system that was piped into the place. He didn't actually do it himself. He had somebody do it for him, but he got the credit for the job. What Paulie really did all day was make stoves. He was a genius at making stoves. Since you weren't supposed to cook in the dorms, Paulie had the hot-plate elements smuggled in. He got the steel box from the machine shop, and he wired and insulated the whole thing. If you were okay, Paulie made you a stove. Guys were proud to cook on his stoves.

‘Dinner was the big thing of the day. We'd sit around and drink, play cards, and brag, just like outside. We put on a big pot with water for the macaroni. We always had a pasta course first and then meat or fish. Paulie always did the prep work. He had a system for doing the garlic. He used a razor, and he sliced it so fine that it used to liquefy in the pan with a little oil. Vinnie Aloi was in charge of making the tomato sauce. I felt he put in too many onions, but it was a good sauce anyway. Johnny Dio liked to do the meat. We didn't have a grill, so Johnny did everything in pans. When he panfried steak you'd think the joint was on fire, but still the hacks never bothered us.

‘I enrolled to get a two-year associate degree in restaurant and hotel management from Williamsport Community College. It was a great deal. Since I was a veteran, I got six hundred a month in veteran's benefits for going to school, and I had that money sent home to Karen. Some of the guys thought I was nuts, but they weren't vets and couldn't get the money. Also, Paulie and Johnny Dio used to push me to go to school. They wanted me to become an ophthalmologist. I don't know why, but that's what they wanted me to be.

‘I took sixty credits each semester, and I was hungry to learn.
When I went inside I was only half literate. I had stopped going to school as a kid. In prison I learned how to read. After lock-in at nine o'clock, while everybody else bullshitted all night long, I used to read. I read two or three books a week. I stayed busy. If I wasn't in school, taking bets, or smuggling food, I was building and maintaining tennis courts in the recreational area. We had a beautiful red clay court and one cement court. Tennis got to be my game. I never played a sport before in my life. It was a tremendous outlet. Paulie and his old wiseguys used to play boccie near the wall, but the young guys like Paul Mazzei, Bill Arico, Jimmy Doyle, and some of the shooters from the East Harlem Purple Gang all started showing up in tennis whites. Even Johnny Dio got interested. He learned to play, except he always swung his racquet like an axe.

‘At the beginning Paulie took me around and introduced me to everyone. Within three months I started booking in jail. Hugh Addonizo, the former mayor of Newark, was one of my best customers. He was a sweetheart of a guy but a degenerate gambler. On Saturday he used to bet two packs of cigarettes a game, and he'd bet twenty games. If there were twenty-one games, he'd bet twenty-one. He bet college football on Saturday and the pros on Sunday.

‘After a while I was booking lots of guys and guards from the prison. I had Karen outside running around and straightening up for me. She was making the payouts or collecting. Guys would bet or buy things from me on the inside and have their wives or pals pay up on the outside. It was safer than keeping too much cash in the joint. If the cons didn't take it, the guards would. Since everybody knew who she was and who she was with, she had no problem making the collections. I was making a few dollars. It passed the time. It helped me to keep the guards happy.'

After two and a half years Henry got himself assigned to the prison farm, about a mile and a half outside the prison wall. Getting to the farm had been Henry's dream. A riot in the Lewisburg cellblocks, where there had been nine murders in three
months, had created a very tense situation. Prisoners, including the wiseguys, had refused to leave their cells and go to work details. During the height of the riot the guards went to the honor dorm and marched all of the wiseguys into solitary, where they would be safe.

Karen had begun a letter-writing campaign to the Bureau of Prisons in Washington about getting Henry assigned to the prison farm. She would write to top bureau officials, knowing that they would pass the letters down through the bureaucracy. She knew that if she wrote directly to the Lewisburg officials her letters could be disregarded. But if Lewisburg received letters about Henry Hill from the main office in Washington, D.C., the local prison officials had no way of knowing whether Henry's case might not be of more than casual interest to the brass. Every time Karen got a congressman to write to the Bureau of Prisons, the bureau would forward the letter to Lewisburg, where Henry's case manager was notified about the congressional inquiry. It was never clear whether the congressional letters were routine responses to constituent requests or whether Henry had some special relationship with a politician. It wasn't that the prison officials felt compelled to do anything extralegal as a result of the political interest in Hill, but they were certainly not going to ignore Hill's rights as a prisoner.

Karen also got businessmen, lawyers, clergymen, and members of the family to write follow-up letters to both the congressmen and the prison on Henry's behalf. She made phone calls to follow up on her letters. She was unrelenting. She kept files of her correspondence and tracked friendly bureaucrats through the system, continuing her correspondence with them even after they had been promoted or transferred. In the end the combination of the wholesale transfers that followed the riot, an excellent prison record, and Karen's letter-writing campaign got Henry assigned to the farm.

To be assigned to the farm was like not being in prison at all. The farm was a two-hundred-acre working dairy that supplied milk to the prison. The men assigned there had extraordinary freedom. Henry, for instance, would leave the dorm every morning at five
and either walk to the farm or drive one of the tractors or trucks to it. Then Henry and three other prisoners would hook up about sixty-five cows to a milking and pasteurizing tank and fill five-gallon plastic containers with the milk and ship it into the prison. They also supplied the Allenwood Correctional Facility, a minimum-security federal jail for white-collar criminals, about fifteen miles away. After seven or eight in the morning Henry was free until four in the afternoon, when the milking process began again. He usually got back to the dorm only to sleep.

‘The first day I walked into the dairy and saw the guy who ran the place sitting at a table with a scratch sheet I knew I was home. The guy – his name was Sauer – was a junkie gambler. He was getting divorced from his wife, and he went to the track every night. I gave him money to bet for me. I pretended I thought he was a great handicapper, but he couldn't pick his nose. It was a way of slipping him the money so he got to depend upon my cash when he went to the track. Pretty soon I had him bringing me back Big Macs, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dunkin' Donuts, bottles of booze. It used to cost me between two and three hundred a week, but it was worth it. I had a gofer.

‘I knew I could make lots of money. There was so little supervision on the farm, I could smuggle anything into the place. I had the job of checking the fence, which meant I had the wire clippers and tractor and rode around the perimeter of the farm to make sure the cows hadn't crashed through anywhere. I could be gone three or four hours a day. After my first day I called Karen from the dairy phone. That was Wednesday night. That Saturday night I met Karen in the fields behind the pasture, and we made love for the first time in two and a half years. She brought a blanket and a duffel bag full of booze, Italian salami, sausages, special vinegar peppers – the kinds of things that were hard to find in the middle of Pennsylvania. I got it all behind the wall by putting it in a plastic liner that went inside the five-gallon milk containers we delivered to the prison kitchen, where we had other guys unpacking.

‘Within a week I had people bringing up pills and pot. I had a
Colombian named Mono the Monkey, who lived in Jackson Heights, bringing in pot in compacted cylinders. I buried milk containers out in the woods and began to store the stuff. I had cases of booze out there. I had a pistol. I even had Karen bring up some pot in the duffel bags when my supplies were low. When I hit the farm I was in business.

‘But I was also working eighteen hours a day. If there was calving, I'd get up at four in the morning. I'd be there late at night if the pipes or tubes needed cleaning. I was the hardest-working, best farmhand the dairy ever had. Even the guards gave me that.

‘In the meantime I went into partnership on the marijuana and pills with Paul Mazzei, a Pittsburgh kid who was inside because of selling pot. He had good local sources, and I got the stuff inside the wall. Bill Arico, one of the Long Island crew, was also at Lewisburg, on a bank robbery, and he did most of the selling. In fact, in no time at all Arico was the biggest dope supplier in the joint. Bill sold about a pound of pot a week. He'd sell five hundred to a thousand dollars' worth of grass a week. There were other guys selling pills and acid. Lots of guys did their time on acid. The prison was a marketplace. The gates would open up and it was a businessman's dream.

‘I used to bring the cocaine in myself. I didn't trust anybody with coke. I put the pot into handballs I used to split in half and retape. Before tossing the balls over the wall onto the handball court I'd call the clerk at the hospital, who was a dope fiend, and he would alert my distributors to start congregating around the handball court. The pot was so compacted that I used to get a pound or two of stuff over the wall in just a few handballs.

‘The only problem was with the bosses. Paulie had gone home by now, but Johnny Dio was still there, and he didn't want any of the crew playing around with dope. He didn't give a damn about dope on moral grounds. He just didn't want any heat. But I needed the money. If Johnny gave me money to support myself and my family, fine. But Johnny didn't give up anything. If I was going to pay my way through the can, I had to earn my own money, and selling
dope was the best way around. Still, I had to do it pretty much on the sly. Even so, there was an explosion. One of my distributors used to store his stuff in a safe in the priest's office, and he got caught. Johnny Dio used to use the place as his office – making calls to his lawyers and pals – and now it was off limits. He went nuts. I had to get Paulie to talk to his son on the outside before we could convince him not to have me killed. Paulie wanted to know if I was selling dope. I lied. Of course not, I told him. Paulie believed me. Why shouldn't he believe me? Until I started selling stuff in Lewisburg I didn't even know how to roll a joint.'