GoodFellas (29 page)

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, labor racketeers, and extortionists of all kinds almost constantly under police surveillance, but never before had Danny Mann and the Nassau narcotics squad come up with a drug dealer who appeared to be involved with so much else. In addition, Henry did not appear to be limited by any rank or status within the mob. Most wiseguys the narks had followed always remained within their own ranks at all times. If they were street-level junk dealers or bookies or loan sharks, they remained such and never, under any circumstances, approached a mobster of higher rank. The protocol was strictly enforced; and it was considered necessary in order to
protect the mob's executive hierarchy from being compromised by their own men. The insulation between the men who actually committed the crimes and the men who directed them and profited most from the crooked schemes was scrupulously maintained.

Henry Hill was different. Somehow he was able to move effortlessly through all levels of the mob's hierarchy. At first it thoroughly baffled Mann and his squad. Henry was not listed as an organized-crime member or associate on any of the department's intelligence books. Nor did his name pop up on any of the wiretap indexes maintained by the department. And yet he was obviously involved with large-scale bookmakers, jewelry fences, loan sharks, and union racketeers and, in fact, seemed to be arranging for top hoods to buy up nonunion garment factories in Brooklyn and Queens at the same time Danny Mann was looking into his junk deals.

When Dennis Dillon, the Nassau district attorney, realized whom his narcotics unit was listening in on, he was delighted. Detectives began collecting Hill's garbage during the early morning hours and came up with discarded bits of notepaper and the backs of envelopes covered with the incriminating arrival and departure times of airline flights they soon connected to the comings and goings of known couriers. There were also sheets of paper that contained doodles and mathematical calculations pertaining to kilos and half kilos of flea powder and dog food. Hill's Pittsburgh distributor, Paul Mazzei, turned out to run a dog-grooming salon as a front. Using everything from bakery trucks to helicopters, narcotics detectives tailed Henry Hill for over two months, following him from one hangout to another, noting his conversations and meetings and listing his apparent dealings and friendships with some of the best-known racketeers in the city. They followed his seemingly endless peregrinations through so many layers of the underworld that their original pocket-size notebooks soon gave way to wall-sized charts.

But most of the case against Henry Hill was based on the wiretap reports. Mann had accumulated two months' worth of authorized
wiretaps, and all of it implicated Henry and his gang far beyond the pleadings and doubt-casting of even the most eloquent lawyer.

‘I've sat on hundreds upon hundreds of wires,' Mann said. ‘At the time of the Hill investigation I'd been a narcotics detective for five or six years, and I knew that eventually everybody gives themselves up over their phones. The real wiseguys, the Paul Varios and the Carlo Gambinos, don't even have phones. Vario wouldn't have one in his house. He used to get all his calls through an intermediary who lived nearby and would have to run through the rain to Paulie's house and give him the message.

‘The danger with the phone, even for wiseguys, is that it's so easy. You talk on it all day long and all night long saying nothing. Your wife orders groceries. You find out the correct time. You call Grandma about dinner Sunday. You begin to forget that it's live. That it can hang you.

‘One of the most common errors made by those being tapped, especially in drug cases where the subjects might even suspect they are being overheard, is to employ a “code” language. In court we get experienced narcotics agents and other experts who can always interpret the code in such a way that even the most sympathetic juries will vote to convict. In the Hill case, for instance, they used gems, such as opals, as a code for drugs. They talked about the amount of money opals should be bought and sold for. In these cases a prosecutor would simply call in a professional jeweler to testify that the amounts of money being attributed to the gems had no basis in reality.'

Detective Mann and the Nassau narcotics squad began recording Henry Hill's Rockville Centre telephone in March of 1980, and within days had prepared the following report for the court in order to extend the wiretap order:

Thus far monitoring has generally revealed that Henry Hill is in the upper echelon – perhaps the head – of a large-scale, organized, interstate drug trafficking and distribution operation which he runs from at least two known locations in Nassau County: (1) his residence at 19 St. Marks Avenue, Rockville Centre, and (2) the
residence of Robin Cooperman, 250 Lakeview Avenue, Rockville Centre (referred to during intercepted telephone conversations as ‘the bat cave').

Still unknown are the full scope of Hill's illegal operation, the identity of the conspirators, and the precise type of controlled substances involved. Monitoring has revealed that at the local level the ring appears to center around Henry Hill, Robin Cooperman, and Judy Wicks; however, many others still as yet unidentified are involved and the nature and scope of their involvement remains unknown at the present time.

Over the course of monitoring, Henry Hill, or others associated with Henry Hill, have conversed, in coded terms or in a manner clearly indicative of drug transactions, with Paul Mazzei, Judy Wicks, Robin Cooperman, Mel Telsey, Steven Fish, Tony Asta, Bob Albert, Bob Breener, Marvin Koch, and individuals referred to as ‘Bob,' ‘Linda,' ‘Ann,' ‘Mac,' and ‘Kareem,' whose last names remain unknown, as well as others whose identity remains unknown.

Uncertainty surrounds the identity of the controlled substances in which Henry Hill and his co-conspirators are trafficking because Hill's conversations with his contacts are uniformly guarded, vague and replete with obviously coded language. Terms such as ‘opals,' ‘stones,' ‘buds,' ‘karats,' ‘OZ,' ‘whole,' ‘quarter,' ‘half,' and ‘one-for-two,' have been employed in an obvious reference to things other than what they commonly connote. However, details surrounding the code terms, such as prices, and the inappropriate use of the terms themselves, make clear that drug transactions are being discussed. Some of the individuals listed in the heading of this affidavit have conferred with Henry Hill or his associates in the above-mentioned coded terms; others, particularly the local callers, have used abbreviated language and have exhibited a general hesitancy to discuss the subject matter of the telephone call thereby indicating their participation to one degree or another in the drug-related conspiracy.

In monitoring Hill's phone on March 29, Mann picked up a conversation between Hill and Paul Mazzei, who later turned
out to be his Pittsburgh distributor, of such bizarre syntax that any jury would convict.

MAZZEI: You know the golf club and the dogs you gave me in return?

HILL: Yeah.

MAZZEI: Can you still do that?

HILL: Same kind of golf clubs?

MAZZEI: No. No golf clubs. Can you still give me the dogs if I can pay for the golf clubs?

HILL: Yeah. Sure.

[portion of conversation omitted]

MAZZEI: You front me the shampoo and I'll front you the dog pills… What time tomorrow?

HILL: Anytime after twelve.

MAZZEI: You won't hold my lady friend up?

HILL: No.

MAZZEI: Somebody will just exchange dogs.

By the time Danny Mann and the Nassau prosecutors were ready to make their arrests they had amassed so much information that in addition to arresting Henry, they also brought in thirteen other members of the ring, including Robert Ginova, a porno film producer who drove a chocolate-colored Rolls; Paul Mazzei, who was picked up in Pittsburgh on a warrant and held for Nassau County; Frank Basile, the twenty-year-old son of Philly Basile, the disco king whom Vario had forced to give Henry his no-show job for parole; and Bobby Germaine, not only Henry's partner in the drug ring but a fugitive in connection with a botched multimillion-dollar wholesale jewelry robbery on East Fifty-seventh Street.

When Mann went to arrest Germaine, the unit had shotguns, bullet-proof vests, and search warrants for the Commack, Long Island, house that Germaine had been renting under an assumed name. When the cops walked in, Germaine insisted they had the
wrong man. He showed them his identification. He insisted he was a freelance writer. He showed them the book he was writing. In the precinct, of course, his fingerprints proved otherwise. When Bobby's true identification was tossed over to Mann's desk, it was a minute or two before the detective had a chance to read the badly Thermofaxed record sent down from Albany. When he saw that ‘Bobby' from the Hill wiretaps was Robert Germaine Sr., he thought that he had somehow mixed up the papers on his desk. But he hadn't. Robert Germaine Sr. was none other than the father of the nineteen-year-old confidential informant whose information had started the entire investigation in the first place. The youngster had started by giving up Henry Hill but had ended up turning in his own father.

It was then that the three burly detectives came into Mann's office, all of them smiling. They were carrying large cardboard boxes marked ‘Evidence' in big red letters. The boxes were filled with Robin's kitchen. There were spoons, sieves, mixing bowls, scales, and strainers. The cops gathered around and began wiping their fingers around the insides of the mixing bowls like children swabbing up batter and then rolled their eyes into their heads. It was their way of telling Mann that Robin's kitchen utensils were covered with traces of drugs. Danny Mann had suspected the kitchen would be covered with a thin layer of dope. He had listened to too many hours of Henry and Robin's conversations about cleaning up the residue of evidence after mixing and cutting a batch of stuff. Robin had alway hated to do dishes. No matter how many times Henry had warned her to wash the bowls and strainers after mixing, she just wouldn't do it. Henry had even bought her a dishwasher. But it had done no good. Danny Mann found it amusing that Henry was facing a sentence of twenty-five years to life because his girl friend hated to wash dishes.

For assistant U.S. Attorney Mcdonald and the Strike Force prosecutors Henry Hill was a bonanza. He was not a mob boss or even a noncommissioned officer in the mob, but he was an earner, the kind of sidewalk mechanic who knew something about everything. He could have written the handbook on street-level mob operations. Ever since the first day he walked into the Euclid Avenue Taxicab Company, back in 1954, Henry had been fascinated by the world he had longed to join, and there was little he hadn't learned and even less that he had forgotten.

Within twenty-four hours McDonald began making arrangements with the Nassau prosecutors to turn their routine drug pinch over to the feds in order to snare bigger fish. Henry was about to become a prize catch, a player in a larger game, even though at first he did not know it.