GoodFellas (30 page)

When the feds first arrived at his jail cell, Henry thought he could use them to help con his way out. Residues of coke and optimism were still in his system. One day he would tell his parole officer he might be willing to talk if he could get back on the street, and the next day he would deny having made the suggestion. He stirred the interest of the FBI by giving them tips on hijackings, murders, and Lufthansa, but he never delivered a punchline.

Henry continued to scramble, hustle, and con for days after his arrest, but these were the last spastic jerks of a hood whose time had expired, the final reflex actions of a wiseguy who did not yet know that he was already dead.

• • •

KAREN: On the night he got arrested, two detectives rang the bell. They had a search warrant. I didn't know that they had just arrested Henry and everybody. I didn't know what was going on. So even though I was surprised by the cops, I felt safe. I felt that I had nothing to hide.

I asked them if they wanted coffee. I had just put on a new pot. Some of the wives, like Mickey Burke, used to curse at the cops and make nasty remarks and spit on the floor. That never made any sense to me. It was better to be polite and call the lawyer.

First the detectives wanted to know where everyone in the house was, and they wanted us all to go into one room while they searched. They never said what they were looking for. The kids, who had been through it all before, just kept watching television.

The detectives were very polite. They asked us to be calm and said they would try to get finished as quickly as possible. They went through everything. Closets. Bureau drawers. Kitchen cabinets. Suitcases. Even the pockets of our clothes hanging in the closets.

I figured out what was going on after some other detectives came over from searching Robin's house. Our lawyer, Richie Oddo, called and said Henry had been arrested for drugs and would be arraigned in the morning.

I didn't think it was such a big deal at first. They found some traces of drugs at Robin's house but nothing on Henry or at our place. I thought maybe we could beat the case. Especially after Henry gave me a signal in court the next morning. He just arched his hand a little bit, and I knew immediately where the drugs were hidden. That's what comes from seventeen years of being married, I knew that that motion meant that the drugs were on a small ledge behind some recessed lights we had installed inside a wall bench at the entrance to the bedroom. The cops had searched there, but you would have to know that you had to reach down and then up to find the ledge. Right after court I ran home, got the stuff – it must have been about a pound of heroin – and flushed it down the toilet. Now they had no proof.

They were holding Henry in $150,000 bail, and he said that he
wanted to stay inside for a couple of weeks or so to clean out his system. He had been taking so many pills and snorting so much stuff that he couldn't think straight. I thought that sounded like a good idea. And I also thought that with no evidence, we had a good chance of beating the case.

That's why I couldn't figure out why Henry was so nervous when I went to visit him and why Jimmy and Mickey were acting so strange. Everyone was edgy. Then I went to see Richie Oddo, the lawyer. Lenny Vario was there. The Oddos and the Varios are related. Richie said he had not been able to see Henry for a couple of days. He was Henry's lawyer. What was wrong? Was Henry hiding from his own lawyer? Richie didn't understand. I could see it was making him suspicious.

Lenny Vario said he had known Henry all his life. He said that Henry was a standup guy. It was as though he was reassuring the lawyer, but he was really sending a message through me. Lenny said that Henry would never talk against certain people, that he'd commit suicide first.

Mickey Burke called me every day. She kept asking when Henry was coming home. I know she was calling for Jimmy. I told her what Henry had told me to say – that he was drying out and trying to get the bail reduced.

One day during the first week, Jimmy called and said he had some material for the T-shirt factory we had in the garage. He said I should pick it up at his shop on Liberty Avenue. I said I couldn't, I was in a hurry, I wanted to get to court, Henry was making one of his appearances. He said for me to come by anyway, it wasn't out of my way.

When I got to the shop, Jimmy asked about things. He was smiling and asked if I needed anything. I said I was in a hurry, and he said the material was in one of the stores down the block.

Jimmy walked outside with me and stood on the street as I started walking down the block toward the store. I noticed that all of the stores along the block had their windows painted out. It gave me a funny feeling. I kept walking, and when I looked back I could
see Jimmy standing there pointing for me to go inside one of the stores.

Inside I could see this guy who was always around Jimmy. Once I had seen him on a ladder painting Jimmy's house. He was very creepy. I always suspected that he did Jimmy's dirty work. He was just standing around inside. He wasn't completely facing the door, so I could get a look at him without him seeing me. He looked like he might have been doing some work inside. Who knows? I don't know why, but something struck me as being wrong.

So instead of going inside, I waved back at Jimmy and said that I was late for court and that I'd pick the stuff up later. Jimmy kept pointing me to the store, but I kept going. I jumped in the car and took off. It was not a big thing. I was in a hurry, and I didn't like the look of the store and that guy. I didn't think of it again until much later.

The next day I went to see Paulie. He was very upset with Henry. He was scowling. He was at Geffkens Bar, on Flatlands Avenue. There were the usual bunch of guys lined up to see him. The minute he saw me, he took me to the side. I told him about Henry's arrest. He said he wasn't going to help Henry get out of this. He said he had warned Henry about being in drugs a month earlier at his niece's wedding – he'd told Henry he would not help if Henry got jammed up. That meant Paulie wouldn't use any of his influence with the cops or the courts or the lawyers or the bondsmen to help. On any other case Henry would have been out on bail already just because Paulie nodded to the bondsman. This time, because of drugs, Henry was still inside.

Then Paulie looked at me. He said that he was going to have to turn his back on Henry. He reached in his pocket and gave me three thousand dollars. He just put it in my hand and covered my hand with his for a second. He didn't even count it. When he turned away I could see that he was crying.

MCDONALD: Henry Hill's arrest was the first real break we'd had in the Lufthansa case in over a year. Ever since Lou Werner's conviction the case had stagnated. Most of the witnesses and
participants had either been murdered or disappeared. For instance, on the same night we convicted Lou Werner, Joe Manri and Frenchy McMahon were murdered. A month later Paolo LiCastri's body turned up on top of a smoldering garbage heap in a lot off Flatlands Avenue, Brooklyn. Then Louie Cafora and his new wife, Joanna, disappeared. They were last seen happily driving away from some relative's house in Queens in a new Cadillac Fat Louie had bought his bride.

Henry was one of the crew's only survivors, and he was finally caught in a position where he might be persuaded to talk. He was facing twenty-five years to life on the Nassau County narcotics conspiracy. His girl friend and even his wife could also be tied into the drug conspiracy, and life could be made very unpleasant for them. He knew this. He also knew that we could send him back to prison to serve out the last four years on the extortion case for violating his parole and that there was a very good chance that he was going to be killed by his best friends.

Henry was too vulnerable. He was facing too much time for a guy like Jimmy to take any chances with him. We suspected that Jimmy was just biding his time for the most opportune moment. We had very good information from informants that Henry was the next on the hit parade. Paul Vario had pretty much turned his back on him, which meant whatever happened happened.

If there was ever a time to flip him against his old crew it was at that moment. From the first day Henry was held in the Nassau jail on the drug charges, we had federal agents talking to him about turning. Jimmy Fox, his parole officer, kept warning him about the danger of going back on the street. Steven Carbone and Tom Sweeney, the FBI men who had stayed with the Lufthansa case, showed him pictures of the bodies.

Also, Henry wasn't totally against working out some kind of a deal. On the first morning after his arrest he had asked his parole officer whether there was some kind of an arrangement that could be made. He said that he knew about Lufthansa and would be willing to tell us something, as long as he didn't have to testify or
surface as an informant. He told his parole officer that he could be our ‘man on the street.'

That was not what we had in mind, so we kept up the pressure and he kept on dangling the bait. It was a game of feeling each other out, except that we knew and he knew that he really had no place to go. The pressure on him was intensified every time the agents showed up at the jail to talk to him. The word inside spreads quickly when someone is repeatedly interviewed by the police or feds. The supposition is that the prisoner must be talking. Otherwise why would the agents come back day after day?

As far as we were concerned, it was just a matter of time. We considered him important enough so that we went back to talk with him even though he screamed in front of the other prisoners and guards that he wouldn't talk to us and that we were trying to get him killed. The minute the door closed he changed his attitude completely. He wasn't telling us anything yet, but he wasn't screaming either, and he'd give us a tidbit here and there about nonrelated matters.

Also, when we issued a writ and had him brought from the Nassau jail to the Strike Force offices, he was the one who suggested that we do the same thing with Bobby Germaine, so that it wouldn't look like he was the only defendant being questioned. I thought we were doing very well considering the kind of wiseguy we had snared, and that's why I went through the roof when I found out that after three weeks in jail, where we'd had complete access to him, he had somehow managed to bail himself out and had disappeared.

HENRY: My scheme was to play them along until I got my own head clear, got my bail reduced, and got back on the street. I knew I was vulnerable. I knew that you were vulnerable when you were worth more dead than alive. It was that simple. But I still couldn't really believe it, and I didn't really know what I was going to do. Sometimes I thought I'd just get some money and go on the lam for a while. Then I thought I might get my head clear and straighten it all out with Paulie. I kept thinking that if I watched my step, if I
kept the thought of my getting whacked in the middle of my mind, I might have a chance of surviving.

In my case I knew that getting caught in the drug thing really put me in the box. Paulie had put the taboo on drugs. It was outlawed. None of us were supposed to be in drugs. It wasn't that Paulie wanted to take some moral position. That wasn't it. What Paulie didn't want to have happen is what happened to one of his best friends, Carmine Tramunti, who went away for fifteen years just because he nodded hello to Fat Gigi Inglese in a restaurant. The jury decided to believe the prosecutor that Tramunti was nodding his agreement to a drug deal. That was it. Bang. Fifteen years at the age of fifty-seven. The guy never got out. Just at a time in his life when he was going to enjoy, when it was supposed to begin to pay off, he gets sent away forever and then dies in the can. Paulie was not going to let that happen to him. He'd kill you first.

So I knew that arrest on the drug charge made me vulnerable. Maybe too vulnerable to live. There wouldn't have been any hard feelings. I was just facing too much time. The crew also knew I was snorting a lot of coke and eating ludes. Jimmy once said my brain had turned to candy. I wasn't the only guy in the crew taking drugs. Sepe and Stabile had bigger noses then mine. But I was the one who was caught and I was the one who they felt might make a deal.

The fact that I had never made a deal before, the fact that I had always been standup, the fact that I had done two years in Nassau and four years in Lewisburg standing on my head and never gave up a mouse counted for nothing. What you did yesterday doesn't count. It's what you're doing today and could do tomorrow that counts. From where my friends stood, from where Jimmy was standing, I was a liability. I was no longer safe. I didn't need pictures.

In fact, I knew it was going to be Jimmy even before the feds played me the tape of Sepe and Stabile talking about getting rid of me. I could hear them. Sepe sounded anxious to get it over with. He said that I was no good, that I was a junkie. But Jimmy was calm. He told them not to worry about it. And that was all I heard.

Sitting in my cell, I knew I was up for grabs. In the old days Jimmy would have torn Sepe's heart out for even suggesting that I get whacked. That was the main reason why I stayed inside. I had to sort it all out. And every day I was inside, Jimmy or Mickey called my wife and asked when I was getting out, and every day that she could, Karen came to the jail and told me everything they said.

If you're a part of a crew, nobody ever tells you that they're going to kill you. It doesn't happen that way. There aren't any great arguments or finger-biting curses like in Mafia movies. Your murderers come with smiles. They come as friends, people who have cared deeply about you all your life, and they always come at a time when you are at your weakest and most in need of their help and support.

But still I wasn't sure. I grew up with Jimmy. He brought me along. Paulie and Tuddy put me in his hands. He was supposed to watch out for me, and he did. He was the best teacher a guy could want. It was Jimmy who got me into cigarette bootlegging and hijackings. We buried bodies. We did Air France and Lufthansa. We got sentenced to ten years for putting the arm on the guy in Florida. He was at the hospital when Karen had the kids, and we went to birthday parties and holidays at each other's houses. We did it all, and now maybe he's going to kill me. Two weeks before my arrest I got so paranoid and stoned that Karen got me to go see a shrink. It was nuts. I couldn't tell him anything, but she insisted. I talked to him in general terms. I told him that I was trying to get away from drug people. I said I was afraid I was going to be killed. He told me to get a phone machine.