It was the first time I had ever had a conversation where the women talked about jail. They made jail very real. They knew the good prisons and the bad ones. They never talked about what their husbands had done to get sent to jail. That just wasn't ever a part of the conversation. What they discussed was how the prosecutors and the cops lied. How people picked on their husbands. How their husbands had done something everybody was doing but had just had the bad luck to get caught. Then in the same breath they would discuss the bus rides up to see their husbands and what they wore on the long trips and how the kids acted up and how hard it was to make ends meet when their husbands were away.

    And as they talked I began to look at them, and I saw that they looked bad. Some of them were even disheveled. I saw that they had bad skin. It was obvious that some of them didn't take care of themselves. I mean, they didn't look very good. A few of them had bad teeth. They had missing teeth. You would never see mouths like that where I grew up. Also, they weren't very well dressed. The stuff they wore was unfashionable and cheap. A lot of polyester and double-knit pants suits. And later, when I got to meet their kids, I was amazed at how much trouble the kids gave them. Their kids were always in trouble. They were always in fights. They wouldn't go to school. They'd disappear from home. The women would beat their kids blue with broom handles and leather belts, but the kids didn't pay any attention. The women all seemed to be on the edge of just making it. They were all very nervous and tense. Their younger kids looked dirty all the time. It was that thing some kids have of looking dirty even after their baths. That was the look.

    If you listened, you never heard such woe. One of these hostess parties could have kept a soap opera going for years. The first night I was with them, most of the conversation was about their friend Carmen. Carmen wasn't there. Carmen was forty and her husband was away doing time. He was her third husband. She had three sons, one by each of her husbands, and the kids were a nightmare. To make ends meet Carmen was selling stolen credit cards and swag. Just a week before the party Carmen's oldest, a teenager, was in a card game with another kid and an argument began over a ten-dollar bet. Her son got mad, pulled a gun out of his pocket, and it went off. The other kid died, and Carmen's son was arrested. When Carmen's mother, the kid's grandmother, heard that her grandson had been arrested for murder, she dropped dead on the spot, leaving Carmen with a husband and son in jail and a mother in the funeral parlor.

    By the time Henry picked me up I was dizzy. When we got home I told him I was upset. He was calm. He said very few people went to jail. He said there was nothing to worry about. He would talk about the money and how hundreds of his friends were doing things that might be against the law, but that they were all making money, and none of them were getting caught. Swag. Gambling. Cigarettes. Nobody went to jail for things like that. Also, he knew the right lawyers. The courts. The judges. The bail bondsmen. I wanted to believe him. He made it sound so easy, and I loved the idea of all that money.

    Then one day you read a newspaper story about people you know, and you just can't put the names you're reading together with the people you know. Those I knew were not individuals you thought the papers would write about. I saw one story years ago in the Daily News about Frankie Manzo, Paulie's friend. The newspaper misspelled his name as Francesco Manza and said he was an organized-crime soldier. The Frankie Manzo I knew dressed and acted like a working man. He had the Villa Capra restaurant in Cedarhurst, and I had seen him carrying packages of groceries into the kitchen, moving cars from out front, wiping the crumbs off tables, and working day and night in his own kitchen.

    To me none of these men looked like big shots. None of them had everything together. There was always something missing. I mean, if they had nice new cars and good clothes, then their houses were in poor areas or their wives looked hard. Tommy DeSimone always drove around in a brand- new car and wore expensive clothes, and he and Angela lived in a two-room tenement slum. I remember thinking, If these are the gangsters they write about in the newspapers, there must be something wrong. I knew Henry and his friends weren't angels, but if this was the Cosa Nostra, it sure didn't feel like it.

    It was after Henry and I got married the second time that I really became a part of his world. We had an old-fashioned Italian wedding, except we had a Jewish ceremony and a rabbi. Four of the Vario brothers were there. So were their wives and their sons. It was the first time I was introduced to all of them at once. It was crazy. The five Vario brothers had at least two sons each, and for some unbelievable reason they'd each named two of their sons either Peter or Paul. There had to be a dozen Peters and Pauls at the wedding. Also, three of the Vario brothers were married to girls named Marie, and they all had daughters named Marie. By the time Henry finished introducing me to everyone I thought I was drunk.

    Only Paul Vario wasn't at the wedding. I had seen that Paulie was like a father to Henry, much more than Henry's real father, who he rarely saw and almost never spoke to. Henry was with Paulie almost every day. When I asked where Paulie was, Henry just said he couldn't make it. Later I found out that he was serving sixty days for contempt after he'd refused to testify before a Nassau County grand jury looking into a Long Island bookmaking ring. I found out after a while that Paul and his sons Peter and Paul junior were always doing thirty or sixty days for contempt. It went with the territory. It didn't seem to bother them. They just accepted going to jail for a little while. They did their time at the Nassau County jail, where they were very well known and where they had so many people paid off that they eventually wound up getting indicted for bribing the whole jail. I remember that the warden and over a dozen guards were indicted. It was a real mess. It was all over the papers. But by then I knew what was going on. I knew it was not normal, not the way I had been raised, but it didn't seem wrong either. I was in the environment and I just went along.

    I'd have to say that Henry's friends were all very hard workers and hustlers. Paulie had the flower store on Fulton Avenue and he had the auto junkyard on Flatlands Avenue. Tuddy Vario had the cabstand. Lenny had the restaurant. Everyone worked somewhere. Nobody loafed. If anything, everyone was always hustling all the time. I never saw people carrying guns. Later I found out that most of the time their wives were carrying them.

    I knew Jimmy Burke was smuggling cigarettes, but even that didn't seem like a crime. It was more as if Jimmy was enterprising. He was hustling to make a few extra bucks carting cigarettes. Jimmy's wife Mickey, Phyllis Vario, everyone made it all look so natural. Anyone who wanted to make a few extra bucks had to go out and get it. You couldn't wait for a handout. That was the general attitude. The other women accepted hustling cigarettes, selling swag, and even hijacking as normal for any ambitious guy who wanted to make decent money. It was almost as though I should be proud that I had the kind of husband who was willing to go out and risk his neck to get us the little extras.

    HENRY: Then I got arrested. It was a crazy bust. It shouldn't have happened, but none of them should ever happen. They are always more because of your own stupidity than any cop's smarts. There were about twenty of us in Jimmy Burke's basement shooting craps. We were waiting for Tommy DeSimone to arrive from Washington, D.C., with a truck-load of cigarettes. It was Thursday, the day we usually got our deliveries and loaded up our own cars and vans. Then on Fridays, between eleven-thirty and two o'clock in the afternoon, we made all our sales. During the morning I'd go to the construction jobs, and by noon or one o'clock in the afternoon I'd go to the sanitation depots and factories, and by two o'clock I'd have made my grand or fifteen hundred dollars for the day.