"Also, Karen loved the idea of getting a legitimate joint. Our first daughter, Judy, was two and a half and Ruth was about six months old, and Karen had been insisting I keep an eye out for a good business opportunity. She knew about the cigarettes and swag and she knew about Air France. She knew I had some money, and she wanted me to invest it right. The bookmaking business wasn't her idea of a good deal. She knew I had taken the pinch, and she knew I used to gamble away most of the money I made right there in our own office. We all did. We'd get some good action from a trainer or owner on a certain horse and we'd add a few grand of our own money on top of the bet. When you do that as a bookmaker, it's only a matter of time. Show me a bookmaker who bets and I'll show you a guy owned by the sharks.

    "Before I thought about taking over The Suite I talked it over with Paulie. He liked the idea. He liked it so much that he ordered the place off limits for the crew. He said we had to keep the place clean. He didn't want to turn it into a joint like Robert's.

    "I was in the place every day, morning till night. Karen would bring the kids in and help with the books. All the books. The books for the SLA and IRS and the real books. I got a decent cook in the place, and I got Casey Rosado, who headed the bartenders' and waiters' union at the airport, to send in some of his spies to tell me how much I was getting robbed by my bartenders. The Suite was a big enough place so that I had six bartenders, three of them on at all times. When I got the word from Casey, I fired all of them. Casey said the bartenders were stealing a thousand dollars a night out of the joint, in addition to a hundred a night in tips they were taking home, plus the hundred and a half I was paying them.

    "We were doing real well for a couple of months, then, one by one, the guys started to show up. First Jimmy came by to see the place. He brought Mickey and a plant with a good-luck banner on it. Tommy DeSimone came by for a toast. Angelo Sepe came. Marty Krugman, a bookmaker I knew who had a wig shop just two blocks away, began hanging around the bar. Alex and Mikey Corcione started showing up, and so did Anthony and Tommy Stabile, until Tommy went away for a holdup. Little Vic Orena, a lieutenant in the Colombo crime family, became a regular. Even Paulie and the Varies began hanging around."

    Within six months The Suite had turned into a gathering place for Henry and his friends. It became an obligatory last stop. The revelers would arrive after midnight, long after they had stuffed their twenties and fifties into the pockets of every bartender, captain, and hatcheck girl in town. As a result, when they got to Henry's place they ate and drank on the tab. Henry once looked at his books and saw that his best friends were drinking him broke. Of course most of the debts were paid off eventually, but payment too often arrived in the form of swag—hijacked liquor, crates of freshly stolen shrimp, phony credit cards, and stolen traveler's checks.

    While The Suite never replaced Robert's as the hijacking headquarters, it did begin to function as a bazaar for dirtier deals, con games, and hustles. Henry was soon selling dozens of transatlantic airline tickets run off by crooked travel agents. He steered big bettors to a crooked crap game run by the Varios out of a brand-new apartment house just off Queens Boulevard. Henry would sometimes take the suckers into the apartment himself and pretend to lose five or six thousand alongside his dupes. The next day, of course, Henry got his "lost" money back, plus 10 percent of the suckers' losses.

    Also, just having a restaurant and club, with its access to the legitimate credit available in the normal business world, gave Henry endless opportunity for making even more money. He began "banging out" freshly stolen credit cards. The Suite was one of the first places that Stacks Edwards and the other plastic wholesalers went with a newly stolen card. Knowing the card had not yet been reported stolen, Henry would immediately use it to run up hundreds of dollars in phony restaurant bills.

    "Instead of making my life simpler, The Suite made it crazier. I had to be there all the time, but I also had to keep an eye on my investment with Milty. I had a million things in the air. I was making it every way I could. And Karen, who was now at home with the kids most of the time, was getting more and more pissed. I had rented a house in Island Park to be closer to Paulie, and, with the kids, she needed somebody to help her around the house. But I was nervous about having some stranger walking around the house. I always had money stashed around the place. Sometimes I had swag stacked up the wall. I also had guns around the place. You'll find that most wiseguy wives do their own housework, no matter how rich they are, because strangers can't be trusted to keep their mouths shut. But Karen wouldn't let up, and finally I asked around The Suite if anyone knew anybody who could be trusted. I didn't want to go to an agency cold.

    "Eddy Rigaud, the Haitian who used to buy stolen cars from me, said he had the solution to my problems. He said his family had done it for other friends. They had the right connections in the mountains, where they would buy young girls from their families. The girls were then shipped to Canada on a tourist visa, and their new owners would go to Montreal and pick them up. He said it usually cost thousands of dollars, but he could do it for me at cost. All I needed was the six hundred bucks for the girl's father and I had a slave.

    "I remember going home and telling Karen, and she looked at me as though I was nuts, but she didn't say no. I gave Eddy the money, and just before Christmas of 1967 he said that the girl was on her way. He gave me her name and the hotel in Montreal where she would be staying, but when I got to the place and went to her room I almost died. When the slave opened the door, she turned out to be over six feet tall and weighed two-fifty minimum. My knees went. She was bigger than Paul Vario. She was so scary that on the plane back to New York I pretended I didn't know her. When I got home I made her wait outside until I could warn Karen. We couldn't keep her. She made the kids cry. She only stayed a day or two, until I could get Eddy to take her back.

    "In addition to this, Karen started getting obscene phone calls. She had been getting them in early December, and we had had the number changed. It was unlisted. Still the calls kept coming. She'd call me at The Suite and tell me about them and I'd go crazy. I told Jimmy about them, and we tried to figure if it was anyone in the crew. It made me suspicious of everybody, except Karen couldn't get his voice. We taped him a couple of times and I couldn't pick him up either. So I decided that the next tune he called, Karen should play up a little bit and ask him to meet her someplace. If Karen could act interested enough, maybe the guy was nutty enough to show up. I couldn't wait.

    "It was the first week in January when Karen called me at The Suite and says she just talked to the guy and said her husband wasn't home and he should come to the apartment in about an hour. I was home in a second, and we turned out all the lights, except one. I crouched down near the front windows and watched. I had a revolver hi my jacket. I swear I was going to whack the guy right there.

    "I waited for over an hour. It was snowing outside. I asked Karen if she thought he'd show. She said she did. I kept looking. Then I realized that there was one car that was driving slowly past the apartment for the second time. I waited. Sonofabitch if it didn't cruise by again. Real slow. This time I spot the driver. He's a man and he's all alone. He's looking right at our door. He wants to make sure everything's calm. I can't wait to make him calm. He drove around the corner, but I knew he was coming back.