=FIFTEEN=

HENRY HILL WALKED OUT of Allenwood on July 12, 1978. He was wearing a five-year-old Brioni suit, he had seventy-eight dollars in his pocket, and he drove home in a six-year-old car, a four-door Buick sedan. Karen and the children had been living in a cramped, shabby, two-bedroom ground floor apartment in a run-down section of Valley Stream. Henry's lawyers, prison guards, and weekend furloughs had swallowed up almost all of his money, but he told Karen to start looking for a house. He had prospects.

    In anticipation of his release, Henry had discussed dozens of potential money-making schemes during his weekend furloughs home. That, in fact, was one of the main reasons that furloughs were so important: They helped Henry to feel he was on the way back into action even before he was out of prison. After four years behind bars Henry had no intention of going straight. He couldn't even conceive of going straight. He needed to make money. For Henry it was a simple matter of getting out and getting over.

    Within twenty-four hours of his release Henry flew to Pittsburgh (in violation of his parole) to pick up fifteen thousand dollars, his share of the marijuana partnership he had started in Lewisburg with Paul Mazzei. Henry planned to use the money as a down payment for a house. Unfortunately, when he got to Pittsburgh he found that Mazzei had just bought a garage full of high-grade Colombian grass and had only two thousand dollars in cash. Henry couldn't wait for Mazzei to raise the money; he had an appointment in New York the next day with his parole officer, and he had promised his daughter Ruth that he would take her to F A O Schwarz on her eleventh birthday and buy her the biggest doll in the store. Henry borrowed Mazzei's largest suitcase, filled it with bricks of marijuana, and headed back to New York.

    Henry had been in prison and away from the street so long that he was uncertain about the procedures for examining luggage before boarding planes. Rather than chance the airlines he went back on an all-night Greyhound bus. It took over twelve hours and made dozens of stops, and he had to get off the bus at every stop and guard the luggage compartment to make sure nobody walked off with his suitcase. Henry wasn't sure where he could unload the grass. He had never sold or even smoked grass before he went to prison. He could not use sources within his own crew, because Paul Vario had outlawed any kind of drug dealing among his men.

    It took Henry at least a week of sneaking around before he was finally able to unload the suitcase. Nevertheless, when he did, he made twelve thousand dollars in cash. It was fast and sweet. He had a down payment. He took Ruth to F A O Schwarz, and even though she cried and said that they couldn't afford it, he bought her a two-hundred-dollar imported porcelain doll. Then he called Pittsburgh and told Mazzei to send him a hundred pounds more. Within a month Henry began wholesaling uppers, Quaaludes, some cocaine, and a little heroin. Soon he had a drug crew of his own, including Bobby Germaine, a stickup man who was on the lam and pretending to be a freelance writer; Robin Cooperman, a clerical worker at an air freight company, who soon became Henry's girl friend; and Judy Wicks, a courier who never made a delivery unless she was wearing a pink-and-blue hat.

    In addition, Henry started a little sideline operation in automatic rifles and pistols, which he bought from one of his Quaalude users and part-time distributors who worked in a Connecticut armory. "Wise-guys like Jimmy and Tommy and Bobby Germaine loved to have guns around them. Jimmy would buy them in shopping bags. Six, ten, a dozen—you never had too many pistols for those guys." Also, Henry started to fence stolen jewelry through a jeweler in the West Forty-seventh Street diamond exchange. Most of the large pieces came from William Arico, another Lewisburg pal, who had joined a gang that specialized in robbing swank hotels and the homes of wealthy people. "Arico worked with Bobby Germaine, Bobby Nalo, and that crew. They were strictly stickup guys. Bobby used to get his information from a woman furrier and designer who used to get into rich people's homes and then give Bobby the layout." One night Arico's gang tied up cosmetic queen Este Lauder in her Manhattan townhouse and got away with over a million dollars in jewels, which Henry fenced. "They got in by Arico pretending to be a chauffeur. He left my house all dressed up in his uniform and hat. Karen even drew a mustache across his face. It went very smoothly, but then the jeweler ruined almost all of the pieces by scratching the stones taking them out of their settings. You always take hot stones out of the settings as soon as you can so they can't be traced. They're then sold off and reset in new pieces. The gold and platinum settings are sold off separately and melted down."

    Henry started to muscle his way into a liquor-distribution route, through which he planned to supply whiskey to all the bars and restaurants where Jimmy Burke and Paul Vario had clout. And, most important of all, he made sure to collect his $225-a-week paycheck for the no-show job as a disco manager with Phil Basile that Paul Vario had arranged for him. Henry needed the weekly pay stub so he could show his parole officer that he was gainfully employed.

    It was on one of his increasingly frequent trips to Pittsburgh that Henry met Tony Perla, a local bookmaker and close friend of Paul Mazzei's. Over drinks at Mazzei's apartment discussing the drug business, Perla told Henry that he had a Boston College basketball player willing to shave points for the upcoming 1978-79 season.

    "Tony Perla had been cultivating this kid, Rick Kuhn, for over a year. Kuhn was a Boston College rebounder, who had grown up with Perla and Perla's brother, Rocco. He was a big kid who wanted to make money. Perla had already given the kid a color TV, money for repairs on his car, and even some grass and cocaine. When I said that Kuhn alone couldn't guarantee the points, Perla said Kuhn would bring in his best friend, Jim Sweeney, the team captain. Perla said that with Kuhn and Sweeney and a third player, if we needed one, we could probably control the game points for twenty-five hundred dollars per game.

    "The players loved it, because they were not dumping games. They could keep their honor. All they had to do was make sure that they didn't win by more than the point spread. For instance, if the bookies or the Vegas odds-makers said the line was Boston by ten, our players had to muff enough shots to make sure that they won by less than the bookies' ten points. That way they'd win their games and we'd win the bets.

    "Perla needed me in the scheme because of my connections with Paulie. Perla wasn't able to place the large numbers of big-money bets you'd have to put down with bookmakers across the country to maximize your profits on every game. Also, Perla wanted to be sure of protection in case the bookies got suspicious and refused to pay. In other words, if one of the bookmakers came up to Perla with a serious beef, he wanted to be able to say that any questions should be taken up with his partners—namely me, Jimmy Burke, and Paul Vario.

    "Some people might not know it, but betting lots of money on college basketball is a very difficult thing to do. Very few bookmakers get into the baskets seriously. In fact, most bookies will handle college basketball action only as a favor for someone who is also betting a lot on football or baseball. And even then, all they'll usually put you down for is fifty, or maybe a thousand dollars tops.

    "That's why I would have to line up a string of maybe fifteen or twenty bookmakers, and I would have to let a few of them in on what was going on so that they'd be able to help me spread the bets around even more. I already knew the guys I had in mind. Some guys, like Marty Krugman, John Savino, and Milty Wekar, would make money with us, while other guys would lose.