Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi

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    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