Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi Page A

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.

    When Tommy finally got in, it turned out that he only had the big-brand stuff. He had the Chesterfields and Camels and Lucky Strikes, but he didn’t have what we called the fill-ins, the less popular brands like Raleighs and L&Ms and Marlboros. Jimmy asked me to go down to Baltimore and pick up the fill-ins. He said if I left right away I could be there early enough to get a load the minute the places opened and be back in plenty of time to sell my stuff before noon. I had a lot of customers who wanted off-brands and I agreed. Lenny, who had been helping me load, wanted to come along. I had about six hundred bucks from the crap game. Jimmy threw me the keys to one of the cars he used and Lenny and I took off.

    It was about midnight when we got to Baltimore. The cigarette places didn’t open until six in the morning. I had been there before and I knew there were a bunch of strip joints along Baltimore Street. Lenny had never been to Baltimore. We started hitting the joints. We listened to a little jazz. Some B-girls in one place started hustling drinks out of us. We’re buying them nine-dollar ginger ales and they’re playing with our legs. By two or three in the morning we’re pretty smashed. We must have gone for a hundred and fifty bucks with these same two girls. It was very obvious that they liked us. They said that their boss was watching, so they couldn’t leave with us, but if we waited outside around back they’d meet us as soon as they got off. Lenny’s all excited. I’m all excited. We go around back and wait. We waited for an hour. Then two hours. And then we just looked at each other and laughed. We couldn’t stop laughing. We’d gotten taken like chumps. We were two dumb gloms. So we drove over to the cigarette joints and waited for them to open.

    The next thing I know somebody’s waking us up at eight o’clock in the morning. We’d overslept. Now we were two hours late getting back for eleven. We loaded five hundred cartons in the car, and there wasn’t enough room in the trunk. We had to take the rear seat out and leave it at the wholesaler’s. We broke up three cartons evenly and placed a blanket on top of them to look like a rear seat. I started going. We’re doing eighty,