It always struck Henry Hill as grossly unfair that after a lifetime of major crimes and petty punishments his longest stretch–a 10-year sentence in a federal penitentiary–came about because he got into a barroom brawl with a man whose sister was a typist for the FBI.
It started as a lark, a spur-of-the-moment trip to Florida with his pals Jimmy Burke and Casey Rosado, the president of Local 71 of the Waiters and Commissary Workers union at Kennedy Airport. Casey wanted company on a flight to Tampa to see his parents and to pick up some gambling money that was owed him.
The man who owed Rosado was the owner of a lounge, a man named John Ciaccio, and shortly after arriving, Rosado, Burke and Hill went to see him. An argument broke out. Burke grabbed Ciaccio and forced him outside into Rosado`s rented car. Nobody in the lounge said anything, but the bartender, a retired New York cop, took down the license plate number.
In the car, Hill struck Ciaccio on the head several times with a pistol. Ciaccio quickly agreed to pay his debt.
Henry: ”About a month after I got back to New York, I heard that the FBI was arresting union officials and that Jimmy Burke `and others` were being sought.
”It didn`t make any sense. Jimmy and I met with Casey and all of our lawyers, and none of us could figure it out, until just before the trial. That`s when we found out that John Ciaccio had a sister who was a typist for the FBI. Nobody knew that was where she worked. Even her family didn`t know.
”She apparently went to see Ciaccio the night we beat him up, and she got hysterical. She burst into tears in the Tampa office of the FBI, and of course, they asked her why. She gave it all up. Her brother. Her friends. The bars. The bets. And naturally, us.”
The trial, which ended Nov. 3, 1972, took 12 days. It took the jury six hours to deliver a verdict of guilty. The judge sent Henry Hill and Jimmy Burke away for 10 years.
But as a result of appeals his lawyers filed, almost two years elapsed between the time of Henry`s sentencing and the day he finally surrendered. In those 21 months, he hustled as he had never hustled before. He was practically a one-man crime wave.
Henry also decided to make his prison stay as soft as possible. He sought out the experts, and found that of all the maximum-security prisons to which he could go, Lewisburg Penitentiary, in Lewisburg, Pa., was probably the best. It was close to New York. It had enough corrupt guards and key officials to make his stay reasonably bearable. And Lewisburg had a large population of organized crime members inside at the time, including Paul Vario (Henry`s mob boss), who was doing 2 1/2 for income tax evasion, and Johnny Dio, who was serving a long stretch for the acid blinding of newspaper columnist Victor Riesel.
In order to get to Lewisburg himself, Henry paid an assignment officer at the West Street jail $200.
It was raining when Henry arrived at Lewisburg. For the first time, he was in a real prison.
Henry: ”In the reception area, standing next to the guards, I saw Paulie (Vario). He was laughing. Next to Paulie, I saw Johnny Dio, and next to Dio was Fat Andy Ruggierio. They`re all laughing. All of a sudden, the guards, who had been screaming, shut up like mice.
”After they checked me in, Paulie and Johnny walked me into the main reception room, and there were a dozen guys I knew waiting for me. They were clapping and laughing and yelling at me. All that was missing was the beer.
”Right from the start you could see that life in the can was different for wiseguys. Everybody was doing real time, all mixed together, living like pigs. Wiseguys lived alone. They were isolated from everybody else in prison. They paid the biggest and meanest lifers a few bucks a week to keep everybody cool. The crew owned the joint, or they owned a lot of the guys who ran the joint.
”After two months of orientation, I joined Paulie, Johnny Dio and Joe Pine, who was a boss from Connecticut, in their honor dorm. For $50, you could get any assignment in the joint. The dorm was a separate three-story building outside the wall, which looked more like a Holiday Inn than a prison. There were four guys to a room, and we had comfortable beds and private baths. There were two dozen rooms on each floor, and each of them had mob guys living in them. It was like a wiseguy convention.
”It was wild. There was wine and booze, and even though it was against the rules, we used to cook in our rooms. I don`t think Paulie went to the general mess five times in the 2 1/2 years he was there.
”We had the best food smuggled into our dorm from the kitchen. Steaks, veal cutlets, shrimp, red snapper. It cost me $200, $300 a week. Guys like Paulie spent $500 to $1,000 a week. Scotch cost $30 a pint. The hacks used to bring it inside the walls in their lunch pails. Paulie put me in charge of cash. When the funds were running low, I`d tell Paulie, and the next thing I know, some guys would come up for a visit with the green.
”Our days were spent on work details, going to rehabilitation programs and school, assembling for meals and recreation. Almost everybody had a job, since it got you time off and it counted a lot with the parole board. Even Paulie had a job. He used to change the music tapes on the public address system. He didn`t actually do it himself. He had somebody do for it for him, but he got credit for the job.
”Dinner was the big thing of the day. We`d sit around and drink, play cards and brag, just like outside. We always had a pasta course first and then meat or fish. Johnny Dio liked to do the meat. We didn`t have a grill, so he did everything in pans. When he panfried steaks, you`d think the joint was on fire, but still the hacks never bothered us.
”Within three months, I started booking. Hugh Addonizio, the former mayor of Newark, was one of my best customers. On Saturday he used to bet two packs of cigarettes a game, and he`d bet 20 games. After a while, I was booking lots of guys and guards. I had Karen outside running around and straightening up the accounts. Guys would bet or buy things from me on the inside and have their wives or pals pay up on the outside.”
After 2 1/2 years, Henry got himself assigned to the prison farm about 1 1/2 miles outside the prison wall. It was his dream. The farm supplied milk to the prison and the men assigned there had extraordinary freedom. Henry, for example, would leave the dorm at 5 a.m. and he usually returned to the dorm only to sleep.
Henry: ”There was so little supervision I could smuggle anything into the place. I had the job of checking the fence, which meant I had wire clippers and a tractor and rode around the perimeter of the farm to make sure that the cows hadn`t crashed through. I could be gone three or four hours. After my first day, I called Karen from the dairy phone. The next Saturday night I met her in the fields behind the pasture, and we made love for the first time in 2 1/2 years. She brought a blanket and a duffel bag filled with booze, salami, sausages, special vinegar peppers.
”Within a week, I had people bringing up pills and pot. I had a Colombian named Mono, who lived in Jackson Heights, bringing in pot. I buried milk containers out in the woods and began to store the stuff. I had cases of booze out there. I had a pistol. I even had Karen bring up some pot in the duffel bags.
”I used to bring the cocaine in myself–I didn`t trust anyone with coke. I put the pot into handballs that I used to split in half and retape. Before tossing the balls over the wall onto the handball court, I`d call the clerk at the hospital, who was a dope fiend, and he would alert my distributors to start congregating around the handball court. I used to get a pound or two of the stuff over the wall in just a few handballs.”
After eight months at the farm, Henry got another break. G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate conspirator, had organized a food strike at the minimum-security Allenwood Correctional Facility, about 15 miles away from Lewisburg. Sixty other white-collar criminals and corrupt politicians joined the strike, and soon the federal prison authorities began transferring them away.
Henry wanted to go to Allenwood to fill one of the newly empty bunks in what everyone agreed was the country club of prisons. Henry made it, because he had befriended a homely secretary. He begged her to put his name on the transfer list. She did, erasing one convict`s name and writing in Henry`s name. Two days later, he was at Allenwood.
Henry: ”Guys ran their businesses from the dorms. We had phone rooms next to the television rooms in each dorm. You`d see guys on the phones all day and night. There were about 40 Jewish guys when I arrived. I immediately volunteered to work in the kosher kitchen. I wanted to establish right away that I was a religious person so I could get religious furloughs.
”I signed up for everything. One month I managed to string together so many furloughs, days off and religious holidays that the joint wound up owing me a day.
On July 12, 1978, Henry Hill was granted an early parole for being a model prisoner.
Wednesday: The biggest caper.
