Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

  “The problem with just sticking the guy up and taking his key was that we never knew when the money would be there. We had to have a key of our own so that we could get in there at a moment’s notice from Frenchy. If we stuck the guy up and got the key, they’d just change the locks, and we’d also alert them that we knew about the money. I figured we had to get the key, so I asked Frenchy to start making up to the guy. Buy him some drinks. Bullshit a little. Meanwhile Frenchy gave me the guy’s address. He lived in a furnished room on Rockaway Boulevard, near Liberty Avenue, across from the White Castle hamburger joint. One day when the guard was off, Raymond Montemurro and I waited all day for him to leave, and when he did we burglarized his apartment, looking for the key. The plan was to get the key, make a copy, and put it back so no one knew. Then, when the money arrived, we’d have the key to a fortune.

  “We went in and out of every drawer in the place and we couldn’t find the key. The sonofabitch must have carried it around with him even on his day off. I couldn’t believe it. I had a fortune waiting for me and I’m stuck with a hundred-dollar-a-week nut job for a guard. The other problem was that Jimmy was getting impatient. He was beginning to say the next time Frenchy tells us there’s something in the room, we snatch the guy and take the key. I was pretty sure that meant Jimmy would have whacked the guy too. It all made me try harder.

  “The guy lived in a typical bachelor’s apartment. It was depressing. It was crummy. He had all these detective magazines around, but he also had a lot of girlie magazines. He was a nebbishy-looking guy around forty. He had glasses and was thin. Frenchy was the opposite. Frenchy was a big, gruff, funny guy. He was married and had a nice family somewhere in Hempstead. He was great company. He told funny stories. On the night shift he was the boss. I just knew that would be important to the guard. Company men always like hanging around with the boss. I told Frenchy about the girlie magazines. I said maybe we could butter him up with a girl.

  “So now Frenchy took the guy to the Jade East Motel, right across the parkway, for a few drinks. Frenchy started talking about girls, and the guy was definitely interested. Then Frenchy began to talk about this girlfriend he had who was a real swinger. She loved to screw. The guard practically went nuts listening to Frenchy’s dirty stories.

  “The next day we got a really great-looking hooker from the Bronx. She used to do numbers for Ralph Atlas’ clients. Atlas was a top-of-the-line bookmaker, and all his clients were big-money bettors from the garment center and Wall Street. She was about a hundred and a half a night, which was very steep back then. She looked like Natalie Wood. She had black hair, a great figure, and beautiful big eyes. She didn’t look like a hook. She looked more like a student or a stewardess.

  “That night Frenchy brought the guard to meet his ‘girl’ at the Jade East. She immediately began to make a play for the guy. Frenchy, playing dumb, made up an excuse that he had to go back to work, and the girl took the guard upstairs to bed. We did not make a move on the key that night. We just wanted to see if it could work. I wanted to know if the guy was vulnerable. He was.

  “The next weekend Tommy and I picked her up again, and we took her to the Jade East. This time the plan was to see if Frenchy and the girl could get the guy away from his key. The Jade East had private steam rooms and whirlpools in the basement, and if we could get them all down there long enough to get the key, make a copy, and put it back, we were home. But first we wanted to do a dry run. Frenchy was supposed to leave the key to the room under the hall ashtray, and we’d know they were going downstairs when he parted the blinds in the room. It worked beautifully. They were down in the steam room for an hour and a half—more than enough time to get a copy of the key made.

  “Later that night Frenchy called. He had heard that between four and seven hundred thousand dollars in cash was coming into the airport the following Friday.

  “No more dry runs. This was the time to do it. Again, that Friday, Tommy and I picked up the girl, and now she’s getting suspicious. She knew we were up to something illegal, but she couldn’t figure it out. This time to make things even nicer I bought some terry-cloth robes for the three of them to wear on the way to the steam room. We gave the girl the robes so she could pretend she got them for Frenchy and the guard as presents. She was a great actress. They were all supposed to meet at the motel at around five-thirty.

  “It wasn’t until about six o’clock when Frenchy and the guard got to the Jade East. By then we’re getting nervous. Everything was running late. We had found a locksmith nearby who could duplicate the keys, except he closed at seven. The minute Frenchy and the guard arrived we sent the girl over to rush them along. She hugged the two of them. Frenchy’s sweating and rolling his eyes up in his head because he knows we’re late. The guard was just a slow and stubborn guy. Every time Frenchy had tried to move the guy along he’d just stand there. He’d get slower. Now at least we had the girl goosing him along, but it still wasn’t until six-thirty that they went to their room to get undressed for the steam room.

  “The minute they were gone I went right upstairs. I reached under the ashtray in the hall. The key was there. I opened the door, and right next to the guy’s pants was his whole key ring. I grabbed the ring and ran downstairs. Jimmy had the car waiting, and we shot out of the motel to the locksmith’s. He was on Rockaway Boulevard, near Jamaica Avenue. We went like hell, but when we got there the guy was getting ready to close. We had to bang at his door and beg. Then we didn’t know which of the keys was the one we wanted, so we ordered duplicates of all eighteen keys. The guy started to work and when he was finished he only gave us fifteen duplicate keys. I asked where the other three were and he said he didn’t have the blanks. Fifteen out of eighteen aren’t bad odds, but in this job I didn’t want any odds.

  “We drove like mad back to the motel and I went upstairs, put the keys down exactly where I had found them, closed the door, and put Frenchy’s door key back under the ashtray. Tommy took half his clothes off and went walking around the steam room until Frenchy saw him. That was our signal that the room was clear.

  “First thing Saturday morning I met Frenchy near the cargo area. He took the fifteen keys to make sure we had the one that worked. He came back smiling. Not only did the key work but he had seen the sacks we had been waiting for. Frenchy said the best time over the weekend for the heist would be just before midnight. Lots of guys would be coming and going during the new shift and the guard would be on his coffee break at the other end of the warehouse. Frenchy also said that there was not going to be a bank pickup until Monday afternoon because of a Jewish holiday, and that was music to our ears. The delayed pickup, which would normally have been made on Sunday night, meant the loss wouldn’t be discovered until Monday afternoon. It also meant the cops wouldn’t know when the money had actually disappeared. People might be able to remember one or two strangers around a place on one night but not over a three-day weekend. It’s just too long a time to pinpoint anybody at the scene of the crime.

  “We had about twelve hours to go. I kept the key in my hand all day long. I was so happy I went out and bought myself the biggest suitcase I could find so I could put the sacks of money inside. At eleven-forty Saturday night Tommy and I drove into the cargo parking area. We had a rented car with bum plates. We waited until the shift began to change. Frenchy said he would be waiting near the platform and that we should just walk in as though we were returning a suitcase to the office. The plan was that he wouldn’t acknowledge that he knew me, but if there was any problem he’d be there to straighten it out. He said chances were that no one would bother me, because there were always lots of people wandering in and out picking up suitcases that had been lost and misdirected. I climbed up the platform ramp and walked into the office area, and I could see Frenchy hovering nearby. I could see the room and walked right up to the steel door. I’d had the key in my hand ever since I left the car. I slipped it in, turned it once, walked inside. The room was just like a big, dark closet. I
had brought a pen-size flashlight because I didn’t want to turn on any lights. The seven white canvas bags were right on the floor. I could see the red seals. I opened the suitcase and put the seven sacks inside and I walked out the door. The suitcase was so heavy I could hardly walk, but Frenchy later said he thought I was leaving empty, because I practically floated out of the joint.”

  Nine

  As Henry had hoped, the theft was not discovered until Monday afternoon. The Daily News story Tuesday said that the money had vanished into “thin air” and that “FBI agents swarmed over Air France cargo building 86 at Kennedy, questioning the employees, searching the area and examining the manifests and bills of lading.” The New York Times story said: “A thorough search of the building and the cinder block locker where the money was placed failed to turn up the parcels. A work crew of about 20 men as well as an around-the-clock private guard were on duty at the building.”

  By the time Air France realized its $480,000 was missing, Henry and his pals had already given away $120,000 of it as “tribute” to the mob chiefs who considered Kennedy Airport their turf. They gave $60,000 to Sebastian “Buster” Aloi, the fifty-seven-year-old capo who ran the airport for the Colombo crime family, and the other $60,000 to their own capo, Paul Vario.

  “We took care of Buster because it was insurance. It kept everybody happy. We gave Paulie a piece because he was our boss. That’s the way it’s set up. He protected us. If there was a beef against us by another crew—and there were always beefs against us—Paulie took care of it. He went to the sit-downs and took our part. The rest of the money we pooled. I could have taken my end and gone home, but what was I going to do with it? Put it in the closet? Jimmy kept it in a couple of bookmakers’ safes, and if I needed a few bucks I’d take it out, and he’d keep tabs. It was like having a bank account.

  “We wanted to spend some money on ourselves. I wanted a new car and some clothes. Karen needed things for the new apartment and the kids. To justify any new spending, the three of us, Jimmy, Tommy, and I, took a trip to Vegas, dropped about twenty grand, and came back bragging that we had won. Everybody knew we went to Vegas a lot and that Jimmy was the kind of guy who would belly up to the craps table and play until his ankles swole. But even then we didn’t overdo anything. I put a down payment on a new ’sixty-seven gold Buick Riviera with a black top and financed the rest, using my brother’s name. Tommy did the same, except he bought a beige Cadillac with a black top.

  “Our first business proposition came about two weeks after the robbery when Paulie came up to us at the backstretch at Aqueduct and said if we joined him in a deal we could buy a fifty-percent interest in Milty Wekar’s bookmaking operation. He had Wekar right there with him in the car. Wekar needed some money. He had been betting heavy on something he had and got burned. It was a great opportunity. Wekar had high rollers and bookmakers for customers. He had garment-center executives, Wall Street brokers, doctors and dentists and lawyers. And he had the guys who took their action. He never took bets for less than five hundred or a thousand dollars a shot, and most of the customers would bet six or seven games at once. Vario said he’d put in fifty thousand if we put in the same. Jimmy and Tommy looked at me and we all agreed. Right there at the track. We didn’t need any lawyers. We shook hands and I was in the bookmaking business. I was twenty-four.

  “It was an education. Milty was a bookmaker’s bookmaker. Most of our action came from bookmakers, not individual bettors. Milty put me on the payroll for five hundred a week and expenses. I used to sit between the two clerks who took the action and I tabbed the bets. I had a yellow legal pad and on it I had all the day’s action. I had baseball, football, basketball, the pros, colleges, the tracks, every kind of action going. And I also had the odds on the sheet, and as the bets came in I’d mark a line for every thousand bet, and then I’d draw a line through whenever five thousand was bet. Milty would look at the sheets and adjust the odds. He’d move the odds up or down depending upon whether he wanted action or not. If Milty had a problem and wanted to lay off some of the bets, he had a line to guys in Florida, St. Louis, Vegas, California. Just about anywhere.

  “I also helped Milty on Tuesday, the straighten-up day. That’s when all the bookmakers and high-line bettors in the city had to straighten up whatever they owed each other for the week. We’d usually straighten up in a garment-center restaurant called Bobby’s. On Mondays we’d make up the payout sheet. There were our expenses, like my salary and stuff. There were ‘pays’ for the winners. There was ‘ice’—about seven hundred dollars a week—for the cops. There was ‘juice’ for when we had a bad week and had to go to the loan sharks for a little extra money ourselves.

  “But usually we didn’t have to do anything like that. We would just call Paulie, and Paulie would give us twenty-five or thirty grand with no interest. After all, he was a partner. If we couldn’t get Paulie and wanted to put off paying for a couple of days, Milty had a great trick. He kept five or six one-thousand-dollar bills around, and he’d give them to me to flash on the winners. Since none of our clients wanted to get paid in thousand-dollar bills, we could always put off paying them for a couple of days. The big bills were just too much trouble for wiseguy bookmakers to cash. Milty must have used those same bills for years.

  “We had a great operation. Milty had five different rooms all over the city where we took the action. We had most of the police on the pad. Milty paid off the Borough Command and the Division. Every once in a while we’d have to stand still for an arrest, usually by the police commissioner’s Confidential Investigating Unit, but it was a misdemeanor, and all that meant was a fifty-dollar fine. Nobody ever went to jail for bookmaking. Still, we couldn’t figure out how the cops always knew where we were. Milty was constantly changing apartments. Sometimes we’d move a couple of times a week, but they always knew our new locations.

  “We finally figured it out. Milty had this old guy who used to go around and rent our rooms. That’s all the guy ever did. Milty gave him three hundred a week to find the apartments, put down deposits, sign the leases, get the gas and electric lines opened up, and get the phones installed. The guy used to come in on the Long Island Railroad, get off, and take buses and subways as far as he could until he found apartments to rent. Somehow the cops got a line on the guy, and they used to tail him from one apartment to another until they had a list of our places. Then, when they saw one of our cars parked outside, they’d crash through.

  “After about four months I took my first pinch for running a wire room. It was in August of 1967, and the cops who broke in said we were doing two million dollars’ worth of business a week. I only wish. We’d gotten word from the cops we’d paid off that we were going to get busted. We were due. They just went through the motions. It was done right. No cuffs or anything. After we were booked we took the cops for dinner on Mulberry Street before we went to night court for the arraignment. Al Newman, our bondsman, was already in court when we got there. I grabbed a cab home. The cops dropped Milty off. The next day we were back in action at a different apartment. We had taken a pinch and now we were okay for a while. John Sutter, my lawyer, bounced the case around the courts for a year until I finally pleaded guilty. I got fined a hundred dollars and went home. It was a joke. The city was spending millions of dollars for plainclothes cops to catch bookmakers, but it was obvious that the whole thing was set up so the cops could shake us down. The cops didn’t want to put us out of business any more than they wanted to shoot the golden goose.

  “It was at this time that another business opportunity arose. There was a terrific supper club and restaurant called The Suite on Queens Boulevard, near Forest Hills. Its owner, Joey Rossano, was a horseplayer and gambler. The guy needed money. We made a deal that I’d take over the place but he’d keep his name on the papers. I paid him some money and I took over his loan-shark debts. I knew some of the guys he owed, and they weren’t very strong. They didn’t have the weight. So I knew I wouldn’t have to pay. I just s
trong-armed them out of the money—and who could they go to? If you were with Paulie and our crew, you could tell most of the city’s half-assed wiseguys to get lost. I made them eat the debts.

  “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.