Read GoodFellas for Free Online Page A

had always been a ‘nurturing ground for radical movements and rebels.’ With Prohibition, the area’s proximity to the overland liquor routes from Long Island and the countless coves for barge landings along Jamaica Bay made it a hijacker’s dream and a smuggler’s paradise. Here were assembled the nation’s first multiethnic alliances of mobsters that would laterset the precedent for organized crime in America. The small nonunion garment factories that dotted the area became ripe for shakedowns and payoffs, and the activities at Belmont, Jamaica, and Aqueduct raceways nearby only added to the mob’s interest in the area. In the 1940s, when the 5,000-acre Idlewild Golf Course began its transformation into an airport employing 30,000 people, moving millions of passengers and billions of dollars’ worth of cargo, what is now Kennedy Airport became one of the single largest sources of revenue for the local hoods.
    Brownsville-East New York was the kind of neighborhood that cheered successful mobsters the way West Point cheered victorious generals. It had been the birthplace of Murder Incorporated; Midnight Rose’s candy store on the corner of Livonia and Saratoga avenues, where Murder Inc.’s hit men used to wait for their assignments, was considered a historic landmark during Henry’s youth. Johnny Torrio and Al Capone grew up there before going west and taking machine guns with them. The local heroes of Henry’s childhood were such men as Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, who joined forces with Meyer Lansky to create Las Vegas; Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, whose well-muscled cutters’ union controlled the garment industry; Frank Costello, a boss with so much political clout that judges called to thank him for their appointments; Otto ‘Abbadabba’ Berman, the mathematical genius and policy-game fixer, who devised a system for rigging the results of the parimutuel tote board at the track so that only the least-played numbers could win; Vito Genovese, the stylish racketeer who had two hundred limousines, including eighty filled with floral pieces, at his first wife’s funeral in 1931 and was identified in
The New York Times
story as ‘a wealthy young restaurant owner and importer’; Gaetano ‘Three Fingers Brown’ Lucchese, who headed the mob family of which the Varios were a part; and of course the legendary members of Murder Incorporated: the ever dapper Harry ‘Pittsburgh Phil’ Strauss, who was proudest of the way he could ice-pick his victims through the ear in movie houses without drawing any attention; Frank ‘Dasher’ Abbandando, who only a year beforeHenry’s birth went to the chair with a Cagney sneer; and the 300-pound Vito ‘Socko’ Gurino, a massive hit man with a neck the size of a water main, who for target practice used to shoot the heads off chickens running around his backyard.
    It was understood on the street that Paul Vario ran one of the city’s toughest and most violent gangs. In Brownsville-East New York the body counts were always high, and in the 1960s and 1970s the Vario thugs did most of the strong-arm work for the rest of the Lucchese crime family. There were always some heads to bash on picket lines, businessmen to be squeezed into making their loan-shark payments, independents to be straightened out over territorial lines, potential witnesses to be murdered, and stool pigeons to be buried. And there were always young cabstand tough guys such as Bruno Facciolo, Frank Manzo, and Joey Russo who were ready to go out and break a few heads whenever Paul gave the order, and such young shooters as Jimmy Burke, Anthony Stabile, and Tommy DeSimone who were happy to take on the most violent assignments. But they did this work on the side; almost all of these wiseguys were employed, to some degree, in one kind of business or another. They were small-time entrepreneurs. They ran two-rig trucking