Read Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family for Free Online

wrap the gun up just exactly how I found it and put it back on the top shelf behind the pipes in the cellar. One day I went to get the gun for Tuddy, and I saw that it was missing. I knew that my father knew what I was doing. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he knew. It was like waiting for the electric chair.

    “I was almost seventeen. I went to the recruitment office and tried to sign up. I thought that was a good way of getting my father off my back and keeping Tuddy and Paul from thinking I was mad at them. The guys at the recruitment office said I had to wait until I was seventeen and then my parents or guardian could sign me up. I went home and told my father I wanted to enlist in the paratroopers. I told him he had to sign me in. He started to smile, and he called my mother and the whole family. My mother was nervous, but my father was really happy. That afternoon I went to the DeKalb Avenue recruitment office and signed up. The next day I went to the cabstand and told Tuddy what I’d done. He thought I was crazy. He said he was going to get Paul. Now Paulie shows up, very concerned. He sits me down alone. He looks me in the eye and asks me was there anything wrong, was there anything I wasn’t telling him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘Yeah,’ I said. Then he got very quiet. We’re in the back room of the cabstand surrounded by wiseguys. He’s got two carloads of shooters on the street. The place is as safe as a tomb and he’s whispering. He says if I want to get out of it, he can fix it with the recruitment office. He can buy me back the papers

    “‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘1 might as well do the time. ’ “

Three

    WHEN HENRY HILL WAS BORN on June II, 1943, Brownsville-East New York was a six-square-mile working-class area with some light industry and modest one- and two-family houses. It stretched from a row of parklike cemeteries in the north to the saltwater marshes and garbage landfills of Canarsie and Jamaica Bay in the south. In the early 1920s electric trolleys and the Liberty Avenue elevated line had turned the neighborhood into a haven for tens of thousands of Italian-American immigrants and Eastern European Jews who wanted to escape the tenement squalor of Mulberry Street and the Lower East Side in Manhattan. The low, flat, sun-filled streets offered only the smallest houses and tiniest backyards, but the first- and second-generation Italians and Jews who fiercely wanted to own those houses worked nights in the sweatshops and factories spotted throughout the area after they had finished their daytime jobs.

    In addition to the thousands of hardworking new arrivals, the area also attracted Jewish hoods, Black Hand extortionists, Camorra kidnappers, and wily Mafiosi. In many ways Brownsville-East New York was a perfect place for the mob. There was even a historical ambience. At the turn of the century the New York Tribune described the section as a haven for highwaymen and cutthroats and said that it 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 later set 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