Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family Read Online Free PDF Page B

running so fast I never had a chance to look back. At the corner I could see Tuddy. He was reflected in the orange flames. He was waving the empty gasoline can like a track coach, as though I needed anyone to tell me to hurry. ”

    Henry was sixteen years old when he was arrested for the first time. He and Paul’s son Lenny, who was fifteen, had been given a Texaco credit card by Tuddy and told to go to the gas station on Pennsylvania Avenue and Linden Boulevard to buy a couple of snow tires for Tuddy’s wife’s car.

    “Tuddy didn’t even check to see if the card was stolen. He just gave me the card and sent us to the gas station, where we were known. If I’d known it was a stolen card I still could have scored. If I’d known the card was hot I would have given it to the guy in the gas station and said, ‘Here, get yourself the fifty-dollar reward for returning it and give me half of it. ’ Even if it was bad I would have earned on the card, except Tuddy wouldn’t have had any tires.

    “Instead, Lenny and I drive over to the place and buy the tires. The guy had to put them on the rims, so we paid for them on the card and drove around for about an hour. When we got back the cops were there. They were hiding around on the side. I walk in the place and two detectives jump out and say that I’m under arrest. Lenny took off. They cuffed me and took me to the Liberty Avenue station.

    “In the precinct they shoved me in the pens, and I was playing the wiseguy. ‘I’ll be out in an hour,’ I’m telling the cops. ‘I didn’t do nothing. ’ Real George Raft. Tuddy and Lenny had always told me never to talk to the cops. Never tell them anything. At one point one of the cops said he wanted me to sign something. He had to be nuts. ‘I’m not signing anything,’ I tell him. Tuddy and Lenny said all I had to give them was my name, and at first they didn’t believe my name was Henry Hill. I took a smack from one of the cops just because he wouldn’t believe a kid running around with the people I was running with could have a name like Hill.

    “In less than an hour Louis Delenhauser showed up at the precinct. ‘Cop-out Louie,’ the lawyer. Lenny had run back to the cabstand and said I had been pinched on the credit card. That’s when they sent Louie. They took care of everything. After the precinct the cops took me down for the arraignment, and when the judge set five hundred dollars bail, the money was put right up and I was free. When I turned around to walk out of the court I could see all of the Varios were standing in the back of the room. Paulie wasn’t there because he was serving thirty days on a contempt hearing. But everybody else was smiling and laughing and started hugging me and kissing me and banging me on the back. It was like a graduation. Tuddy kept yelling, ‘You broke your cherry! You broke your cherry!’ It was a big deal. After we left the court Lenny and Big Lenny and Tuddy took me to Vincent’s Clam Bar in Little Italy for scungilli and wine. They made it like a party. Then, when we got back to the cabstand, everybody was waiting for me and we partied some more.

    “Two months later Cop-out Louie copped me out to an ‘attempted’ petty larceny and I got a six-month suspended sentence. Maybe I could have done better. Looking back, it sure was a dumb way to start a yellow sheet, but in those days it was no big thing having a suspended sentence on your record. And I felt so grateful they paid the lawyer, so that my mother and father didn’t ever have to find out.

    “But by now I’m getting nervous. My father is getting worse and worse. I had found a gun in his basement and had taken it across the street to show Tuddy, and then I put it back. A couple of times Tuddy said he wanted to borrow the gun for some friends of his. I didn’t want to lend it, but I didn’t want to say no to Tuddy. In the end I started to lend Tuddy the gun and get it back after a day or two. Then I’d