1.
By far
the most curious member of the Robert’s Lounge Gang was Henry Hill, who enjoyed
a close relationship with Jimmy Burke that puzzled most of the other gang
members. They were unaware that the link between Hill and Burke extended back
nearly twenty years. Hill, then a fourteen-year-old street punk, had begun
running errands for the players in a Mafia-run poker game in Brooklyn. Among
those players were Burke and Paul Vario, Sr. Impressed by the youngster’s
eagerness to please, his street smarts, and his apparent desire to become a
real crook, the two men adopted him as a sort of mascot. Later, Hill became
part of Burke’s crew, participating mostly in gambling operations and disposal
of hijacked goods.
Over the years, Burke and Hill developed
a relationship that was nearly father-son, and under Burke’s tutelage, Hill
demonstrated something of a flair for crime. Quick to spot any angle that could
be exploited, Hill became a personal favourite of Vario, Sr., who tended to
take credit for Hill’s development. Vario could not
sponsor Hill for Mafia membership, however, much as he admired Hill’s
moneymaking abilities: Hill was only half eyetalian. He had an irish
father who despaired of his son’s choice of a criminal career.
Burke in effect
became Hill’s surrogate father, much to the dismay of some other Burke
associates, who thoroughly disliked him, fair-haired man with the pronounced
paunch that made him look like a pregnant pencil. And they wondered why
Burke continued to treat Hill like a son, even after his protégé developed a
serious drinking and narcotics problem that by 1973 was beginning to make him
act more like a junkie than the street-wise moneymaker he was reputed to be.
2.
“Well,
if he’s for real and he needs help,” said Martin Krugman, as he combed a
salt-and-pepper hairpiece, “I might be able to accomodate him.”
“So what do I tell him?” Menna asked.
“Tell him to sit tight. I’ll arrange a
meeting, and then we’ll see.”
Krugman said all this casually, as if
barely interested. In truth, he could hardly contain his joy. The patient
manipulation of Werner was about to pay off at last; the fish was ready to be
gaffed into the boat. The moment Menna left the salon, Krugman called his
friend Henry Hill. Immediately, Hill contacted his mentor, Jimmy Burke.
As an old gambler, Jimmy Burke knew that
luck ran in streaks, and true to form, his own luck had suddenly and
dramatically improuved. Like the card player who laments a long run of bad
cards, Burke had been close to despairing that anything good would come his
way. But in only a week in the late fall of 1978, he was dealt a number of
astonishing good hands, almost as if he were controlling a stacked deck.
Hill then told him that a Kennedy Airport
employee might be able to provide very lucrative inside information – perhaps
the big score Burke had importuned his gang to look for. This promising news
came on the heels of two other equally lucrative propositions, both of which,
Burke noted with satisfaction, had also come from his protégé, Henry Hill.
During the summer and early fall of 1978,
Hill had tried to interest Burke in the schemes of one Paul Mazzei, a
Pittsburgh dog groomer who had turned to a life of crime, primarily narcotics
sales. Hill and Mazzei had become friends in prison, where Mazzei, serving time
for narcotics peddling, proposed a plan. Essentially, the plan involved a
double-barreled operation: Hill and Mazzei would set up an interstate narcotics
operations, which would include the exchange of hill’s heroin supplies for
Mazzei’s cocaine, with the promise of immense profits for both.
More interestingly, Mazzei had a
secondary twist to the drug operation, one that promised even greater profit.
He knew a player on the Boston College basketball team, one of the nation’s
most important college squads – and the subject of heavy betting throughout the
country. This particular player and a teammate, Mazzei said, were willing to
“do some business”: in exchange for cocaine and money, they would agree to
shave points.
Hill, involved for years in illegal gambling,
needed no education on the potential of the plan Mazzei was proposing. The key
to such gambling was the point spread, the number of
points by which a particular team was favoured to win. If, for example, team A
was picked by the odds-makers in Las Vegas to beat team B by three points and
then proceeded to win by only two points, those who had bet on team A to win by
the spread would lose their bets. (If team A won by three points, it was called
a “push,” or tie, in which event no one won or lost.) On the other hand,
betters could “bet against the spread” – in other words, bet that particular
team would win, but by nowhere near the margin prophesied.
There were a number of variations, but
this basic scheme remains the lifeblood of the multibillion dollar illegal
betting business in this country. The key, obviously, is the point spread: if a
better knows that a particular game is guaranteed to result in a certain margin
of victory, then he can proceed, as H.L. Mencken put it, with the calm
certitude of a christian holding four aces.
To Hill’s disappointment, Burke was
initially skeptical of the Mazzei scheme. He was uncertain that the bets could
be sufficiently dispersed to avoid rousing the suspicions of bookmakers around
the country, he did not know if Mazzei could keep college basketball players on
the take, and he doubted Hill’s ability to oversee an enterprise of such scope.
Moreover, the scheme required a capital outlay, and Burke was reluctant to
commit his dwindling resources to a risky operation. Nevertheless, as a
criminal capitalist, he saw the vast potential of the deal: profits from the
basketball-fixing would be reinvested in the narcotics transactions, which in
turn would fuel a widening sports-fixing operation, which in turn would
underwrite more narcotics transactions ... and so on.
“Keep it quiet, for now,” he told Hill,
stalling for time. “Before anything happens, I want to talk to Mazzei.”
In early november, Mazzei came to New
York to meet Burke. Accompanied by his fellow conspirators, the brothers Rocco
and Anthony Perla, Mazzei met Burke in Robert’s Lounge and laid out his
proposal. Also present was Krugman, who nodded significantly several times
during Mazzei’s presentation, a signal to Burke that the idea of using a
network of cooperative bookmakers to conceal large bets (several hundred
thousand dollars) was viable.
The question of
how the bets would be was critical to the scheme. They had to be made
carefully, for a sudden infusion of bets on one side in a particular game would
compel the odds-makers to shift the line in order ot balance the betting.
Furthermore, a huge amount of money bet one way was almost always an indicator
that a game had been fixed. Bets as large as those that Burke and Hill were
planning to make had to be parceled out in relatively small chunks so as not to
arouse suspicion.
“I like it,” Burke said when Mazzei was
finished, and with that the deal was struck: Mazzei and his confederates would
provide the corrupt player and the cocaine; Burke would provide the starting
capital, the network of bookmakers, and his organisation’s muscle.
If there were any doubts in Mazzei’s mind
about the Burke gang’s sinister reputation and willingness to use violence, they
were dispelled during his visit to New York. Mazzei had spent much of his time
in Robert’s Lounge, the kind of place he thought existed only in the movies; he
later told Hill he had never seen so many scary-looking hoods in one place,
includiing the menacing James Burke. Hill himself prouved to be pretty scary. One night, following dinner with Mazzei in a Long Island
diner, Hill became enraged by an Astrology machine that took two of his
quarters but refused to tell his future. Hill tried to remove the balky machine
entirely, even though it was chained down. When an angry diner employee, armed
with a butcher knife, attempted to stop him, Hill pulled a gun on the man.
Then, to Mazzei’s amazement, Hill set his own car on fire. [Arson was one of
his main activities, which he forgot to mention in all of his interviews.]
Little wonder then that Burke dispatched
Hill to Boston to talk with the two Boston College players Mazzei had said were
on the take. Armed with $5.000 from Burke to begin the payoffs (and a sanction
to commence operations from a delighted Paul Vario, Sr.), Hill was there to
show the flag and to make two things perfectly clear. He was to demonstrate to
the two young men – Richard (Rick) Kuhn and James Sweeney – that his
“organisation” had things well in hand: they would never have to fear
retribution from angry bookmakers not in on the fix who might discover they had
been had. Second, he was to let the players know that this was no game; he was
the chosen representative of heavy hitters who were prepared to do anything to
protect their investment.
“You don’t have to worry,” Hill told the
players in what he took to be his most quietly menacing tone. “If there is any
problem, the people in New York will handle it. They are heavyweights, believe
me, so nobody’s going to retaliate against you. Got it?”
Kuhn, who understood both the explicit
and implicit meaning of what Hill had said, haggled a bit, then settled on a
deal that would give him $2.500 for each game in which he would try to ensure that
a particular point spread would be maintained. Although Sweeney said almost
nothing during this exchange, Hill assumed that his silence meant consent. To
seal the deal, Hill gave Kuhn $600 in cash and a quarter-ounce of cocaine.
Kuhn had marked six games on a pocket
schedule he brought with him. These were to be nationally televised games
against major teams that were certain to attract strong betting interest. The first of the six games, on december 6, almost ended the
entire deal: what was supposed to be a sevenpoint loss turned out to be a
nineteenpoint victory, and some of the big bookmakers in on the scheme began
grousing about “those fucking kids.”
Surprisingly, however, Burke, who had
lost a modest amount of money on that first game, seemed only moderately upset
– at least by his standards: he only once threatened to kill all the
participants.
Hill discovered that there were nearly as
many excuses as there were points in the game. Kuhn claimed that despite his
best efforts, Boston College – on the strength of an outstanding performance by
the team’s star – simply ran away with the game. Hill warned him there were to
be no further slipups, and he told Kuhn to persuade the team’s star player to
take part in the scheme. When Kuhn tried to offer a few more excuses, Hill made
it clear that neither he nor “the organisation” was interested in hearing them.
“Listen,” Hill snarled, “how can you play with broken arms?”
Despite his propensity for strongarming,
Burke did not participate directly in this episode. He had become temporarily
preoccupied with a matter of greater concern, which was the chief reason for
the relative equanimity in his disposition.
The man from Lufthansa had just delivered
the key to the treasure vault.
3.
Four
days after the december 11 robbery, Henry Hill flew to Boston to revive,
refine, and otherwise direct the Boston College scheme. Burke was unhappy about
the result of the first game, in which he and several bookmakers had lost a
small pile of cash. Armed with $5.000 from Burke, Hill was to provide onthepost
encouragement for the crooked players to shave points.
The immediate focus of Hill’s attention was
the next night’s game between Boston College and Harvard. Favoured to win by a
lopsided thirteen points, Boston College was playing at home against an
inferior opponent. The smart money around the country was on Boston College to
win by a huge margin and easily exceed the anticipated point spread.
But Burke was betting the other way –
that Boston College would win by a much smaller margin. Bookmakers around the
nation happily took what appeared to be sucker bets: no way could Harvard stay
that close to a nationally ranked team.
They were as surprised as most of the
fans when Harvard not only stayed closed but threatened to win the game,
finally losing by only three points. Among the preppies who were urging the
Harvard team on sat the distinctly non-prep Henry Hill, who cheered himself
nearly hoarse. (Possibly, he was the only Harvard fan with a Brooklyn accent
there that night.)
Hill had good reason to cheer. Burke
would tell him later, “I got down real good,” meaning that his bets had paid
off, earning somewhere around $150.000 in profit, while Hill earned a somewhat
smaller – but nevertheless impressive – amount. As often happened in such
enterprises, the actual perpetrators would up with a relatively small slice of
the haul.
Hill went to the Boston College locker
room after the game. He met Rick Kuhn outside and handed him $3.000. James
Sweeney, Kuhn’s increasingly reluctant partner in the point-shaving scheme,
later received $500 of that amount. (Some days afterward, Kuhn received in the
mail a token of Mazzei’s and Hill’s appreciation – a new camera filled with
cocaine.)
Although Burke intended the scheme to
serve as something of an object lesson on the necessity of putting money to
work, he also provided insight into the vagaries that can bedevil criminal
Capitalism. In the case of basketball game-fixing, he discovered that although
he stood to win on any one game, he also faced some risk of loss in what was
fundamentally a risky operation.
That part of the lesson was driven home
some weeks after the commencement of the fixing scheme. The occasion was a game
between Boston College and Holy Cross, a contest of some interest to Hill and
Burke, since it was to be nationally televised and would attract strong betting
interest. Both men decided to bet heavily and Hill, in a talk with Kuhn, laid
down the rules; Kuhn would make sure that Boston College did not win the
anticipated point spread.
By coincidence, on the day of the game
Hill was at Burke’s home helping his mentor install brick on a kitchen wall.
(Apparently, Burke had discovered an area of the house which did not contain
brick, and had set about to rectify that oversight.) Before setting to work,
both men got busy on the telephone, carefully spreading their bets. Hill
invested $15.000, while Burke bet just over $50.000.
Curious to see how their investment was
doing, they turned on Burke’s television toward the end of the game. Hill wished
they hadn’t. To Burke’s mounting fury, the Boston College team was racing up
and down the gym floor, literally running away with the game.
“What the fuck is this shit?” Burke
roared. Hill noticed the unmistakable signs of an approaching explosion of the
Burke temper.
“Jesus, I told them -” Hill began, but
this explanation was cut short when Burke delivered a resounding kick to the
television.
“That’s it, no more with these goddamn
kids!” Burke shouted, as Hill hoped he would not vent his fury on less
inanimate objects. “I’m finished! I don’t want to hear about these fucking kids
anymore!”
“Okay, Jimmy,” Hill said, hurriedly
making his exit, hoping that Burke would not hold him responsible for the
failure.
In fact, Burke did feel that Hill was to
blame. But in the larger scheme of things, his temper rapidly cooled, for he
had already found a number of better ways to convert his $1 million slice of
the Lufthansa haul into profit-making enterprises. There was that deal in
Florida with Vario, for instance: a mob-owned resort club was looking for new
buyers willing to put up a modest amount of cash and pick up the place for
nearly a song. And that other deal involving a $250.000 outlay for high-grade
cocaine that could be peddled for profits up to fifty times that.
Yet, all of it hinged on the necessity
for his crew to keep their heads straight and do exactly what he told them.
Evidence was accumulating that they had paid scant attention to Burke’s warnings.
He’d heard reports of money being spent wildly, boasts to girlfriends, and
general loose talk, all followed by hints directed Burke’s way that it did not
make much sense for them to have taken all that risk for so little return. The
indications were unmistakable: unless Burke took action, it would all come
apart.
“Things are going to have to tighten up,”
Vario informed Burke. The caporegime of few words had summarised the situation
succintly. The FBI and police hounds were drawing nearer. It was time to take
steps to make certain there were no loose ends for them to grab.
4.
Martin
Krugman, who was ostensibly Werner’s bookie, demonstrated an equally astounding
lack of memory when questsioned about his client. No, he just couldn’t recall
much of anything, but he’d certainly think about it, and he’d call the FBI if
and when he remembered something. And Henry Hill, identified by Mr. X as a
participant in the Lufthansa heist and a member of a gun-running operation, was
the subject of the FBI’s first direct move. Armed with a search warrant, agents
rummaged through his house on Long Island. They found no guns, and Hill
professed to be mystified by talk of such matters as armed robbery.
5.
“Jesus
Christ, you’re sick, Henry, you know that? You need psychiatric help!”
Considering the speaker – James Burke – this
was an interesting piece of Psychoanalysis. But then, Burke, despite a criminal
record that virtually made him a textbook example of what criminologists call
an antisocial psychopath, was surprisingly straitlaced on such matters as sex,
alcohol, and narcotics, at least as they pertained to him personally.
So it was that Burke looked upon his
protégé Henry Hill with increasing dismay in the late spring and early summer
of 1979. Clearly, Hill was going to hell in a hand basket at breakneck speed.
He was drinking to excess and appeared to be stoned out of his mind most of the
time, often helping himself to samples of the narcotics he and his prison
friend frmo Pittsburgh were dealing. The same dealer – Paul Mazzei – had led Hill
and Burke into the basketball point-shaving scheme. Although the scheme was
finally ended by one of Burke’s temper tantrums, all involved had just about
broken even, and Burke had been willing to forget about it.
But Hill as a
degenerate was quite something else again. Visiting Hill’s home on Long Island
one summer’s day in 1979, Burke was astounded to see that his protégé’s new
bedroom had been redone completely in a style that could only be described as
high-tech bordello, complete with huge bed, strobe lights, mirrors, and a pile
carpet in which people seemed to sink to their knees.
But it was what
went on there that really go to Burke. Very much the traditionalist, Burke
found Hill’s household arrangements a zoo. Hill had a girlfriend, apparently
with his wife’s knowledge (he described the third side of his triangle as “my
Christmas present”), plus a string of other girls. Into the bedroom-playroom
they came, along with a circle of young people Hill had recruited into his
widening drug operation. They liked to party, and Burke was shocked one day to
find Hill in bed with a man and a woman, both of whom were teasing him; because
he was so stoned, he did not know which one had just performed fellatio on him.
To Burke’s further shock, they were attempting to arouse Hill so that he could
have intercourse with a man elsewhere in the house.
“This shit is sick!” Burke yelled later
as Hill finally began to emerge from his stupor. “What, are you crazy?” Hill
did not quite understand why Burke was so angry, and this sent his mentor into
another outburst, which ended in a renewed effort to get his protégé into
psychiatric treatment. “You’re sick, you stupid son of a bitch!” Burke shouted
at him. “You have to get help. You need a nut doctor!”
Burke had little hope that Hill could get
his head straightened out, so he decided to cut the ties that bound them
together. Henceforth, Burke announced, Hill was on his own; the Gent wanted no
more to do with him. With that break – taken, he thought, before the police
became aware of Hill’s narcotics operations – Burke hoped he would be free of
whatever legal consequences Hill was sure to suffer on the inevitable day when
the police would burst into Hill’s house.
Burke did not know that the police were
fully aware of Henry Hill and his narcotics operations.
6.
Six
months later he got his chance. In April 1980, police arrested Hill and four
other people on charges of smuggling narcotics from Colombia up through Key
West and other areas of Florida, then shipping most of them out to other areas
of the country; they kept the remainder for local dealers. (Subsequently, the five were among fourteen people indicted
by a Nassau County grand jury for trafficking in heroin, cocaine, amphetamines,
Quaaludes, and marijuana. One of the fourteen was HIll’s wife.)
In short, Hill ran a narcotics
supermarket, and Broder had one of the biggest cases of his career. He also had
one of the easiest. Hill and his confederates, just as Burke feared, had become
so careless that they left a trail a mile wide. To Broder’s surprise, they even
stored narcotics in Hill’s house. And Mrs. Hill had an incriminating habit of
writing down telephone messages regarding narcotics transactions and then
leaving them lying around.
During the raid, police found these and
the narcotics hidden in Hill’s house, but were so taken with Hill’s bedroom that
they neglected to search thoroughly under that deep pile rug, where another
four ounces of heroin lay concealed. Still, they collected more than enough
evidence to make a solid case, Broder decided. This judgement was rewarded when
a sudden development took everyone by surprise.
Henry Hill announced that he wanted to
make a deal.
Broder’s first encounter with Hill was in
a somewhat intimate circumstances of a strip search in the offices of the
Nassau County Police Narcotics Squad. First impressions revealed a man who
reminded Broder of a shrewd rat, cunning and street smart, alertly waiting for
the soft spot to exploit. Henry Hill was every inch the professional criminal.
A vast world separated the two men as
they sat down to discuss Hill’s cooperation. Broder was an idealist, a liberal,
and a great
admirer of Robert Kennedy. At one point he had headed the district
attorney’s Civil Rights Bureau. Born in New York, he had been an assistant U.S.
attorney in Wisconsin. Then, desperately homesick for New York and for his
culinary passions for genuine New York bagels and pizza, he and his wife
returned. Broder took a job in the Nassau County district attorney’s office,
working for Denis Dillon, who preceded Thomas Puccio as head of the Eastern
District Organised Crime Strike Force. Dillon, after winning election as
district attorney, cleaned out a politically corrupt office and recruited a
whole new staff of prosecutors, vowing that political considerations would no
longer play a part in the way the DA conducted the people’s business. To that
end he transformed his office into one of the best such operations in the New
York metropolitan area.
Dillon and Broder, members of the new
breed in the district attorney’s office, practically oozed deeply felt liberal
sympathy for the poor and downtrodden within their jurisdiction. Their
sincerity stood in stark contrast to the cynical world that Henry Hill the
street kid represented. A thirty-six-year-old crook stepped in the intricacies
of the criminal world and its established pattern of double- and triple-cross,
Hill was a conniving con man who had no sympathy for anyone except himself and
– to Broder and Dillon’s surprise – the women in his life.
And that concern, Broder perceived, was
mainly responsible for Hill’s momentous decision to become a stool pigeon. He had
been in prison before and had remained a “standup guy.” He had never betrayed
his mentor and protector Jimmy Burke, or the Mafia godfather with whom he was
loosely affiliated, Paul Vario, Sr. But now, in addition to the twentyyears
sentence Hill faced in Nassau, he was confronted with the fact that the women
in his life were in danger of going to prison for a long time.
Hill’s relationship with these assorted
women were so tangled that Broder never did quite figure them all out. But
however complex, they remained immaterial to the main point: for whatever
reason, Hill had agreed to give Nassau County information that, considering his
long criminal record and known associations with members of organised crime,
promised to be nothing short of sensational.
“You’ll have to go the whole yard,”
Broder told Hill. This was the prosecutor’s standard warning that Hill would
have to provide solid, provable information and later testify against those he
had accused. Only then would the D.A. consider whiping the current charges off
his slate.
In the beginning, Hill appeared to be
fulfilling the hope of both the Nassau County district attorney’s office and
the police that he would provide them with unparalleled insight into criminal
conspiracies. As Hill began talking, he made it clear he was prepared to give
them the key that would unlock the mystery of the Lufthansa case. All ears,
Broder and the police listened as Hill began telling a story that was hard to
believe. Not noted for mental organisation, Hill rambled all over the place,
maddeningly flitting from one topic to another.
But there were plenty of nuggets of gold
among the worthless pebbles: stories about fallout among members of the
Robert’s Lounge Gang; beatings of several men who had run afoul of the Mafia;
the killing of Tommy DeSimone; the intricate pattern of betrayal among those
involved in the Lufthansa heist; and, for good measure, an incredible (and
untrue) story about Theresa Ferrara. Paul Vario, Sr., had been smitten by her
beauty, Hill claimed, and the aging don’s infatuation led him to use her as a
courier to move $3 millions of the Lufthansa proceeds to Florida. Later, after
discovering she was an FBI informant, Vario had her gruesomely murdered,
destroying her body so that he would never again have to think of the physical
beauty that had so nearly unhinged him.
Taken as a whole, it sounded like lurid
fiction – Broder suspected some of it might be – but it was clear that Hill had
achieved his first aim; getting the undivided attention of the Nassau County
authorities. And it was also clear that Nassau County, in the person of Richard
Broder, was prepared to cut a deal. If, as Hill promised, he could deliver
Jimmy Burke to them on a silver platter (along with several other matters of
interest), then he – and the women – would walk on the narcotics case.
Broder, listening carefully, began to
detect the strong fear that permeated Hill’s rambling account, a fear that
seemed fixed on the figure of Burke. It was something beyond the normal
trepidation many men felt about the Gent and his reputation, yet Broder could
not quite figure out why Hill was so plainly terrified of the man who had been
his father figure for more than twenty years.
Henry Hill knew what it was, but for the
moment, he kept it to himself. He was not yet ready to tell Broder that he had
felt the shadow of death move very close to him, the cold chill of its breath
on his neck.
Like many such establishments in Queens,
the diner was all gaudy excess, the sort of place, its regular patrons liked to
joke, where they polish all that chrome and fake marble up front, while in the
back they’re greasing up the spoons.
Uninterested in either the decor or the
level of fat globules in the food, two men sat in a corner booth. It was a steamy day in the especially hot summer of 1980,
when even the asphalt seemed to sag under the heat.
Hill tried to remember, but a brain
dulled by narcotics was having a hard time remembering. Finally, he remembered
that a hood of his acquaintance, Robert Germaine, Jr., was present when salient
deals were discussed. Although Germaine was not a member of the Hill drug ring,
his father, Robert Germaine, Sr., was.
“That’s him,” Burke decided instantly.
“Okay, it’s taken care of.”
Germaine, Sr.,
was a professional criminal whose main claim to fame was his involvement in the
million dollars robbery of the posh Hotel Pierre in Manhattan in 1972. Soon
after the meeting in the Queen diner, he received a phone call from Burke. It
was a courtesy call of sorts. Burke announced that Germaine’s son had to be
murdered because he had served as a police informant in the narcotics case
involving Henry Hill. Burke expressed his apologies, but then, he reminded
Germaine, business was business.
“Do what you have to do,” Germaine said
simply.
Some time later,
the body of his son was found in Queens with a bullet hole in his head. (In a
horrible irony, it turned out that both Hill and Burke was mistaken. Germaine
was not the informant. The police brought this fact forcefully to the attention
of Germaine, Sr., when they arrested him later for narcotics peddling. Germaine
merely shrugged and said, “That’s the way it goes.”
Burke had intended the murder of Robert
Germaine Jr., both as a favour to his longtime protégé and as a means of
protecting any possible testimony against himself by the presumed informant.
But it turned out to be one of Burke’s few major miscalculations, for the act
stimulated Henry Hill’s thought processes, and he began to see clearly, more
clearly than he had ever seen anything in his life, that he was a dead man.
[Wrong.]
The arithmetic was irrefutable: Burke had
murdered – or contrived to have murdered – almost everybody in the Robert’s
Lounge Gang who had any Knowledge of the Lufthansa robbery. Of those who knes
the great secret, only Hill and Angelo Sepe remained alive. And now Hill faced
an extremely serious narcotics charge. What would prevent Burke from killing
even his old buddy Henry Hill to ensure that he did not cooperate with
prosecutors?
Nothing. Hill was alarmed at the casual
slaying of Germaine Jr., on a very flimsy supposition. In no small way, it drew
Hill’s attention to the question of his own place in the scheme of things. In
this mood, Hill arrived at the deduction that he had no choice but to opt for
the lesser of two evils – cooperation with the prosecutors. There was grave
danger there, too, but at least he would have a fighting chance, instead of the
certainty of his own execution.
Thus it could be argued that Jimmy Burke
drove Hill into the arms of the Nassau County District Attorney’s office. Hill
himself took the next step in the late summer of 1980 by declaring his
willingness to cooperate. Nassau County was certainly interested in what he had
to say about Jimmy Burke and the Lufthansa heist, but Hill guessed there were
other people who would be even more interested in that subject.
In the early fall of 1980, Hill contacted
his federal parole officer and announced, “I want to talk to the FBI.”
Like a magic talisman that opens the
castle doors suddenly, the mention of Lufthansa in Hill’s initial discussions
with the FBI produced intense interest. Plainly, the Bureau[cracy] was eager to
hear what Hill might have to say on this subject, but the first conversations
were disappointing. To Carbone’s anger, Hill rambled
all over the lot, and it was difficult to tell exactly what solid information
he had to impart. Carbone had the feeling the FBI was going to have trouble
with this witness.
McDonald was distinctly unexcited by the
entry of Hill into the Lufthansa case, which had been virtually moribund for a
while. For one thing, he was a key prosecutor in the ABSCAM case, especially
the trial of Senator Harrison Williams of New Jersey, and the mountain of work
was crushing him. At the moment he was in no position to become reinvolved in a
case that seemed to cause him nothing but aggravation. For another, the
tentative deal with Hill specified that if he provided solid evidence, he would
receive limited immunity on any federal charges and the pending Nassau County
charges would be dropped. That, McDonald understood, involved an intricate
arrangement between federal and local prosecutors, the kind of deal that
carried the seeds of its own destruction. If one of the parties felt that it
was not getting fair value, the entire deal would collapse.
And, finally, McDonald was not impressed
by his first sight of Henry Hill. Like all prosecutors, McDonald believed that
first impressions of witnesses were important, since juries tend to scrutinise
their appearance carefully, using it as a guide when determining such matters
as credibility.
Certainly Hill
looked anything but credible that day in the late fall of 1980 when he walked
into McDonald’s office. Shaking like a leaf from drug withdrawal symptoms, he
was a wreck. Glancing at the stack of baseball bats in a corner of
McDonald’s office – and wondering for a moment if the bats (which belong to the
Strike Force softball team) were used to enliven interrogations – Hill
introduced himself to the prosecutor and began a monologue that McDonald had
difficulty following.
McDonald had seen his kind many times
before – the protypical street hustler and small-time hood. Among Hill’s
incoherent rambling, however, McDonald detected a few flashes of intelligence.
With time and effort, perhaps this fair-skinned, sandy-haired man who looked as though he had just emerged from a washing
machine could be turned into a credible witness.
Or perhaps not, for just as McDonald was
musing on that possibility, Hill vomited into the wastebasket.
“Get the hell out of my office,” McDonald
snapped at him. “Go get yourself a lawyer, straighten yourself out, and then
come back to see me.” As Hill left, McDonald thought aloud: “This is our big
Lufthansa Witness?”
Actually, as things turned out, Hill
could not provide much in the way of evidence on the robbery. Carbone and the
FBI learned, to their dismay, that Hill’s firsthand Knowledge was limited. He
knew all about how Krugman the bookmaker had put his hooks into a supervisor at
Lufthansa, and he knew that his manœuver was ultimately rewarded when the
supervisor produced the critical inside information. But Krugman was dead, and
Werner had already been convicted, so that information was of little value. As
for Jimmy Burke, Hill said that he told the Gent about Krugman’s Lufthansa
contact and that Burke subsequently planned the heist. To FBI agents curious
why Hill himself had not been involved in the heist, Hill claimed that Burke
had wanted him along on the job, but finally decided against it because of “bad
blood” between Hill and Sepe. The estrangement between Sepe and himself, Hill
related, went back to their days together in the federal penitentiary in
Atlanta.
One day, Hill said, another inmate
deliberately shoved him. Hill did not retaliate, leading Sepe to call him a
“fag,” among other epithets. Since then, the two men could not even be in the
same room. At any rate, Hill claimed, Burke appreciated his help in setting up
the Lufthansa heist and later gave him $10.000 for his trouble.
All very interesting, but it amounted to
a very thin case against Jimmy Burke. So thin, in fact, that McDonald was
distinctly unenthusiatic. The only thing linking Burke with the Lufthansa
robbery was Hill’s claim that he told Burke about Louis Werner and later
received $10.000 as a reward. Without any other corroborative evidence, it
wasn’t enough to bring before a grand jury.
If McDonald and the FBI were disappointed
in what Hill had to say, the authorities in Nassau County were astounded. What
Hill was now saying to the federals was at some variance with what he had told
Broder and the Nassau County Police. For example, Hill previously had not
mentioned his participation in the Lufthansa plot. Even more curious was the
fact that Hill, although obviously aware of the FBI’s interest in Burke, failed
to repeat what he had said in the confines of the Nassau County District
Attorney’s office – that Jimmy Burke was a participant in the Hill-Mazzei
narcotics scheme, and was, in fact, “the irishman” mentioned in the wiretaps.
Broder began to get a gut feeling that
all was not well with the Nassau-federal deal on Hill. Was it possible that
Hill, having decided that he liked life as a federal witness, had no intention
of fulfilling his agreement with Nassau County? He was busy helping the FBI and
the [DEA] to make several cases, including delivery of Paul Mazzei, his former
[PIC]. As long as the federals were grateful for that, Hill had little
incentive to extend himself for Nassau County. Plainly put, he had become a
federal witness, and if he remained helpful to them, he could enjoy the
considerable power of the federal Government to protect him.
So much for Broder’s perception. In fact,
what was happening amounted to a dangerous communications gap between the
federal Government and Nassau County. It all turned on the operating definition
of the word “cooperation.” In the federal view, Hill would “walk” on the narcotics
charges against him if he “fully cooperated” with the Nassau DA. In other
words, “cooperate” was defined as “provide all the information he had.” Whether
Nassau could make a prosecutable case based on that information was another
question entirely; that was not Hill’s problem, for he could not be held liable
for the vagaries of the jury system.
Nassau County, on the other hand, equated
“cooperation” with “conviction.” In other words, if Hill provided enough
information for the county to indict and convict Jimmy Burke as the ringleader
of the narcotics operation, then Hill’s “cooperation” would then be adjudged
satisfactory. Anything less than a conviction would be considered
unsatisfactory.
There were political reasons for Nassau
County’s attitude. A politically conservative area with predominantly
republican enrollment, the county was sensitive to the crime rate. Since 1980
was an election year, the district attorney’s office was not about to risk the
wrath of voters by releasing professional criminals in a highly publicised,
major narcotics case [Wrong.] without getting something substantial in return –
such as an equally highly publicised conviction of somebody else.
Possibly it was the political
consideration that moved Nassau District Attorney Dillon to tell MacDonald that
the deal was off. Henry Hill would be indicted in Nassau County for narcotics
peddling. McDonald and Puccio were almost beside themselves with rage. Their
honour was prosecutors – exemplified by the promises they had made to Hill if he cooperated – was now in danger of being
undercut. It was not hard for them to imagine the effect such a development
would have on any future attempts to get criminals to testify against
coconspirators. [Wrong.]
The Eastern District Strike Force decided
to fight, and when Hill was indicted in Nassau County in early 1981, a nasty
brawl broke out between the two jurisdictions. The battleground was a court
hearing in Nassau held to determine whether Hill had fulfilled the terms of his
understanding with the county. The hearing amounted to an extraordinary
display. Lawyers from both sides snarled and scratched at each other in polite
legal language while Hill sat there like a wallflower who is stunned to
discover several handsome beaus fighting over her.
Obscured in the flurry was the most
telling legal point of all, a critical one made by McDonald. It was absurd,
McDonald argued, to talk of convicting
Jimmy Burke in Nassau County on a narcotics charge. Since Hill was an
accomplice in the scheme, under New York State Law the prosecution would have
to come up with a corroborating witness, someone who was not an accomplice and
who could buttress Hill’s testimony against Burke. But Nassau County did not
have such a witness and had no hope of getting one. So what was the reasonable
prospect of ever making a prosecutable case against Burke?
The final decision in that court hearing,
however, centered on the question of whether Hill had in fact fulfilled his
agreement to provide information to the best of his recollection and ability.
The court ruled that he had and that Nassau County had no right to indict him.
The decision, which sharply rebuked Nassau DA Dillon, did not confer much
credit on anyone involved, least of all Hill. In the aggregate, Hill had
precipitated the whole thing by trying to trump his deal with Nassau County by
reaching out to the FBI. In the view of many, Hill in effect had shrewdly
played off the two jurisdictions against each other; in both cases, the coin of
the realm was mention of two names that had the power to cloud men’s minds:
Burke and Lufthansa.
Hill, of course,
was the only real winner in the resulting controversy; when the dust finally
settled, he emerged unscathed. He no longer faced a major felony conviction,
and he had been granted limited immunity from any federal charge. In the
process, he had been transformed from the lowlevel street rat who had first
walked into McDonald’s office some months before into professional witness.
After Hill was enrolled in the Federal
Witness Protection Program – which provides new identities, relocation, and a
monthly stipend for witnesses who testify in cases involving organised crime –
he spent most of his time in debriefings with a wide range of Lawenforcement
organisations, particularly the FBI. He also testified at various trials and
before grand juries while wrapped in a cocoon of tight FBI security.
Most of the cases concerned relatively
lowlevel stuff, except for an interesting parole violation case prosecuted by
McDonald’s office. To Hill’s immense satisfaction, it involved Burke. This was
the second time in as many years that the Government had sought to keep him
behind bars by charging him with violation of the conditions of his parole. In
august 1980, Burke was charged with leaving the State in early 1979 without his
parole officer’s knowledge or approuval – namely, as Hill testified, to visit
Paul Vario, Sr., in Florida. (Burke’s lapse was understandable, since the
purpose of the trip was to deliver Lufthansa proceeds to the Lucchese capo. It
would have been difficult to secure permission to deliver the loot from the
biggest cash robbery in american History.)
Since this amounted to a technical
violation of parole, Burke’s remaindg to Prison was not expected to last long.
Still, McDonald noted, at least he was in jail, no picnic spot for anybody,
even as tough a man as the Gent.
“Don’t kid yourself,” said a New York
City Police detective assigned to the Strike Force. He began an imitation of a
weasely convict seeking to curry favour with a man of Burke’s connexions:
“Cigarette, Jimmy? You want the top bunk, Jimmy? No problem, whatever you like.
Can I get you some candy, Jimmy? Anything else I can do for you, Jimmy? Just
say the word, you got it, my friend.”
A minor exaggeration? Two detectives who
transported Burke from Prison to a court hearing were dismayed to hear a guard
call out cheerfully, “Good luck, boss!”
7.
Steven
Carbone took little notice of the weather, for he was absorbed in the daunting
task of trying to make sense of the jumble inside Henry Hill’s head. It was a job of considerable difficulty, for as Carbone and a
group of FBI agents discovered, Hill obviously knew a great deal, but seemed
incapable of putting it into any coherent order.
“Anybody like to spend a nice weekend
away?” Carbone had asked his agents just prior to the previous Memorial Day weekend.
The agents who volunteered had some sense of what they were in for: the
complicated task of moving witness Henry Hill to an FBI safehouse in the Pocono
Mountains of Pennsylvania. They would also have to figure out the logistics of
transferring his entire family.
Hill, as the FBI
men discovered, was a typical street hustler, alternately demanding,
recalcitrant, expansive, and charming. Above all, he was difficult, and Carbone
quickly realised he was dealing with the most aggravating witness he had ever
handled. Endlessly Hill beseeched him for assorted favours and bombarded him
with complaints about his treatment at the hands of the federal Government
(money seemed to be a dominant theme), and Carbone found his often moody
witness quite a handful.
But then, most such witnesses tended to
be difficult, and Carbone and his agents settled down to the task of finding
out what of value resided in his memory. The FBI agents were invariably polite
during these sessions, although privately, many of them began to think up
horrendous tortures to inflict on Hill. What he had to say was an odd mixture
of fact, supposition, rumour, thirdhand gossip, and on occasion outright
misstatement. Finding what was true in all this was like trying to discover
pieces of gold in a slag pile.
The problem,
fundamentally, was that Hill had existed too long in a world where truth was
relative and could be used or abused as events dictated. Worse, Carbone decided,
Hill had the mentality of an eight-year-old; he was seemingly incapable of
keeping the most basic details straight. Often, he would contradict himself in
the space of minutes, then profess not to understand when an FBI agent pointed
out the discrepancy. [e.g. BillO’Reilly, CharlieRose. HowardStern.
AlanDershowitz. MarkRegev.]
That was bad
enough, but Hill then passed into the phase that Carbone and the other dreaded:
the one which followed the inevitable moment when informants began to see themselves
as colleagues of the agents. The tipoff came
when the word “we” crept into Hill’s conversation. As if he weren’t
exasperating enough, now the agents had to listen to Hill talk as if he were a
fellow agent. [BillO’Reilly.]
Hill began to put forth suggestions designed,
he claimed, to clean up the Lufthansa case and put Jimmy Burke behind bars.
Founded partly on his exaggerated belief in the size and powers of the FBI –
“Hey, you guys can do anything,” Hill liked to say – the schemes had a number
of disadvantages. Among them, Carbone noted quitedly, was their illegality.
Patiently, he explained to Hill such important technicalities as the necessity
for the FBI to obtain warrants and court orders.
“Well, you guys can work that out,” Hill
would reply, rubbing his hands together like a man who had just built the house
and now expected the FBI to pain it.
There were some compensations for the
agents, however, chief among them the meals. Accustomed to a diet of fast food,
especially in the midst of a major investigation, the FBI men had little
opportunity to eat decent meals. Hill, it turned out, had an even greater
distaste for takeout cuisine, for he was a trained cook with genuine culinary
talent.
He demonstrated it one day after
announcing that he would prepare a grand dinner for “us.” While Carbone and his
agents waited, Hill bustled around the kitchen, frenetically preparing what he
promised would be a multicourse masterpiece.
“You know, this is surreal,” Carbone
remarked, as he watched Hill, humming like a contented little housewife, buzz
around the kitchen. At last, dinner was ready: lobster fra diablo, with all the
trimmings. Carbone took a bite; it was exquisite.
“I was worried about the sauce,” Hill
fretted.
“Oh, this is fabulous!” Carbone assured him,
while the other agents added their compliments. “Really good, Henry, the
greatest.”
But dinners of threestar Michelin Guide
quality were footnotes to the chief business at hand – the relentless
debriefing of Henry Hill. The agents began to unearth a few germs, not the
least of which was the matter of Martin Krugman. According to Hill, Burke had
murdered the bookmaker on suspicion that he was about to cooperate with the
FBI. He later buried Krugman underneath Robert’s Lounge.
“Underneath?” one agent asked
incredulously, for of many fantastic things Hill had told the FBI up to that
point, this was among the most remarkable.
Hill was adamant: Burke had buried
Krugman and two of his other murder victims beneath the cellar floor of
Robert’s Lounge.
Passed on to the Queens district
attorney’s office, Hill’s story led to a court order allowing the police to dig
up the cellar, followed by a highly publicised excavation that preoccupied New
York City newspaper readers for an entire week. It was the kind of bizarre
development New Yorkers love – “Only in New York,” as the saying went – and
even Jimmy Burke couldn’t resist joining the fun. In the sort of gesture that
infuriated the FBI and the police, Burke announced through his attorney that,
to prouve his innocence, he would be willing to pay for a bulldozer to
completely excavate the bar’s cellar. The offer was declined, and another black
mark was entered against Burke’s name: wiseass.
In his own way, Carbone couldn’t resist
the lure of the excavation either. On a saturday night he was watching a
Broadway play with his wife, but he wasn’t really concentrating. As she was
aware, his mind was a few miles to the east, in the cellar of Robert’s Lounge.
He could not wait to find out what the diggers had found. At intermission, he
got on the phone. The call was followed by “I gotta go.”
Figuring that if she couldn’t beat them,
she might as well join them, Mrs. Carbone accompanied her husband to Queens,
there to confront a media circus. Under the glare of klieg lights, a crowd of
reporters, camera crews, and curious citizens had gathered behind police lines
to gawk at what the diggers hoped would be a disinterment.
Carbone went downstairs into the basement
where he saw several men working in a chestdeep hole. They were optimistic
about finding something, for, as they told Carbone, their first sight upon
entering the place was a large, deep hole in the basement floor, covered by a
cardboard carton – along with signs of recent digging.
But, as had happened so often before, the
promising development turned out to be nothing more than an empty hole. Hopes
were raised when the police diggers found some bones, but laboratory tests
later revealed them to be animal bones, probably from a cow (Robert’s Lounge
was built on land occupied years before by a farm).
There were some Media carping about the
waste of taxpayers’ money in this exercise, but even police detectives who did
not particularly like the FBI – Robert Kohler among them – leaped to its
defence. “There were bodies buried in the cellar,” he said to his colleagues.
“But, you see, the minute Burke found out that Hill was talking, he made sure
the bodies were moved.”
Kohler was probably right, but it was of
scant comfort to Carbone and everybody else involved. Once again, a promising
thread had been snapped.
8.
Ahearn was not alone in his opinion: Steve
Carbone was beginning to think the same way. Henry Hill was still chattering,
but the task of making sense out of his ramblings was not getting any easier.
Hill still tended to confuse details and dates. He would casually mention
something important, then immediately careen over to another subject. Carbone
began to wonder if he was losing his mind.
In the hope of obtaining information from
the star witness, Carbone was patient with Hill, even in the face of Hill’s
repeated insistence that the FBI didn’t understand the first thing about
organised crime. He, Henry Hill, would enlighten them. The FBI agents did not
feel particularly enlightened, however, and they were pleased to discover that
Hill believed he was smarter than the agents, whom he would occasionally
patronise.
“I think I’m going to strangle him,”
Carbone told McDonald, adding his opinion that the prospect of getting anything
of substance from Hill was growing dimmer with each passing moment.
McDonald counseled patience. Although
Hill seemed to be downplaying his own role during a criminal career that
stretched back over two decades – almost all of it in association with Paul
Vario, Sr., and Jimmy Burke – it was only a matter of time before he would
remember something of great interest. Of this, McDonald seemed certain.
Sure enough, a short while later, during
early july, Hill was escorted into McDonald’s office, where the prosecutor was
attempting to get the cooperation of Judith Wicks, Hill’s friend and
coconspirator in the Nassau narcotics operation. Finding Wicks somewhat
reluctant, McDonald wanted Hill to persuade her that cooperation was the best
route. Sweeney of the FBI, Hill’s guardian, sat in on what seemed to be a routine
session.
Hill was able to convince Wicks to turn
herself over to McDonald, who then began checking some dates. At one point,
Wicks said she couldn’t remember where she was on a particular day.
“Aw, you know where we was,” Hill told
her, “we was up in Boston, fixing basketball games.”
McDonald reacted as though someone had
just punched him in the stomach. Behind him, on his office wall, was a framed
engraving of the Boston College campus.
“When?” McDonald asked.
“Nineteen seventyeight,” replied Hill. He
went on to list several players from “Boston University” whom he had bribed to
shave points. Hill added that he was acting in behalf of Jimmy Burke. Palpably
disappointed, McDonald realised Hill was confused, as usual; in fact, the names he mentioned were Boston College players.
McDonald stared at Hill for what seemed a
long time. At last, he said, “Henry, did the FBI put you up to this?”
“What, are you kidding, Ed?” Hill
answered, demonstrating a common New York habit of answering a question with a
question. “No, I wouldn’t do that, you know that.”
“Okay,” said McDonald, who noticed that
Sweeney looked almost stricken. Like McDonald, Sweeney instantly grasped the
significance of what Hill had so casually revealed. If it was true, Hill and
Burke were involved in interstate racketeering, far more weighty than anything
that could have been dredged up in connexion with the Lufthansa case.
McDonald dared not believe it. That
night, he reviewed an old Boston College yearbook and put together a list with
pictures of ten names, including those of Rick Kuhn and James Sweeney. The next
day, he showed the list to Hill. Unhesitatingly, Hill picked the names and
pictures of Kuhn and Sweeney as the two players he had bribed.
“He said what?” Carbone was nearly livid
with rage when Sweeney told him what Hill had revealed in McDonald’s office.
“You mean to tell me,” Carbone fumed,
“that this guy talks to us for two months and never bothers to mention this
little detail? Terrific. I wonder what else he’s forgotten to tell us.”
Carbone was further angered when
preliminary checking by his agents turned up unmistakable evidence – hotel
receipts, telephone records, and so on – that Hill was telling the truth.
Still, Carbone was bothered: Why had Hill waited so long to reveal this?
“So we fixed a few basketball games, so
what?” Hill replied when an annoyed Carbone questioned him. “So we gave them a
few bucks, and we made some bucks. So what’s the big deal?”
“So what’s the big deal,” Carbone repeated
evenly, trying to control his temper. “Henry, do me a big favour. If you
remember any other things like sports bribery, let us know, won’t you?”
“Oh, I sure will, Steve,” Hill replied
brightly, missing Carbone’s sarcasm.
Slowly, it all began to come together, a
large jigsaw puzzle that piece by piece was assuming the shape of the most
significant sports bribery scheme since the infamous college basketball fixes
of 1951. McDonald, accustomed to being disappointed by anything that showed
promise in the long hunt for Jimmy Burke, hoped that this promising thread
would not be snapped like all the others. But there was Carbone, bursting into
his office almost every day with still another piece of paper – a hostel
record, a toll call slip, a Western Union receipt – prouving the unbelievable:
Hill was right.
Buoyed by what he now believed to be a
major criminal case, Carbone was again on the prowl. This time, he spent more
time behind his desk, for the investigation was essentially a hunt along a
complicated paper trail. And as the trail grew in length, so it did in breadth.
For instance, to Carbone’s astonishment, his agents discovered that the ring
leaders had sent some money to Rick Kuhn through Western Union. And Western
Union keeps records: people receiving money have to sign for it.
One of Carbone’s agents, Edmundo Guevara,
known for his passion for detail and organisation, was assigned the task of
making sense out of all the paper other agents were collecting. Hunched over a
computer, Guevara tried to detect patterns that would point unmistakably to a
criminal conspiracy.
Carbone had one worry: increasing amounts
of evidence prouved the involvement of Hill, Mazzei, and some others, but there
was little to prouve a role in the pointshaving plot. Hill’s testimony, without
some backup, would not be quite enough.
“The telephone records!” Carbone suddenly
shouted. In a fortuitous flash of memory that turned out to be most
significant, Carbone recalled that some time after the Lufthansa robbery, the
FBI had subpoenaed Burke’s telephone toll records. Agents had pored over them,
but the records made no sense, for the numbers called seemed to have no
relation to the Lufthansa conspiracy. They were put aside in the thin hope that
someday they might be of some use.
Now they were. Hill had provided the
Rosetta Stone, and the mysterious pattern of calls, fed through Guevara’s
computer, suddenly made sense. What emerged was a distinctive patterns of calls
to major bookmakers, timed perfectly with the games Hill had claimed were
fixed.
“So we finally got lucky,” Carbone said,
reminding his agents that the telephone company destroys its records of toll
calls after six months. Had the FBI tried to get them in 1980, nearly two years
after they were made, there would have been nothing to feed into Guevara’s
computer.
The FBI’s luck got even better, and this
time, it was Special Agent Thomas Sweeney who scored. On the morning of
september 8, 1980, Sweeney was in Pittsburgh, where, with Special Agent James
Byron of the Pittsburgh FBI field office, he was to visit the home of Rick Kuhn
in the suburb of Swissvale.
It was 6:30 A.M.,
and Sweeney was about to employ one of the FBI’s favourite techniques, the
early morning interview. At that time of day, mose people, having just arisen,
tend not to be at their most alert.
Kuhn, just awakened, did not seem
especially surprised by the appearance of the two FBI agents in his parents’
home, nor did he react when they told him they wanted to talk to him about
“your basketball activities” at Boston College in 1978.
“You don’t have to talk to us,” Byron
said. With those words Kuhn had been warned; anything he said subsequently was
purely voluntary – and admissible.
Kuhn agreed to discuss the matter, and
all three adjourned to the FBI car parked outside. There Kuhn demonstrated
appalling ignorance, including a lack of familiarity with the Constitution. He
could have declined to say a word to the agents, and they could not have done a
thing about it. Or he could have demanded that a laywer be present during any
conversation.
As it was, Kuhn put his head in the
noose. After a few minutes of idle chitchat, Byron got to the point: there have
been “allegations of wrongdoing on your part” involving pointshaving, What did
Kuhn have to say about those allegations?
“Do I have to talk about it?” Kuhn asked.
“No,” Sweeney said, and again told him
that he was perfectly within his rights to leave the car and go back into the
house.
But Kuhn stayed, and to Sweeney’s
surprise not only discussed the matter, but admitted his role. Kuhn confirmed
Hill’s account in almost every detail. Sweeney, who was taking notes, could
scarcely believe his luck.
In twenty minutes of conversation, Kuhn provided
the heart of the case: Hill, acting in concert with Paul Mazzei and Mazzei’s
friends the Perla brothers, had conspired with james Burke to fix at least six
college basketball games.
The Kuhn admission overcame the last bit
of hesitation on McDonald’s part. Added to FBI Special Agent Edmundo Guevara’s
computer printouts showing the damaging pattern of Burke’s longdistance calls,
the admission meant that the case was ready to move forward into the courts.
And just as McDonald was about to proceed
in the case that he was certain would put Jimmy Burke away for a long time, the
wild card nearly destroyed it all. Henry Hill decided to play his own game.
With mounting anger, McDonald, telephone
receive pressed to his ear, could hardly believe what he was hearing.. A
reporter for the Washington Post was calling to inform him he was writing a
story about a major college basketball gamefixing operation run by a man named
Henry Hill. Did Mr. McDonald care to comment about it?
Mr. McDonald did not, for he and Carbone
had been extremely careful during the several months of the investigation to
keep its secrets. Yet here was a newspaper reporter who seemed to know all
about it. Where was the leak? The answer came quickly
enough: Sports Ilustrated magazine was about to publish a major piece about the
fix scheme. The coauthor and main source was Henry Hill.
McDonald stood in the center of his
offfice wanting to punch a wall. “I am going to kill Henry Hill!” he announced
loudly.
A short time later, an angrylooking Carbone
burst through the front door of the safe house in which Hill was staying.
“Hey, Steve, how are you doing?” Hill
said in the standard Brooklyn greeting.
“Hello, Henry,” Carbone replied. “I am
going to kill you.”
“What?”
“I said I am going to kill you,” Carbone
said, speaking slowly. “I am going to kill you in ways you can’t imagine. I am
going to kill you so that you are out of my life forever. Do you understand
that?”
“Hey, Steve, what’s your problem?” Hill
asked, looking around in some alarm. The other agents were not smiling. One of
them stagewhispered to him, “Please don’t get him mad.”
“What’s this?” Carbone snarled, throwing
a copy of Sports Illustrated.
“It’s a magazine,” Hill said.
“I know it’s a magazine,” said Carbone,
almost beside himself with fury. “What about the article in there? Did you tell
them all about the fixing?”
Hill confessed that he had, and explained
that his lawyer had arranged a deal in which the magazine had paid him $10.000
for the story.
Carbone’s concern, like McDonald’s, centered
on what Hill had said in the article, much of which was at considerable
variance with what he had been telling the FBI.
“Tell you what we’re going to do,” said
Carbone, lapsing into the form of pure Brooklynese he adopted when he wanted to
establish direct communication with Hill. “We’re going to sit down, and we’re
going to go over the whole thing, and we’re going to figure out exactly what
the truth is. You got it?”
“Sure, Steve, anything you say,” a
chastened Hill replied.
The resulting twodays session was a distinctly unpleasant
experience for all concerned. In the sort of casual acquaintance with the truth
that had so often infuriated Carbone and McDonald, Hill professed to see no
problem with the account he had given to Sports Illustrated – an account, he
brazenly admitted, that contained gross distortion and untruths. He did
not seem understand that the magazine account would come back to haunt him
during the upcoming trial. Defense lawyers, Carbone pointed out with some
asperity, would drag him through the story word by word and hang him with the
contradictions. And with that, there was a good chance the whole case would go
out the window.
Hill not only failed to grasp that
central point but also seemed unable to understand that his testimony had to be
precise; he could not treat the facts casually. Carbone and McDonald devoted
two solid weeks to the considerable task of readying Hill for trial, and the
process reminded Carbone of training an especially thickheaded dog not to
urinate on the rug. With growing edginess, Carbone
watched as Hill, just as he seemed certain of one aspect of the case, would
forget it a few minutes later and claim something else altogether.
McDonald was worried: his start witness
demonstrated an inability to keep things straight. He would have to be used
carefully. Meanwhile, trial date was approaching, and the main defendants
(there were five including Burke) had been hauled in. Burke’s arrest in july of
1981 was a source of immense satisfaction to FBI agents, who, acting under
strict instructions from McDonald, were to play the prosecutor’s longest shot –
they would point at the benefits of “cooperating” and would assure Burke that
there was still time to save himself. Burke heard out this standard spiel with
a smile, then responded in the way McDonald assumed he would.
“You tell Ed McDonald,” Burke said
quietly, “to go fuck himself.”
On october 27, 1981, the trial opened in
one of the cavernous courtrooms in the Brooklyn federal courthouse. Even in a
room that size, things seemed a little crowded. Present were five defendants
and their lawyers, McDonald and his prosecution team, and a packed house of
spectators. The room also contained a series of large charts the FBI had drawn
up showing, in organisation chart style, how all the defendants interconnected.
The jury could not fail to notice that a box marked “James Burke” occupied a prominent
place in the center of the largest chart. McDonald intended to make his points
graphically whenever he got the chance.
Defendant Burke, attired in an expensive
threepiece suit that made him look like a union delegate attending a fancy
wedding, was the focus of attention, for he had become at that point the most
publicised criminal in the entire city. Legally, Burke was in that courtroom
for a trial addressed to the question of whether he and his four codefendants
(including Paul Mazzei and the Perla brothers) had conspired, as the United
States Government charged, to engage in the fixing of basketball games.
But most people regarded the proceeding
as “the Lufthansa trial.” Mentioning the name Lufthansa was strictly forbidden
on the grounds that it might prejudice the jury against the defendants, but the
popular perception was that the Government, having failed to get Burke in
connexion with the Lufthansa robbery, was settling for the fix case as
consolation prize.
That was not quite true, of course, but
there probably was not a single prospective juror who had not read some of the
extensive newspaper stories during the previous three years openly accusing
Burke of being the Lufthansa robbery mastermind. And they had almost certainly
heard of Henry Hill, one of the FBI’s most highly publicised informants – the
man, according to the newspapers, who knew the secret of the robbery. So in an
important sense, the trial threatened to amount to a showdown on the question
of credibility between two professional criminals named James Burke and Henry
Hill.
Which was precisely what worried Carbone
and McDonald. “First time out of the chute,” Carbone told the prosecutor as the
trial was about to open, using still another of the animal metaphors he adopted
when discussing Hill. Even after all those weeks of pretrial preparation, there
remained grave danger that Hill might not get it straight.
And he didn’t. The defense attorneys were
on him like hungry dogs, and Hill revealed himself to be muddled,
contradictory, and uncertain of the facts that were staring at him from the
charts. Worse, he conceded that facts in the Sports Illustrated article
differed from the facts he had revealed to the FBI, then claimed that the
magazine had lied. It went downhill from there, including the defense’s
recitation of Hill’s criminal record and capacity for untruth. Hill’s first
appearance as a witness at a major trial was an unmitigated disaster.
Carbone was livid. Joining Hill and
McDonald in the prosecutor’s office during the lunch break, he exploded.
“You stupid son of a bitch!” he yelled at
Hill. “What are you an idiot? The chart’s right in front of you, and you can’t
even get dates straight!”
McDonald’s relative calmness during this
session had everything to do with a shrewd tactical manœuver he was playing
out. He had made Hill the first major witness, and as he anticipated, the
defense lawyers eventually exhausted themselves against that obstacle. In
truth, there was no real crossexamination of Hill, as lawyers commonly
understood the term. Since there were so many contradictions, and since Hill
was so completely confused, the defence was trying to nail pudding to the wall.
And when the defence lawyers had finished
pounding away at Hill, to no particular effect except that he appeared very
confused, McDonald played his high card. He called to the stand one James
Sweeney, the Boston College player and friend of Rick Kuhn who had been a
reluctant participant in the fix scheme. Much like a father getting his son to
admit that he had broken the upstairs window while horsing around, McDonald led
Sweeney through the whole scheme. Since Sweeney was not testifying under a
grant of immunity and had not asked for any consideration from the prosecution,
his account, recited with quiet sincerity, was devastating. The jury ate it up.
The rest was anticlimax. On november 23,
1981, after nearly four weeks, the trial ended. Through it all, Burke sat
calmly at the defence table as though the proceedings concerned a zoning
dispute. In his prison cell when the trial was not in session, however, he
demonstrated his infamous temper. “That little cocksucker!” Burke fumed to an
audience of fellow convicts on the subject of Henry Hill. “That lying, sneaking
son of a bitch! I give him five thousand dollars to make a few bets, and this
is what happens.”
Not surprisingly, Burke’s cellmates
agreed with this defence. But the jury did not: after twentytwo hours of
deliberations, it found Burke and his four codefendants guilty as charged.
On january 23, 1982, Burke dressed in
bright orange federal prison uniform, stood before a judge who sentenced him to
twenty years in prison. Burke demonstrated not even the slightest reaction.
Back in prison, Burke went on another
temper tirade. His rage arose from the circumstances in whic he now found
himself – imprisoned, not for the Lufthansa robbery of which everybody knew he was the
mastermind, but for a betting operation he had long forgotten.
In his fury about Hill and the fix trial,
Burke may have forgotten a number of other matters in his past that might come
back to haunt him. Perhaps he even assumed that everybody else who knew about
them had forgotten also, leaving him in no further danger.
But Henry Hill was beginning to remember
other things.
9.
Kohler
did not dwell on this thought for long, for his immediate objective was to
prouve that Jimmy Burke had murdered Richard Eaton. The case had preoccupied
him and his partner Detective Sergeant James Shea for quite some time, and they
now had the final connecting link of evidence in hand.
It had come from Henry Hill, who during
his continuing conversations with the FBI, mentioned Jimmy Burke’s custom of
murdering people who got in his way. One of the examples Hill cited was a man
named Richard Eaton, whom Hill knew casually. Hill also knew that Eaton had
attempted to cheat Burke in a big cocaine deal. He was therefore not surprised,
upon inquiring in march of 1979 about the whereabouts of Eaton, to hear Burke’s
answer: “I whacked that lying fuck out.”
Hill had felt a twinge of concern at the
time, t in the New York underworld, murder was not an uncommon occurence.
Besides, by the Moralstandards of that world, Burke was perfectly justified in
committing the murder, in view of Eaton’s gross violation of business Ethics.
And since it was a relatively trivial matter, Hill forgot about it until he
suddenly recalled it some time after he began cooperating with the FBI. McDonald was astounded by still another example of how Hill
would rack his brain for months trying to remember something incriminating
against Jimmy Burke and then mention, almost casually, his Knowledge of a
felony.
The murder of Eaton was not a federal
crime, so McDonald had no use for Hill’s testimony on that score. But the
prosecutor knew two men who did. One was Detective Robert Kohler. The other was
Detective Sergeant Joseph Coffey, one of the police department’s most famous
investigators, noted for his success in breaking Mafia cases. Coffey headed a
unit that investigated organised crime murders.
It was not until late 1983 that Coffey
and Kohler got to debrief Hill on the Eaton case, for McDonald deliberately sat
on the information for some time. During that period, he did not committ a
single word of Hill’s revelation on paper, while the basketballfix legal
process was under way, he would have been required to turn any such writing
over to the Burke’s defece attorney under the constitutional stipulation that a
defendant had a right to see all of the material against him. Therefore, Burke
would have been alerted prematurely that Hill had revealed the murder of Eaton.
Coffey was unimpressed by Hill, whom he
instictively distrusted. But as he listened to Hill discuss the EatonBurke
connexion, he noticed Kohler becoming increasingly agitated. And from Kohler’s
questions, he knew that the Brooklyn detective was finding that Hill’s
information meshed perfectly with what he had already determined to be the
truth. To Coffey’s surprise, he realised that Hill was giving them a
prosecutable murder case against James Burke.
Hill mentioned a number of other items during
the conversation. These Coffey found less compelling, and he summed up their
value to Kohler after Hill had finished: “Hill is full of shit. Mostly.”
“Mostly,” echoed Kohler.
“But he’s right about the Eaton thing?”
Coffey asked, knowing the answer.
“Yeah, he is,” Kohler replied, almost in
wonderment. After years of wrestling with a puzzle that lacked one little
piece, Kohler now had the corroboration he and Shea had sought for so long.
Kohler rushed with this news to Brooklyn
Assistant District Attorney John Fairbanks, who welcomed it with something less
than total enthousiasme. A young prosecutor who moved and spoke with an almost
lubricated smoothness that reminded many people of a psychiatric counselor, Fairbanks
had been on the case ever since Eaton’s body was found in 1979. Through every
step of Kohler and Shea’s investigation he had expressed his admiration of
their minor classic of criminal investigation. And yet, as much as he liked
both detectives and however much he appreciated the job they had done, he had
the sad duty as a prosecutor to tell them it was simply not enough; there was
no way he could even think of trying the case without that critical
corroboration. Now the detectives had brought it, but Fairbanks noted with
dismay that the corroboration had come from Henry Hill, a professional criminal
whose record for duplicity, untruth, and sheer criminality might cause grave
problems of credibility. The case, Fairbanks fretted, was largely circumstantial,
hanging by a thread. A witness like Hill, who had performed so badly during the
basketballfix trial in federal court, might be a time bomb just waiting to blow
up in their faces.
Fairbanks weighed the matter carefully.
What were the prospects that a local jury, watching Hill in action, would
return a murder conviction against James Burke? In the end, Fairbanks came to
the conclusion that a man like Burke, who had kept the forces of Law and order
preoccupied (and frustrated) for years with a long list of crimes that remained
unpunished, was eminently deserving of prosecution. The case of The People of
the State of New York v. James Burke would go ahead.
As the trial opened in the shopworn old
court building in downtown Brooklyn during the early fall of 1984, Fairbanks
had more than his share of problems. In addition to his fears about the
efficiency of Hill as a witness, there were also questions about the medical
evidence. Two medical examiners had come to different conclusions as to the
cause of Eaton’s death. One said it was strangulation; the other listed
hypothermia as the cause. It was the kind of difference defence attorneys liked
to exploit.
And there was another, more delicate
problem, centering on Burke’s rumoured propensity to buy off cops to beat a
case. Before entering the courtroom, Fairbanks took Kohler aside. “I don’t
really want to ask you this,” the prosecutor began, uncomfortably, “but I have
to. Look, uh, Burke got maybe two and a half million dollars from the Lufthansa
heist. That’s a lot of money and, uh ...” Fairbanks was trying diplomatically to
convey his fear that millionaire Burke might try to buy off the prosecution’s
chief witnesses.
Kohler was nearly shaking with rage. “No,
you didn’t have to ask,” he said, in what was nearly a growl. “Look, get this
straight: I never took a dime in my life. My badge isn’t for sale.”
“I’m sorry, Bob,” Fairbanks said. “But I
had to ask. You know Jimmy has bought a lot of cops in his time – or so we
hear.”
“Not this one, friend,” Kohler said. He
stalked away.
If Fairbanks worried what an insulted
Kohler might do on the witness stand, he needn’t have worried. Kohler had a
crisp, nononsense style of testifying that usually impressed juries. As Kohler
demonstrated during his testimony in the Burke murder trial, he also had a
knack for recounting little details that tended to stamp jurors’ minds with
stark reminders of the crime under discussion, in this case. Kohler had a whole
series of them, including one memorable anecdote. He had gone to the morgue, he
related, to check Eaton’s back for bullet holes or other wounds. The body was
frozen stiff, so Kohler stood it upright. It slipped from his grasp and fell to
the floor, bouncing “like a piece of marble.” The jury, Fairbanks noted with
satisfaction, hung on every word and certainly understood what the prosecutor
meant when he talked about a murder “in cold blood.”
The fulcrum of the trial, however, was
Henry Hill. Fearing the worst, Fairbanks led him through the story of Burke’s
“whacked out” comment, then turned him over to Anthony Lombardino, Burke’s
defence attorney, a lawyer noted for his flamboyance. Lombardino jumped all
over Hill, drawing from him the familiar story of his criminal career. Sensing
that his victim was on the ropes, Lombardino pressed ahead.
It was a serious
tactical error. As Fairbanks knew, Hill was the type of witness who was
initially uncertain, but under repeated body blows, he would gather his
strength and start to slug it out toe to toe with a tormenting defence lawyer.
The trick was to get to Hill early, cut him up quickly before he had a chance
to recover, then stop. But Lombardino went on too long, and Fairbanks,
hardly believing his luck, sat back and watched in satisfaction.
He was delighted when Lombardino
committed another tactical error: in his summation, he overdid his
characterisation of Hill. “Courtroom whore,” “the devil himself,” and “weasel”
were some of the milder epithets he used, and too long a string of them had a
numbing effect. Moreover, Lombardino tried to appeal to the jury, which
consisted of eleven blacks and one white, by alluding to Martin Luther King;
this manœuver clearly offended some of them. After a twoweek trial, they took
only a few hours to return a verdict of guilty on a single charge of
seconddegree murder.
“The bastard died of hypothoimia!” Burke
complained to his cellmates, apparently not understanding that the precise
method of Eaton’s murder – tying someone up, beating him into unconsciousness,
and leaving him in subfreezing temperatures is legally as deadly a method as
any – was to a large extent immaterial. That fact of legal life was brought
home in december 1984, when Burke was sentenced to twentyfive years to life.
The final fall of James Burke was
witnessed by some of his most noted lawenforcement adversaries, among them
Edward McDonald. “Hey, Ed, how are you doing?” Burke said, greeting the
prosecutor like an old friend. Fairbanks, not quite believing what he was
seeing, stared.
During Hill’s testimony Burke often
glared at another adversary, Special Agent Thomas Sweeney of the FBI. Burke had
a general animus for the FBI (“I hate the fucking FBI,” he often said), but for
reasons that were never entirely clear, he reserved a special dislike for
Sweeney. Oddly, he bore no grudge toward Carbone, who had the unsettling
experience during the basketballfix trial of encountering Mrs. Burke in a
hallway during a court recess. Mrs. Burke, who seemed to know exactly who
Carbone was, spent some time chatting with him about assorted topics of no
special consequence. All the while, Carbone felt awkward: here she was,
exchanging social pleasantries with the man who had spent a good part of his
career trying to put her husband behind bars.
You’ve
got to do what you’ve got to do.
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