GoodFellas (23 page)

‘That's why I would have to line up a string of maybe fifteen or twenty bookmakers, and I would have to let a few of them in on what was going on so that they'd be able to help me spread the bets around even more. I already knew the guys I had in mind. Some guys, like Marty Krugman, John Savino, and Milty Wekar, would make money with us, while other guys would lose.

‘When I got back and told Jimmy and Paulie about the scheme, they loved it. Jimmy loved to beat bookmakers, and Paulie loved to beat anybody. We were standing in Geffkens Bar, and Paulie kissed
me on both cheeks. I was back a couple of months and I was already bringing in one score after another. That's what I did and that's what made Paulie happy.

‘When I had the thing set up, Mazzei and Perla flew into the city for a meeting at Robert's with Jimmy and Paulie. By then Paulie had turned the basketball deal over to his son Peter, and Peter and I flew up to Boston with Mazzei and Perla to talk to the players. I had never met the players before. Perla had been the contact, but now we were going to be betting heavy money on these kids, and I wanted to make sure they understood the seriousness of what they were doing.

‘The meeting was set in the Sheraton at the Prudential Center, in Boston. Kuhn and Sweeney looked nervous at first. Before I would talk to them I took them, one at a time, into the bedroom and searched them for wires. Then they ordered the most expensive stuff on the room-service menu. They talked about their careers, and both said they felt they were either too small or not good enough to make the pros.

‘They knew who I was and why I was there. They knew I was the one with the connections to get the bets down, and they kept asking me to make sure to get bets down for them in addition to the twenty-five hundred we promised them for every game. They talked about shaving points and betting lines and the odds so casually I had the feeling they had been doing this stuff since high school.

‘I asked which of the upcoming games they felt we could shave. Sweeney took out one of those little schedule cards, circled the games he thought we could fool around with, and gave the card to me. They kept saying that they liked the idea of just shaving points and not blowing the games.

‘I remember going to the first game we tested. I wanted to see them on the court for myself. It was the December 6 game against Providence. It was really a dry run, but Jimmy and I put a few bucks down to see how it would work. Boston College was favored to win by seven. Kuhn got me the tickets, and I found myself sitting right behind Sweeney's parents, in the middle of the Boston College
rooting section. They were cheering like mad. When we got ahead by a few extra points, I began to relax. We were home. Providence was dead. We're racking up some points.

‘Sweeney is having a great night. His parents are jumping up and down. Sweeney started hitting from all over the court. I'm cheering right along, but toward the end of the game I see that we're too far ahead. I see that I'm cheering for my own disaster. Everything Sweeney threw in the direction of the basket went in. Bang! He'd hit for two and run back up court looking so proud of himself. I'm holding the wrong end of a bet and this jerk is looking for a prize. Bang! Two more. Bang! Bang! Two free throws. I'm watching this shit. I want to scream, “Miss the free throw!” but I got his folks in front of me smiling and cheering. I've got a disaster on my hands. Towards the end I thought I saw Rick Kuhn throw the ball away three or four times, trying to get us below the spread. I thought at least he was trying. On one play I saw him foul this Providence guy in such a way that the basket counted and the guy got a free throw. Typical for the night, the guy missed the free throw. But Kuhn was thinking. By jumping too late Kuhn let the ball bounce over his head, and the same Providence guy who had just missed the free throw grabbed it. The guy drove around Kuhn, who was standing there like a lamppost. The guy scored. Still, that idiot Sweeney is dropping shots in. I'm supposed to be puffing cigars on my way to the bank, but Sweeney has blown the bet. He wouldn't stop.

‘All they needed to win by was seven. They would have won the game and I would have won the money. Instead they won by 19 points – 83 to 64. Some scheme. A waste. They took a perfectly good no-lose deal and threw it away. It was ridiculous. If we had bet big money on the game we would have been dead. I didn't want to go near the kids. I talked to Perla and Mazzei and said I was pissed and Jimmy was going to be even more upset. We were serious people. If the kids wanted to shave points, fine. It was business. But if they didn't, then let's forget the whole thing. No hard feelings, just goodbye. I told them, don't screw around – you can't play ball with broken fingers.

‘Later Kuhn said that just before the Providence game he had gone over to Sweeney to tell him the spread was seven, but Sweeney didn't say anything. During the game, when Sweeney began scoring, Kuhn said he asked Sweeney what he was doing. Sweeney said he was playing to win. Kuhn said that after the game he had told Sweeney he was crazy, that he had just blown twenty-five hundred dollars. We had a Harvard game coming up that weekend, and I told Perla it was their second chance, but I was going to need some assurances. Kuhn said he had already recruited Ernie Cobb, the team's best player, into the deal. It was a lock.

‘At the December 16 Harvard game everything was perfect. We only bet about $25,000 on it because of the Providence disaster. We bet on Harvard. Our bet was that Boston couldn't beat Harvard by more than the 12-point spread. This time the players did well. They threw away dozens of shots to keep the winning score low. Boston wound up winning by only 3 points, and we cleaned up. Then, on December 23, we got bold and bet more than $50,000 on the UCLA game, where the guys were the big underdog. That time we bet that Boston would get beaten by more than the 15-point spread. Again the guys did fine. They managed to lose by 22 points, and I began to think that the thing might really work.

‘We were riding high. The next game, against Fordham, on February 3, we had trouble laying off enough bets in New York, and we sent Mazzei to Las Vegas to bet $55,000 with the bookmakers. This time we were betting on the underdog, Fordham. We bet that Boston could not beat them by the 13-point spread. Since Boston was the easy favorite, it was just a matter of how much our guys decided to win by.

‘It should have been beautiful. We should have cleaned up. Except that just before the end of the game we got a call from Paul Mazzei. He said that he had been driving into Vegas from the airport with the money for our bet when he got into some kind of a traffic jam, and by the time he got to town he was too late to get the bet down.

‘Guys got killed for missing the window on winning bets, but
Mazzei was smart enough to call before the game was over to make sure we didn't think he was holding out on us. We should have made a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but we wound up holding nothing.

‘It was an omen. We got some money down on the next game, February 6, against St. Johns, but that turned out to be a “push,” or a game where the point spread balances itself out and nobody wins and nobody loses. We let the money ride on the next game, February 10, which was against Holy Cross.

‘In that game Holy Cross was the favorite, and all our guys had to do was make sure they were beaten by at least 7 points. We, of course, bet Holy Cross to win by the 7-point spread. It was our big-money game. We bet with both arms. The bookies already had our money from the “push” game the week before, and we dumped even more green on top of that.

‘I was at Jimmy's watching the game on television. It was a party. Everything was going as you'd expect. Holy Cross was winning all through the game, but toward the end our guys seemed to get all fired up. It looked as though they didn't want to lose by too much.

‘Pretty soon, before anyone even realized it, they had come within a few points of the lead. As the clock began the final countdown, our guys tried to pull back, but by then the Holy Cross players went cold. Our guys are just standing there, but Holy Cross couldn't hit from anywhere on the court. Then the other Boston College players, the ones who weren't in on our scheme, started scoring from all over. They must have smelled an upset. It was awful. Of course Holy Cross finally won, but they only won by 3 points instead of the 7-point spread, and Jimmy and I went down the tubes.

‘Jimmy went nuts. He was furious. He put his foot through his own television set. I know he lost about fifty thousand dollars all by himself. I finally got Perla on the phone and he said that he had talked to Kuhn right after the game and that Kuhn had said they just couldn't bring themselves to lose by too much against Holy Cross.

‘That was it. No more. The end of the point-shaving shaving scheme. Jimmy was so mad at losing the cash that he said he wanted to shake those kids up. At one point during the night he said, “Let's go up to Boston and put their heads through hoops,” but we never went anywhere. By then Jimmy had bigger problems than money.'

Henry was out of prison only two months when he first heard about Lufthansa. His bookmaker pal Marty Krugman first told him about the possibility of the Lufthansa score. Marty and his wife, Fran, had come by to see Henry and Karen's new house, in Rockville Centre. It was a three-bedroom brick ranch house with a sunken living room, but Marty hardly looked at a wall. He kept motioning for Henry to talk with him on the side. Marty was so distracted during the visit that he kept grimacing at Henry to cut the house tour short whenever their wives were not looking. Finally, when Fran and Karen were in the kitchen making sandwiches, Marty told Henry about Lufthansa. He said that there were millions upon millions of dollars in untraceable fifty- and hundred-dollar bills sitting out there in a cardboard vault at Kennedy Airport just waiting to be robbed. He said it was the ultimate score. A mountain of cash. Marty said that the money, which was flown in about once a month as part of the routine return of U.S. currency that had been exchanged in West Germany by American tourists and servicemen, was sometimes stored overnight in the Lufthansa cargo vaults before it was picked up by armored trucks and deposited in banks.

Marty's information had come from Louis Werner, a pudgy, forty-six-year-old Lufthansa cargo supervisor, who owed Marty about $20,000 in gambling debts. According to Marty, Lou Werner was one of those long-shot bettors who had spent the past eleven years trying to support an estranged wife, a girl friend, a loan shark, three children, and a $300-a-day gambling habit on a $15,000-a-year salary. Like many airport bookies, Marty
Krugman had carried Werner on the rim for months in the hope of a jackpot tip on a hijacking score.

Henry, Jimmy, and the crew at Robert's had picked up thousands of tips from Kennedy's indentured cargo handlers over the years, but Lou Werner's tip to Marty was unique. Werner's information held out the promise of more money than anyone in the crew had ever robbed before. And Werner was so desperate to get started that he actually had a plan. He had methodically worked out the details: how many men would be needed, the best time for the heist, how to bypass the elaborate security and alarm system. Werner had even figured out where the holdup men should park. Most important, the score was in cash – clean, easy-to-spend, unmarked money. For professional crooks that kind of cash is better than diamonds, gold, or even negotiable securities; it doesn't have to be cut, melted down, recast or resold. There are no treacherous middlemen, insurance adjustors, or wiseguy fences involved. A guy can spend it walking out the door.

After meeting with Marty, Henry became obsessed with Lufthansa. The timing was perfect. Jimmy Burke was about to be released from Allenwood and temporarily assigned to the Bureau of Prisons' Community Treatment Center, a seedy hotel that had been converted to a halfway house on West Fifty-fourth Street, near Times Square. Jimmy would sleep at the center, but he would be free to roam around the city during the days and evenings. Tommy DeSimone was also due to be released to the halfway house at about the same time. Henry realized that he, Jimmy, and Tommy could beat by ten times their glorious $480,000 Air France score of 1967. It was the best welcome-home present any of them could ever receive.

There was only one problem: Jimmy Burke hated Marty Krugman. Jimmy had not trusted Marty since the early 1970s, when Marty was just starting out as a bookmaker and owned For Men Only, a men's hairstyling shop and wig salon next door to The Suite, Henry's Queens Boulevard nightclub. Marty did well enough in the wig business to star in his own late-night television commercial,
in which he would be seen swimming vigorously across a pool wearing his wig while an announcer proclaimed that Krugman's wigs always stayed put. Henry always found Marty Krugman amusing, but Jimmy saw him as a mark. He felt that Krugman was booking out of his store and paying nothing in tribute or protection. Jimmy kept insisting that Henry shake down Marty for at least two hundred dollars a week, but Henry kept trying to placate Jimmy with stories about how Marty wasn't doing well enough yet to be shaken down. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Jimmy was a part-time insomniac, and when he couldn't sleep he turned on the television. Whenever he saw Marty's wig commercial at four in the morning he felt duped. ‘That fuck has the money to go on television,' he would complain to Henry, ‘but no money for anybody else?' Eventually Jimmy had Tommy DeSimone and Danny Rizzo work over one of Marty's employees as a warning, but instead of giving in, Marty threatened to go to the DA.

‘Jimmy never trusted Marty after that, so when I finally got to run the Lufthansa thing down for him I emphasized how much money was involved, and I made sure I put in all the zeroes before I said the tip came from Marty Krugman. As I expected, Jimmy lit up over the idea. Still, he didn't want anything to do with Marty. He said he'd think about it. All he thought about was the money. After a week he finally told me to bring Marty down to Robert's.