"Pretty soon we're importing the cigarettes ourselves. We'd fly down to Washington, D.C., on the shuttle, take a cab to the truck-rental place, use a fake license and ID to get a truck, and then drive to one of the cigarette wholesalers in North Carolina. We'd load up with about eight or ten thousand cartons and drive north. But as more and more guys began doing it, things started to heat up. At first a few guys were pinched, but in those days they'd just give you a summons. The cops were tax agents and they didn't even carry guns. But then they began confiscating the trucks, and the rental people stopped giving them to us. We used every scheme in the world to get those trucks, from bribery to sending local people in to make the rentals. We burned out half the U-Haul places in Washington, D.C. They went bust. Vinnie Beans had the Capo Trucking Company in the Bronx, and so we started renting his trucks. He didn't know what we were going to do with them, so that went along fine until he realized he was missing a dozen trucks. When he found out that they had been seized by the state he dried up our supply. If we hadn't been with Paulie, believe me, we would have been dead. Eventually we had to buy our own trucks—the business was that good. Tommy and I bought a nice twenty-two-footer, and Jimmy Burke was bringing in trailer truckloads. For a while we were all doing great, but then too many guys got into the business. The whole Colombo crew from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, started glutting the market. They took away the edge. But by then I was already into other things.

    "I began stealing cars, for instance. It wouldn't have paid if I hadn't come across Eddy Rigaud, who was an import-export agent for the Sea-Land Service in Haiti. Rigaud owned a small retail store in Queens where he sold Haitian products, and he was somehow related to very influential people in Haiti. I remember one Sunday there was a whole story in The New York Times Magazine about his family. The deal was that since he could get hot cars out of the country, I would steal the cars he needed off the city streets.

    "It was simple work. I had kids working for me.

    Kids from the neighborhood. Friends of theirs. Kids who were savvy and knew what was going on. They'd steal the cars for a hundred dollars apiece, and I'd accumulate ten or twelve cars. I'd park them in the rear of parking lots to get them off the street, and I'd get serial numbers for them from cars that were about to be scrapped. If I gave Eddy Rigaud the identification numbers for the cars in the afternoon, I had a manifest for exporting the cars the next day. Then I'd send all the cars down to the dock. The paper work would just shuttle them through. The cars would be inspected to see if they had spare tires and no dents, just as they were described on the manifest. They were all new cars—little Fords and other compact, gas-efficient cars, because gasoline was a buck and a half a gallon in Haiti in those days. I'd get $750 a car. It was just a couple of hours' work for me, and then every five or six weeks I'd fly down to Port-au-Prince to pick up my money. That wasn't too bad either, because I'd always go down with counterfeit money and stolen traveler's checks and credit cards.

    "And all the time I'm moving around with Paulie. I'm driving him here and I'm driving him there. I'd pick him up about ten o'clock in the morning and I wouldn't drop him off until after he had his liver and onions or steak and potatoes at three o'clock in the morning. Paulie never stopped moving and neither did I. There were a hundred schemes in a day and there were a thousand things to watch over. Paulie was like the boss of a whole area, and he watched over the guys who watched over the day-to-day gambling clubs, hot-car rings, policy banks, unions, hijackers, fences, loan sharks. These guys operated with Paulie's approval, like a franchise, and a piece of everything they made was supposed to go to him, and he was supposed to keep some and kick the rest upstairs. It was tribute. Like in the old country, except they're doing it in America.

    "But for a guy who traveled all day and all night and ran as much as he did, Paulie didn't talk to six people. If there was a problem with the policy game, for instance, the dispute was presented to Steve DePasquale, who ran the numbers game for Paul. Then, in the morning, when Paulie met Steve, he would tell Paul what the problem was, and Paul would tell Steve what to do. Most of the time Paul just listened to what Steve said, because Steve really knew the numbers business better than Paul. Then he'd tell Steve to take care of it. If there was a beef over the crap games, he'd talk to his brother Babe. Union things would be referred to the union guys, whoever they happened to be, depending upon the specific unions and the kind of dispute. Everything was broken down to the lowest common denominator. Everything was one on one. Paulie didn't believe in conferences. He didn't want anyone hearing what he said, and he didn't even want anyone listening to what he was being told.

    'The guys who reported to the people who reported to Paulie ranged from regular hustlers to legitimate businessmen. They were the street guys. They kept everything going. They bought up the schemes. They kept everything nice and oiled. And Paulie ran the whole thing in his head. He didn't have a secretary. He didn't take any notes. He never wrote anything down, and he never made a phone call unless it was from a booth, and then he'd only make an appointment for later. There were hundreds of guys who depended upon Paulie for their living, but he never paid out a dime. The guys who worked for Paulie had to make their own dollar. All they got from Paulie was protection from other guys looking to rip them off. That's what it's all about. That's what the FBI can never understand—that what Paulie and the organization offer is protection for the kinds of guys who can't go to the cops. They're like the police department for wiseguys. For instance, say I've got a fifty- thousand-dollar hijack load, and when I go to make my delivery, instead of getting paid, I get stuck up. What am I supposed to do? Go to the cops? Not likely. Shoot it out? I'm a hijacker, not a cowboy. No. The only way to guarantee that I'm not going to get ripped off by anybody is to be established with a member, like Paulie. Somebody who is a made man. A member of a crime family. A soldier. Then, if somebody fucks with you, they fuck with him, and that's the end of the ball game. Goodbye. They're dead, with the hijacked stuff rammed down their throats, as well as a lot of other things. Of course problems can arise when the guys sticking you up are associated with wiseguys too. Then there has to be a sit-down between your wiseguys and their wiseguys. What usually happens then is that the wiseguys divide whatever you stole for their own pockets and send you and the guy who robbed you home with nothing. And if you complain, you're dead.

    "The other reason you have to be allied with somebody like Paulie is to keep the cops off your back. Wiseguys like Paulie have been paying off the cops for so many years that they have probably sent more cops' kids to college than anyone else. They're like wiseguy scholarships. Paulie or Babe, who handled most of that for Paul, had been taking care of cops since the guys were rookies on patrol. As they rose in rank, Babe kept taking care of them. When they needed help on a particular case, when they needed some information, Babe would get it for them. It was a two-way street. And when they took money from Babe, they knew it was safe. They developed a trust, the crooked cops and the wiseguys. The same thing went for everybody else. Politicians—not all politicians, but lots of them—needed help here and there. They got free storefront offices, they got the buses and sound systems they needed, they got the rank-and-file workers from the unions to petition when they needed it, and they got lawyers to help them poll-watch. You think that politicians aren't grateful? You think they don't remember their friends? And remember, it's not Paul Vario doing all this. Very few politicians ever meet Paul Vario. Not at all. This is all put together by businessmen connected to Paul. By lawyers indebted to Paulie. By building contractors, trucking company bosses, union guys, wholesale butchers, accountants, and people who work for the city—all the kinds of upstanding people who are totally legit. But behind it all there is usually a wiseguy like Paulie waiting for his payday.