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Using the youngster's information and an accompanying affidavit from the Brooklyn district attorney that verified the youngster's reliability as an informant, Ma
Tapes were made daily. Each reel ran twenty-four hundred feet. By the time Ma
It was not long before Ma
Most of the hoods the police had been able to watch over the years were relegated to one or perhaps two very narrowly delineated areas of mob business. Narcotics cops followed junk dealers, their suppliers, their couriers, and even a few distributors. Gambling-suppression squads kept tabs on bookmakers and policy bankers, who never seemed to talk to anyone who wasn't either another bookmaker or a customer. There were loan sharks, hijackers, labor racketeers, and extortionists of all kinds almost constantly under police surveillance, but never before had Da
Henry Hill was different. Somehow he was able to move effortlessly through all levels of the mob's hierarchy. At first it thoroughly baffled Ma
When De
But most of the case against Henry Hill was based on the wiretap reports. Ma
"I've sat on hundreds upon hundreds of wires," Ma
"The danger with the phone, even for wiseguys, is that it's so easy. You talk on it all day long and all night long saying nothing. Your wife orders groceries. You find out the correct tune. You call Grandma about di
"One of the most common errors made by those being tapped, especially in drug cases where the subjects might even suspect they are being overheard, is to employ a 'code' language. In court we get experienced narcotics agents and other experts who can always interpret the code in such a way that even the most sympathetic juries will vote to convict. In the Hill case, for instance, they used gems, such as opals, as a code for drugs. They talked about the amount of money opals should be bought and sold for. In these cases a prosecutor would simply call in a professional jeweler to testify that the amounts of money being attributed to the gems had no basis in reality."
Detective Ma