Paul "Paulie" Vario

Vario ran a Lucchese crew out of a cab stand and a junkyard in Brownsville for three decades, and the men who worked for him did the two things that made money in that part of Brooklyn: they took what moved through the airport, and they lent money to people who could not get it anywhere else.

He is on this page under his own name. Most people have met him as Paulie Cicero, which is the name the film gave him, and the film is careful to show what he actually did all day, which was almost nothing visible.

The cab stand

A capo of Vario's kind is not a manager in any sense a business would recognise. He did not plan robberies and did not want to hear about them in advance.

What he sold was permission and protection: the right to operate in his territory, insulation from other crews, and a route to the family above him if a dispute needed settling. What he took was a share. Men brought it to him in cash, at the cab stand, and the transaction left no record anywhere.

Hill, Burke and the airport

Vario's crew included two men who could never be inducted — Henry Hill, whose father was Irish, and James Burke, who was Irish outright. Both earned heavily and neither could ever be made, which suited a capo perfectly. They took the risk, he took the percentage, and they had no standing to complain about the split.

When Hill was arrested on narcotics charges in 1980 and began cooperating, Vario was among the men he testified against.

He died at the federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, on 3 May 1988.