Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family
Nicholas Pileggi. Simon & Schuster, $17.45 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-671-44734-2
This is a riveting account of organized crime as a way of life. The ""wiseguy'' (mob parlance for a street-level hoodlum) is Henry Hill, 30-year veteran of a Brooklyn strong-arm branch of the Luchese crime family, who turned against and helped convict his former associates five years ago and entered the Federal Witness Protection Program. Pileggi, a crime reporter for New York writing here with Hill's cooperation, does a superb job of re-creating the gangster's career, from his early days as an errand boy (at 12) to racketeer Paulie Vario in Brooklyn's BrownsvilleEast New York section, to his pivotal roles in a Boston College point-shaving scandal and the $6-million Lufthansa heist at Kennedy Airport in 1978. Hill's story becomes an extraordinary vantage on a demimonde that lives a high, violent, score-to-score life in which car theft, hijacking-to-order, credit-card scams, cigarette smuggling, and other hustles and schemes are as workaday as 9-to-5 at the office. Literary Guild featured alternate. Foreign rights: Sterling Lord. January 30
Details
Reviewed on: 01/01/1985
Genre: Nonfiction
Mass Market Paperbound - 978-0-671-63392-9
Paperback - 331 pages - 978-0-8161-4206-4