And then they'd fly back and have to go rob somebody else. 'Sometimes they would take private planes and stiff the private charter service - I mean, everything had to be a scam and a ripoff - and they would go and lose all this money in Las Vegas. 'They'd just take a suitcase full of cash, jump on a plane, fly to Las Vegas,' Pileggi says. I'd rather go out there and steal, and make as much money as I can, and live as good a life as I can.' 'Īnd Hill did love to spend - but only when he had to. His father was an electrician he said: 'My father gets on a subway every day, and he goes back and forth, and he comes home with no money. 'But he wanted to put all that energy into doing bad things,' Pileggi shrugs. In some ways, Hill was a kind of model employee. He was gonna go back into prison, where about 1,400 mob guys were waiting to kill him.' attorney caught him in a lie - he was getting yanked out of the program. Hill was in the federal witness protection program, and 'everything he told me, he was basically telling the FBI. Hill might just have been spinning yarns, of course, but Pileggi had a pretty thorough fact-checker. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. And I said, 'What'd you do with the money?' And he said, 'I put it down on a yellow Bonneville convertible.' I mean, this guy not only remembers what he did, he remembers the color of the car.'Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Wiseguy Author Nicholas Pileggi The number came in, and it was like 1,200 bucks. The first money he made was on a number - he bet the number. 'He was extremely articulate, he was funny, and he was an easy interview,' Pileggi tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. The other key part of Hill's appeal as a subject, Pileggi explains, is that he was no dummy. 'And I said, 'You know, if you're going to do a book about Napoleon, it might be interesting to see that world from the point of view of the soldier.' ' 'He was sort of a soldier in Napoleon's army,' Pileggi remembers. Adapted by Pileggi and director Martin Scorsese into the 1990 film GoodFellas, it follows the rise and fall of true-life Brooklyn gangster Henry Hill - 'a little cog' in the Lucchese crime family who turned FBI informant after a drug arrest. Twenty-five years after its initial publication, Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy remains one of the signal narratives about life in the Mafia. Hill is the central figure in Wiseguy, the 1986 Nicholas Pileggi book that became the movie a 25th-anniversary edition is out with a new foreword from director Martin Scorsese. Ex-mobster Henry Hill (left, with Ray Liotta, who played him in the movie GoodFellas) met for a little Italian on the occasion of a DVD release.

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