A great insight into the motivations, strategies, and personalities of organized crime in New York in the 50s - 60s. Exactly what I was looking for. ( )

Henry the rat fink
a real coked up piece of work
just watch the movie. ( )

A shallow portrait of a psychopath. It should be interesting to see things from Henry Hill and his wife's perspectives, but there is so little there. Even as they are killing people, they like to defend themselves as being just like big kids, who like to have fun. They are addicted to drugs and to gambling, so the fun is predictable.

> Then Tuddy said from now on all mail from the school gets delivered to the pizza parlor, and if the guy ever again delivers another letter from the school to my house, Tuddy's going to shove him in the pizza oven feet first. "That was it. No more letters from truant officers. No more letters from the school. In fact, no more letters from anybody. Finally, after a couple of weeks, my mother had to go down to the post office and complain."

> 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. … 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.

> And still, the idea of trusting myself to the feds was almost as scary as having to face Jimmy. It wasn't that the feds were crooked and would sell me out. It was that they were so dumb. They were always making mistakes. In my own drug case, for instance, I knew that the informant was Bobby Germaine's son, because the cops had accidentally left his name in the court papers. They were always fucking up like that, and I didn’t want them fucking up with my life. ( )

First this book is an oldie but goodie. If you want a book that reads exactly like the movie this is it. This book is based off of fact but the story itself at times lends to fiction for most law abiding citizens. This book was a collaborative effort between Nicholas Pileggi and mobster Henry Hill.This book sort of romantizes the lifestyle of the criminal Hill and his association with the Lucchese crime family. If you want a more rounded perspective of the story read "On the Run: A Mafia Childhood: Gregg Hill, Gina Hill". ( )

New York mobster Henry Hill started his criminal career in 1955, at the tender age of eleven, running errands for the local mafia. He continued on with a rather impressive variety of illegal activities until 1980, when he realized that two remaining options were to cooperate with the FBI and enter the Witness Protection Program, or to get whacked by his supposed friends for knowing too much about a multimillion-dollar robbery. (He chose the FBI.)

This biography of Hill -- although perhaps it's at least partly an autobiography, as much of it is in his own words -- was the basis for the movie Goodfellas. I haven't seen that particular film, but I will say that I was a little surprised by just how much the people described here resembled some of the gangsters I have seen in movies and TV. I'm not sure whether I find that fact entertaining, disappointing, or kind of scary.

I did learn some things about the structure and day-to-day business of organized crime that I failed to pick up from watching The Sopranos, though. And the book also offers some insights into the psychology of career criminals, although it turns out not to be too terribly profound. Mostly it boils down to a few simple things: 1) Whatever everybody else around you is doing seems perfectly normal. 2) Money and power are nice! And 3) nobody really expects to be caught. (This belief is apparently far less irrational than it sounds, or at least it was in Hill's day.)

There are some hair-curling stories in here, but on the whole I didn't find it quite as engrossing as it seemed like it ought to be. More than anything, the staggering levels of corruption depicted here left me feeling kind of depressed. ( )