Wise Guy - Life In A Mafia Family

Nicholas Pileggi's vivid, unvarnished, journalistic chronicle of the life of Henry Hill - the working-class Brooklyn kid who knew from age twelve that "to be a wiseguy was to own the world," who grew up to live the highs and lows of the mafia gangster's life - has been hailed as "the best book ever written on organized crime" (Cosmopolitan).

Wise Guy - Life in a Mafia Family

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"GoodFellas," scheduled to open Sept. 21 in Chicago, is a memoir of life in the Mafia, narrated in the first person by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), an Irish-Italian kid whose only ambition, from his earliest teens, was to be a "wise guy," a Mafioso. There is also narration by Karen, the Jewish girl (Lorraine Bracco) who married him, and who discovered that her entire social life was suddenly inside the Mafia; mob wives never went anywhere or talked to anyone who was not part of that world, and eventually, she says, the values of the Mafia came to seem like normal values. She was even proud of her husband for not lying around the house all day, for having the energy and daring to go out and steal for a living.

There is a passage early in the film in which young Henry Hill looks out the window of his family's apartment and observes with awe and envy the swagger of the low-level wise guys in the social club across the street, impressed by the fact that they got girls, drove hot cars, had money, that the cops never gave them tickets, that even when their loud parties lasted all night, nobody ever called the police.

In all of his work, which has included arguably the best film of the 1970s ("Taxi Driver") and of the 1980s ("Raging Bull"), Scorsese has never done a more compelling job of getting inside someone's head as he does in one of the concluding passages of "GoodFellas," in which he follows one day in the life of Henry Hill, as he tries to do a cocaine deal, cook dinner for his family, placate his mistress and deal with the suspicion that he's being followed.

Wiseguy Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis tohelp you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:Plot SummaryChaptersCharactersObjects/PlacesThemesStyleQuotes This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion and a Free Quiz onWiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi.Nicholas Pileggi's non-fiction book, Wiseguy, is the basis for the hit movie, GoodFellas, directed by Martin Scorsese (1990). Wiseguy is the true story of Henry Hill, a member of the Lucchese organized crime family in New York. Henry's heyday takes place during the 1960s and 1970s during which time he works under prominent mob boss Paul Vario in the Brownsville-East New York section of Brooklyn. Henry is drawn to the mafia lifestyle as a young boy, taking a job at Tuddy Vario's cabstand at the age of eleven. The impressionable boy is introduced to the wealth and power that is granted the men in the Varios' employ. As these men are criminals by nature, they have no qualms about luring young Henry into the life. Henry is industrious, clever, and willing to hustle to run whatever errands the men need. He quickly earns the approval of his elders, who allow him to drive their cars and drink their booze, making Henry feel like an adult. Henry feels accepted and approved of for the first time in his life. He neglects his schooling, and when the truant officer sends a letter to his parents, the Varios respond by threatening Henry's mailman to ensure Henry never receives another such letter.

Henry is ambitious. As he comes of age, he throws himself into wiseguy schemes with gusto. Paul Vario is even more impressed with the adult Henry than he was with the child. Henry is reliable, loyal, and quick to recognize and act on an opportunity. Paulie introduces Henry to Jimmy Burke, who teaches Henry the illegal cigarette business. Jimmy's true passion, however, is hijacking. During the '60s and '70s, the mafia has great influence at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York and hijacking airline cargo becomes a major mafia pastime. Henry and his pals pull of a major heist, stealing nearly half a million dollars from Air France. This heist propels Henry, Jimmy, and their friend Tommy DeSimone to a higher echelon within the mafia.

Shortly after being released, Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy stumble across the opportunity to reprise their Air France score, but this time for ten times the payout. The Lufthansa airlines theft nets them five million dollars in cash plus hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stolen jewels. The three friends should be on top of the world, but the Lufthansa strike is what finally destroys their lifestyle. Jimmy becomes greedy and paranoid and starts killing off everyone involved in the heist except a few key members of his own crew. Tommy's violent ways come back to haunt him as a rival crime family kills him in revenge for Tommy's having killed a made man. Henry has even bigger problems, as he is arrested in connection with a narcotics conspiracy.

Henry Hill was a hood. He was a hustler. He had schemed and plotted and broken heads. He knew how to bribe and he knew how to con. He was a full-time working racketeer, an articulate hoodlum from organized crime, the land of rara avis that should please social anthropologists as much as cops. On the street he and his friends referred to each other as wiseguys. It seemed to me that a book about his life might provide an insider's look at a world usually heard about either from the outside or from the capo di tutti capi, top.

"My father was the kind of guy who worked hard his whole life and was never there for the payday. When I was a kid he used to say he was a 'subway-man,' and it made me want to cry. He helped organize the electrical workers' union, Local Three, and got flowers for his funeral. He worked on skyscrapers in Manhattan and housing projects in Queens, and we could never move out of our crummy three-bedroom house jammed with seven kids, one of them stuck in his bed with a bum spine. We had money to eat, but we never had extras. And every day I saw everyone else, not just the wiseguys, making a buck. My old man's life wasn't going to be my life. No matter how much he yelled at me, no matter how many beatings I took, I wouldn't listen to what he said. I don't think I even heard him. I was too busy learning about paydays. I was learning how to earn.

"We were always scheming. Everything was a scheme. Tuddy got me a job unloading deliveries at a high-class Italian food store just so I could toss the store's most expensive items through the windows of Tuddy's cabs, which he had parked strategically nearby. It wasn't that Tuddy or Lenny or Paul needed the stuff-the imported olive oil, prosciutto, or tuna fish. The Varies had more than enough money to buy the store a hundred times over. It was just that stuff that was stolen always tasted better than anything bought. I remember years later, when I was doing pretty well in the stolen credit-card business, Paulie was always asking me for stolen credit cards whenever he and his wife, Phyllis, were going out for the night. Paulie called stolen cards 'Muldoons,' and he always said that liquor tastes better on a Muldoon. The fact that a guy like Paul Vario, a capo in the Lucchese crime family, would even consider going out on a social occasion with his wife and run the risk of getting caught using a stolen card might surprise some people. But if you knew wiseguys you would know right away that the best part of the night for Paulie came from the fact that he was getting over on somebody. It wasn't the music or the floor show or the food-and he loved food-or even that he was going out with Phyllis, who he adored. The real thrill of the night for Paulie, bis biggest pleasure, was that he was robbing someone and getting away with it.

I wanted to enlist in the paratroopers. I told him he had to sign me in. He started to smile, and he called my mother and the whole family. My mother was nervous, but my father was really happy. That afternoon I went to the DeKalb Avenue recruitment office and signed up. The next day I went to the cabstand and told Tuddy what I'd done. He thought I was crazy. He said he was going to get Paul. Now Paulie shows up, very concerned. He sits me down alone. He looks me in the eye and asks me was there anything wrong, was there anything I wasn't telling him. 'No,' I said. 'Are you sure?' he asked. 'Yeah,' I said. Then he got very quiet. We're in the back room of the cabstand surrounded by wiseguys. He's got two carloads of shooters on the street. The place is as safe as a tomb and he's whispering. He says if I want to get out of it, he can fix it with the recruitment office. He can buy me back the papers.

It was understood on the street that Paul Vario ran one of the city's toughest and most violent gangs. In Brownsville-East New York the body counts were always high, and in the 1960s and 1970s the Vario thugs did most of the strong-arm work for the rest of the Lucchese crime family. There were always some heads to bash on picket lines, businessmen to be squeezed into making their loan-shark payments, independents to be straightened out over territorial lines, potential witnesses to be murdered, and stool pigeons to be buried. And there were always young cabstand tough guys such as Bruno Facciolo, Frank Manzo, and Joey Russo who were ready to go out and break a few heads whenever Paul gave the order, and such young shooters as Jimmy Burke, Anthony Stabile, and Tommy DeSimone who were happy to take on the most violent assignments. But they did this work on the side; almost all of these wiseguys were employed, to some degree, in one kind of business or another. They were small-time entrepreneurs. They ran two-rig trucking firms. They owned restaurants. For example, Jimmy Burke was a hijacker, but he also had a partnership in several nonunion storefront clothing sweatshops in Queens. Bruno Facciolo owned Bruno's, a ten-table Italian restaurant in the neighborhood, and prided himself on his meat sauce. Frank Manzo, who was called "Frankie the Wop," owned the Villa Capra restaurant in Cedarhurst and had been active in the carpenter's union until his first felony conviction. And Joey Russo, a solidly built youngster, was a cab driver and construction worker. 041b061a72