Wiseguy
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family |
|---|---|
| Author: | Nicholas Pileggi |
| Genres: | |
| Publisher: |
“At the age of twelve my ambition was to become a gangster. To be a wiseguy. Being a wiseguy was better than being President of the United States. To be a wiseguy was to own the world.”—Henry Hill
Wiseguy is Nicholas Pileggi’s remarkable bestseller, the most intimate account ever printed of life inside the deadly high-stakes world of what some people call the Mafia. Wiseguy is Henry Hill’s story, in fascinating, brutal detail, the never-before-revealed day-to-day life of a working mobster—his violence, his wild spending sprees, his wife, his mistresses, his code of honor.
Henry Hill knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and he turned Federal witness to save his own life. The mob is still hunting him for what he reveals in Wiseguy: hundreds of crimes including arson, extortion, hijacking, and the $6 million Lufthansa heist, the biggest successful cash robbery in U.S. history, which led to ten murders. A firsthand account of the secret world of the mob,
Wiseguy is more compelling than any novel.
| Find it: |
|---|
Related works
- 1991 BAFTA-Film winner
- 1991 Edgar–Video nominee
- 1991 Golden Globe-Drama nominee
- 1991 Oscar-Picture nominee
- Score: 28.41
Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece GoodFellas immortalizes the hilarious, horrifying life of actual gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), from his teen years on the streets of New York to his anonymous exile under the Witness Protection Program. The director’s kinetic style is perfect for recounting Hill’s ruthless rise to power in the 1950s as well as his drugged-out fall in the late 1970s; in fact, no one has ever rendered the mental dislocation of cocaine better than Scorsese. Scorsese uses period music perfectly, not just to summon a particular time but to…
