Wiseguy

Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy is a work of narrative nonfiction that chronicles the life of Henry Hill, a mid-level organized-crime associate who spent twenty-five years inside the American Mafia before becoming a federal witness. The book, which inspired Martin Scorsese's film Goodfellas, draws on extensive interviews with Hill to reconstruct his rise and fall within the criminal underworld of New York City.

The book opens in May 1980 with Hill sitting in a Nassau County jail cell on narcotics conspiracy charges. Federal prosecutors were simultaneously investigating him for the $6 million Lufthansa German Airlines robbery and a Boston College basketball point-shaving scheme, a betting fix in which players deliberately manipulated the score margin. Hill learned that Paul Vario, the mob boss who raised him from childhood, had abandoned him, and that his closest friend of over twenty years, James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke, was planning to murder him. With no other option, Hill decided to enter the Justice Department's Federal Witness Protection Program along with his wife, Karen, and their two daughters.

The narrative moves back to 1955, when eleven-year-old Henry wandered into the Euclid Avenue Taxicab and Limousine Service in the Brownsville-East New York section of Brooklyn, looking for an after-school job. The cabstand was the unofficial headquarters of Paul Vario, a rising capo, or captain, in the Lucchese crime family, one of New York City's five organized-crime families. Henry, the son of an Irish-born electrician and a Sicilian-American mother, was hired by Vito "Tuddy" Vario, who taught him to drive at twelve and trusted him enough to let him remain during private conversations. Henry earned money through small-time hustles: fencing stolen goods, delivering policy slips for the numbers racket (an illegal lottery), and passing counterfeit bills. At thirteen he met Jimmy Burke, already a legendary hijacker known for extreme generosity and extreme violence. On Henry's fourteenth birthday, Tuddy gave him a no-show union card, and Henry stopped attending school entirely. When the school sent truancy letters, Tuddy's men kidnapped the family's mailman and threatened to shove him in the pizza oven if he ever delivered another school letter to the Hill house. Henry's first arrest, at sixteen, was celebrated by the crew as a rite of passage. The neighborhood, birthplace of Murder Incorporated, a notorious 1930s and 1940s hit squad, treated wiseguys as local royalty. Henry enlisted in the paratroopers at seventeen and ran illegal operations at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Returning from the army in 1963, Henry partnered with Paul Vario's son Lenny. Vario placed them at a restaurant secretly owned by a Lucchese family boss, but the arrangement collapsed. Henry expanded into stolen credit cards, cigarette smuggling with Tommy DeSimone, a volatile young crew member, and exporting stolen cars. Vario operated through intermediaries, never wrote anything down, never used a phone except from pay booths, and provided protection for his men while they earned independently and kicked tribute upward.

In 1965, Henry met Karen Freid, an eighteen-year-old Jewish girl from Long Island. Karen was initially repelled but became dazzled by Henry's connections: front-row seats at nightclubs, champagne from celebrities, kitchen entrances past long lines. They eloped to North Carolina, and Henry converted to Judaism. Karen gradually absorbed the rhythms of the mob world, rationalizing Henry's lifestyle by noting that his friends all appeared to have legitimate jobs.

Henry's operations expanded through Kennedy Airport, where Burke's crew dominated hijacking and cargo worth billions passed through annually. Henry's first major score came from the Air France heist in April 1967. Using a tip from Bobby "Frenchy" McMahon, an Air France cargo foreman, Henry devised an elaborate scheme to duplicate a security guard's key. On a Saturday night before a holiday that delayed the bank pickup, he walked into the cargo area, loaded seven canvas bags of cash into a suitcase, and walked out. The haul totaled $480,000. Henry invested his share in a bookmaking operation and took over The Suite, a Queens Boulevard supper club.

Violence pervaded daily life. Tommy DeSimone murdered Billy Batts, a made man (a formally inducted member) of the Gambino crime family, after Batts insulted him. Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy transported the body upstate, discovered Batts was still alive in the trunk, and beat him to death. Jimmy killed his best friend after discovering the man had informed on a cigarette shipment. By 1969, Henry began an affair with a woman named Linda, creating years of domestic turmoil with Karen, who once held a loaded revolver between his eyes.

A trip to Florida with Jimmy to collect gambling money turned disastrous when the man they roughed up had a sister who worked for the FBI. Federal extortion charges followed, and in 1972 Henry was sentenced to ten years. He arranged assignment to Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, where Vario was already imprisoned. Karen visited weekly, smuggling food, liquor, and drugs. Henry entered a marijuana and pill-selling partnership with Paul Mazzei, a Pittsburgh inmate. After transferring to the minimum-security Allenwood Correctional Facility, he exploited furloughs so frequently that neighbors thought he had been released early. He was granted early parole on July 12, 1978, after approximately four years.

Henry immediately violated parole, assembling a drug crew and wholesaling marijuana, cocaine, and other substances. Through Mazzei, he became involved in the Boston College point-shaving scheme, bribing players $2,500 per game to win by less than the point spread, the bookmaker's predicted margin of victory. Meanwhile, Henry's bookmaker friend Marty Krugman told him about millions in untraceable currency sitting in a Kennedy Airport cargo vault. The tip came from Lou Werner, a Lufthansa cargo supervisor who owed Krugman gambling debts. Jimmy organized the heist. On December 11, 1978, the crew overpowered security guards, forced the night supervisor to open the vault, and loaded cash into a van. The robbery netted $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewels.

Jimmy then began systematically murdering anyone connected to the robbery. Stacks Edwards, a crew associate assigned to dispose of the getaway van, was shot in bed for failing to do so. Krugman disappeared after demanding his share. Joe "Buddha" Manri, a crew member, and McMahon, the Air France cargo foreman who had helped Henry years earlier, were found shot in a parked car. DeSimone was killed by the Gambino family for having murdered made men without authorization. Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward McDonald led the investigation but could not crack the case because nearly every witness was dead.

On the day of his arrest in May 1980, Henry was juggling guns for Jimmy, heroin deliveries, and cocaine use. A narcotics detective had monitored his phone for two months after a young informant, who turned out to be the son of Henry's own partner Bobby Germaine, exposed the operation. In jail, Henry tried to string federal agents along, but the feds played him a tape of crew members discussing his murder. After briefly bailing himself out, Henry met Jimmy at a diner and recognized the signs of danger: Jimmy suggested meeting at a bar Henry identified as the type used for hits, then asked him to travel with one of the men pushing for his death.

McDonald told Karen the entire family had to enter witness protection. On May 27, 1980, Henry signed an agreement committing to full cooperation in exchange for immunity. Over the next five years, his testimony resulted in approximately fifty convictions. Vario was convicted and died in prison in 1988. Burke was convicted of murder, sentenced to life, and died in prison in 1996. Henry was never able to help prosecutors crack the Lufthansa case because virtually all participants and witnesses had been murdered. Henry and Karen settled in an undisclosed town under new names but divorced in 1989. Henry was removed from the witness program in 1996 and, after years of substance use problems, entered rehabilitation in 2006.