The book is based on the real life story of a mobster Henry Hill. He used to be a member of Lucchese crime family. A deeper look into a Mafia World And it's something different to know about the Mafia from someone inside the under world. The experience was totally different from reading a Mafia Fiction (i.e. The Godfather, The Sicilian, Omerta etc). When I read The Godfather, I don't know from where it came, but a strange sympathy worked for the Mafia. But when I read this book, I came across to know about Mafia (the real Mafia) that it's totally different from what I read in those fictions. It's not so sympathetic and it's quite brutal and blood thursty. The money and self-interest is everything in this world. In this sense, I will give all the credit to Henry Hill. He was so honest about his detail description. Nicholas Pileggi ( / p ɪ ˈ l ɛ dʒ i/, Italian: [piˈleddʒi]; born February 22, 1933) is an American author, producer and screenwriter. He wrote the non-fiction book Wiseguy and co-wrote the screenplay for Goodfellas, its 1990 film adaptation, for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

I waited for this book for a long time. Watched my favorite movie "Goodfellas" based on this book several times. So when I got the hard copy of the book, I could not resist myself finishing it at once. It is As good as the movie. But if someone watches the movie, the book is waste of time in my opinion. The movie is a total honest representation of the book. But my case is different. I love to read about Mafia. :) He was visualising the movie, where the camera would be, what he would be focusing on, while we were writing the script. He already sees the movie in his head." It is this disregard for other people that makes this such a chilling book. In this world of wiseguys, all is theirs for the taking. In fact, it made me think that if this is still the case, that anything you happen to possess that is of interest to the Mob can be taken away from you, the much-touted American concept of freedom is not very valid. At least you're not free to own things, and if you try to put your case to the law, Hill provides ample examples of how both the police and the judicial system has members on the take. When Pileggi came out of the men’s room, Hill said, "Come on, let’s get out of here!" Straight away, Pileggi saw why Hill was so keen to leave. "I looked over and I realised Henry had hit the Maitre D' in the head with a wine bottle. The guy was bleeding." "What happened?" asked Pileggi, as they drove away. "The guy gave me some lip," said Hill, by way of explanation.

Pileggi co-wrote the pilot of the CBS television series Vegas, which first aired in September 2012. [2] Personal life [ edit ] Goodfellas ( originally titled Wiseguy) is a terrific true crime book that just stops short of romanticizing the life of a gangster. The book is about working class Italian and Irish gangsters in Brooklyn, starting from their early days in the 1950s to their fall in the 70s and 80s, told through the eyes of a foot soldier - Henry Hill and his wife Karen.

Nobody had written much about Organised Crime before. The subject became Pileggi’s speciality, and when the publishers Simon & Schuster bought the rights to Henry Hill’s life story, Pileggi was a natural choice to write it.He grew up with those people - he knows the culture better than any other movie director out there," says Pileggi. "Marty knows it, Marty grew up with it, Marty lived it. I had the same experience - I knew those people, so there was an intimacy with that material that gave Marty tremendous freedom." Whilst reading it, it is soon very obvious why Martin Scorsese was so attracted to this story, indeed I can almost imagine his excitement, as he works out how to structure key scenes and who to cast. Wiseguy even has some advantages over its still-more-brilliant offspring. A two-and-a-half- hour biopic must necessarily simplify and omit events. In Henry Hill's case, a lot of those events are interesting. Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family is a 1985 non-fiction book by crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi that chronicles the life of Henry Hill, a Mafia associate turned informant. The book is the basis for the 1990 Academy Award–winning film Goodfellas directed by Martin Scorsese. [1] [2] [3] Summary [ edit ]

GoodFellas' is an amazing tale, and a wonderful evocation of a bygone era but is one of those rare occasions where the film is all you really need. Henry believes that his wiseguy friends are invulnerable, as indeed they seem to be. In this insular neighborhood, even the legitimate businessmen are willing to cover for their wiseguy neighbors who are admired as entrepreneurs and are unafraid to bend the rules. Wiseguys offer an alternative to scraping out an honest living in difficult economic times; many otherwise honest men and women are willing to accept a bribe now and again to earn a little extra money. Many judges, lawyers, and policemen are also on the wiseguys' payroll. Given these role models, it is no surprise Henry grows up to believe that honesty is for the weak and vulnerable; he perceives law-abiding citizens as fools, as prey. When he was arrested for a range of offences, including drug-dealing (which his Mob bosses had told him to stay away from), he agreed to testify against his fellow ‘wiseguys’ and was given a new identity, under the US government’s Witness Protection Program. This was where Pileggi came in. In the 1950s, he worked as a journalist for Associated Press and New York magazine, specializing in crime reporting for more than three decades. [2] Career [ edit ]It wasn’t that Henry was a boss. And it had nothing to do with his lofty rank within a crime family or the easy viciousness with which hoods from Henry’s world are identified. Henry, in fact, was neither of high rank nor particularly vicious; he wasn’t even tough as far as the cops could determine. What distinguished Henry from most of the other wiseguys who were under surveillance was the fact that he seemed to have total access to all levels of the mob world.” Part of me wishes that I had read this book, which directly inspired Goodfellas, without having seen or even having any knowledge of the movie. There’s so much about Goodfellas that seems outrageous and over-the-top and made up, so it was almost weird to learn that Henry Hill was a real person, and that everything he describes in his memoir actually happened. Having seen the movie created this weird mental disconnect where even though I knew I was reading a memoir, it still felt kind of like a novel. (It also doesn’t help that the narration in Goodfellas is practically lifted word-for-word from the text of Hill’s memoir, to the point where I hope he got a screenwriter’s credit for the movie) The project is centered on Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, two Italian-American crime bosses that ran their respective families in the middle of the 20th century. In 1957, Genovese attempted to assassinate Costello but failed, although he was wounded and decided to retire, as much as one can retire from the Mafia.

Lccn 85022047 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL7660706M Openlibrary_edition The book “Wiseguy” is about Henry Hill a member of the Lucchese crime family.The book itself tells a different perspective of the “Mob”. Its seen through the eyes of Nicholas Pileggi the author but told to by Hill himself . It displays an interesting outlook,Mob movies books characters have fascinated the world for so long and its the belief that their is another world more exhilarating and exciting fast paced and the common person is just looking to escape the real world into a book or another life. Pileggi was married to fellow author, journalist, and filmmaker Nora Ephron from 1987 until her death in 2012. [2] Partial filmography [ edit ] YearWiseguy reads so well because Pileggi knew the world he wrote about. And GoodFellas plays so well because Scorsese knew that world too. For anyone who hasn’t seen GoodFellas (or read Wiseguy), Hill was an Irish-Italian New Yorker who became a small-time gangster as a teenager, and grew up to become involved in many of the Mob’s illegal enterprises.