Wiseguy is Henry Hill showing us all the ugliness that comes with the glamour, because he knows that we came to see both.

This isn’t The Godfather, which reinvented mafia thugs as sophisticated outlaws too smart to work within the confines of society. And Hill’s voice is clear and distinct (like I said, a lot of Henry Hill’s narration in the movie is just lifted straight from the book), and best of all, he’s able to articulate the appeal of the mob world while also acknowledging the ugly aspects of it. Together, they make the perfect blend of writers: Pileggi’s background is crime journalism, so he knows how to interview his subject, do research, and present the facts in a way that’s informative and engaging. I call it a memoir, but the book is really Pileggi’s – he writes it as a straightforward nonfiction book, but thanks to extensive phone interviews he conducted while researching the book, there are long sections told in Hill’s own words as he details his rise and fall in the mob. This means that he shares everything in this memoir, detailing the murders, the robberies, the drugs, the affairs, the betrayals…it’s all here, and it’s all just on the safe side of completely unbelievable. Henry Hill, in collaboration with Nicholas Pileggi, wrote this book after he’d been placed in witness protection after ratting out the other members of his New York mafia family – so at that point, he’d already burned all his bridges and had nobody left to protect and nothing much left to lose. So I would actually be more likely to recommend this to someone who’s never seen Goodfellas, who can appreciate the sheer outlandishness of this memoir. (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) 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. 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.

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. Ever since the first day he walked into the Euclid Avenue Taxicab Company back in 1954, Henry had been fascinated by the world he had longed to join, and there was little he hadn’t learned and even less that he had forgotten.” He could have written the handbook on street-level mob operations. He was not a mob boss or even a noncommissioned officer in the mob, but he was an earner, the kind of sidewalk mechanic who knew something about everything. Attorney McDonald and the Strike Force prosecutors Henry Hill was a bonanza.

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