To their credit, both works do their best to describe mob life without glamorizing it. A word of warning: if you harbor a strong dislike for violent movies, stay away from 'Wiseguy.' Like its movie adaptation (Martin Scorsese's masterful 'Goodfellas'), the book makes no bones about the lawless nature of its characters. (Originally written September 2000 - ported over from the now-defunct )'At the age of twelve my ambition was to become a gangster.' So says Henry Hill, the career criminal profiled in Nicholas Pileggi's fascinating read, 'Wiseguy.' This biography/memoir introduces you to Hill's little corner of the mob world, with an 'articulate hoodlum' and an organized-crime journalist as your straight-shooting tour guides. More than anything, the staggering levels of corruption depicted here left me feeling kind of depressed.

(This belief is apparently far less irrational than it sounds, or at least it was in Hill's day.)There are some hair-curling stories in here, but on the whole I didn't find it quite as engrossing as it seemed like it ought to be. 2) Money and power are nice! And 3) nobody really expects to be caught. Mostly it boils down to a few simple things: 1) Whatever everybody else around you is doing seems perfectly normal. And the book also offers some insights into the psychology of career criminals, although it turns out not to be too terribly profound. I'm not sure whether I find that fact entertaining, disappointing, or kind of scary.I did learn some things about the structure and day-to-day business of organized crime that I failed to pick up from watching The Sopranos, though.

I haven't seen that particular film, but I will say that I was a little surprised by just how much the people described here resembled some of the gangsters I have seen in movies and TV. (He chose the FBI.) This biography of Hill - although perhaps it's at least partly an autobiography, as much of it is in his own words - was the basis for the movie Goodfellas.

He continued on with a rather impressive variety of illegal activities until 1980, when he realized that two remaining options were to cooperate with the FBI and enter the Witness Protection Program, or to get whacked by his supposed friends for knowing too much about a multimillion-dollar robbery. New York mobster Henry Hill started his criminal career in 1955, at the tender age of eleven, running errands for the local mafia.

Wiseguy pileggi