Wrong Lane Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family

By Donald Morrison

Henry Hill's specialties included arson, auto theft, bookmaking, bribery, drug dealing, horse-race fixing, credit-card fraud, extortion and freight hijacking. He organized the much publicized 1978-79 Boston College basketball point-shaving scheme and helped plan the $6 million Lufthansa holdup at New York City's Kennedy International Airport in 1978.

Then came 1980. Hill received a valuable piece of information that year: some of his fellow "wiseguys," as New York hoodlums call themselves, were plotting to kill him. He had been arrested on a drug charge, and his Lufthansa-heist partners were afraid he might talk to the feds. Their fears were well-founded; the following year Hill's testimony resulted in a string of convictions. The canary later sang to Nicholas Pileggi, a veteran journalist, in various secret locations around the U.S. The result, told largely in Hill's words, has the sound and horror of authenticity, The Godfather minus the glamour. There is no rich, family feeling here, no accretion of loyalties and vendettas. There is only the nostalgia of a successful sociopath for a lawless past. "Truckloads of swag. Fur coats, televisions, clothes--all for the asking," the thug recalls. "When I was broke I just went out and robbed some more. We ran everything. We paid the lawyers. We paid the cops. Everybody had their hands out. We walked out laughing. We had the best of everything."

The son of an Irish electrician and an Italian mother, Hill entered the crime business at age eleven, when he took a part-time job at a Brooklyn taxi stand run by the brother of a local mob boss. Under the capo's tutelage, Hill slowly learned how to run crap games, pass off counterfeit money, torch buildings for a fee and, finally, how to take over businesses and squeeze them dry. Along the crooked way, he married a nice middle-class girl from Long Island, who realized rather late that her husband was not just another up-and- coming businessman.

With a cold eye and a fine sense of irony, Pileggi records the underside of industry as his informer dashes from scheme to scam, driving from North Carolina to New York with a load of untaxed cigarettes, delivering stolen cars for shipment to Haiti, reburying a murdered colleague whose resting place is threatened by a new housing development. Hill forms no permanent friendships and makes no future plans. Everything is for the moment, and associates, even those who gave him a hand, are betrayed for the sake of the bigger payoff, the easier deal. Only at home is life a chore. "You'll find that most wiseguy wives do their own housework, no matter how rich they are," Hill tells Pileggi, "because strangers can't be trusted to keep their mouths shut." Modern wiseguys who cannot keep their mouths shut are dealt with in a style that has not changed since the '30s. He describes a friend's fate: "Tommy used a piano wire. Remo put up some fight. He kicked and swung . . . They buried him in the backyard at Robert's (restaurant), under a layer of cement right next to the boccie court. From then on, every time they played, Jimmy and Tommy used to say, 'Hi, Remo, how ya doing?' "

Hill, now 42, lives with his two children and long-suffering wife in an unnamed city under an assumed identity. They are part of the federal Witness Security Program, and as such receive $1,500 a month; they run a legitimate business and own a suburban home. For those repelled by the notion of a malefactor getting away with murder, there are two compensations: this is a true picture of crime, with its permanent sense of insecurity, its blunders, its lack of intelligence and trust. And then there is the source of Hill's current misery. "I'm an average nobody," he complains. "I get to live the rest of my life like a shnook." Pileggi draws no moral, but it is obvious that for a wiseguy, life as a shnook is almost worse than death by piano wire.