Wiseguy

... felt a way

... is this a better title than Wiseguy?

Ah.

The book is Wiseguy.

Um, I could have been okay with Wiseguy, too.

Mm-hmm.

Wise Guys.

I think that would've been a fine...

Number one on the list of the most perfect movie adaptations of all time, Martin Scorsese's 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas.

Based on Nicholas Pileggi's 1985 non-fiction book Wiseguy.

The article notes that Goodfellas feels uniquely, incredibly cinematic.

It's pure cinema.

It is famous for its long tracking shots, its freeze frames, its needle drops.

But if you read Wiseguy after seeing the movie, it is genuinely eye-opening because the movie is staggeringly in line with the book.

It's almost verbatim in places.

Yes.

A phenomenal book.

Now, Pileggi had previously written Wiseguy, which Martin Scorsese famously adapted into Goodfellas in 1990.

Right, a huge cultural touchstone.

And five years later, they teamed up again for Casino.

Both books deal with the mob.

Both are incredibly violent, but the source article draws a really stark contrast between them.

It does, because while Wiseguy was definitely dark, Casino is significantly more harrowing.

Why is that, do you think?

I think he captured his essence.

There's also many, many stories in the book Wiseguy talking about Tommy's violent tendencies.

But the question always seems to be... because they come from Henry, are those stories true, factual? So I guess I would ask, before he was killed, where did Tommy fit within the crew? How trusted was he? And was he as violent as they portrayed?

Yeah.

And when I was ahead of the strike force and, and, you know, it was somebody who I liked and, uh, I didn't know that he got together with, with, with Henry and they were doing a story, but relatively early on, we're doing a book relatively early on Nick, came and told me what they were doing.

And I had no control over that, and I more or less allowed them to do it.

And so 1985, Nick publishes Wiseguy, and it was a bestseller in the New York Times, bestseller list, and a great book, absolutely great book.

After around the time that the book came out, there was a TV show called Wiseguy, and And there was no connection between them at all.

Tony Soprano, 6653, says, Who is Stanley Diamond? He was an associate of Jimmy Burke, but little is known about him.

His name is mentioned in the book Wiseguy.

Well, this is one question that I did notice when I clicked a thing and actually looked into.

I've actually heard of this guy before.

And his masterpiece sits at the absolute pinnacle of this ranking.

Number one on the list of the greatest true crime books ever written is Pileggi's 1985 classic Wiseguy.

It really is the gold standard of the insider narrative.

So Wiseguy is the life story of Henry Hill, an associate of the Lucchese crime family in New York, who eventually flips and enters the Witness Protection Program.

Right.

Now, the Mafia is notorious for omertà, the code of silence.

He didn't write him as a tragic Shakespearean antihero.

He wrote him as a blue-collar worker whose industry just happened to be hijacking, extortion, and eventually narcotics.

And it's even like – it's a major sort of theme of the movie, him sort of writing this book, right? That he's like learning how to write and writing a book and the book sort of structures the movie, which is funny because it's based on a character who famously had someone else write the book about him.

Am I wrong about that? Did he write – he didn't write Wiseguy, right? Her husband wrote Wiseguy.

Her husband wrote it.

Yeah, yeah.

The movie made Henry Hill famous, but there was another important aspect that made this situation unique.

Goodfellas was based on the book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, a true crime account by Nicholas Pileggi which chronicled Hill's exploits in the mafia and presented a detailed and ruthless account of the life of a mobster told from a first-hand perspective with the help of Henry Hill himself.

Unsurprisingly, the book will serve as our main source today as we bring you the story of the man who always wanted to be a gangster in order to become a somebody in a neighborhood full of nobodies.

[upbeat music] Henry Hill was born on June the 11th, 1943 in Brooklyn, New York, one of eight children to Henry Hill Sr. and Carmela Costa.

As far as Goodfellas, there's just a ton of extra materials for this film, and I had a great time going through them.

So I had read Nicholas Pelleggi's novel Wiseguy a few years ago at this point, and it is written from Pelleggi's perspective about interviewing Hill.

And this is while Henry Hill is still in the Witness Protection Program.

So he's like, they're like sending him to just like random airports and just like making him hop around to like try to like actually get a hold of him.