|
It is the biography of Henry Hill, written by the journalist Nicholas Pileggi.
Henry is a half-Italian, half-Irish. His father was an Irish worker who came to America before the Second World War. Henry is living with his family and his mother, a woman from Sicily, three sisters and four brothers, one of them physically handicapped, in a very small flat in a working district of New York.
In order to earn some money beside school Henry starts working at a cabstand opposite of his house.
He is doing small jobs for little gangsters, so-called wiseguys, who are on the rise for getting powerful Mafiosi.
When they find out about him being half Italian the wiseguys like him even better and start to accept him within their community. Henry is very smart for his age and he completely understands how the guys work without having to ask. So he soon manages to earn a lot of money, although he knows that it is "dirty" money. After a while he stops attending school and only hangs around with wiseguys. He adores their style of living and wants to become like them. He prefers being with grown-ups and has to be considered as rather smart for his age. Slowly he becomes one of them, going to their parties, playing with their children, and he is rarely seen at home.
They teach him how to deal with the police, how to vanish after a deal. When he is thirteen he is arrested for the first time, but his parents do not even learn as fact, because the wiseguys get him out of prison within an hour. Henry then adopts their lifestyle fully, spending money as soon as he gets it, gambling and selling cigarettes and alcohol on the black market. He knows perfectly whom to pay and when it is better not to notice anything.
After a serious quarrel with his father he signs to join the paratroopers, what is a bad shock for the Mafiosi, who immediately offer to get him out of this disaster, but he refuses. Even at the army he keeps on making money out of everything he touches.
He is forced to leave the army a little earlier than planned when he seriously hurts another guy during a fight.
After his time in the army he returns to the wiseguys again. In the meantime he was learnt everything about the organisation, knows ho is who and the way these guys think. He knows that he has no chance to become an important member of the Mafia, because of being only half-Italian, but he enjoys life in every possible way.
The Mafia he is connected to is still the Mafia before the powerful family businesses but it slowly gets more organised and a lot more bloody.
Henry gets used to the Mafia methods of silencing people and he makes clear that all these things seem very normal to him.
At the age of twenty-two he gets to know his future wife who comes from a rather wealthy family. She loves him a lot and adores his way of life, although not knowing exactly what he does. Her parents do not like him at all, so the two get married secretly and after the wedding their parents finally accept him, although his mother-in-law never stops nagging.
The killings within the Mafia, and the number of dead bodies around the mob slowly get out of control, everybody whacks everyone, even if he only dislikes the other's face.
Henry keeps on with his life, making money, spending money, his family is able to get along fine and in the meanwhile they have two children. He gets to jail from time to time but - due to his connections - never for long.
Finally the police is able to prove his involvement in a big narcotic deal and Henry is sentenced to six years in prison. Soon the money stops flooding in, and his wife Karen and the children barely manage to survive. Although he keeps on dealing in prison, the money is not flooding like before and because of their spending everything all the time they do not have anything to subsist on. Karen now has to work at a dentist's, nevertheless she does not stop loving her husband.
After he is released from prison he starts getting into the Mafia business again.
When he first hears about the Lufthansa deal he is not too interested, and because of not being involved he prefers to follow his own business.
But he learns everything about the deal, he knows who has to do which job and he realises the dimensions of this project.
When the Lufthansa robbery is over, where Lufthansa loses many millions in cash and jewellery, the FBI starts to investigate. Soon most of the men who took part in the project are dead or simply vanish and the wiseguys get nervous.
Out of bad luck Henry is arrested because he is supposed of dealing. The FBI knows that he has something to do with the Mafia but does not pay much attention to him - he is only a little fish. When Henry faces another long period of prison, he gets nervous when he hears that the gangsters he grew up with are now all dead and that he would be the next because of knowing about the Lufthansa deal he gets into panic. So he offers the FBI to tell them all they want to know, if they protect him and make him part of a Witness Protection Program. The FBI accepts and Henry testifies against all his former business partners and even friends without any remorse, bringing them into prison.
Henry Hill spends the rest of his life in a little town, feeling rather safe. From time to time he travels - under heavy protection - to trials testifying against his wiseguys.
In this book the Mafia is not so powerful, as in Mario Puzzo´s "Godfather" and the characters are rather described as not too intelligent and sensible. They are very brutal, but have little in common with the feudal clan system described in the "Godfather". It is a portrait of the Mafia before and during the time of prohibition, when it was not yet so well organised as it became later. There were no rules and everyone acted rather independently.
|
