So what sort of man was Henry Hill? 'He was a hustler. I had the same experience - I knew those people, so there was an intimacy with that material that gave Marty tremendous freedom.' 'Marty knows it, Marty grew up with it, Marty lived it. 'He grew up with those people - he knows the culture better than any other movie director out there,' says Pileggi. And GoodFellas plays so well because Scorsese knew that world too. Wiseguy reads so well because Pileggi knew the world he wrote about.

'He was visualising the movie, where the camera would be, what he would be focusing on, while we were writing the script. 'I’ve been looking for this book for years,' he told Pileggi. 'I tried to get behind the traditional Cops & Robbers kind of story.' This was what Scorsese liked so much. Pileggi spent several years with Hill, and the result was Wiseguy. 'I thought, 'It’d be great to do a story from the point of view of a middle level guy, or even a low level guy.’' Hill was no Godfather, but he’d spent his whole life in the Mafia. When he was arrested for a range of offences, including drug-dealing (which his Mob bosses had told him to stay away from), he agreed to testify against his fellow ‘wiseguys’ and was given a new identity, under the US government’s Witness Protection Program. The subject became Pileggi’s speciality, and when the publishers Simon & Schuster bought the rights to Henry Hill’s life story, Pileggi was a natural choice to write it.įor anyone who hasn’t seen GoodFellas (or read Wiseguy), Hill was an Irish-Italian New Yorker who became a small-time gangster as a teenager, and grew up to become involved in many of the Mob’s illegal enterprises. Nobody had written much about Organised Crime before. That period, in the 1950s and 1960s, was also the period that began to expose Organised Crime, as we came to know it.' I was assigned to cover crime – I covered the police, I covered corruption.

'Right out of college, I went to work at the Associated Press in New York City, in the mid Fifties.

'I was a journalist since I was young,' says Pileggi.

Martin Scorsese turned the biography of a New York hoodlum, Henry Hill, into a cinematic masterpiece

Goodfellas book nicholas pileggi