Word: hills
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Marcos' critics on Capitol Hill were equally outspoken. "Marcos has lost whatever shred of legitimacy he had," said Congressman Stephen Solarz, a New York Democrat. Republican Senator Richard Lugar, leader of the 20-member team of U.S. observers that monitored the Philippine election, was even more ominous. Said he: "President Marcos has lost the church, he has lost the middle class, and clearly he is now in the process of losing military support...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...