Word: pileggi
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...WISEGUY, Pileggi...
...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...
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...
...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...
...much of the book. Pileggi is content to let the subject describe these activities. Since he grew up behind the family shirt shop right across from the old Lindy's on Broadway, the surprisingly likable Blye is full of pungent city speech. Though he works fifteen hours a day for his $50,000 income, he loves his work as few men do. Consequently, Blye, Private Eye is that most mesmerizing of pastimes: inspired shoptalk...