Thanks to a no-show job (as a union bricklayer), Hill managed to live an ostensibly normal suburban life with his wife (a nice Jewish girl from Long Island who seems to have viewed her husband as a good provider with odd business associates) and two daughters. Bootleg cigarettes, hijacked cargoes, stolen credit cards, bookmaking, loan-sharking, and a wealth of other illegal enterprises nonetheless provided Hill with a steady flow of easy money. The Mafia, however, seems not to be an equal-opportunity employer, and lack of an Italian surname precluded his advancement. Sicilian ancestry (on his mother's side) gained Hill entr‚e into the rackets before he was a teen-ager. Before that 1980 day, Hill had enjoyed a consistently prosperous career as a street soldier (or wise guy) for Paul Vario, an aging underboss in the Brooklyn-based mob headed by Gaetano Lucchese. In matter-of-fact style, Pileggi (an investigative reporter for New York magazine) tells the story of Henry Hill, whose for-the-record existence ended at age 36 when he entered the Justice Department's Federal Witness Protection Program. Crime does pay-and well, most of the time, according to this unsentimental profile of a lower-echelon hoodlum turned informant.
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