Volume 33, Number 8 · May 8, 1986
Hood's Progress!
By Murray Kempton
Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family
by Nicholas Pileggi
Simon and Schuster, 256 pp., $17.95
We do not often find a vocational-guidance manual as useful or a domestic-relations chronicle as lively as Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. Wiseguy ends with Henry Hill, Pileggi's antsy antihero, lodged with 4,500 other civil servants in the $25-million-budget line of a federal protected-witness program that scrupulously observes merit-system standards. Hill and his fellow bureaucrats have passed the entry-level test for experience at criminal pursuits and have established their tenure by turning in such of their former comrades as missed the lesson that organized crime, like the old American Communist party, is an enterprise whose securest profits are reserved not for those who stay but for those who bolt.
Review, 952 words
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