Hill's cohorts over the years included people like James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke, whose children were named, with both homage and hope, Jessie James Burke and Frank James Burke, and who, while in a Bureau of Prisons halfway house, masterminded ''the largest successful cash robbery in American history,'' a $6 million haul from Lufthansa German Airlines at Kennedy Airport.

He is working here with rich material and fascinating characters. Hill's version of the American dream is told in ''Wise Guy'' by Nicholas Pileggi, a contributing editor of New York magazine, who has covered crime and politics for many years.

Everyone knew who we were, and we were treated like movie stars with muscle.'' He eventually became one of a group who, in his words, ''walked in a room and the place stopped.

His energy, intelligence and what seems to have been a general likableness quickly started him on his way to becoming the kind of tough thief New Yorkers euphemistically call a ''wise guy.'' Henry Hill had both driving ambition and a talent for staying alive. IN 1955 an 11-year-old of Irish-Sicilian parentage walked across the street from where he lived in Brooklyn into a dingy, mob-run cab company looking for after-school work. Wiseguy is more compelling than any novel.WISE GUY Life in a Mafia Family. A firsthand account of the secret world of the mob, The mob is still hunting him for what he reveals in Wiseguy: hundreds of crimes including arson, extortion, hijacking, and the $6 million Lufthansa heist, the biggest successful cash robbery in U.S. Henry Hill knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and he turned Federal witness to save his own life. Wiseguy is Henry Hill's story, in fascinating, brutal detail, the never-before-revealed day-to-day life of a working mobster - his violence, his wild spending sprees, his wife, his mistresses, his code of honor. Wiseguy is Nicholas Pileggi's remarkable bestseller, the most intimate account ever printed of life inside the deadly high-stakes world of what some people call the Mafia. To be a wiseguy was to own the world.' - Henry Hill Being a wiseguy was better than being President of the United States. 'At the age of twelve my ambition was to become a gangster.

Wiseguy life in a mafia family