Books: Wrong Lane Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi

by Nicholas Pileggi Simon & Schuster; 256 pages; $17.95

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 in 1978.

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...

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